EU referendum TV: Gale force winds of waffle on Sky, BBC and ITV

Jeremy Vine during the EU referendum coverage on the BBC
BBC
Ellen E. Jones24 June 2016

Veterans of the election TV all-nighter are used to hot air.

It tends to accumulate in studios while everyone’s waiting for some verifiable results to roll in.

But when BBC1, ITV and Sky News began broadcasting last night around 10pm, the gale force winds of waffle were enough to match the blustery weather outside.

This wasn’t just the usual airtime-filling speculation; this was speculation about when we might start speculating.

Since the psephologists had no similar past events to base their exit polls on, they dispensed with the convention altogether.

BBC graphics guy Jeremy Vine used the first of his famous 3D visuals, not to deliver information, but to illustrate just how little information he had. Would we be able to start guessing at midnight? At 2am? At “breakfast time”, whenever that is? Even the colour scheme was unclear. “Jeremy, just one thing to clarify,” interjected an impatient David Dimbleby, “Blue is out? Yellow is remain?”

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Over at ITV, what News at Ten anchor Tom Bradby lacked in incomprehensible graphics, he made up for with a constant rotation of gabby guests; Theo Paphitis off Dragon’s Den, Toby Young and hippy-dippy former Cameron advisor Steve Hilton (sans tie, obvs) all got their two pennies in, despite many having already got their two pennies in, at length, on Channel 4’s chaotic Wednesday night debate.

The host of that show, Jeremy Paxman was notably absent from our screens, probably still recovering in a darkened room somewhere. In fact, Channel 4 had opted out of the results night coverage altogether, preferring to catch up with a special midday bulletin today.

Nigel Farage was first to hazard a guess at the result, while all around him were exercising caution. He conceded defeat, then “un-conceded”, all before 11pm. At two minutes to midnight he appeared to concede again, telling ITV’s Robert Peston. “If I was a betting man, I would say maybe Remain will grab it by a nick,” yet he remained bullish, adding, “the Eurosceptics are gonna win this war.” That alarming fondness for a military metaphor became the mercurial man’s most consistent calling card over the course of the evening. His 4am speech also included the bizarrely bad taste boast that victory had been won “without a bullet being fired”.

Sky News’s equally gaffe-prone Kay Burley didn’t disappoint, mistaking the black former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, for the (also black) Tottenham MP David Lammy. Was this a contributing cause of her colleague Adam Boulton’s ever-deepening frown? His eyebrows got lower and lower, finally coming to rest on the tip of his nose at about 5.45am.

Only slightly less embarrassing, were the BBC’s tedious technical troubles with off-site interviews around the country. It aided the attempts of Tom Bradby’s team to ‘own’ the tech side of things. Not only did ITV manage to actually turn on the mic for their interview with Leave campaign funder Arron Banks, they also had their own Twitter corner in the studio, complete with anonymous youths tapping away on their shiny macs and a dedicated tweet correspondent, who offered up solemn commentary such as, “Lily Allen: really not holding back there”

Those hip young things at ITV also had the best party invites. Julie Etchingham was at the Remain campaign do where, by 11.30ish, Chuka Umunna had a few buttons undone and there were even some (Belgian?) beers being drunk straight from the bottle. By 02.28 unexpectedly strong results in Lambeth and Wandsworth had bolstered the Remain camp’s hopes, but the party vibes told a truer story. Put it this way: Only the Leave camp’s bash had drunken whooping, a shortage of champagne and a dancing girl in a sequinned mini-dress.

By this uncivilised hour, even those of us who hadn’t touched a drop were having trouble grasping the import of Jeremy Vine’s ladder of matchsticks on the BBC, so hooray for Sky News’s giant primary school charts. Ultimately though, stats and graphics have rarely counted for so little in election night coverage. This one came down to a count so straight-forward it could have been done on a pocket calculator. That count may have often felt too close to call, but the Battle of the Broadcasters had a clear and surprising winner: after many years of BBC domination, this time ITV got their mix spot on.

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