Challenges Dimblebydom
chamber, filling up with MPs as they got elected — a weirdly sci-fi, zombiesque attempt at graphic illustration — while Sophie Raworth wandered around a giant puzzle map in a piazza outside.
Both ITV, helmed by Tom Bradby, and Sky News, anchored by Adam Boulton, adopted the same format of hiving their commentators off into an “opinion room”. Yet the astonishing news of triumph and disaster came so thick and fast, this to and fro between news and comment was frequently interrupted and hardly necessary — this was an election in which the results spoke for themselves, loud and clear.
Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night got off to a surprisingly poor start with an hour’s attempted comedy from Gogglebox, already superseded by the news. But from 11, the main show hosted by Jeremy Paxman, with David Mitchell as an inadequate sidekick, soon proved much the most watchable of the lot, despite having technically the ropiest outside reports (showing Cameron’s acceptance speech in Witney inaudibly from the back of the hall).
Here presentation and opinionation came together — and a round table of punchy, funny guests raised their game to Paxman’s level. Revelling in it all, he was astonishingly rude to his bright assistant with the charts, Cathy Newman, saying that a monkey with a blue rosette would have been elected in Cameron’s constituency and a donkey in Boris’s. He repeatedly challenged his old mucker about his now apparently frustrated ambitions to leadership: “How long are you prepared to wait, Boris?” And for his pains was told his interruptions were feeble. When novelist Louise Mensch suggested that the Tories would love Jeremy to be their candidate for Mayor, Paxman complained that it was “a low blow”, while looking perfectly pleased. For all the high traditions of Dimblebydom, it was Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night that felt like the inside track.