Charlie Courtauld: No one can abide him, but a curmudgeon on camera can make for good TV

"And now on BBC2, Newsnight." It was a surprising statement from the continuity announcer on Wednesday night. In all the years I've watched the programme – both while and in the decade since I worked on it – I've never heard the programme trailed without a presenter being named. "Now Newsnight, with Jeremy Paxman/Kirsty Wark/Martha Kearney/Uncle Tom Cobley/whoever." So what's different tonight? Then the titles rolled and all was revealed. Hunched alone in the studio was Andrew Neil – perhaps the least popular figure ever to sit in that presenter's chair.

Like most other arrogant TV producers, I've kept my best interviews. They're sitting on a shelf in my study, gathering dust. No, not the answers, you fool, just the questions. Hours were spent honing the perfect phraseology and cadence for these ritual humiliations. For us, the answers are just the boring witter between those killer questions.

In my time, I've written questions for many TV presenters. But there's a bit of a gap on the shelf. It's in the Midnight Hour section: Wednesdays. And that's because Wednesday was Andrew Neil night – when the ruddy-cheeked Scotsman would presume to write his own questions and scripts. There is nothing better calculated to get the backs of TV producers up than to see a day's work scrunched up and flying towards the wastepaper basket. But it's good for us. At the end of the night, a presenter who takes sufficient care to pen his own interviews is usually better briefed.

And well-briefed he was. Often better briefed that the interviewees. Those scripts and questions, the spleen and invective written in Neil's black-inked fountain pen, were pithier, ruder, crueller than anything I could come up with. He frequently had his victims squirming in a way that was a delight to behold – so long as they were the minister responsible: if, on the other hand, Andrew was giving the third degree to some hack, academic or Lib Dem, the result was as humiliating for the viewer as it was for the victim.

And so Andrew Neil landed up last week presenting Newsnight. And just as he did with us, he's landed the team with a bit of a dilemma. Get the right guests, and he's a master; get the wrong ones and he's a disaster. Two examples last week revealed the problem: on Tuesday, Neil kebabbed the child support minister Baroness Hollis over the Child Support Agency. The following night he meted out the same treatment to an obviously innocent – and bewildered – Peter Bottomley MP, whose only crime appeared to be that he was a friend of the ex-chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Gurbux Singh. As ever, Neil was peerless in his aggressive probing – humiliating guests with a sneer not even Jeremy Paxman can match.

But it's not just the interviewees who can't abide him: producers – and more importantly, viewers – seem to share this antipathy. He's useless on Talkback, rubbish at reading autocue. The camera definitely does not love Andrew Neil.

Partly this can be ascribed to professional jealousy, partly, to a residual disdain for Scottish newspapermen within the TV establishment. How dare this jumped-up Jock presume to tell us about TV! But not entirely: witness how that other Scot, Andrew Marr, has made the leap from Fleet Street to the warm embrace of TVland. There's more to it than that. More to it even than Neil's past associations with the man most hated at the Beeb, Rupert Murdoch. No, what really gets up people's noses is his self-assurance, his all-too-obvious lack of empathy. Contrary to much of what has been said, I don't think Neil's well-publicised politics need get in the way of his TV career. A heart-on-sleeve right-winger could be an asset in the programme's armoury.

But the tenure of Andrew Neil at Newsnight will be a test for the producers. Rarely has a presenter been so hated. Sometimes, that dislike is justified: I'd shiver to watch Neil interview a train crash victim about the failings of our public transport system. But I'd love to see him get his teeth into John Prescott. In a Victor Kiam-style boast, I'd love to see it so much, I'd produce it for nothing. But it won't happen: Prescott's too canny for that. But let's watch and see who does get ensnared by those enormous designer shoulder pads. Make no mistake: if Newsnight can deliver the guests, Andrew Neil can deliver the interviews.