UK General Election

Well, this is hardly a fair comparison. Regardless of your views of Fallon and McDonnell, they are senior figures in current politics and therefore their comments are extremely relevant because they're the people involved - and however entertaining Balls and Osborne are, they are no longer in day-to-day politics. You make it sound like Fallon and McDonnell were on all night and exclusive to the BBC, when they were on all channels, including ITV. It's like slagging them off for having the Prime Minister on.

I could easily say, I turned over to ITV and they had Quentin Letts and Andy Coulson on as studio guests, and so on.



Well, indeed, and that also happened in 1997 - The Election Night Armistice is on YouTube and, as I remember from the time, the biggest laugh in the whole thing comes not from anything they've done but at the news that David Mellor had lost his seat. But then in 2001, the official most boring election of all time, they didn't do anything. But of course the problem is that it's a side-effect of increased enthusiasm for elections - there's more interest in political comedy when there's more interest in politics, ie when stuff's happening. If it's a boring election nobody's enthused enough to bother.

It is interesting that C4 can now go on all night, but presumably these days you don't need an enormous newsgathering operation to cover an election when you have social media and the like.



Well, I would always say that the more opportunities for the public to engage in the political process, the better, and if just one person who wouldn't normally bother with political TV is encouraged to watch it and consider their vote, they are justified. It's easy to say we didn't used to have them and things were better because we had proper set-piece interviews (which we still have anyway), but we didn't have social media either and that's clearly here to stay and the parties take that seriously.

I would certainly say that the public are more engaged with elections than they were in the past, two decades or so ago all the election campaign programmes used to stink the place out in terms of ratings. It was all shoved out opposite Corrie and 'stEnders and you wouldn't have had two hour debates in the middle of primetime like we do now, it would have been considered madness.



Well, indeed, no real viewer thinks like that. Every election some hipster pops up and goes, oh, do you know, ITV did a programme and it was quite good. Of course they should be doing a professional and interesting programme. They've been doing it for sixty years. We know they can do it. Doesn't mean anyone has to watch it when they get all they want from the BBC.

The Beeb themselves have certainly been happy to innovate, bringing in social media as well, and I noticed a couple of people on Twitter pointing out how diverse the BBC team was as well. And for me the best thing about the results graphics is that they always named the MP as well as the seat, which is useful to know which personalities have got in. That alone was of fantastic value.

The one thing I don't like about the BBC coverage, which I mentioned two years ago, is that the live DOGs keep on saying the location of the count rather than the seat, and it doesn't matter where the count is. So all the South London seats had "LIVE: Wandsworth" on the screen, but none of the seats are called Wandsworth, so what value does that have for the viewer? Who cares it's in Wandsworth? One obvious example is when Geeta Guru-Murthy was reporting and it said "LIVE: Camberwell" on the screen. Camberwell is the name of a seat, but they weren't talking about that, they were talking about Bermondsey. That doesn't help.

Actually my favourite bit was when they tried to interview Tom Watson, having lost his speech earlier, and he said they were about to do a declaration so "I'll move out of the way so you can cover it". Of course, it was a dull safe seat nobody was interested in, plus they had no microphones so we couldn't hear it. Thanks Tom!

The point isn't that "oh, ITV can do it too", the point is that ITV do a much better job than the BBC even though ITV's spend and studio size is so small in comparison. That's why a lot of us always like to turn to ITV for breaking news and prefer ITV's news bulletins - we don't talk about it just to be contrary, we talk about it because they're subjectively better.

Interestingly, UTV managed a 1 hour election special at 2pm and 5pm yesterday for an hour each, as the main ITV coverage ended and everywhere else went to normal afternoon shows - obviously they didn't put on an overnight broadcast (although I don't think UTV did in 2015 either, which would have been before ITV bought them out). Wales didn't get anything extra, but nice to see UTV still getting some special treatment. I wonder if this was because suddenly MPs in Northern Ireland became very important to Westminster politics, or if it was scheduled anyway?

EDIT: They're also getting an hour on Sunday morning, after Peston on Sunday. Again, ITV at large is just showing normal shows during this slot, whilst STV is showing two half hour local programmes. Looking at the schedule, these perhaps have been buried because of the STV debate on Tuesday and them airing the British Soap Awards on Wednesday (a day after ITV)?

