As with its presentation of Obama’s victory, so the Beeb neglected to invest coverage of his accession with much trace of scope or exuberance. Huw Edwards sat on a roof in central Washington with “my good friend” Matt Frei. The weather was intemperate and so were they. Levity was in short supply; wit and insight less so. Huw was a step up on Dimbleby (David) in so much as he used proper sentences and treated the audience with respect, but failed to match Dimbleby (Richard) in marshalling his own resources and that of his colleagues to render a moment of history also a moment of TV history.

Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of hundreds of…

Huw’s panel comprised fusty academics and crumpled lawyers who were rarely allowed to speak and when they did largely confined themselves to swapping anecdotes about their respective grandchildren. Despite Huw’s hyperbole – “my eminent guests…the eminent presidential historian…” nothing eminent by way of comment ever proved imminent.

This non-roll call continued. No premier league politicians from the US or overseas looked in. No writers, commentators or analysts were called up. There wasn’t even a celebrity on hand to spread a little razzamatazz. Huw’s own attempt at a convocation – “It’s not often we can say we’re witnesses to the making of history; it’s a great pleasure to be here” – masked a forlornly self-evident truth: that he was one of the few people on behalf of the Beeb to be here, there or anywhere.

Jon Sopel waits for his cue. And waits. And waits.

This “defining moment in America’s history” turned out to be singularly undefined by BBC personnel. Perched on a balcony near the inauguration podium, Adam Brookes remarked that he could see “hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people” – seconds after cameras had shown viewers precisely the same thing. Jon Sopel stood in front of a mighty throng that stretched a mile up to the Capitol Building. He reckoned there might be “a mile of people” stretching up the Capitol Building. For his part, Huw spied “crowds, immense crowds”.

It might be stating the obvious, but on television it’s not always necessary to state the obvious. On television it’s always necessary to let the pictures state the obvious, and for words to fill in the gaps. Not literally, mind; one of the most irritating of all elements to this coverage was Huw and Matt’s decision to witter on during the inauguration ceremony itself, cutting into and over the words of the participants (they even crashed the non-verbal items: “we’ll enjoy the music in a moment,” drawled Huw; No! Let us hear it now!)

Huw and Adam swap pleasantries in a lava lamp

Rather, they should fill in the gaps of understanding. Venturing that Obama should ditch “‘yes we can’ for ‘no we must’” is all very well, but why does the Vice-President have to take his oath before the President? Why does the transfer of power have to happen at noon? Why is the whole thing outside? Why so much prayer-speak? Why the pageantry? Why is the American national anthem the same as ours? Was that really Dan Quayle walking past just then?

Answers came there none. Instead came endless ooh-look-at-that nattering, peppered with cutaways to that horrible bubble-themed branding left over from election night. A fanfare sounded. “Fanfares are sounding,” noted Huw. Hillary Clinton appeared. “Hillary Clinton, there,” surmised Matt, “it’s a bittersweet moment for her.” How did he know? Michelle Obama wore a glittering gold dress. “Gold glitter,” concluded Matt.

Katty Kay searches for things to point at. She is cold.

If they weren’t looking and pointing, they were talking about themselves. Matt unburdened his soul: “I got up before dawn, which I don’t normally do.” His kids wanted a sleepover at the White House. Jon Sopel, trying to recover from a premature handover, decided to go one better: “I left my hotel at five this morning”. Katty Kay was outside the White House sporting an enormous white duffle coat and mammoth black gloves. Clearly she was a bit cold. “It’s cold,” she confirmed.

There were two brief forays abroad. One found Lizo Mzimba in a suit at the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham. He turned to his guests. “Baroness Young, you’re an expert… in diversity.” Come again? “People here are going to be eagerly watching,” he predicted. This interlude confirmed and denied nothing. A trip to Kenya might have held potential for something more illuminating, except, as Karen Allen disclosed, all was complete darkness – “as you can see behind me”.

Karen Allen in Kenya. "Earlier on today, it was light."

Deciding upon the significance of the occasion, or rather the degree of significance, proved equally impenetrable. For Huw, expectations were at “unprecedented levels”. But for Matt, “expectations are pretty low” and it was “patience” that was at a premium.

Reflecting on Obama’s speech, he reasoned the new president “wants to get away from the impression that he’s very very good with words” – only to go on and cite his wordplay as one of the stand-out features of the day, in particular the verbal “stinger missile” he deployed at George Bush (a man who Huw Edwards twice casually called “the most unpopular president in recent memory”).

Those moments that did resonate on a plane somewhere a few inches above triviality involved people who had nothing to do with the BBC, but whose responses had the good fortune to be captured, by chance or design, on its technology.

Somebody does their job: a close-up of the crowd

The man interviewed in the National Mall who testified to an infusion of “hope, above and beyond; this is an awesome process”. Unknown faces in the crowd reacting to the occasion with naked honesty. Bill and Hillary Clinton being put in their place by a woman with a clipboard, headphones and a red jumper. The men and women of the military choir singing The Star-Spangled Banner (how come this can sound so moving and God Save The Queen so lumpen?) And the helicopter carrying George Bush out of office and into obscurity, rising through the air and flying behind Huw Edwards’ ear.

Is it possible that the BBC has forgotten how to do Big Events well? Or is it just that nowadays smaller = safer? Is there really a belt-tightening, Daily Mail-fawning catechism pinned up on the Television Centre canteen noticeboard?

Behind you! George W Bush circles an oblivious Huw

“It’s already been a day that few of us will ever forget,” Huw signed off. What, there was more? Not for viewers of BBC1. Evidently two hours’ outside broadcasting was thought enough of an extravagance for the plug to be pulled with Obama’s victory lunch, parade, dinner and 10 balls still to come.

One of America’s “defining moments”? Shush! If anyone asks, the BBC was never there.

Granted, election night television is never the slickest of endeavours. An element of improvisation and unexpected mistakes can add a bit of levity to proceedings. But only if those proceedings are rooted in a self-evidently sure-footed, fired-up attitude in front and behind the camera.

An assistant floor manager makes his mother very proud

Such an attitude had scant presence here. David Dimbleby was crabby from the off. Tired, unable to summon useful observations (“We don’t know what’s going to happen until we get some votes in”), falling back on crass elucidation, and invariably resorting to asking yet another guest yet another variation on “so, what does it really mean?”, this was definitely not vintage Dimbleby.

