Newsnight ed Peter Barron has been gamely justifying the Madonna interview. Here’s the case for the defence:

Our audience share doubled, nearly three million watching three or more minutes of the interview. Grubby talk I know…

Was it newsworthy? The interview spawned hundreds of articles worldwide, so if it wasn’t that’s an awful lot of us with rubbish news judgement.

Well there’s a lot of celebrity news outlets. Newsnight didn’t used to be one of them.

The truth is there are good ways to put on audience, and then there’s doing a Madonna interview. Will many of the two million or so Madonna-watchers tune in for more Liquid Newsnight?

Maybe the lesson for BBC2 is that an entertainment show would do better at 10.30pm than current affairs.

And did you know that Madonna has a new kids book out? Neither did I…