When the cameras go live in the BBC studios tonight for their election coverage it will mark 65 years of televised analysis of the results. As the BBC’s own delightful paean to these programmes showed, it will also mark 65 years of an awful lot of hanging around. Election night coverage approaches what the film historian Charles Barr has called ‘pure television’: those occasions of live transmission with which cinema simply cannot compete.
It can be excruciating stuff. On election night in 1964 the evening’s host, Cliff Michalmore, filled time with a libidinous survey of the ‘lovely gals’ on show for the audience at home. Come 1979 we were treated to the sight of an increasingly anxious Michael Cockerell in Cardiff City Hall waiting for the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan. Time passes, no Prime Minister appears and Cockerell fills time pondering this ‘city hall with many halls’ and whether Callaghan has ‘been taken up the back passage.
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