Just minutes in, he appeared on a giant screen behind Jeremy Vine’s head, gesticulating furiously at a studio assistant. He then tied himself in knots over the difference between baseball and basketball; went on to refer to a key swing state as “a toss-up steak”; and finally announced that Virginia had been “Republican since 1964 when LBJ [a Democrat] took it”.

In fact, his grasp of American states, or more precisely his grasp of viewer-friendly labels for American states, was his greatest failing of the night. Tennessee was dismissed as “the home of Nashville and Memphis”. Minnesota was summed up as a “state of lakes and forests”.  South Carolina was merely “proper southern territory”, Iowa had “eight pigs for every resident” and Pennsylvania was “the big potato”.

"They move so fast...eight pigs...those dresses...big potato"

This wasn’t just lazy, it was verging on the actively ignorant. David also seemed to show his age, in terms of turns of phrase, slow-wittedness, and – sad to say – all-round curmudgeonly moaning. Sounding like a 1960s Man Alive reporter, he recalled how Barack Obama “wasn’t seen as a black”. “Oh dear, they move so fast,” he whimpered when faced with a moderately-paced on-screen results update. His verdict on Sarah Palin? “Those dresses…she looked good in them.”

He was lucky he had, sitting to his left, the BBC Washington correspondent Matt Frei, who revealed himself to be a walking bibliography of American facts and fancies. Whenever David allowed him to speak, Frei certainly proved to be the most useful of the permanent guests, more so than the US analyst Professor Larry Sabato – never afforded enough time to develop his arguments – and America’s own Dimbleby doppelganger, Ted Koppel, whose ponderous interjections (“let me ramble for a moment about American history”) even spurred our host into a somewhat ironic plea for less jaded chat.

Ted Koppel reminisces about 200 years of American history

Back in London, Jeremy Vine essayed a more sober tone than he’s chosen, or been forced, to do of late. No jeans, no jumping around, no Roger Rabbit-esque interacting with virtual politicians. But what he gained in dignity he lost in relevance.

The graphics at his disposal were dull and cumbersome. He was made to walk up and down a gantry for no reason. His microscopic analyses of random districts were always cued in at the least appropriate moments. Some of the comparisons he drew with previous polls were just plain meaningless.

Jeremy Vine updates viewers on Ross Perot's latest prospects

Out in the field, Justin Webb was sorely underused, as was John Simpson (noting, sniffily, that this was the 13th US election he had covered) who was made to walk around outside Grant Park in Chicago talking to whoever he could find like Paddy Haycocks in a particularly sonambulant edition of As It Happens. Jon Sopel had been relegated to lurking in a Virginian coffee shop; “the place is really rocking” he insisted, as the camera panned round a half-empty room.

Other less experienced troops were handed much bigger gigs and their lack of experience and gravitas was often cruelly exposed. Laura Kuenssberg had got the worst gig of the night: the inevitable, pointless, look-how-trendy-and-modern-we-are internet café party.

Two women watch "everything that happens on the internet"

Yelling into the camera from Times Square (or “Time Square” as the on-screen caption insisted) Laura explained this was where “people don’t just come to celebrate the new year, they come here to watch elections too!” Get away. She interviewed Ricky Gervais. “Who would David Brent vote for?” she asked.

Then she introduced the people who would, for the BBC, be watching “everything that happens on the internet”. Everything? Absolutely everything? What on earth comprised this multi-brained, uber-hot-wired army of digital soldiers? Two women at a trestle table. One of whom was looking at Facebook, the other at Twitter. “It’s the hottest ticket in town,” Laura pleaded.

Elsewhere Laura Trevelyan was standing next to some balloons in Pennsylvania. “These are the balloons,” she observed, pointing. “We don’t have anything predicted,” she went on, seconds before a caption predicted that very state to be won by Obama. Katty Kay struggled to be heard above the children’s choirs at John McCain’s HQ in Phoenix, Arizona. And Rajesh Mirchandani was at another Republican base in Colorado, being taken down by a local party chairman after getting his facts wrong about local politics. “You don’t know your history very well, do you?” the bigwig grunted.

Laura Trevelyan points at balloons: "these are the balloons"

When it came to handling the conveyor belt of pundits and special guests, David made tough weather of even the most favourable of climates. He was unclear on names; thrown by quick changes of personnel; ineffectual at interrupting rambling point-scoring (Christopher Hitchens: “Sarah Palin believes in witches…she can’t tell the president of France from Inspector Clouseau”) and ill-disposed towards eliciting much by way of insight from a raft of Republican and Democratic insiders.

Confronted by the two-headed ravenous beast that was historian Simon Schama and former UN ambassador John Bolton, however, David finally jerked into something close to life. He merrily slapped down an overwrought Schama for wanting him to anoint Obama the winner too soon (“You’re such a wuss,” Schama retorted), indulged the pair in some caustic ideological nitpicking, then attempted – not that successfully – to pop Bolton back in his place after he began an unashamed anti-BBC rant.

Schama gets emotional (again); an outraged Bolton blushes

First to feel the ire was Katty Kay, who ended up in a direct exchange with Bolton over the significance of Sarah Palin. “I think all your comments show is a fundamental ignorance of the Republican party,” he snapped. But it was Rajesh Mirchandani’s lame grilling in Colorado that really stoked the fires. “You,” he raged at everybody and nobody, “should fire that reporter! That man wasn’t conducting an interview! He was having an argument! I realise you’re a guest here [to David, or possibly the entire BBC] but that was outrageous!”

“Well,” sighed David, “you’ve had your say about that,” and hastily moved matters back onto less torrid ground. It was an unpleasant yet slightly surreal explosion. Bolton infused the coverage with a bit of energy, but of the wrong kind: negative, not positive; destructive, not constructive. Nonetheless it was energy, something the entire programme had not exactly been doused with up till then.

Granted, some of the lethargy was not the fault of our host or the BBC. Projections that should have turned up on the hour every hour failed to do so. Repeatedly, David hyped up the countdown to Results O’clock, climaxing in a bombastic musical sting, only for little or nothing to happen. “We have only two results,” he complained shortly after 12.30am, “what’s going on?” The Beeb were also erring on the side of propriety and not following network such as Fox or CNN in jumping the gun. “We will wait for the Associated Press and our affiliate, ABC,” David intoned.

