The Guardian has put together a photo gallery showing shots of some of the election night TV coverage through the years right up to some of the technology likely to be on show tonight.
The coverage choice for UK viewers this evening and throughout most of tomorrow will be between BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky. Sky TV are launching the UK’s first High Definition news channel and will most likely have an unprecendented number of correspondents reporting from all around the country. However, with the Beeb having a £10M budget for their hi-tech coverage there should be a great deal of visualisation fun for viewers to digest, particularly in the shape of Jeremy Vine doing his virtual green-screen Gollum-like routine.
There does, however, appear to be an air of caution with some broadcasters with regards to the more imaginative presentation approaches:
All the broadcasters stress there will fewer gimmicks this election – apparently the lessons have been learnt from Vine’s ill-advised comedy cowboy routine during the US presidential election in 2008 – and the emphasis is on clarity.
“There’s almost an arms race about how you cover election programmes. People are not knocked out any more if they’ve seen things like Avatar. I think what people want is clarity,” said Craig Oliver, the BBC’s election night editor.
As Oscar Wilde never said, ‘there’s a fine line between ill-advised and comedy genius’…