Thanks, David Dimbleby. Now maybe Question Time can get with the times

Imagine the joy of turning to David “Brexit will be a walk in the park” Davis, live on TV, and saying: “Some people might think you ARE the joke about Brexit.” Last night David Dimbleby showed why he has been able to choose his own abdication date. How appropriate he was given a the standing ovation from a panel that as well as Davis, featured Jo Brand, Nicky Morgan, Angela Rayner and Caroline Lucas. How very BBC that the final panel was four women and a man. All white, but hey.

And here are five things we learned in his final show:

• David Dimbleby goes out at the top of his game, as quick as ever. Also, he may be a closet remainer. Or at least somebody determined to flush out the arguments against another referendum now the country knows the real choices.

• No one in Southwark, south-east London, which hosted the last show of the Dimbleby reign, has any time for David Davis, or his alternatives to the May withdrawal deal.

• Given a day or so away from the party bosses, Labour shadow education spokesperson Angela Rayner and the Tory MP Nicky Morgan could almost certainly sort Brexit. Especially if Jo Brand and Caroline Lucas were there too.

• As an option for Brexit, “we can still walk away” really, really doesn’t cut it, at least in this part of the country.

• The Twittersphere is vile (OK, that’s not new.) But when it’s a proud boast that #BBCQT is the second most-tweeted TV show after Love Island, it’s worth remembering that a high proportion of those tweets will be unpleasant personal abuse directed at a single person who fumbled an important point.

And so ended Dimbleby’s 25-year reign as emperor of the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme. With just a hint of a man-tear, he thanked the 100,000 people who had made up his studio audiences in his time hosting the show, and paid a handsome tribute to his backstage people. It was “not goodbye, but goodnight”. In January, Fiona Bruce launches the new regime as the programme’s first female presenter. She will surely be highly professional – if you were looking for continuity Dimbleby, Bruce is probably it. But maybe that’s Question Time, always that nanobeat off the time.

Question Time was already a “thing” when Dimbleby took over in 1993. It started in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher had just become Britain’s first female prime minister, and Jeremy Corbyn was still a Haringey councillor. Michael Foot was not yet Labour leader. Politics was angry and uncompromising and it demanded a voice from beyond Westminster. No wonder the BBC took the risk of trialling a TV version of the already long-running weekly radio show, Any Questions.

Putting ordinary voters (that is, screened and selected but not actually auditioned) into a studio and allowing them to take part in a live debate with real politicians marked a significant relaxation of the BBC’s self-appointed role as guardian of the dignity of politicians and the UK’s political institutions. The show’s first presenter, Sir Robin Day, was famous for the way he assumed parity with the politicians he questioned. On Question Time, he also assumed parity with the audience. He dismissed foggy opinions from them with the same impatient contempt as he did from their political leaders. When Day was finally persuaded to retire after a decade in the chair, there came, after a rocky few years, David Dimbleby. Watch and learn, children, watch and learn.

Dimbleby has been presenting the weekly programme since he was 55, and he is now 80. He was born before the second world war. He has been on TV since 1962. The only reason that he is not a national icon is because the essence of his skill is to be the enabler rather than the star (a role he struggled to maintain on his last night in the chair). He does not generally interpose himself between the panel and the audience except to keep things focused and moving forward. His style, shown to greatest effect as ringmaster in the vast production that is the BBC’s election coverage, is to be so immersed in the world around him that he is surprised by nothing, unless surprise is appropriate.

He is immensely hard-working and meticulous in his preparations – anyone who’s taken part in election night would recognise that his capacity for detail is daunting – but he can be as witty as he is thoughtful. In lots of ways, he is the Reithian BBC incarnate. Accurate, respectful and occasionally, well, dull.

And of course there’s the problem. It doesn’t matter that he’s still fit and sharp and right up there on social media. Like the Reithian BBC, he’s out of time. You can modernise the external folderol of the programme, moving from email and texts to Twitter, but the show is still essentially analogue and it is slowly being cannibalised by the digital ecosystem.

But then it is a mirror of our political times, with exactly that half-second of delay that undermines intelligent conversation. Yet this lumbering TV show is where once upon a time in about 1982, David Steel proposed to David Owen and began the centrist surge that led to Tony Blair.

It’s also where that curious, more subtle shift in the balance of communication between politicians and their voters took place. It has given, every week, an imperfectly representative section of the public the chance to make politicians address the questions we all want addressed. And sometimes, like last night, we really learn something hard and complex that can’t be conveyed more easily.

• Anne Perkins is a freelance writer and broadcaster