A big moment

There was a moment at about 1700 yesterday when it all felt like it was kicking off. There were angry scenes at Television Centre in London and protesters started to gather outside BBC Humberside, the location of Richard Bacon's show. Thankfully it started raining and the Hull protest soon faded away.

We'd taken the decision to simulcast the whole of Question Time live on the network. We moved Richard's show earlier at 2200 to cover the build up. Before the show Twiter had burst into life, at one stage in the evening a thousand tweets a minute about Question Time were appearing from all over the world.

Our audience of 5 live listeners were brilliant - fascinated by Question Time and keen to react afterwards. Richard and I and the team in London struggled a bit to cope with the sheer volume of calls, emails, texts and tweets.

One woman took our politicians to task, accusing them of 'not listening' and giving the BNP a way in by ignoring people's feelings. An ex soldier called to say that he had been impressed by Nick Griffin. It was electric and felt like a big moment in TV and political history. As usual, our listeners did most of the talking and most of the work.

I'm glad we devoted the whole show to it - we could have stayed on air until 0500 with the huge amount of response we had.

Louise Birt is editor of the Richard Bacon show

• Listen again to last night's special Richard Bacon Question Time debate.
• Twitter is still buzzing with discussion of Question Time. Follow 5 live and Richard Bacon and, if you're tweeting about Octoberfest or listening to the programmes from Hull, use the hash tag #5liveHull so we can keep track of the conversation. Hundreds already are.
• The (blurry) picture shows the enthusiastic audience for last night's broadcast. It's from Richard's phone.