2015 Election and the Leaders Debates

BBC Wales info - http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/wales-2015-election-coverage (including leaders debate on 1st May presented by Huw Edwards)
BBC NI info - http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/bbc-northern-ireland-election-2015-coverage (leaders debate on 5th May, no further info available yet)

If STV does show it it will be at 11.15, and then the night shift.

Not related to the current election campaign, but couldn't see mention of this anywhere and thought it would be of interest. The BBC have just put a number of videos and interviews about the history of their election night coverage online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/elections

Blog post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2015/election-archive

Does anyone know why debates were never covered Googlebox?

Maybe something to do with the footage not allowed to be used in a comical way? (Similar to the rules surrounding use of Parliamentary footage)

ITV only placed a few restrictions on other broadcasters using footage from the debate, but this was one of them:

1. News and current affairs access only
2. On-screen credit required after 4 April 2015
3. No access after midnight on 14 May 2015

From what I saw, most other channels used some form of on-screen credit anyway …

Isn't this a rather harsh restriction, especially considering the long and proud history of political satire in the UK? Just think if The Daily Show in the U.S. was prohibited from showing footage from the presidential debates!

Could only see HIGNFY running anything on it, and they're not on till Friday, by which time it will be old, old news.

It's probably not ITV's restriction. There is next to no political satire on TV now anyway - Have I Got News for You and the new ITV puppet show will be about it, and both will have to be very careful during the election campaign.

Wouldn't Gogglebox be working under the Fair Dealing provision in copyright law that you can get away with a short extract for the purposes of review? That would trump ITV's restrictions.

They probably steered clear for impartiality reasons.

I suspect as well Gogglebox was in the can by Thursday night.

More the impartiality reasons... they could get away with Current Affairs saying it was topical discussion etc. Far fetched - but the rules around broadcasters are more strict than newspapers for election coverage.

They'd need to have criticism / comment of each leader and each person in the interests of balance and any 'oh I don't trust him' type of throw away lines could be taken as interfering.

More a bigger minefield than you'd think.