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After 50 or so years as a provocative television guest, Monday's night's Q&A was an unusual outing for Germaine Greer.
With the program convening its first all-woman panel - including the host Annabel Crabb - the honoured and ornery Germaine had a problem: there was nobody in sight to fight with, and a Greer without another guest to goad is a Greer left casting around for innovative ways to get on somebody's goat.
It took a while. For much of the program you sensed the frustration of a matador trapped in a badminton tournament. But she, and the program, came to belated life in the final quarter hour, enough time for Greer to sling forth a sally of pithy offerings ranging from a jovial aria on boobs and the public display of same, to the time she'd had to imagine herself having a penis for a day.
"All I could think was that I couldn't wait to get rid of it. What a nuisance!"
Male viewers crossed their legs and wondered if Germaine might be on to something with the idea of detachables.
This was entertaining, but there was a patented Greer "Did she really say that?" moment to come and it prompted the most lively audience reaction of the night - a short, horrified gasp and groan.
It came after Julie Bishop was asked if she would ever get her top off in public to make a point, an idea from which the foreign minister wisely recoiled. "It's not something I've ever had the desire to do online. I'm quite adept at my emoji language and that's about as radical as I get."
Bishop was to physically recoil at Greer's follow-up interjection: "What if it got you commutation of the life [sic] sentences for two Australians?"
After a shocked pause of several seconds, the minister shut it down: "Please don't go there, Germaine."
Germaine, who's been hearing that since the middle of the last century and mostly ploughing on regardless, zipped her lip.
It had been mostly a zipped-lip kind of show.
A program famous for its sometimes over-the-top political argy-bargy was relentlessly polite this time around.
The panellists - Bishop, Greer, "bad feminist" writer Roxane Gay, CEO Holly Kramer and Youth Without Borders founder Yasmin Abdel-Magied - bantered gently on a range of issues.
Proper policy discussion was thin on the ground until the final bell roused a debate on child care; oddly, domestic violence was left untouched while the headline scandal of sexual harassment of women doctors was thoroughly dissected.
And there was discussion of the merits or otherwise of calling oneself a feminist; and of double standards in politics - Julie Bishop tiptoed through this minefield when asked whether she could do her job if she were a mother.
Greer's views on Bishop's wariness of the label "feminist" were polite: "She's perfectly entitled to put it that way if she wants to." But she also recalled the heady days of her own youth, noting: "We never talk these days about liberation."
Viewers, too, were awaiting some fire in the belly. By the halfway mark, some on the Q&A communal snarkfest known as Twitter were wondering how a program that held so much promise was panning out so pedestrian.
Others disagreed, as you'd expect. Good television - like feminism, as this program confirmed - can be in the eye of the beholder, and debates that sounded rehashed to some were actually new and interesting for others.
And then there was the larger symbolic point to consider - that for the first time on the Q&A desk, it was coast-to-coast women. It was a show worth saluting on those grounds alone.
