Election night TV – horror, tedium and constipated monologues
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Version 0 of 1. Election night on television is always a weird mixture of horror and tedium, like a Paranormal Activity marathon, or a nine-hour real-time BBC4 documentary set in an abattoir. Fortunately, for the casual observer at least, this election night leant heavily on horror. Which, as everyone knows, is slightly more entertaining. For the BBC, the horror gushed forth at the stroke of 10pm; David Dimbleby sending his buttoned-up avengers scrambling across the studio to make sense of the exit poll before it could even be beamed across the wall of Broadcasting House. On his mark, Emily Maitlis began Minority Reporting like billy-o through a torrent of impenetrable statistics, while John Curtice of the British Polling Council gradually unravelled to such an extent that you ended up worrying how he’d look whenever the camera returned to him. Would his hair be sticking up? Would his tie still be on? Would we find him bearded and crying, swigging moonshine and wearing a punched-through top hat with a mouse in it? Meanwhile, the poll played such havoc with Andrew Neil, Paddy Ashdown and Alistair Campbell that they simply ignored the results in favour of listing all the different types of clothes they’d most like to eat. Things rallied after a couple of hours – especially once the focus switched to Jeremy Vine in his deathless seat-by-seat virtual reality prison – but, sheesh, talk about a rough start. Meanwhile, Channel 4 offered the evening’s most unequivocal horror: Jeremy Paxman playing for LOLs. His Alternative Election Night demonstrated a crazed effort to metamorphose his traditional Newsnight-era eye roll into a masterclass of insult comedy. However, given that each of his constipated monologues essentially involved him repeating the word “idiot” over and over again until his colon gained sentience and strangled him unconscious, it’s fair to say that it wasn’t exactly an unqualified success. In fact, the only way the channel’s offering became bearable at all is if you imagined that the whole thing was the result of a low-budget 1980s body-swap comedy where Paxman and David Mitchell urinated in a fountain at the same time and turned into each other with largely unsatisfactory results. Sky’s approach – as you’d expect, a combination of whooshy graphics and muted gloating – was entirely superseded by the coverage on Sky Arts, which essentially managed to be its own DVD extra. Fixed cameras were set up around the Sky News studio and, as they aimlessly cut from one to another, we’d hear the disembodied voices of Sky News bigwigs telling us how great Sky News is. Which was bizarre to witness, admittedly, but still preferable to Kay Burley. So far, all horror. And that left the tedium to ITV, the perennially downcast Adrian Chiles figure of British television. Whenever I flicked over throughout the night – which I did infrequently, and only through a sense of moribund duty – I was presented with the same sight; three men sitting around a table, grinding out the sort of excruciating small talk you make when your girlfriend goes to the toilet and you’re left trapped in a room with her parents. I stopped checking at 1am. I hope they’re still alive. |