Neil from West Sussex asked: 'How do you sleep at night, Mr Blair?' Marion, a nurse from Brighton, demanded of the Prime Minister: 'Would you wipe someone's backside for £5 an hour?' And Maria from Essex, shouting that he was talking 'rubbish', became so animated by her fury that she leapt out of her seat at him.
The fascinating thing about these encounters on Channel 5 between Tony Blair and angry members of the electorate is what didn't happen next. Alastair Campbell didn't punch his BlackBerry blue with expletive-rich e-mails to the editor of the show raging that the audience had been packed with Tories, Trots and tossers. Tony Blair didn't leave the studio demanding the head of the aide who had signed him up to this lacerating confrontation with discontented voters.
No, the Prime Minister and his strategists were quietly satisfied. It couldn't have gone more to their plan had they scripted it themselves. If their 'masochism strategy' is to come off as intended, it is vital that people are rude to Tony Blair. If it ain't hurting, it ain't working.
Among the many things that make him the most consummate communicator of his era is Tony Blair's grasp of the celebritisation of culture and how politics can be adapted to it. For the fallen celeb, the route to rehabilitation can involve submitting to a dose of ritual humiliation presided over by Ant and Dec. For a Prime Minister trying to re-establish his credibility with alienated voters, redemption is sought from a tongue-lashing on TV. Mr Blair is doing the political equivalent of bushtucker trials. It is a case of I'm A Prime Minister ... Keep Me In There. Much of Labour's campaign - the attack ads, the pledge cards - may feel jaded. But this is a novelty which breaks previously iron rules about how to get elected. The first of the commandments in the strategists' old testament is that the candidate should always be shielded from feel-bad emotions such as hatred, disdain and contempt. Deliberately putting the Prime Minister in abuse's way breaks the rules by which campaigners have operated for decades.
No previous Prime Minister has done this. Margaret Thatcher never took a question from the public about her going rate for wiping backsides. You cannot see any of Tony Blair's world peer group putting themselves in the stocks and inviting the public to chuck rotten eggs. Jacques Chirac, of the imperial French presidency, would not allow such lèse majesté . George Bush would never take the risk of walking naked into the debating chamber with members of the public hand-picked for their hostility.
Conventional wisdom has it that this must be madness. The traditional campaign playbooks say that leaders should always be displayed among crowds of cheering supporters affirming their goodness and greatness. And predictably conventional reporting has depicted these TV trials as evidence that the wheels are already coming off a 'humiliated' Prime Minister's campaign.
I wonder. It is always worth remembering about Tony Blair that he has made a career at the top of politics by flouting many of its usual rules. Clause Four could never be reformed; it was. Labour would never win two landslide majorities in succession: it did. A Labour Prime Minister could never carry his party into a divisive and contentious war alongside an extremely right-wing American President; he did. Prime Ministers never pre-announce their retirement plans; he has. No-one ever gained popularity by constantly exposing himself to voters who say he sucks. That's his next trick.
The 'masochism strategy' is a development of what he did during the build-up to the Iraq war when he was deliberately exposed to opponents of the invasion, the better to try to answer the country's doubts about the enter prise. Going further back, it also owes something to John Major and the soap box he employed during the 1992 election campaign. Whether or not they are conscious of this debt to the former Conservative Prime Minister, Labour's strategists are seeking to replicate Mr Major's successful device to make himself look unspun and authentic. The threat of assasination now makes it impossible to stand the Prime Minister on a crate in the open air. The next best thing is to try to find spontaneity in the TV studio: the 21st-century version of the town square meeting.
Tony Blair remains unrivalled as a political actor-manager, not least because he understands how to adapt his performance to survive. He grasps what television has done to the relationship between its consumers and those who appear on the box. It has stripped away reverence for power and deference to office. His questioners often address him not as 'Prime Minister' but as 'Tony' and sometimes more abusive appellations. Mr Blair was the first of his generation of British politicians to get a handle on the celebritisation of politics. Even some of his own staff mock when he is booked on to the soft sofas of shows such as Richard and Judy . What the snotty and the snobbish fail to see is that these programmes reach sections of the public who are otherwise tuned out of politics. And Tony Blair is good at it. He does 'human' on television more naturally than ever will the awkward Michael Howard or the stiff Gordon Brown.
Another thing no previous British Prime Minister has ever done - would never have dreamt of doing - is to speak about his relationship with the country as if it were a marriage that has gone through a rocky patch. Of the many toe-curling passages in his speech to Labour's spring conference, one of my nominations for the cheesiest went like this:
'And then, all of a sudden, there you are, the British people, thinking: you're not listening. And I think: you're not hearing me. And before you know it, you raise your voice. I raise mine. Some of you throw a bit of crockery.' I won't quote anymore of that bilge because it will make you want to heave not just plates in his direction, but also the contents of your stomach. Members of his own Cabinet were in desperate need of a sick bag when they heard it.
Which probably goes to show why they are not Prime Minister and he is. To invert the old feminist slogan, the political is now the personal. Participants in focus groups do often talk about their attitudes towards the occupant of Number 10 as if they were married to him. The disaffected among them speak of being 'let down' or 'betrayed' by him precisely as though the Prime Minister was a disappointing spouse.
By inviting people to hurl crockery, he hopes to demonstrate that he is not swollen with arrogance. He is still humble enough to expose himself to the people's dissatisfactions. The more he is beset by cross - and often contradictory - complaints from finger-thrusting audiences, the more he hopes to come across as the reasonable, charming and responsible half of the relationship. By soaking up the anger, he calculates he may drain it. He's happy to be arguing all the way to polling day - so long as the country is then ready to kiss and make up.
And it seemed to work at least with Maria Hutchings, the woman who lambasted him on Channel 5 about the health service. After an off-camera conversation, she later declared herself to be impressed that he had listened.
It is a sign of the damage done to his reputation that Tony Blair calculates that he has nothing left to lose by inviting people to say why they hate him. It is a demonstration of his self-confidence in his skills of persuasion that he thinks it will ultimately help them to love him again. The doubters include some on his own campaign team who wonder whether it is really a brilliant stratagem to invite voters to beat up on the Prime Minister on live television while reporters lovingly record every brickbat for Labour-loathing papers.
It's just worth noting that Tony Blair has made a career at the apex of British politics from understanding how to use the media and running against the conventional wisdom. And rather a long career it has proved to be.