Swinging and Climbing

Jo came round and visited us last night as we sampled the best of the media blitz that surrounded the election coverage. The BBC where in my opinion the best with the elder of the Dimbleby brothers showing the Paxman's of this world how to control your guests. Peter Snow's swing-o-meter was impressive, complete with ancillary animation and sound effects to flesh out the effect of the CGI. I particularly liked the 3 way pie chart that depicted the various battles between the 3 main parties. The interactive features where OK although let down by the slowness of the Sky Box meaning transitions kept cutting the video feed.

ITV certainly had the celebrity aspect hands down. They hosted an election party where they could troupe out a series of impersonators and famous people to comment on how they thought it was all going. There CG wasn't as polished as the BBC's and when the election snakes and ladders board came on I felt they where dumbing down a little. The red button just brought forth a bunch of adverts.

Channel Four held back the wave of stats with their Secret Election coverage which included some very bitting "hidden camera" footage. The humour was very heavy on the satire which I found ok in small doses.

Five choose the easy route of re-broadcasting Sky's coverage which did win the "Most screens on the interactive section" award. They even included a camera in their gallery where the program controllers sit. After about 5 minutes of waiting for them to swear whilst barking instructions we came to the conclusion it was just boring filler.

The only "foreign" channel we saw covering our exercise in democracy was CNN. Their main conclusion was that given Tony's slimmed down majority we wouldn't be having a second American led war with the UK assisting! I was a little shocked that some people thought 2 wars in 8 years was a possibility :-(

All in all I found this year a pretty boring election. For all the accusations over Iraq I was never going to base vote on who said what about the war. I'm more interested in the idealogy behind domestic policies. It seemed this year there wasn't much to separate the parties aside from how negative they could be about each other. The result is as I expected. I'm happy Labour's majority has been curtailed a little, hopefully it will help keep them honest. I'm not overly worried they are going to screw things up as they have, either though luck or judgement, kept the country ticking along reasonably well. I also glad the Conservatives have made some modest gains. Hopefully this means they can start broadening their support base and move on in developing their policies away from the entrenched position they found themselves in after the last static performance. It is interesting to the Lib Dems have done well, mostly at the expense of Labour. I think this shows they are now to the left(-ish) of Labour which is odd for me seeing as they got my vote this time round. Who'd of thunk it ;-)