Who needs a swingometer? Radio is better for elections
The week in radio Gerard O’donovan
As with all else, the general election dominated the week in radio, one moment imprinted indelibly on the memory: the breath-stilling seconds just after 10pm last Thursday when the exit polls predicted the landslide for the Conservatives.
Listening to the hours of results and analysis that followed – toggling between stations but sticking mostly to Radio 4’s Election 2019 and LBC’S Election Special – was a purer and more focused election experience than anticipated. Undistracted by constantly streaming on-screen graphics or the dispensable gimmickry of swingometers and the like, I found myself hanging on every word, thirsty for more and more, wholly swept up in the unfolding political drama. On Radio 4, the default position of presenters Emma Barnett and James Naughtie was restraint, caution and neutrality, though the inevitable shock and awe seeped through occasionally – not least when Labour’s Barry Gardiner conceded the election on air within five minutes of the exit poll.
Over on commercial LBC, meanwhile, unfettered by the need for neutrality, the mood was infinitely more upbeat. Co-host Iain Dale – never one to hide his political light under a bushel – was cock-a-hoop, joshing with his regular broadcast partner (and former Labour cabinet minister) Jacqui Smith over the Labour rout, forcing her to entertainingly resist any insistence on “defenestrating” Jeremy Corbyn there and then.
In fact on both the BBC and LBC, it was extraordinary how quickly the conversation moved from the “stonking Conservative victory” – in Barnett’s words – to consideration of Corbyn’s future, or rather, lack of it. Long before the moment Ian Levy’s first Conservative gain for Blyth Valley put the course of the night beyond doubt, Andrew Marr on the BBC reported that no fewer than two campaigns were already under way to unseat the Labour leader. Nowhere did this come across as biased or unbalanced – at least not compared to, say, some of the more amusing moments in LBC’S coverage, such as when – following Mark Jenkinson’s gain in Workington – Dale exultantly reported rumours that Ken Livingstone was calling for Corbyn’s resignation.
Few programmes summed up the cultural scale of the Conservative win as much as the Dead Ringers Election
Special (Radio 4, Friday), a brilliantly fizzing and negativity-free knee-jerk satirical response, all the more impressive for having been “written at dawn, recorded at lunchtime, and edited in a hurry”. All the usual favourites were there, from the brutal Andrew Neil/diane Abbott spoofery to the spot on Trump impressions. But it was Good Boris’s efforts to restrain his more, shall we say, “whiff-waffwhaaaaah!” character traits that, carrying a perfectly balanced edge of critique and fondness, seemed to capture perfectly this key political moment. A mood never quite matched by the rather less high-spirited comic commentary of Where’s the F in
News (Radio 4, Friday), with Jo Bunting and her female panel riffing on the election coverage and results.
The BBC’S excellent Beyond Today podcast gave a younger perspective than much of the rest of the coverage. It was particularly incisive in a section devoted to social media’s bubble effect – with Marianna Spring and Joey D’urso from BBC Trending charting election day online, how a huge amount of “echo-chamber” prolabour activity gave an early misimpression of the overall strength of support, and how the traditional notion of the “shy Tory” applies just as much to sharing online as anywhere else. Moderate Conservatives, it seems, are simply less inclined to post than Labour supporters.
Social media was a theme taken up again in Like, Share, Vote (Radio 4, Monday), in which producer Susan Hulme followed five Facebook-loving floating voters to get a sense of how influenced they were by the messages and adverts targeting them on the platform. Hulme’s sample group – four older men and a younger mother – was far too small, but it covered a reasonable range of voter uncertainty and the audio-diary format gave a strong sense of how each individual was tempted by competing messages. Again it was Online’s echo-chamber tendency to consolidate existing opinions rather than actually sway voters that came to the fore here. Confirming an overall impression that, in the short term at least, online is not necessarily more powerful than other media when it comes to shifting traditional voting preferences.
A momentous, emotional, involving week in politics made all the more so by experiencing it via radio.