"Yes we can" - students at Morehouse College in Atlanta

Even so, much more could have been made of the delays and their possible explanation. When results did arrive, their significance was acknowledged in a cursory numerical fashion, and that was usually it. Not until 4am, when mathematics pushed Obama over the 270 total needed to become president, did coverage suddenly become infused with a sense of importance – and that was chiefly thanks to stirring shots of joyous crowds punching the air, embracing and weeping buckets, scenes you would never witness in this country even if Obama agreed to become Prime Minister.

David had one last shot at redemption in the unlikely shape of a live link-up with Gore Vidal. Slumped in a swivel chair, hair and clothes perilously askew, the salacious chronicler appeared intoxicated by the spirit of the occasion – or rather, intoxicated by an occasional spirit. Most probably several. Kicking off by mistaking David’s query about “being excited” as “being expected”, he proceeded to speculate on the absence of “an eruption”. Puzzled, David pressed for an explanation. “May I talk the facts of life to you?” Vidal drawled. “The BBC audience I know very well, and they like the facts of life…”

"May I talk the facts of life to you?...I don't know who you are"

He then commenced an exposition of such mind-jarring monotony as to make any discussion of electoral college mechanics seem as palatable as a particularly well-baked big potato. In response, David did his best, perhaps realising this was his final chance at a reputation-enhancing roustabout. But as Vidal’s syntax became steadily garbled, so the writer’s line of vision steadily veered off towards a point somewhere on his far left.

Barely-disguised titters began to trickle from the guests back in the studio. Still Vidal went on. “I don’t know what you’re saying that I’m saying…I don’t know why you would, because I don’t know who you are…” By now Vidal was virtually side-on to camera. David hung in there: “I know who you are!” he chided. “Well you’re one up on me…this is the BBC…you like to get people who don’t know much about the subject…”

Enough was enough. Yet another pop at the corporation? This was clearly too much. “I think,” David announced, “we’ll quit while we’re ahead.” If decorum had not prohibited as much, his studio panel would surely have got to their feet in acclamation. They contended themselves with roars of laughter. “Well that was fun,” deadpanned David, “and unexpected.”

It was certainly the latter: David hadn’t been this feisty and downright awake all night. Trouble was, everybody else was already asleep, or past caring, or busy trying to find a replay of Obama’s victory speech on another channel. The party was over, at least on the BBC, and like a guest suddenly remembering where they’d put those eight pigs they’d brought with them when they’d arrived, it was too late. The viewer was full up: with emotion, with fatigue, with history.

Moving pictures: a million people punch the air in Chicago

There was nothing more, nothing new, to be said. David and his guests had a go, but more, you sensed, out a duty to fill up the rest of the programme than a love of live television. The coverage succumbed to total insignificance. One of the Times Square ladies of letters talked about an invitation she’d received on Facebook. Ted Koppel sounded even more depressed. When the end came, David didn’t even say goodbye.

This was a night that did not reveal the Beeb in its best light, in particular one of its otherwise esteemed broadcasters, but nonetheless supplied a window onto a country that was very visibly hauling itself into the 21st century, and doing it with an electoral college-sized smile on its face.

Much earlier on in the evening, David had struck an oddly wistful tone in noting “one of the sadnesses of modern communication…it’s brilliant television, you just can’t hear anybody.” Wrong. This was one time when television worked most of its magic through pictures, and where the sounds emanating from BBC television failed to add any colour to an occasion where colour, literally, meant the world.

The BBC have announced a new children’s show, provisionally titled Election in which Jonathan Dimbleby goes looking for a natural leader among the country’s 11 to 14-year-olds.

The format, in fact, sounds great. Have a look at the BBC press release for more.

There is bad weather in the Western Isles. On Newsnight, “Radio 2′s Jeremy Vine” (in the words of Jeremy Paxman) has just exhibited a blurred map of Britain flecked with indistinct multi-coloured blotches. It is not clear what any of it means. Back on BBC1 David Dimbleby signs off Question Time by exhorting viewers to “sleep well!” as if positively encouraging us to switch off.

None of this amounted to a start, even an inauspicious one, for the night’s election coverage. It was meant to be a defining moment in contemporary political history. Instead we’d had to wait until 11.35pm for BBC1 to kick off its annual hustings hootenanny, and even then the principal protagonists didn’t seem at all sure of themselves.

David looked tired. He peered out at viewers from a desperately murky set. It seems to have become the norm to house BBC election programmes in either very bright or incredibly gloomy studios, rather than the delicate pastel parlours or commanding multi-level hangars of yore. If you’re hoping to encourage people to stay up late to spend several hours in your company, you’d think an aesthetically warm shopfloor would be a given.

Up in Scotland, tipped to be the most eviscerating of the night’s contests, Alex Salmond expected “a hypothesis built on an if”. Presenter Anne MacKenzie had “no clear idea what is going to happen.” Her guest, analyst Lorraine Davidson, confessed, “nobody knows what is going on.” And actress Elaine C Smith, dressed in a glittering chemise of tarpaulin, appeared utterly vexed. “I got very depressed today,” she confided.

Back in London, David’s cohorts were also a little subdued. Nick Robinson’s opening gambit was the meek prediction: “You’ll know Tory success when you see it.” Tony King, sadly, was nowhere to be seen. In his place was Jenny Scott from the Daily Politics show, who through choice or design ended up doing little more than repeating what Nick said.

In recent times the faces of David’s guest politicians have become as familiar as the experts. Sure enough, at one point Theresa May noted, with more than a trace of disambiguated weariness, “I’ve been on your programme a number of years, you know!”. “What messages are your ears pricked for?” David asked of John Reid, only to receive the familiar accentuate-the-positive, pour-scorn-on-the-opposition riffs.

All the featured politicians were guilty of blather, all through the night. You had to wonder if, after all these years, such rituals no longer have a place in these kind of proceedings. Robin Day used to interrogate and leave David to present. Now, for local election nights, David does both. It’s not a good move. Especially as David wasn’t really interested in anything his studio guests had to say. At one point he informed his panel of politicos that he found their endless nitpicking and trotting out of the same old soundbites (“A mixed bag”, “Too soon to say”, “A mixed picture”) to be “so boring”.

Like last year, Emily Maitlis was in a pub. This time, though, it had been cleared of punters and noise and all distractions so as to resemble nothing more than, well, a studio with a few bottles in the background. This really was going from one extreme to the other. Her presence there was as equally pointless as it had been when she was surrounded by boozy noise and clutter. Michael Portillo, Oona King and Mark Oaten swapped anecdotes. “Some bloggers” were on hand to talk about, well, blogging. Time passed.

