The moments between: the art of putting bums on seats on election night
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