Monty Python's Election Night Special

Here's some light relief for anyone who was frustrated or irritated by last night's BBC television coverage of the Euro election results. 

And what a fine gadget the swingometer was compared with the ghastly visual aids we have to put up with these days (see previous post).

Euro-election coverage: was the BBC’s graphical overkill a violation of its charter?

The increasing domination of BBC news coverage by ever more expensive, elaborate and distracting graphics is an issue that I’ve touched on several times since starting this blog.

Last night’s Euro election coverage saw this graphical mania plumbing new depths, as we had to watch Jeremy Vine groping his way around a virtual studio, with maps on the floor and walls, as bar charts kept springing up from beneath his feet and one incomprehensible circle after another kept materializing behind him.

Does anyone at the BBC (other than their computer graphics nerds) seriously believe that viewers like watching this kind of stuff, let alone find it useful?

According to the BBC’s Royal Charter, the corporation has an obligation to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.

Have a look at the following, helpfully described on the BBC's website as 'The figures explained', and see if you think it achieves any of these objectives.

Then click Play again, close your eyes and see if you’re any more or less the wiser when you can’t see Mr Vine or his graphics.

Lord Mandelspin strikes again

The bloggers' verdict on this morning's interview of Peter Mandelson by Andrew Marr seems to be that the former ran rings around the latter (e.g. HERE).

But it's hardly surprising given that the only proper job Mandelson had before he went into politics was as a back room boy on LWT's Weekend World for Brian Walden, one of the finest interviewers ever seen on British television.

As for whether or not it's a good idea to allow spin doctors to migrate from behind the scenes to centre stage is arguably much more debatable than Gordon Brown seems to think. Or perhaps the P.M. is the only person in the country who has forgotten the troubles associated with his new deputy's various departures from Blair governments.

My problem, whenever I see Lord Mandelson on the screen, is that it always reminds me of Rory Bremner's brilliant impersonations of him, and I'd be very surprised if I'm the only viewer who can't get this image out of my head.

Brown does a better job than Obama at the 65th anniversary of D-Day

In case anyone thinks that I only ever post negative comments about Gordon Brown (not so, as you can see HERE and HERE), I do agree with today’s positive assessment of his D-Day performance by Clark Judge, a former Reagan speechwriter: 

'Today, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was by far the most eloquent and most appropriate, at least to this American’s ear.  More purely than the others, he captured the transcendent significance of the moment — the legacy of sacrifice for an enduring cause that ennobled and continues to ennoble the world.  At stake was something larger than one country, one moment, one fight, something beyond time and place, something on which all of time would turn, and he captured that.

'The others were good, though each with an ever so slightly bemusing touch of the parochial.  Was a ceremony marking heroic exertions made in alliance with Britain really the right occasion for a US president to invoke Lexington and Concord?  And didn’t the soldiers of all the countries engaged that day, not just Canadians (the only focus of the Canadian PM’s account of the post-war world), return home to build, not just a better country, but a better world?  And didn’t the men who hit the beaches in 1944 fight for something beyond national vengeance and personal survival, though from the repeated references in the French president’s remarks you might have thought otherwise'  (see Podium Pundits for fuller version).

President Obama came nowhere near matching Ronald Reagan’s masterpiece on the 40^th anniversary of D-Day (HERE), and, as Clark Judge notes, the references to battles in the American war of independence did seem a bit barmy in the presence of a distinguished British contingent that included a direct descendent (Prince Charles) of the king against whom they were rebelling.

How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet

It’s hardly surprising that people believe that Caroline Flint was expecting a seat in the cabinet when she expressed loyalty to Gordon Brown the day before she resigned.  

Have a look at the interview below, where, after a minute or two, you can hear her saying: “.. and serving, if he wants me to, in Gordon Brown’s c-uhh-government.”  

Given the context of the discussion, it's difficult to think of any word beginning with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ other than ‘cabinet’ that she so quickly aborted and corrected to "government".

The trouble with slips like this is that, as the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis, used to say “Once it’s out, it’s anyone’s.” 

The interview is interesting in other ways too, as it includes quite a lot of breaches of one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely 'one speaker speaks at a time' (for more on which, see HERE). 

You can also see an interesting first hand report on the interview HERE from Iain Dale, one of the interviewees.