You missed a great fight.
In the red corner, the TV presenter. In the blue, his earnest producer.
It had become quite personal.
They were trying to agree the tone of a report on the European Parliament's brand new Parlamentarium visitor centre.
'You're being totally unconstructive," the presenter was hissing to his colleague, jabbing at a screen in front of him. "Why do these bloody things never work when you want them to!"
She muttered something back at him, trying to keep things quiet. His response was to raise his voice further. "Give me ideas! Give me your thoughts! Stop being stroppy and give me SOMETHING." (this said while thumping his fist on the table.)
"Don't you accuse me of being stroppy," the producer snaps back.
Drop the Dead Donkey comes to Brussels.
The cameraman was keeping out of it, instead panning around the room, picking up general shots of visitors trying hard to look as though they weren't listening.
To be fair, their job wasn't an easy one - how to get across in 30 seconds all that needs to be said, all that ought to be said about this strange and costly venture
The European Parliament, trying to help people understand what it actually does, has spent £18m on its new baby.
Cynics, certain elements of the tabloids among them, would prefer to label it a 'propaganda centre': a way to "brainwash children", a way for "MEPs to stroke their own egos"(Daily Mail).
I probably would agree with the 'egos' bit, not so much the brainwashing. Take any eight-year-old along to this and they'll be bored witless after five minutes and back on their Nintendos.
Problem is, three years over budget, if it wanted a good press, it couldn't have got its timing worse.
The Euro-zone is in meltdown, austerity measures are biting hard but hey, let's give them a stilt walker in an EU flag, some free nosh and a jazz band and they'll be storming through the doors.
Not quite. It was hardly heaving.
You can see where the money went. Because it's a high-tech, multi-media, gimmick-fest.
Following airport-style security checks you are greeted by over-zealous, too-cheery visitor guides so anxious to show you something that it all smacked, just a little bit, of desperation. If they really pressed home how fantastic everything was, maybe we'd believe it.
I'm armed with a multimedia audio guide (think iphone only bulkier and clunkier) and the expo starts in a room with models of the three European Parliament sites in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg and signs showing some of the issues debated.
It's a disappointing introduction - and anyone with a young family would have bored children even at this early point.
It doesn't get much better downstairs - a dimly lit, long, long dreary tunnel filled with spoken and written quotations.
There are lots of black and white photos here and, if you swipe your audio guide against them you get an explanation of what you're looking at on the device itself.
It's meant to be the best kind of interactivity, but it hasn't been thought through. You swipe your phone across one of the swish all-singing, all-dancing consoles and it starts telling a story in your chosen language.
But if you're half-way through and someone else swipes their card over it, the whole thing begins again in their chosen language. A lot of people weren't bothering.
The problem is it's like a long, long, long lecture. It's educational - to a degree. But it's neither entertaining nor engaging.
The next room is all about getting to know your MEPs. There are pictures and biographies of all 736 of them, as well as recorded messages from some. One wonders how many of them genuinely thought this was a good idea.
Throughout it feels like expensive, slick design over substance.
There's a huge multicoloured LED ceiling with European facts and statistics screened below on a circular screen.
Then there are more screens allowing you to witness the parliament in action and hear real stories from EU citizens.
I sit on a sofa and start to listen but while their stories are interesting, it's all very samey and oh so positive
- it's like we're being sold a line. And that feels faintly sinister.
It was easy to become distracted - especially as this was where the TV presenter and his producer were arguing so vociferously at the next table.
I never found out what line they chose for the report.
Leaving, I felt unclear about the purpose of this venture, paid for by you, me, all of us.
No doubt coach parties and school trips will keep the numbers up but whatever the great minds behind
Parlamentarium (I keep wanting to say Planetarium) were imagining when they brewed up this idea,
I can't help but think they could have done so much better - on significantly less cash.
Can I suggest the next time they're in the UK they take a trip to Leeds City Museum or the National Media Museum in Bradford to find out how.
In the meantime here are some bedtime stories from the visit Thomas. You'll not enjoy them half as much as The Gruffalo...
xxxx
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