Election Betting.com

Well, it’s nearly here. I hope everyone has got their tea and biscuits ready in advance of one of the most hotly anticipated television events of the last decade. Millions of us will be glued to our sofa as we mentally decide who we’re going to back in the Spring’s most important vote.

That’s right; ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ is back.

Oh, and before the return of Cowell et al, we have to endure ninety minutes of Gordo, Dave Cam and, er, ‘the other one’ as the first Prime Minister TV debate hits the ITV screens.

Lest we forget, it has taken six months of careful horse trading and negotiation to come up with a set of rules for the debates, never mind get the three of them to agree. As one of the newspapers said this week, the result is “a set of preconditions that makes the Treaty of Versailles look like a hastily scribbled shopping list.”

There are 76 separate rules to follow ranging from the mundane ‘the moderator will introduce the leaders’ (inserted, presumably, so the watching millions know who Nick Clegg is) to the rather formal ‘at the end of programme the three leaders will shake hands’ (it’s a 5/1 chance that one of them doesn’t shake another’s hand after the event).

The rule that has caught most people’s attention is Clause 40 which is at risk of making the whole programme look like something a 1950s China would have considered staged. “In order to maximise the time available for viewers to hear the leaders discussing election issues with each other, the studio audience will be asked not to applaud during the debate. There will be opportunities to do so both at the beginning and at the end of each programme.”

So, if you are in the audience; no clapping, no cheering and no heckling please. It’s 11/8 that this rule will be broken first by someone applauding, but considering the lack of enthusiasm anyone has for this Election, the 7/4 on someone booing looks a better bet.

As Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, says, “People are used to watching Question Time on the BBC, and are used to seeing bad answers being booed at and testimony from the audience that can throw a politician, and here we are with something resembling 1970s set-piece Soviet television. The audience will be mere scenery.”

So, the best we can hope for is that someone’s mask slips or that one of the candidates drops a bit of a clanger. If not, with rules limiting each answer to no more than a minute, and the audience having to sit in the studio not saying a thing, the whole thing looks less like the cut and thrust of modern day politics and more like a stunt dreamed up by TV channels desperate for ratings.

Who Will Win The First TV Debate?