That is an opinion, though - it depends entirely what you want from election coverage. If you prefer the way ITV do it, fantastic. But the fact is, many people prefer the Beeb coverage, and nobody's forcing them to watch it. They know there are other channels.

In previous elections the Lib Dems have been the main challengers here, but there was a shift in votes toward Labour in 2015 due to tuition fees and Labour mounted a bigger campaign. The University of Kent has a lot of foreign students and describes itself as "The UK's European University", so in light of that and students likely taking more notice of politics due to Brexit... Of course the thing about university towns is the student population is transient, so if there wasn't another election for 4-5 years it could have all changed again. Plus students may register to vote in either or both their home and uni locations (and can vote twice in local elections, but only once in a general). I doubt anybody expected it to be a Labour gain and more than likely could flip back again next time.

As I understand it, the people at the ~150 or so polling stations who are asked to do the exit poll are allowed to fill in a second ballot "privately" so they don't have to say how they voted to a researcher.

I can't remember Canterbury *ever* getting a live TV declaration. Folkestone and Margate have in the past (when Michael Howard was Tory leader, and Nigel Farage running for UKIP in Thanet South - Margate Winter Gardens bit more impressive on camera too..), and obviously local TV will go to whichever venue is declaring the most seats. Maybe Canterbury will get one next time - it's the only Labour seat in Kent now. Then again there are other seats that are now even more marginal than ours (187 votes).... From the coverage, looks like plenty of media at the university talking to students on Friday.

That's how I understand it, too - I'm sure I remember seeing one archive clip on YouTube that was showing a second ballot box outside the polling station marked "EXIT POLL" or similar, but annoyingly I can't find it now.

It isn't fair to say that "most people prefer the BBC coverage", most people haven't given another channel a second thought. That is the key point in this sort of argument.

The other general point about this is that even if the Beeb do have more resources, that does not mean that they are at a disadvantage because it depends what you do with it. And ITV should know that, because about twenty or thirty years ago, they were dominating over BBC News which may have had more resources but was incredibly boring and unattractive. ITN used to be by far the most popular, because they had a team of presenters and reporters who people knew and liked and they were quicker and more incisive. I used to watch quite a lot of ITN at the time, their bulletins were at convenient times for me and I often preferred their reporters and news agenda. None of which is the case anymore.

The most obvious example too is when TVam were beating Breakfast Time and Breakfast News, despite Breakfast Time benefiting from one of the biggest news-gathering operations in the world, and TVam spending about 50p on the news. Greg Dyke even pointed out that they didn't have the Beeb's resources, but "news is about ideas", and he thought TVam's news was more interesting and more engaging and they had Gordon Honeycombe who was an incredibly popular figure. So there's no obvious and unarguable advantage from having more resources. It depends what you do with it. Indeed, I would argue that the reason for the increased success of BBC News in recent years is that they've out-ITNed ITN in terms of finding the right presenters and being quicker to embrace a slightly more populist news agenda - without losing the authority they always had. Kudos to ITV for wanting to create a distinctive team and agenda, and getting critical acclaim, but the main aim is to appeal to the ITV audience.

You can say, oh, the Beeb are always going to win because they just do the same thing, but they do freshen it up - Mishal Husain and Amol Rajan played prominent roles on Thursday night - and if they do it badly, people will go elsewhere, as they have in the past. Money doesn't come into it.

I mean, who had the most successful election out of the Daily Mail and that blog Another Angry Voice? Compare the relative resources of those two.

Well, that is not the BBC's fault. It's the audience who decide to do that, and it is up to ITV to come up with compelling reasons for people to choose them instead.

In the fifties people were happy enough with a single TV chanel, then ITV turned up and virtually the entire audience switched to them because they were far more exciting than the BBC. More recently, it was not that long ago that GMTV were dominating the breakfast market and most viewers didn't bother looking elsewhere. Now look where we are. How has that happened?

Sorry, misunderstood the question.

Not sure whether anyone has posted this yet, but the end of the SIX yesterday had a nice montage of events, together with the nice extended version of the BBC News theme.

Interesting that the BBC Election 2017 material on the iPlayer is to expire in a month, unlike past polls that usually have had an eleven month extended period offered.