It really wasn’t my first time on the BBC Radio 4 News Quiz. I thought I’d already experienced most versions of the show. Sometimes the crowd is giggly from the very beginning, and sometimes you have to really work to get an earnest laugh out of them. Sometimes there’s so much news that you don’t quite know what to prepare for, and sometimes there really is only one show in town, and you have to be ready to make endless gags about it.

My fellow panellists and I were on stage on Thursday evening, and things were going pretty well. The audience had been slow to warm up, but they were getting there, and I don’t want to speak for the other guests, but it felt like everyone was having a good time. Then the producer’s voice boomed across the auditorium.

“Huh, guys”, I paraphrase, “while you’ve been recording, Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to have fallen out, and they’re now at each other’s throats on social media. Would you maybe like to talk about that for a bit?”. Chaos naturally ensued.

I got my phone out and raced to Twitter, for the first time in a good long while, and immediately clicked on Musk’s profile, something I’d rather hoped I would never have to do again. There it all was. “Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate”, the man-child had petulantly posted. “Such ingratitude”.

An instant favourite was “Remember this? @realDonaldTrump”, linking to the video of Trump and Musk standing outside the White House, lovingly looking at a Tesla car. It felt, I told the audience as we were yet to start recording again, like watching a break-up happen in real time. Do you not remember that holiday we had in Sicily, Brandon? Did Sicily mean nothing to you? Nothing at all?

I then had to correct myself as I saw that Musk had retweeted a poll asking people to choose between himself and Trump. This wasn’t a lovers’ quarrel, but an explosive fight between two middle schoolers during recess. Back in my day, MSN Messenger wouldn’t have known what’d hit it later that evening.

In any case, we ended up finishing the show, throwing whatever jokes we could think of at the breaking news. We walked back into the green room and I leapt on my phone, scrolling through the many posts I’d somehow already missed in that half hour or so. I will spare you the whole retelling, as we all have but one precious life on this earth, but do feel the need to mention some highlights.

Everyone will have their favourite moments, of course, but I personally enjoyed the drama of Trump telling Truth Social that he would be terminating “Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts” (extraneous capital letters: model’s own). That Musk couldn’t find anything wittier to say than “big, ugly bill” was also a delight. Most playground insults roll off the tongue better than whatever this was.

The cherry on the cake followed shortly, in the shape of Kanye West deciding to wade in with a heartfelt and beautifully pathetic “Broooos please noooooo [hug emoji] We love you both so much”. Again: all of this just works so much better when you imagine that everyone involved is 11 years old. Well, all of it is also considerably more entertaining when you try to ignore the fact that the two men at the centre of the spat are, respectively, the most powerful head of state in the world, and the wealthiest man in the history of humanity. It’s an Alien v Predator remake, but one where we unfortunately share a planet with both beasts.

Speaking of which – did it remind you of anything? Because it gave me the oddest sense of deja vu. Naturally, America must always go for bigger, bolder, more intense remakes, but we in Britain have already lived through a dramatic falling out between a chaotic, untrustworthy leader and his wily, eccentric adviser.

Sure, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings never fought quite so dramatically in the public eye, but their dynamic was similar. Johnson was always going to betray Cummings and Cummings was always going to try and destroy Johnson as retaliation, yet we had to watch them go through the motions in real time. It was both entertaining and exhausting, just as this version has been.

Do you know what both fights also have in common, by the way? Absolutely all the people at the centre of them have been men. We keep getting told by cranks and reactionaries that women are simply too emotional and unreliable to hold positions of great power, yet these are all little boys acting like they’ve just drunk three cans of Red Bull in a row.

At time of writing, it’s looking like Trump and Musk are on the cusp of trying to patch things up, and they were always going to do that, right? That’s what kids do. They skipped nap time and so they’re cranky and end up fighting their pals, just because they can. That’s what little boys do.