Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Any Tumblrs/Twitterers fancy some remote election TV coverage bingo tonight?

One of the signs that this election will be the first one genuinely fought between three parties rather than two is that the swingometer is out of date.

This device is one of the institutions of election-night TV coverage, with pundits showing how a swing of X% from one party to another nationwide would affect the number of seats won. It’s a bit of a rough-and-ready measuring tool, but it’s a great visual aid to show how there needs to be quite a big swing to really affect the make-up of parliament.

The early versions were genuine moving devices (like the one above from the late 1970s), and not exactly the most thrilling things ever seen on TV. As technology improved, they became a little more intricate, but still followed the same basic principle.

This video wall from 2001 included a representation of how many seats would theoretically be won/lost for each percentage swing. You can see that it’s still just red and blue though.

Now, with the Liberal Democrats much more of a credible force, the simple two-way swingometer is hopelessly inadequate and out of date. New visual guides will be needed to help viewers. The BBC’s website has a cool little device that allows you to shift votes from one party to another, including the Lib Dems and minority parties, rather than just Labour and Conservative.

Today, ITV announced how they’d be using a three-way swingometer (above) in their studio on election night, as part of their flashy all-holographic, all-the-time, coverage. It looks odd, to say the least, but I can see what they’re trying to do: showing how particular parties are siphoning off the votes of others. The “326” label on each beaker is the number of seats required for an absolute majority in parliament.

I doubt that we’ll see Will I Am appearing via hologram, but election night should prove an opportunity for the various broadcasters to showcase their creative teams. The girlfriend’s working as a stringer at one of the election counts, so I’ll be home alone, and I’ll probably be flicking between all the channels, media butterfly that I am.

So, will this election see the death not just of our first-past-the-post electoral system, but also of the swingometer? The latter’s more likely than the former, unfortunately.

The girlfriend is watching Glee.

I’m dying a little inside every second.

Tonight saw the first ever televised debate between the leaders of the three main political parties here in the UK, and it made for some pretty good viewing.

Now, bear in mind that we don’t directly elect someone to be a Prime Minister; we instead elect someone locally, and the party which wins the most seats chooses someone to be the Prime Minister. We don’t vote for Brown, Cameron or Clegg directly, instead for whoever represents their party in each local area.

Of course, we all know who the leader of each party is well before the election, so there’s an element of figurehead-ness involved, which explains why these guys are being paraded left, right and centre all over the media each day. And many people do vote on the basis of the national party, rather than the local candidate, a group in which I’d probably include myself.

This was the first chance to see all three leaders facing off against one another, and especially for Brown to target the policies of the other two. In Prime Minister’s Questions each week, inevitably it is the sitting PM having to defend himself and his party for their actions. In this debate setting, Brown was able to go on the offensive a bit more.

And he did. He tried to go for the jugular a few times, although I noticed he was aiming almost exclusively at Cameron. Maybe Brown doesn’t view the Lib Dems as an actual threat? He made some hay by targetting the Tories’ failure to ring-fence certain areas as immune from cuts, as the Labour party have done.

I couldn’t help but feel, however, that with so many different ring-fences in place (NHS, education, police, etc), wherever cuts are going to fall under Labour, they will be swingeing. A lot of departments are going to see some massive cuts, all because Labour think the three areas above play better with voters.

David Cameron, the Tory leader, seemed a bit off the pace, although he seemingly had an anecdote for every single situation: “There was a story just recently about…”, “I was in XXX the other day, and met a man who said…”, and so forth. It got very tiring, very quickly.

Policy-wise, there were some good bits about protecting the NHS budget (which we knew already), and thankfully the issue of National Insurance didn’t take up too much time. As surprising as it sounds, there are more important things at issue than a £6 billion tax cut which would just be made up elsewhere anyway.

Inevitably, there was plenty of fawning towards the right-wing newspapers, with mentions of immigration controls (a complete fop to the Daily Mail and its brethren) and constant cries for more policemen on the street. The latter was from all three parties, despite statistics showing a big drop in crime in the last decade.

I think we all know where the blame for that lies, oh wise and wonderful media… They make it sound like it’s a battlefield out there, when in fact it has been improving. Anyways.

But for me, the winner by a country mile was Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. Just getting equal billing in the first place was a massive coup, and he used his airtime to great effect. He relied on a constant theme of the choice not being restricted to the two other parties; there is another way which should be tried.

His policies seemed more in touch with the real world, to my mind, touching on subjects which the other two wouldn’t go near, and making the Lib Dems stand out as being different from the two parties which are uncomfortably close to each other nowadays, policy-wise.

Stating that the Cold War anachronism that is the Trident nuclear submarine programme should be scrapped was bold, as were his plans on classroom sizes. The scrapping of ID cards, and of university tuition fees. These are genuine policy areas which should be debated, whereas the other two candidates seemed more interested in political point-scoring and the mythical realm of “cutting waste”.

Although defence was mentioned, mostly in terms of supplying “our boys” (copyright The Sun) with the right equipment, there was no talk of whether we should even be in Afghanistan, nor of how quickly our troops would leave.

Likewise, transport wasn’t mentioned, nor Europe, which for me is a vitally important topic. Hopefully that will come up at one of the subsequent two debates over the next fortnight.

As I said at the beginning, it was genuinely interesting viewing, although so often I found myself wanting to lean into the TV and just slap them about the face for what they were saying. The girlfriend and I probably discussed more politics in that 90 minutes than we have done in the last year. Thankfully, we’re of relatively similar opinions!

I can see why people disengage with politics, because some of the debates were about the most trivial, pointless shit (MPs expenses and whose party was worst), but it also showed that there is room for political debate on TV. We don’t need to see petty point-scoring, or the theatre of politics, because that is boring for all but the most seasoned politicos.

But to see party representatives doing more than giving 10-second soundbites, and actively spelling out their proposals? I’ll take much more of that please.

Who has two thumbs and managed to get a pair of tickets to the extra Flight Of The Conchords gig in a few weeks time?

THIS GUY!

I’m adding this to that week in May which is just full to the brim of things to do. By the time that’s done, I’m going to need the holiday…