There is a saying in Glasgow that is pretty useful for ensuring someone worth listening to can be heard. A cry of ‘one singer, one song’ will come up from a crowd, mainly when people start singing along with a solo, but also when someone is talking and a clamour of voices threatens to drown them out.

We could have done with a bit of that crowd-sourced discipline last night when Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling met in Glasgow for the second and final televised debate of the referendum campaign. Any undecided voters tuning in for reasoned debate would have left disappointed. All the big topics were covered – currency, oil revenues, the future of the NHS. But the overall tone – aggressive, bad tempered and well, just a bit too shouty – gave a poor impression of politics and was a pretty unedifying spectacle overall.

Salmond’s inability to detail a ‘plan B’ on the currency provided Alistair Darling with a win in the last debate. This time Salmond tried to answer, but not with a ‘plan B’, instead with plans X, Y and Z. He offered three alternatives in an attempt to flood the debate and flush away the question.

A former chancellor, Darling knew this was not an answer. But I fear his continual demand for a ‘plan B’ played badly with the crowd, and viewers at home. People may not have been any clearer on the currency but they wanted the debate to move on from the shouting match it soon descended to.

Unlike the STV debate earlier this month, this debate was broadcast across the United Kingdom. Viewers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland got to see a version of Salmond that Scottish voters are all too familiar with. Gone was the cheeky chap who pops up occasionally on Have I Got News for You. Instead we saw the bad tempered shouting Johann Lamont encounters at first minister’s questions each week.

When someone shouts at you it is hard not to raise your voice in reply. We could have done with the cool, calm, unflappable Darling we usually see. A simple ‘come on Alex, you’re a former economist, you know this doesn’t add up’ would have taken some of the heat out of the exchange. Instead the whole debate descended into a rammy (there’s another Scottish phrase for you all – this article is an education!), and when it comes to bad-tempered shouting matches Salmond has the most experience.

I am a fan of televised TV debates – they offer a focus and excitement to politics that can get lost in long campaigns. I hope this bad-tempered exchange has not put broadcasters, or more importantly viewers, off the idea. The BBC made a poor decision on the format – having politicians cross examine each other just did not work and led to the worst of the squabbling. Though perhaps now nationalist claims of BBC bias can be put to bed; aggressive questions from the audience were all directed to Darling, and this viewer at least felt Salmond’s assertions on the land of milk and honey that an independent Scotland will become were left unchallenged.

The debate has been written up as a win for Salmond. And as this is the last debate neither man will get the chance to claim ‘best of three’. Alistair Darling can take solace in the news that early polling shows the debate has had precisely no impact on voting intentions.

It has been a long, long campaign; with just 24 days until the poll most Scottish voters will be glad this is nearly over. I suspect the Scottish phrase most in use last night and again on 18 September will be ‘gies peace’ – translation: ‘give us peace’, or in plain English: please stop talking!

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Kirsty O’Brien is a former head of policy development for the Labour party and worked as an adviser to Gordon Brown from 2009-2010

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Photo: BBC