Last Monday, I took part in a Channel 4 debate on the EU referendum in Norwich. The evening, overseen by Jon Snow, was a fascinating insight into the making of the televisual sausage. Yet I was left incredibly disillusioned.

The debate was intended to give a voice to younger people, whose opinions are largely overlooked. Instead, it ignored the stated interests and preferences of those young voters whose concerns they claimed to be addressing. In both the initial debate on Facebook, and the following panel discussion, Snow asked the assembled youngsters whether they were more concerned with the issue of immigration or the economy: both times the answer was the latter.

Yet this splash of democracy did not deter a relentless focus on the former topic. There is something deeply ironic about the fact much of a debate addressing the lack of youth voices was dedicated to immigration, a topic which, just before that debate, had been declared to be of less concern. The debate had been moulded not to express the opinions of the young, but to fit the general media narrative.

The division between the Facebook debate and the News at 7 event was also telling, presumably rooted in the demographic difference of the two audiences. While the first comprised a simple debate among the audience, the youths were apparently not considered mature enough to speak to the older Channel 4 audience without the mediation of the panel of ‘experts’.

The panel was largely uninteresting and uninformative. One member, Conservative MP Tom Pursglove, seemed to have been invited purely for the novelty of being the youngest Conservative member of the Commons. The superficiality of the panel’s pandering was further demonstrated by Darren Grimes, a young Brexit activist, who provoked uproarious laughter when he said that his campaign would engage with young people with “animated graphics, nice shiny things”.

The IN campaign have similarly embarrassed themselves recently after their ‘ravin, chattin, votin’ advert, yet such appeals to our supposedly inane and unengaged generation fell flat. The young audience members, clearly infinitely more self-aware than the apparatchiks onstage, appeared just as informed as the panellists, but seemed far more interested in debating one another than the hacks in the front seats.

Speaking to a few from the crowd at the station afterwards, we all questioned why the panel had even been there; had they contributed anything? They certainly hadn’t convinced any of the undecideds.

Much is said of our generation’s apathy. It seems on an almost daily basis that we are confronted with some self-important columnist telling us how vacuous and narcissistic we are. Yet it strikes me that it was the gathered young people who wanted nuance, who wanted facts that they could think about, not facts that tell them how to think.

Personally, I can’t help thinking that if young people just want to discuss the issue with one another, and not be lectured by members of political parties with vested interests and axes to grind, then that might have been the way to engage them.