In thankful contrast to his half-hearted maps, Jeremy had some treats to showcase the three main parties. For Labour he conjured up Blair’s Last Match: a tennis court with a net strung across the floor, over which the Prime Minister “served” a number of volleys at heights corresponding with his party’s poll performance. A particularly mediocre shot was met with the sound of Dan Maskell murmuring, “Oh, I say.” A poor hit cued in John McEnroe wailing, “You can not be serious.” A few titters rang round the studio.

For the Tories, he mustered a giant house in honour of the one David Cameron is self-consciously renovating himself, and which rose and fell in storeys in line with the Conservatives’ fortunes. If the party were to do badly, the entire edifice would, Jeremy vowed, come crashing down: a spectacle he illustrated by running across the studio to avoid being flattened by some virtual scaffolding. “So you’ve got to get over 40%,” David informed his Tory guests, “or else Jeremy is a dead man.”

Vine’s finest moment, however, came when examining the prospects for “Ming’s Bling”. Purely, it seemed, because the Liberal Democrats “are often coloured orange,” Jeremy had chosen stacks of gold bars as a metaphor for their performance. A hologram of Menzies Campbell duly materialised, sporting a tracksuit and sacks of heavy jewellery. “It’s an Ali G set-up,” Jeremy observed.

Then, suddenly, the hologram came to life. First it slumped forward, an illustration – Jeremy fussily explained – of the party “doing badly”. This was not very impressive. It looked like Jeremy’s computer had crashed. But then the hologram started to dance. Jerkily at first, but slowly becoming more animated, it began to move through a series of hip-hop gestures, to the sound of some specially prepared rap music: “Yo, Lib Dem Ming, with the Lib Dem Bling! Yo, Lib Dem Ming, with the Lib Dem Bling!” As the figure thrashed and frugged, Jeremy joined in. “Let me see if I can do this dance,” he stated. Arms flailing, he writhed and wriggled like a man trying to climb out of an invisible sack. It was a small screen epiphany. You watched, transfixed, too frozen in shock to even cover your eyes. “I didn’t know we were going to be joined by David Brent,” drawled David. It was his best line of the night.

Proceedings took on a markedly funereal tone as David ran through some early council declarations, observing he was “beginning to sound like I’m reading some mournful football results.” Up in Scotland Elaine C Smith, encased in her sparkling bin liner, professed to be confused. In Cardiff Guto Hari wondered if members of the Labour Party felt “like they’re in the Life Of Brian.” Emily was joined by a very old-looking Rory Bremner, who launched into a repeat routine of the one he’d done on the BBC on election night in 1992, before venturing, according to John Reid, “the worst Glasgow accent I’ve ever heard”.

A sudden flurry of excitement accompanied the SNP’s first gain of the night. Ennui soon returned, however, spurring another outburst from David. “It’s irritating,” he grumbled. “These curmudgeonly English councils. We’re all up – why couldn’t they be up?!” Tardiness, coupled with confusion, was wreaking havoc with the familiar repertoire of election nights. It was now clear there was to be no rush of results; no climatic breakthrough; no moment of revelation – at least not this side of sunrise. And there was still almost another five hours of coverage to go.

David popped a sweet into his mouth and continued to suck it all the way through his next link. Theresa May decided to dip into her back catalogue and revive her hit slogan of 2003: “Churn”. The sound failed at Blaenau Gwent. “Very disappointing,” mused David. “Wales is doing better than at any point in the history of Wales,” insisted a goggle-eyed Peter Hain.

In her bijou bar, Emily had been joined by Dave Rowntree of Blur, who had stood as a Labour candidate in a council ward he knew he could never win. She wondered if Damon Albarn hadn’t even “turned round and said: mate!?!” Dave stumbled over his words. “I don’t know why I can’t speak tonight,” he apologised. Probably because it was now gone 2.30am.

Speculation surrounding Alex Salmond’s fortunes was perfunctorily scattered (and hastily forgotten) when the man’s declaration swam finally into view. From inside her shimmering baking parchment, Elaine C Smith detected “a miraculous turnaround. Never underestimate the power of celebrity,” the prominent actress and showbiz personality noted. At which point someone walked blithely in front of the camera.

The sloth-like pace afforded acres of airtime to set piece interviews and link-ups with the regions, besides equally patience-sapping recitations of viewers’ emails. These were read out by Jenny with all the poise of a startled station announcer. The text messages chuntering across the bottom of the screen were similarly distracting and pointless. We weren’t watching to find out amateurs’ opinions, we were watching for the voice of the professionals, dammit!

It was now obvious there’d be no clear picture from anywhere before morning. Declarations sidled rather than surged in. David insisted there was still “lots to do” before going off the air. Another round of intra-guest baiting wasn’t one of them. “This is the way of driving viewers completely mad,” he rebuked in his best schoolmaster’s tones, “Those viewers who are mad enough to be up at 4.38am, that is”.

The late hour, as usual, was starting to go to David’s head. At one point he mistook Hilary Armstrong for Hazel Blears, even though she was sitting but one metre from his face. Next he accused Nick of brazenly repeating observations that he himself had said. Then something approaching a trance-like euphoria overwhelmed him, as he eulogised lyrically and at length over live shots of dawn over the River Thames. “Birds are singing,” he whispered. “Can you hear them? It’s not like in the country.”

Posterity – and OTT – records David falling into a similar reverie during the late stages of his stint anchoring Election ’87. Then, however, the daydreaming took root a good 16 hours after polls closed; this time it was more like six. Desperate measures were called for. Someone threw a handful of blossom over Jeremy. Emily detected “the lights of the Tesco Express flaring up” across the road. “No advertising please,” admonished David, though if anyone was available to deliver, he did “quite fancy a full English.”

In Scotland everyone had packed up and gone home, intending to start all over again at midday. Half the English councils hadn’t opened their ballot boxes at all. Talk staggered on to the vagaries of voting systems. “I can explain D’Hondt,” David stressed, referring to an archaic formula for proportional representation, “but only if we can do it directly by telephone”. Tory MP Eric Pickles apologised for being “a bit venomous” with Jenny. The house that Cameron built was, according to Jeremy, close to completion. Blair’s Last Match elicited a restrained cheer. And, despite their being no obvious signs of an improved stock of Lib Dem Ming and his Lib Dem Bling, Jeremy did the dance again anyway.

