Swing When You’re Winning

Well, for a while there it looked like we might have a result which would contradict the exit poll, but as Friday morning went on (in direct correlation to us running out of beer), things went as predicted. Which has pissed off just about everyone: Tories, for a lack of an overall majority; Labour, for losing such a chasm of seats; and the Lib Dems, whose waning Cleggmania boost over the past few weeks had started to resemble a former ‘X Factor’ winner trying to get a Christmas number one - they had spectacularly failed to capitalise on their initial popularity.

Not even the voters were pleased, particularly those who didn‘t have enough time to vote. There were bizarre scenes in Sheffield where irate voters complained when the doors closed on them at 10pm, which is what they’re legally supposed to do, considering they had been open since 7am that morning. There was confusion with a lack of ballot papers when teams of students turned up without their polling cards. They had probably left them in the union bar to use as coasters.

And then some familiar faces were ousted, like Jacqui Smith, whose expenses claims could rival Greece’s budget deficit, and Lembit Opik, who had been rather wisely sidelined during the campaign, which was probably something to do with his insistence on putting taxpayers money into researching meteorites. Both lost to Conservatives, who took significant gains everywhere, including my home town of Swindon, with both North and South constituencies formerly being Labour strongholds.

I stuck with the BBC coverage throughout, which was mostly first class, particularly the visual effects department who had been working overtime to plonk Jeremy Vine in some form of virtual reality hanger like the holodeck on the Enterprise, walking on the computerised pavement outside Number 10 with constituency names underfoot, and in a particularly stunning if peripheral act of CGI grandiose, he physically appears to topple scandalous expense-claiming MPs with their images fixed to a falling stack of dominoes. Almost as brilliant was the enthusiasm of Emily Maitlis and her giant iPad which, when it worked, seemed the best way to successfully dumb down each passing result into pretty, logical, pictorial sense for dribbling drunken idiots, which is important when you’re doing live television at 3am. She was still pressing buttons the next morning with endearing affection, like someone showing off a new car.

But, god, Andrew Neil was annoying. I was watching the coverage with my Dad who just couldn’t take Neil’s constant harassing any longer (particularly when you’re moored on a boat talking to such political minds as Joan Collins), at one point shouting, “just save Maureen Lipman and sink the bloody thing!” The coarse double act of Dimbelby and Paxo was cynically spot on, and you can’t help but watch and admire how they can continue to discuss detailed constitutional reform after such a long time without sleep. If that was me, I would just end up mumbling into a sock.

And then there was an awful sense of hurry up and wait, which is a common trend on any rolling news broadcast. Token talking heads from Paddy Ashdown, George Osbourne and even some important people were unceremoniously cut to focus on live broadcasts of one of the Big Three doing something, anything, from shaking hands or driving somewhere. These were the worst cut-to’s, as a helicopter tracks the roof of a car across London with commentators not completely sure where they were or, indeed, what car they were supposed to be looking at. Looking down on the scene resembled some form of CCTV tracking system, as if we were checking that the cars didn’t run any red lights or drive in the bus lane.

Following it on Twitter was fun, too, especially getting tweets from people like Armando Iannucci, who complained that the live TV feed wasn’t working on their boat and were therefore probably the only people in the whole country who didn’t know what the hell was going on. That’s the sort of insight that you just wouldn’t have got before, even at the last election. Whether this is a good thing, of course, is debatable. As an aside, why not follow me at @iknowbenjohnson, if you choose to do that sort of thing.

And then came the result, which despite its unprecedented nature, still managed to get quite boring quite quickly. We still don’t technically have a government at the time of writing, until Clegg decides which of his former bullies he wants to bunk up with and therefore alienate just about everybody else. But after the Big Three had spoken on Friday, journalists have just been left to report on a whole lot of hypothetical and speculative nothingness, repeatedly, and usually using the same talking heads that had been on the television for the past 24 hours. After the mammoth live broadcast, the BBC cut rather reluctantly to an episode of ‘Flog It!’ as some form of twisted clemency, before unloading even more speculative nothingness into our ear holes, the like of which is still going on as I type.

Now, perhaps this is just to do with the fact that reality TV is no longer a strand of television but actually television itself, but the whole thing did have an air of ‘The X Factor’ about it; after deliberating for hours and then throwing open to the public vote, we still had to wait until the end of the weekend to get any form of a result. And, just like on ‘The X Factor’, someone else should have won.