Smithson’s view: Will there be more rubbish from the BBC on May 1st?
Written by Mike Smithson on 18th April 2008 – 11:50 amWhy is it that BBC’s election results programmes are so appalling? Just look at the “Ming’s Bling” clip, above, from last year and ask yourself whether this is the product of a licence funded broadcasting system that takes it public service obligations seriously?
What really gets me is that the BBC results programmes seem to want to focus on everything but giving the late evening/very early morning viewers what they desperately want – the results. For local elections we have to wait until all the results are in from a particular authority and then all the BBC gives us is a simple outline of the number of seats won and lost and the new make-up of the council.
People who stay up into the early hours don’t need something jazzed up like “Ming’s Bling”. They are watching because they want to know what is happening.
Surely in these days of mass information processing a voter should be able to find out on the night from the BBC what happened in the specific election that they participated in a few hours earlier?
OK – they cannot go through every ward result on TV programmes but they could use their web-site and link that into their coverage.
Over the past few months with the White House race I’ve been mightily impressed by the way the US networks do results programmes and the way that they link it in to their web-sites. You can find out what happened down almost to the smallest precinct of just a few hundred voter – and this is being constantly updated.
Yet here the corporation puts a vast amount of resource into coverage results, but it is all disparate and all over the place. Each local radio station and TV region has its own operation as well as the national programmes. But instead of giving us detailed results and analysis what they do is what is journalistically easy – get reaction.
Why not a bit of rationalisation to put the resources into getting a fast results service down to ward level together with quality analysis?
* Mike Smithson founded and edits PoliticalBetting.com, the UK’s leading political discussion blog. He was a founder member of the Liberal Democrats, stood for Parliament at the 1992 General Election, and has served as both a county and borough councillor. This is the third in a regular series of monthly articles from Mike.
Posted in Op-eds
18th April 2008 at 1:54 pm
I remember Ming’s bling and I was not impressed.
However what is really irritating is that all of the MPs being interviewed have to “play the game”. Whatever the results are, they are good for our party, and bad for everyone else.
I find it incredibly tedious to watch.
It would be better instead to look at the record of particular councils in various parts of the country and then get a batch of results every 5 - 10 minutes.
18th April 2008 at 3:56 pm
One of the few good things about the 2007 local elections (unless you live in Hull, Eastbourne or Northampton) was that the BBC never had need to use that godawful animation.
18th April 2008 at 4:13 pm
They have hit on an idea for this - although whether they’ll time it right for late night viewers is another question.
There are going to be three bloggers (including moi for the Lib Dems) racing the Beeb to get the results in. I imagine we’ll “win” handily because you’ll all be texting/twittering/facebooking/commenting etc etc and telling us, won’t you! And we don’t have to get double/triple confirmation before we stick something up. So it’ll go onto our individual blogs which I gather will be fed onto the Beeb website. So at least the results will be there, if not on the actual programme.
Am going to write on LDV next week telling everyone how to get results to me.