“It’s been a weird night for us,” concluded David with a sigh. Memorable for frustrating, rather than exhilarating, reasons and shorn of much of the usual motifs of election TV, this hadn’t been a vintage excursion for viewer, voter or presenter. Supposition rather than certainty is no means of support for such a long night’s journey into morning. Yet the team did their best, and parted on much the same terms as they, and us, had first met: on a hypothesis built on an if.

Fame may deal an inconsistently fleeting hand to practitioners of TV and politics, but when both worlds collide you see stardom at its most ephemeral. Who remembers the likes of Ian Lang, Linda Chalker and Rosie Barnes today? Who could identify a picture of Bryan Gould, a man once touted as Britain’s next prime minister? And whatever happened to John Selwyn Gummer?

IThe General Election of 1992 might not rate as one of the most seismic of the 20th century, but it was certainly one of the most transitional. Whole generations of faces, forces and ideas were in flux at that time, and to watch again the 14 hours of results coverage hailing from those (depending on your view) grim or glorious days was to see the fabric of political history unravel and reform before your eyes.

Such forces were in evidence inside the BBC studio as well. For the first time since rationing there was no Robin Day ready to perform his “usual humble function”; instead, Peter Sissons manned the guest pod, visibly and audibly determined to make a strong impression. David Dimbleby and Peter Snow were present, naturally, as were (reprising their roles from 1987) Tony King and John Cole. But tacked on the end of the row was Peter Kellner, another wonk, whose role seemed to consist solely of robbing airtime from Tony and John to pass their kind of analysis off as his own.

In the event, all three were strangely underused – a case of too many cooks, especially when quite enough pot-stirring was going on out in the field. For an exit poll had predicted a hung parliament, which meant we were in for “one of the most dramatic and exciting election nights since the war.” But if this would turn out to be somewhat far from the BBC’s estimation, then the ensuing coverage would begin somewhat far from David’s expectation.

“I can’t believe nothing’s happening … we’re having to wait an awful long time for results … almost midnight and just four declarations …” His complaints pulsed on. The high turnout (77%) had delayed any sort of tide of results until the early hours. It meant that the levels of tension surrounding the outcome were prolonged beyond anyone’s anticipation – as was the need for David and his team to pad out proceedings.

Neither made for particularly absorbing television. Pointless shots from the BBC helicopter above John Major’s Huntingdon constituency showing complete blackness were followed by pointless shots of a brass band playing in a city square somewhere in Manchester. “While the nation has been deciding between parties, we’ve been having a party of our own,” explained Jill Dando half-heartedly, which turned out to mean Rory Bremner. “Unlike Jason Donovan, it still could go both ways,” he mugged as “Peter Snow” before adding, predictably, “it’s just a bit of fun.”

Meanwhile Michael Buerk waited by Paddy Ashdown’s house in Yeovil, wondering if the Lib Dem leader “had a pocket calculator to hand” and noting “there’s a public telephone box conveniently just outside.” Jeremy Paxman did the same thing in Neil Kinnock’s constituency of Islwyn, wearing a hideous lemon raincoat.

Relief came in the form of “an old friend”, as David dubbed it: the much-vaunted re-appearance of the swingometer, heralded with a clip from its last outing in 1979. “Thanks Harry!” cried Peter Snow to an unseen stagehand as the giant pendulum swung down from the heavens. Here was the biggest turn of the night, the star of that week’s Radio Times front cover and without a doubt the finest example of what David patronisingly dubbed “election wizardry” for many a year. Clear, comprehensive and entertaining, the swingometer and associate spin-offs were all a joy to watch, even if their messages were, for a time, muddled.

The forecasts were already being revised by the point the first result finally arrived – not, as was planned for, from Kate Adie and her “furious fingers” in Torbay, but Sunderland South. The good people of Torbay had nonetheless erected a large sign atop their stage proclaiming “ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE”. David tried repeatedly to get Kate to explain this, but to no avail. Over at Basildon there was “no sign of Anna Ford at all,” but there was the sight of David Amess defying the odds, the polls and the pundits to hold his seat and therefore portend Tory victory. “I’m reminded very strongly of 1987″ conceded Tony, just as Mrs Thatcher made her first appearance of the night, emerging out of the gloom to warn Charles Wheeler, “Careful you don’t slip – have a nice sleep!”

By now Vivian White could detect “a most delicious sense of tension at Conservative Central Office.” Results began to trickle in. The constituency of Hyndburn appeared, labelling itself “AT THE HEART OF LANCASHIRE’S HILL COUNTRY”. “Putney is never going to go back to the Labour Party,” forecast David Mellor. Frank Dobson, gossiping with Sue Cook at Labour’s official “victory” party, still cautioned, well, caution. As did every single Labour MP interviewed, despite John Cole astutely observing how “people of a Conservative turn of mind” were making their presence felt despite having previously masked it from the pollsters.

At 1am finally – thankfully – everything picked up. Norman Lamont used his victory speech to apologise to his rival Monster Raving Loony Party candidate for “not giving him a lift when his car broke down in front of me.” Tony concluded the Tories had won. “All your predictions are turning out wrong,” snapped Malcolm Rifkind. David spotted “Chris Patten’s wife, Lavender.”

John Smith reckoned we were “still in a cliffhanger situation,” despite Peter Snow now forecasting, for the first time, a proper Conservative majority. “Come along, please!” ordered the returning officer before announcing Party Chairman Chris Patten’s defeat. The camera cut to other Tory politicians listening in. “It’s written on their faces – Lavender Patten there,” noted David again.

This was clearly, from the BBC’s point of view, the biggest sellable story of the night – the man who had mastermind a national victory but lost his own seat in the process. Reams of Conservative ministers queued up to share their condolences. People speculated on how quickly he could be got back into the Commons. Michael Heseltine wouldn’t say. John Cole wouldn’t guess. David Dimbleby merely spied, “Chris Patten’s wife, Lavender.”

Elsewhere, Labour had as good as conceded defeat. David thought Neil Kinnock was “tired looking”. Peter Sissons wondered if “Labour will ever win an election under the current system”. Jeffery Archer turned up with an explanation for the Tories’ fortunes: “People have been coming up and saying, we’re very angry with you Jeffrey.” “Not you personally?” qualified Peter. The BBC helicopter, still gamely hovering in a cloud of darkness, attempted to show John Major leaving for London. “I dunno whether you can see him,” mused David. “I certainly can’t.”

