With an awful lot of airtime and no substantive results to fill it, Jeremy Vine was left prancing around the BBC studio last night, illustrating a string of often interesting polls with an increasingly bizarre set of visual themes. First, we were treated to a string of increasingly less impressive images showing the ‘Beanification’ of Gordon Brown, from an morphed image of the Prime Minister with ‘Iron Joe’ Stalin to that of the gurning, accident-prone Mr Bean. Would Brown achieve ‘the full Rowan Atkinson’ by the end of the night, Vine pondered? (Yes. And here’s another kick in the teeth.)
These, at least, were recognisable cues to anyone who had been following press or broadcast coverage in recent months (especially Private Eye’s superb twin Brown spoofs). Vine pounced from one image to the next in his jeans, before developing another layer of wardrobe for his next skit – involving simulating snow that plunged the studio into the prehistoric era. Before you knew it, computer generated ice mummies of Conservative leaders were trotting across the screen, culminating in David Cameron as ‘politicus electus’ or something similar. How very strange – but it was to get even stranger with a dive into wild west territory shortly after. The London mayoral candidates where paraded as candidates from the Beano, made to scuffle in cartoon fashion. What happened later, we cannot say – suffice to say that anyone who came in from a hard night on the tiles might have thought they’d left The Day Today running on the telly. Politics always has a touch of theatre, but this was a circus. (We won’t even touch on the forced neon oddity of Emily Maitlis’s techno bistro stomping ground – it looked like a club for vampires, and featured some characters of similar pallor.)
Reacting to all these invisible items must be a very odd way to work, rather like making the recent Star Wars movies – all one has to work is the equivalent of two tennis balls on a stick. You suspect that Jeremy Vine would go green with envy, had he seen the astounding touch screen technology employed by CNN’s full throttle, multi-screen Situation Room, in which on-screen maps are manipulated, video is called up and dismissed at will, and the fonts resemble those used on the touch screens in Star Trek: The Next Generation (whoever chose them must be very, very pleased with themselves). What with the cuts to the licence fee, it doesn’t look like Jeremy will be getting one of his own anytime soon.
Let’s hope the BBC’s art department has a few more cartoons up its sleeve – heaven help us when three-dimensional political coverage takes off. Perhaps a cinema should make a night of it, advertise an all-night marathon of local elections, free popcorn and an open bar, as voters drifted in from work to watch the results unfurl on the big screen in glorious three-dee. Smoking pipes, jackets and vigorous debate would be encouraged, while holographic, walking-talking representations of the candidates would stroll the cinema’s floor, meeting, greeting and clinking champagne flutes with whoever would talk to them. The fantastic future is just around the corner…
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 
