Party election broadcasts: uniting the nation in despair and embarrassment
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Version 0 of 1. I recently attempted to predict the winners of the upcoming local and European elections. I did this by analysing the BBC1 continuity announcer's voice immediately after a party election broadcast. If he sounded interested by what he'd just seen, the party got a point. If he sounded triumphant in any way, it got two points. If he sounded abjectly mortified, zero points. I had to abandon this study, however, because the poor man sounded uniformly horrified by all of them. Well, of course he did. He's a human being. We are now fully in the swing of party election broadcast season; a period of time so completely miserable that it somehow, briefly, manages to unite this divided nation. You see, a party election broadcast is a great leveller. It doesn't matter where you sit on the political spectrum, or how crackpot your ideas are – whenever anyone sees one, they automatically die inside. They're awful. People can only watch them through their fingers, or if they pull a face like Donald Sutherland wading into the pond after his daughter at the start of Don't Look Now. Your heart always sinks during a party election broadcast. I suspect that's down to when they're scheduled. Nobody wants to hear from a politician at 6.57pm. They've had their brain softened up by the inane newsreader/weather forecaster chatter at the end of the news, and they're ready to see Matt Baker on The One Show gurgle at his own hands like he's just noticed they're there for half an hour. The last thing anyone, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Tory, wants at this stage is to endure several minutes of David Cameron's balloon face droning on about how hard they work. What's interesting is that every single party election broadcast ever made is destined to make you burn up with embarrassment, but in a variety of ways. The three biggest have each attempted to convey a mass-appeal message to prove that they're just like you, and they've all failed. The Conservatives opted for their now traditional mixture of regional accents, 3am BBC2 Ceefax music and slightly desperate footage of forklift trucks to sell their message that things aren't as bad as they probably are. Labour unwittingly framed Ed Miliband as David Brent, by filming him glancing self-consciously at the camera whenever he takes a mad stab at empathy by, say, going to a hospital and shaking a dying woman's hand. But they're both eclipsed by the Liberal Democrats' offering, where Nick Clegg wears his nicest suit – the "I agree with Nick" suit, from back when everyone liked him – and wanders aimlessly through a deserted market. The few people he passes don't even notice he's there. It's like watching Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. The poor sap doesn't realise that he's already dead. This is also a European election, so all the fringe parties get their chance to spray their badly thought-out stream of consciousness at us too. Even Ukip. Even though they've already got every episode of Question Time for that. These broadcasts elicit a completely different breed of embarrassment. When the main parties make a broadcast, you feel sorry for them. But when the small parties to the right of the Conservatives make one, you end up feeling sorry for the entire country. Watching these broadcasts – especially watching more than one of them in a row – is just about as depressing as life gets. They're barely even party election broadcasts. They're more akin to the sort of chilling YouTube video that tabloids dig up three days after a mass shooting. There's one where a succession of crag-faced almost-authoritarians hold up signs reading: "I'm English! Not British!" like Bob Dylan would if he'd embarked on an unfulfilling career in middle-management right before recording Subterranean Homesick Blues (English Democrats), and one where a giant octopus smashes up Westminster (An Independence from Europe). The BNP even rewrote All Things Bright and Beautiful for its broadcast, although it was censored because either a) the mainstream media doesn't like its message of hope, or b) it's weird to play a song that appears to accuse Big Issue sellers of murdering children with axes on the telly at teatime. Most extreme of all, though, is Britain First's broadcast. It's rammed with air-raid sirens, union jacks, crucifixes and photographs of Winston Churchill and Enoch Powell staring at each other as though they're on the cover of a bargain-bin romcom DVD. There's a spokesman too, but I couldn't work out what his policies were because his bit was filmed with an iPhone on a main road at rush hour. At a push, I'll assume he's talking about how much he loves the bearded Austrian who won Eurovision, but that's just speculation. Obviously it's great to live in a country where people get to express their opinions freely, but I just wish they'd learn to do it in a more entertaining way. The ghost of Nick Clegg? Not entertaining. Ed Miliband self-consciously glad-handing sick pensioners? Not entertaining. The phrase "Keep Britain Christian" written in a grimly sub-McNabb font and mounted next to a bad painting of Jesus? Not entertaining, and actually quite hard to watch. Especially right before The One Show. I think that's my biggest concern here, that all these broadcasts have made The One Show three minutes shorter. Roll on Friday. |