A subliminal utterance kept playing in my head as I watched hours of prediction and speculation on election night. It was the voice of Sergeant Joe Friday.
Most of you would be too young to know Sergeant Friday. Dragnet, the series in which he featured, was broadcast on New Zealand radio in the 1950s. His signature phrase was “All we want are the facts, Ma’am”.
And that was all I wanted after the polling booths closed at 7 pm on Saturday. All I wanted were the results.
Instead, every news outlet gave me proof that British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson was right: Work does expand to fill the time available for its completion. Each outlet had lots of time to fill as the vote count continued throughout the evening.
I was prepared for prediction and speculation. That is the nature of emerging political fortunes, and those offering it do so in the expectation that things will become clearer as the night progressed. It’s an unfortunate fact that clarity and New Zealand’s emerging brand of Mixed Member Proportional Representation take longer to come together than First Past the Post.
There was also a certain inevitability about the appearance of BWC graphics. BWC? It stands for Because We Can and denotes the use of elaborate studio graphic overlays that can place thoroughly urbanised presenters in territory that Indiana Jones would struggle to reach. On election night it had TVNZ’s intrepid Jason Walls theatrically scaling the heights of massive columns and trekking along fast-moving bar graphs. TV3/Stuff may have had less grunt in the electronics department but it, too, managed to paint the floor with graphics that contained less information than the straightforward charts it also displayed.
And, although their ephemeral nature makes the information harder to assimilate, the tickertape results along the bottom of the screen were there as expected. And, as anticipated, they went in one eye and out the other.
All this paled, however, alongside the retreat into entertainment in which both TVOne and TV3/Stuff freely engaged. Such actions on both networks detracted from the serious business of the evening. TVOne wanted your election party photos, while 3/Stuff played bingo with its audience. Live crosses to election parties in people’s homes? Spare me! Continue reading “We wanted the facts and got endless entertainment”