Famous names flashed past. Colin Moynihan, once the subject of a thousand alternative comedy jokes, lost his seat. A “quiz show host in the cardigan,” won Chester. This turned out to be Gyles Brandreth, or as David pronounced it, Gyles Brand Reth. Then Mrs Thatcher reappeared, looming out of the mire, muttering still of how “Winston carried on … I enjoy a party … everything will be conserved … 13 years …”

Vivian White remained alert down at Conservative Central Office. Party workers held up placards that spelled out “JM IS PM”. “JM will be PM,” Vivian corrected. John Wakeham revealed he’d written the final result on a piece of paper “last Friday.” “Have you got it with you, in your pocket?” Vivian pressed. David Mellor waved to the crowd. There was no applause. Inside Patten addressed the faithful. “In four or five year time we can make it five in a row,” he vowed. “Five more years! Five more years!” came the cry.

This was all too much for James Cox up in the BBC Scotland studio. “You just had a Tory majority printed across your head,” japed David mid-handover. “How terrible,” hissed James. Dawn broke. Having made the decision to stay on the air through to 6am, the BBC now had to find things to fill it. We learned John Prescott had snapped his two front teeth on some toffee his wife had left for him in the fridge. “We send our commiserations,” mugged David. Tony King complained about the campaign having too much razzamatazz. Ben Elton looked in from the depleted Labour Party bash. “I’ve been glued to the coverage watching David do his impartial thing, as he always does,” he whined.

As John Major began to speak at Conservative Central Office, the picture quality started flickering between full colour and grey. “A slight element of Spitting Image entering our screens,” David quipped. Three people, John Major, his wife and Chris Patten, then appeared at a window. “Three of them, at the window,” said David. It was time for breakfast. The familiar long list of credits crawled by to the sounds of Bruce Dickinson and Mr Bean’s I Wanna Be Elected. Footage from the song’s video was spliced together with images from the night including someone falling over and someone kissing their wife. It wasn’t the most dignified of exits.

9.30am found Michael Foot in a big woolly jumper, Jennie Bond outside the Kinnocks’ house in Ealing (“He must be bewildered”) and a Palace of Westminster shrouded in morning mist. The air was ripe with outrageous forecast and shameless score-settling. Shirley Williams expected “proportional representation within two years”; Rhodes Boyson informed Tony Banks, “You’ll have grown a beard” by the time Labour ever win power; Dennis Skinner complained about “having come up to Leeds, through heavy traffic” only to get interrupted by David.

Time dragged. The fact no party had yet secured an outright majority proved to be no guarantor of the kind of fevered plotting that enveloped the closing hours of both 1974 elections. Here it was obvious the Tories had won and nothing would change that.

And so, for want of much else to do, everyone quibbled and argued and blamed the media for anything they could think of. Hugely earnest debates about electoral reform and political re-alignment rumbled back and forth, the like of which would have sent even Robert MacKensie running for cover behind a cup of tea and a bun in the BBC canteen. There was no ceremonial trip to Buckingham Palace for, as David obtusely explained, the PM “already has the Queen’s commission”. There wasn’t even the usual cluster of declarations from Northern Ireland to wait for, some jobsworth having decided to stubbornly fall in line and count votes the same time as the rest of the UK.

Peter Sissons entertained a panel of “Tory grandees”, including a visibly eroding Nicholas Ridley, followed by one of “Tory youngsters”, a frankly fraudulent way of introducing the likes of John Redwood and Virginia Bottomley. Of Angela Rumbold he ventured the question, “Should there be a ministry for women?” to which the reply came: “Certainly not.”

There wasn’t really need to carry on broadcasting until 4pm. All the business of the day was over just after lunch, when John Major took a turn around Downing Street. “He’s left his soapbox behind for now,” noted Martyn Lewis stupidly. “I wonder when we’ll see it again?” So a distracted David resorted to first asking John Cole, “Have you anything at all to say about anything?” then taking idle potshots at the opposition, accusing ITN of calling results based on “assumptions, not facts”. Later still, everyone started counting numbers in their head before “all of us round the table” spotted the Tories had actually bagged the largest number of votes cast (13.9m) for any one single party ever. Up in Manchester Rory Bremner did a gag about Gordon Brown’s mouth.

Finally, after quite possibly two dozen more shots of the “girls at the phone banks”, the end was at hand. “Sadly I’ve no figures for the Natural Life Party,” David fluffed during his sign-off. Peter, Tony and John remained mute, as they had for most of the previous 14 hours. The closing credits evaporated as soon as they could. It was a strangely unspectacular finale to a confoundingly spectacular occasion.

At least they got the exit poll right. At the start of the coverage, David Dimbleby announced that the Conservatives were going to win the General Election with a majority of 146. At the end of the coverage, David Dimbleby announced that the Conservatives had won the General Election with a majority of 144.

The fact that the simple business of predicting an outcome was so prone to failure is something we’ve been able to appreciate over the past four years of BBC Parliament’s real-time replays of General Elections. With the poll from 1983 completing the set, we’ve now been able to see every election from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – three notable decades in political and television history.

It’s probably fair to say that 1983 was the first General Election coverage that bares some real similarity with what we get now. It was the first without the two mainstays of the Beeb’s election nights, David Butler having retired from the box – broadcasting on BBC radio for this election – and Bob McKenzie having died some 18 months previously. A now-beknighted Robin Day was still there, and indeed referred to himself as, “a humble spear-carrier” in his introduction, as he would do again four years later. David Dimbleby hosted for the second time, and he was joined by a new face to the Corporation, Peter Snow, who took on Bob McKenzie’s old role.

Somewhat surprisingly there was no replacement for David Butler, and with only three presenters it was odd how they were lolling about in an enormous, sparse studio. David and Peter shared a long desk with a big screen between them with Robin to their left. For the first time, all the psephologists, including political editor John Cole, were hidden away backstage, to be brought out when required – which in Cole’s case wasn’t until 3.30am.

In addition, there was no wall of facts for Peter to run around in front of. The cardboard props, including the swingometer, had been traded in, for the first time, for computer graphics, but the technology didn’t exist to render these on a large scale so they were simply projected onto the monitor behind Peter, who stayed seated throughout. This robbed quite a lot of energy from proceedings, but on the plus side the graphics remained simple, clear and concise (apart from the Golden Shot-inspired Tory target board that seemed to confuse everyone), thanks presumably to the excitingly-named Monotype International, who were thanked in the credits for their “typographical co-operation”.

