TV Revew: How's the mood? What's the mood over there? Has the mood changed since I last asked you about the mood? As coverage of the US presidential election results kicked off late on Tuesday, it was the question of the night; asked by news anchors at a collective rate of about three times a minute.
They wanted to know the mood among the parties because they had no idea what the result was. All they knew was that it was "too close to call" and that "the only thing for sure is that it was going to be a long night". And how is the mood in my sitting-room? Upbeat.
I've got a big jug of coffee and some matchsticks, in case the eyelids give up. For sustenance, I have both HobNobs and Jaffa Cakes. Which will it be? It's too close to call. The one thing for sure is that it's going to be a long night.
If you had gone to bed at 11 p.m., you might have done so expecting to wake up to a President Kerry. On its late evening news, the BBC was reading the body language of the two candidates, decoding exit polls and suggesting that John Kerry might soon be measuring the White House for curtains. Newsnight was already talking about President Bush in the past tense, with Jeremy Paxman sporadically, dutifully, reminding everyone that no votes had actually been counted yet.
In between, Peter Snow explained how the electoral college system works. And then explained it again about three dozen times after that. It's become something of a running gag that for every major election the BBC provides Snow with outrageous graphics to bounce about in. This week he stalked across a computer-generated map of America, trying to avoid states as they sprouted at his feet. When a winner is declared, he told us, this will happen: suddenly, a digital helicopter came shuddering from the pixelated sky and landed on the very real Snow. A door will open on the side and the winner will emerge, he told us from somewhere under its wheels. He has become the clown of political commentators, missing only a computer-generated spinning dicky bow.
RTÉ had a clever answer to the over-the-top graphics of other stations: it had almost no graphics. There was no score card in the corner of the screen. No rolling news along the bottom of it. Early on there was a brief snapshot of how things stood, but it contained a monochromatic list of names and percentages, which gave some wrong information anyway, and it seemed to have been cobbled together on somebody's Power Point. Who needs snappy statistics, seemed the thinking, when you have the grinding academia of John Bowman?
I was just about to pick up my remote control and answer that question when RTÉ did a wise thing and switched to the CBS coverage, where Dan Rather was uttering so many of his trademark folksy expressions that it sounded like he was talking in code. "Bush is sweeping through the south like a big wheel through a delta cotton field," he declared. "This presidential race is hotter than the devil's anvil."
In general, the US channels were cautious, keeping their opinions to themselves rather than repeating their errors of four years ago. A pundit appeared on Fox News to declare that "either the exit polls are completely wrong or George Bush has lost", but it was rare boldness. Instead they dissected the exit polls: what candidate made voters feel safer, who they trusted on the economy, which had a nicer haircut, but not, maddeningly, who they had voted for. There is some agreement about not publishing these statistics, so CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC instead talked around the results.
Flicking through the channels I caught one pundit who seemed to be saying that polling data tells us that about one out of 20 polls is wrong. But what if the poll that threw up that information was that one in 20?
When the results finally began to come in, the US networks at least had the added interest of senatorial and gubernatorial elections to keep things chugging along. Because there was so little information from key states, on the British channels and RTÉ, sporadic activity was only short relief from much yakking. It was 18 months' worth of election discussion crammed into these final hours.
From RTÉ came the dull drone of talking heads; from Dublin, where Bowman hosted a panel, and from Washington where Mark Little had been poured into place. As the hours grew late and the mind woozy, the BBC panel seemed to stretch to the horizon. And the most exciting election since . . . well, since the last one, was pretty tedious at times.
BUT IT REMAINED impossible to know quite when to go to bed. Even as the night dragged on and the election began to lean towards Bush but not yet fall into his arms, you didn't want to put the head down moments before the networks called Florida or Ohio or Pennsylvania. So you struggled on, trying to understand why several channels had different scores, watching the Republican and Democrat panellists swap moods, wondering if Mark Little spends an hour in a trouser press before going on air.
And as the sun rose on a new day, the Democrats, having had the election stolen from them four years ago, were desperately trying to find a way of stealing it back. All the American pundits were hanging on in there. On Fox News - drier and more measured than its reputation suggested it would be - half-newscaster, half-basset hound Brit Hume was exasperated. "We're getting to the point where we're getting to the outer limits of our coherence." On the BBC, meanwhile, writer Bonnie Greer was saying that when she had earlier called the result for Kerry, she really knew it was going to go to Bush. Now, that's a flip-flop.
By mid-morning on Wednesday, the terrestrial channels had dropped most of their coverage. It was back to antiques and animal makeovers. Sky News was running its sports bulletins again. Yet there was still no winner. No neat resolution. No reward for our endurance. At that point we were being told it might take 11 days to sort this out. Peter Snow's helicopter must have been running out of fuel. How's the mood in the sitting-room? Frustration. Bordering on mutinous. It was better to concede defeat, even if it would be a few hours before John Kerry did.
WHILE ALL THIS was going on, Charlie Bird was absent. The rooftops and balconies of Washington were crowded with broadcasters and pundits, so that from the White House lawn it must have looked like the final scene in The Birds, only featuring men in suits and bad ties. Except, one of our Birds was missing.
He was still at home, continuing to do excellent work on the Cian O'Connor story for RTÉ news (Tuesday). He looked to be relishing in the old-fashioned gumshoeing; his reports regaled us with tales of anonymous faxes and sources and tip-offs. His excitement has been a foil to the stolid demeanour of Avril Doyle, president of the Equestrian Federation of Ireland, who has been quite skilled at saying a lot and saying nothing at the same time.
It is an altogether intriguing story. There seems little else that could be added to it, although if we were to learn that O'Connor had in fact ridden Shergar to Olympic victory, that would be a twist to raise even Doyle's implacable eyebrows.
BIRD - OF COURSE he's now Dr Bird - did appear briefly in Family Fortunes: de Valera's Irish Press, in an old news report from the day the newspaper went tabloid. Later in the week, RTÉ's Drawing The Line would theorise about trust in the media, but being a case study of power and greed Family Fortunes made for a more interesting programme. It recalled how Eamon de Valera, through sleight of hand, created and controlled the Irish Press, and made sure it was passed down through the family, so that they coined it while most shareholders gained little from their stock.
The company's current existence in a "strange half-life" was left somewhat unlit, and it featured no current voices from within the de Valera family. But Dev's complex scheme was skilfully explained, and it was a decent film about "how idealism and revolution starts in hope and glory and ends up fumbling in the greasy till", as Tim Pat Coogan put it. It proved to be a brief distraction from a different president and the history that is about to be written.
