Sometimes, when I’m watching a performer on stage, I suddenly get the feeling that the lights are angled such that they really have no idea exactly where the stage ends and where the audience begins. If they’re lucky there’s laughter and feedback that fuels the performance. If it isn’t comedy, then they can’t be sure what the audience are feeling or thinking. Or even if they are still all there. We might have all slipped out to the bar. Which would please the management, but not the performer.
It felt a bit like that last night with the election coverage on TV. The BBC went all out and there was much walking through virtual sets and pointing at imaginary dominoes and a giant iPad that stood over the heads of two presenters like the monolith from Clark’s 2001. But instead of embedding the possibility of a brand new dawn of civilisation, this one was was designed to remind us of all the fuck-ups we’ve made in the past. With a slap of an icon, we were shown the seats held by the Tories after the last election. Another slap and we were shown the spread of seats held in the form of hexagons and told how stupid we all were to have believed in the actual map coverage. We were bitch-slapped into political awakening by two harbingers of doom standing before the monolith, each daring the other to come up with something even more fact-based than the last statement. If your graphics are big enough, then it must be right?
My favourite pundit of the night was Mariella Frostrup who said something along the lines of ‘how typical of men to try to predict something that hasn’t even happened yet?’ Sadly, I wasn’t paying that much attention at the time because I was trying to work out if it was Ian Hislop next to her. It was either him or Paul Merton. I get them mixed up if they aren’t on the usual sides of the screen. Like two aging, insufferable versions of Ant and Dec. I mean even more insufferable. I was hoping to see Armando Iannucci who had tweeted about being there at some point. How would he cope, being in a live version of Thick Of It? But I missed him. I took a bath at one point and all I could hear was Bruce Forsyth blubbering on about having his back to the audience and wheeling out a thirty year old catchphrase. Twat.
Half the fun of the election was following people on Twitter who seemed to be having a much better time of it all getting pissed and stuffing themselves and tapping on iPhones. Ellie Harrison, the artist had launched a drinking game for the election night, hopefully that went well. As with most things in life, the ‘event’ of the election was slightly disjointed from any sense of the real by the mediation of the errr, media. Personally, I find it hard to relate to much of the cold reality of it without thinking of giant swingometers, dominoes with politicians faces on and a massive table with numerous monitors embedded across its huge facade. Sure, I know what the effects of the election may be, but at the moment it’s hard to know what the real effects might be.
This morning, with a hung parliament in the air and politicians running from each others houses to join forces like kids who suddenly have to tell each other that were only pretending not to be friends and are really bezzie mates, anything could happen.
Me, I feel like I just returned from Viet Nam with the faint wiff of guilt and remorse about me. Should I have done things differently? Maybe I didn’t survive and only my soul escaped from the night before? Will I end up in a dismal veteran’s hospital of the mind, with no proper health care. In a few months no one will give a fuck about what we did here today in the name of freedom. Still, the graphics were pretty cool and we know that Bruce is still alive, so it’s not all bad eh?
Post a Comment