Because the coverage hadn’t started until 10.40pm (Carrott’s Lib being screened after the polls had closed), it wasn’t long until the real action began. All there was time for was a convoluted explanation of the boundary changes and a trip down Downing Street with Esther Rantzen – who was able to introduce us to Wilberforce, the cat who supposedly lived at Number 10 – before we were already onto the first results. Selina Scott, in a floral frock, looked in from Guildford (after her then screen husband Frank Bough had done the same job in 1979), but it was a jumpsuited Valerie Singleton who had the honour of presiding over the first declaration from Torbay.

Apart from some excitement at the impressive Liberal support in the first few seats – leading to a slightly revised prediction – from that moment on the outcome looked inevitable and the actual results seemed to take a backseat to thoughts over the future of the Labour party and what sort of showing the SDP would get. Indeed, even before a single result had been declared, everyone seemed certain that Labour were doomed, David Steel claiming they were no longer, “a serious contender for government” and Robin Day discussing the presumably-soon-to-be-vacant leadership with Neil Kinnock.

It was fascinating to see some stalwarts of the ’60s and ’70s, such as Phillip Tibenham looking windswept in Penrith, Bernard Falk in a leather jacket in Liverpool, and Donny MacLeod in Inverness, alongside the debuts of some more familiar figures from today, like Jeremy Paxman, who interviewed Norman Tebbit in Chingford in front of some heaving bookshelves which looked seconds away from collapsing.

As ever seismic political moments jostled with minutiae from the period, including the revelation from David that Renee Short keeps poodles (Robin: “Can we talk about important things?”) and a visit to the same horrible ’80s shopping centre in Pendle we’d see again in 1987, this time with the declaration made in front of a branch of Carstuff.

Similarly, we got to see the debuts of numerous soon-to-be-big names in more auspicious circumstances, although the result from Sedgefield was simply flashed up on the screen. Ann Widdecombe came second to David Owen in Plymouth Devonport while Hilary Benn was unable to beat the Tory tide in Ealing North. Keith Vaz lost his deposit in Richmond while Virginia Bottomley failed to take the Isle of Wight, despite Thatcher having visited her on a hovercraft. Steven Norris, “an Audi car dealer”, did manage to get in at Oxford East, though.

At 12.30am, David introduced, for the first time, Tony King, billed as “a Canadian, like Bob McKenzie, sadly missed tonight”, who was let out of the backroom for a few moments throughout the night, this time pondering who might be the opposition in 1988. We also got the first of King’s winning similes, describing the Labour performance since 1966 as resembling “a tennis ball falling down the stairs”. Later King would say that this was the UK’s first “presidential election”, claiming that no voters ever thought Michael Foot made for a viable Prime Minister.

Despite this claim, however, much of the action during the night and the following day was anything but stage-managed. Michael Foot was doorstepped leaving his house – we were told to watch the results elsewhere as he didn’t have a television – and refused to give an interview, repeatedly claiming waiting until the results were announced was “the sensible thing to do”. The following day he refused again, again repeatedly announcing “it is only fair” that he didn’t speak to those journalists as he hadn’t spoken to any others.

Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street to go to her count to a number of hollered questions from the waiting hacks, and she hollered some answers back, neither of which we got to hear, while Esther Rantzen’s commentary on this moment was, in its entirety, “Mrs Thatcher. Ha ha ha!” Nicholas Witchell was assigned to following Maggie around on the night, but didn’t seem to have much luck, with ITN’s Michael Brunson being that bit quicker with the mike and managing to get answers to his questions while Nick followed sheepishly behind. On the plus side, Geoffrey Howe’s declaration at Surrey East was held up because “we’re waiting for ITN”.

With the Tories safely back, and the prediction having shot back up to its original position, by 1am, it was time to look elsewhere, helped by the SDP’s entire Gang of Four getting their results one after the other. Roy Jenkins held on in Glasgow Hillhead to ceaseless and earsplitting heckling throughout the declaration and his speech, while after a dozy returning officer had finally got the figures right and given Labour 18,000 instead of 1800, Bill Rodgers lost Stockton North. David Owen won while Shirley Williams was out and all four looked on at each other’s declarations via split-screen, leading to discussion of virtually nothing but the future of the Alliance for about half an hour.

At 2.30am David referred to the election as “strange”, given that the Tories were heading for a massive landslide despite actually getting fewer votes than in 1979. With the Alliance enjoying plenty of second places, much time was spent discussing electoral reform, which you feel Bob McKenzie would have approved of. Fortunately Robin had Alan Beith, whose count wasn’t until Friday, as a virtual permanent sidekick throughout the evening, rebutting the arguments of both Labour and Conservative MPs.

Perhaps the biggest loser of the night turned out to be Nicholas Witchell, who found himself at Thatcher’s count in Finchley watching a door through which “Mrs Finchley” (as David memorably referred to her) failed to emerge for some time and, worse still, had Michael Brunson standing in front of it. Some expert flannelling from Nick followed, as he ran through the various fringe candidates standing against the PM – including the Belgrano Blood Hunters Party and the Law and Order in Gotham City Party, but not a bloke who’d changed his name to Margaret Thatcher, who’d been barred from standing – and even moved on to providing “some facts about Finchley”.

As we moved towards the end of the night’s coverage at 4am – which was to be followed by the film Crooks Anonymous – Esther interviewed some of the people hanging around outside Downing Street, first alighting on an old woman purely because of her “beautiful hat”, while we were treated to extended shots of a load of photographers’ backsides which, we were told, had Margaret Thatcher and Fred Emery somewhere the other side of them.

After a big long list of credits (featuring the likes of Jana Bennett and Lorraine Heggessey), the antics of Leslie Phillips and Stanley Baxter, some Ceefax and Breakfast Time, it was 10am and we were back with David, Peter and Donald MacCormack, who was filling in while Robin was off in Downing Street getting the first interview with the re-elected PM – though only, we were told, after they’d managed to win the toss with ITN. David buggered up his first link by suggesting we’d find out who would be contesting the election in 1888.

Val was also back, this time in a woolly jumper down the road in Truro, but surely the best combination of reporter and location in the morning shift was Bob Wellings at Greenham Common, with the great man managing to look urbane and aloof despite being in the middle of a gang of women singing protest songs. Bob rather tactlessly suggested that, given the Tories’ huge win, “unfortunately for you, your campaign is pointless”, to general uproar.

As with the previous night, many Beeb reporters found themselves embarrassing themselves in the rush to get in the thick of the action, with Michael Cole following David Steel down the road to his house only to find that he was actually walking to Alastair Stewart and an ITN camera crew to do an interview, while Cole’s cameraman fell over Steel’s dog to add to the chaos. Cole did manage to interview Steel a bit later though, and was even invited in, glass of wine in hand, to watch Steel carve a joint of lamb in a not-at-all-staged photo opportunity.

