It sounded as if a World Heavyweight Championship was just about to begin. The roaring mob. The pent-up energy. The buzzing excitement at the prospect of an upset, a defeat, a knockout blow. The tension was palpable, seeping through my study, as the contenders squared up to each other for Round Two.
I don’t have Sky and wanted to experience The Prime Ministerial Debate live, as it was happening, rather than wait up until 11.30 last Thursday night to watch it on BBC2, so I had no alternative but to listen to Gordon, Dave and Nick thrashing it out on Radio 4 instead of watching them on screen. I must admit I wasn’t looking forward to it. How to endure 90 minutes of political knockabout without the necessary diversion of being able to scrutinise every hand movement and facial expression for clues as to what really lies behind those carefully manicured hairdos? But from the first 15 minutes of build-up, as Robin Lustig and The World Tonight team set the scene in Bristol and prepared us for combat, I was hooked. Not because we heard anything different from the first debate the previous week. On the contrary, the three contenders were incredibly careful not to veer away from the issues they felt, and had been advised, they could score points on — Trident, immigration and, if you must, the economy.
On radio, though, I should have realised how much fascination there would be in guessing what was going on from their tone of voice, those upswings and downturns of timbre. It was also so much easier to focus on what was being said, without the distraction of Alastair Stewart’s arm-waving (last Thursday it would have been Adam Boulton of Sky News) or the constant switching from face to face, mugshot to mugshot.
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