British Channel 4 News has sent reporters to Iran to “get to grips with Iran’s perspective,” and it looks like Jon Snow has already done a smashing job of it: Axis of evil? Doesn’t feel like it from here. (Hat tip: dustyroadguy.)

All 13 of us are now on site in Tehran, some have been out to Qom to scout it out for a transmission from there next week.

We shall be going ourselves tomorrow, it’s where the tangle of religious leaders debate and teach and think about Islam, Iran and quite a bit more.

It’s a mammoth operation trying to set up next week’s live reports, it’s not an exercise which has ever been attempted before on this scale - and Iran itself is feeling its way in working out quite what we will be able to do. […and how best to exploit it for propaganda value. —ed.]

So we are on a voyage into the unknown, our reason for being here centres on Monday’s nuclear report out of Vienna and we shall then tailor our coverage accordingly.

But the idea is to try to get to grips with Iran’s perspective and what it feels like to be in the eye of the storm.

Strangely, axis of evil is not the first descriptive phrase one finds coming to mind.

Last Thursday, Snow got a close-up look at Iran’s perspective: A small dose of detention.

This afternoon we experienced the other side of the coin, a small dose of detention by the authorities at what once was the US embassy and now is the forlorn and vacant ‘nest of spies’.

As so often, the guys doing the detaining were more frightened than we were, or should I say paranoid, while they sought a higher authority to check that our authority or permission was adequate.

Of course after two hours they found that it was and suddenly they transformed into charming, humorous characters without a care in the world.

And they laughed! Oh, how they laughed!