Nick Witchell could only look on from Downing Street as Thatcher enjoyed her lunch with, apparently, “Michael Parkinson”, a slip of the tongue that particularly amused David. Nick tried to follow her as she progressed down the row of well-wishers, only for his microphone cable to be shorter than he would have liked. His cameraman pressed on regardless while Nick frantically signalled for him to come back, until he had to physically grab him and point him in his direction.

The cameras also caught Roy Jenkins arriving at SDP HQ but couldn’t really see or hear him properly as he stood on the steps and eventually seemed to give up and zoomed out to get a long, lingering shot of Trevor McDonald chatting to his crew. Michael Foot entered and left Labour’s headquarters to much the same scrum of photographers who had obscured our view of Thatcher overnight, though Brian Hanrahan (who David couldn’t resist suggesting was going to “count them all in, and count them all out”) had the added complication of a load of inquisitive schoolkids between him and the Labour leader.

At 12.30pm we were able to enjoy a shambolic bulletin with a hapless Sandi Marshall, reading out the news of Tony Benn’s defeat twice in a row and then greeting the next still with silence before a voice could be heard whispering, “Page 39, page 39″. After that, and for the rest of the afternoon, the Labour and SDP post-mortems continued, interspersed with results from Northern Ireland. Robin tried to interview Kenneth Clarke on numerous occasions only to be continually interrupted by technical breakdowns, declarations and photocalls, while Neil Kinnock was asked where he was, and replied, “I’m in the offices of Islwyn Borough Council and behind me is a display of posters explaining the considerable advantages of relocating your industry to this borough.”

David interviewed a journalist down the line from Moscow who appeared not to have any opinion on the election at all (“A rather inconclusive conversation”, summarised a frustrated Dimbleby) but who mysteriously was unable to hear David when he mentioned rumours that Andropov was on his deathbed. Martin Bell, meanwhile, was turning his nose up at NBC’s coverage of the poll and its constant comparisons between the Conservatives and the Republicans.

Finally Michael Foot was put in front of a BBC camera, although as Vincent Hanna warned, “Mr Foot does not want to talk about the campaign but the events in Northern Ireland have compelled him to say something about something else”, and indeed Foot was able to speak, unchallenged, into the camera about his dismay at Gerry Fitt losing his Belfast West seat to Gerry Adams, after which he was thanked for appearing – an approach more suited to ’50s rather than ’80s elections.

Proceedings closed just before 4pm with the time-honoured Little Something The Backroom Boys Have Put Together, that being a musical montage of the night’s highlights backed with appropriate tunes – Tony Benn losing his seat to Hello Goodbye, Supertramp’s Dreamer accompanying shots of Michael Foot and Dr Kiss Kiss over a picture of David Owen kissing his wife. David followed it with the words, “I’m sorry about that”, referring, presumably, to his haphazard introduction and not his opinions on the piece.

Professor Ivor Crewe summed up the day’s events by saying it had been a wholly negative election with anyone who’d achieved anything doing so because the voters hated them less than the alternative – a rather sour note to end on. 23 years later, however, the coverage had been nothing but a joy from start to finish, regardless of your political persuasion.

Thanks to BBC Parliament’s latest vintage presentation, however, there’s a new contender for the crown. “A close run thing, a very exciting evening,” was David Dimbleby’s breathless opening gambit as he set out his stall from a distinctly underwhelming studio set minus all the multi-level gantries, whirring mechanoids and thronging foot soldiers we’re used to on these occasions. But before he’d even given us a chance to get used to this modest MFI ensemble, let alone meet the rest of the team, we were hit with the news that the BBC and Gallup were going for a Tory majority of 26.

This was a big deal: a substantial turnaround for the Government (with a previous majority of 144), and a slap in the face for opinion polls taken throughout the campaign which all pointed to a Conservative landslide. But David was adamant. This was how it was to be. Except “only if that calculation is absolutely right.” Then: “it’s only a guide, no substitute.” And then: “there is a margin of error, 2% either way.” It turned out this meant the actual Tory majority could by anywhere between 86 and minus 17. “It is going to be between those two points,” David pleaded. But it was no good. Even Peter Snow’s spinning CGI House of Commons couldn’t mask such a shameless hedging of bets. In less than two minutes the once-triumphant poll had been deliberated, dismissed and dumped. “Is it worth it?” David wondered meekly.

But if confidence had ebbed from the studio, exuberance certainly had not. In “glorious Technicolor” Peter unfurled his Election Battleground, a crisp, shimmering mural of graphics which, brilliantly, he had to operate using some fiddly, cumbersome buttons on the wall. It was an immediately eye-catching display, in telling contrast to the bulk of his recent toys which have become steadily less obvious and more flamboyant. Here we saw all the information in slick tables, colourful graphs and straightforward maps: the Beeb’s first, very tentative step into big screen election electronica, but in retrospect an unfussy, sensibly exciting shop window.

Also present was another face, still very much part of present day election programmes, Tony King, plus the then BBC political editor John Cole and, perched right on the end of the row in semi-splendid isolation, Sir Robin Day. Opening what would be his last election for the Beeb by trotting out his usual selfless introduction – “I am but a humble spear-carrier” – he proceeded to be completely confused by the number of monitors surrounding him. “I thought you were going to be behind me,” he babbled to Labour’s Jack Cunningham, “but you’re in front of me. Even better.”

This would be as close as we’d get to that sense, so familiar to these events, of things forever balancing on the edge of collective confusion and technological subsidence. As it was, with the entire production staff hidden from view behind the scenery, there was very little bustle and tension in the air. Indeed, an atmosphere of eerie calm pervaded the entire programme, even infecting the various political guests who exercised singularly less sound and fury than on previous occasions. Perhaps this was to do with the perceived inevitability of the outcome. Perhaps everyone was just exhausted from what many testified to being a very gruelling and bad-tempered campaign.

Still, that familiar awkward opening hour when not much happens passed fairly quickly, thanks chiefly to loads of zipping around the country giving an impression of a lot happening when in reality it was nothing of the sort. David Steel was in his conservatory in Ettrickbridge watching himself on television. “He’s not throwing in the sponge,” David observed. John Smith was down the line from Scotland explaining how exit polls “keeps programmes like this going and allows us to have interesting conversations.” Philip Hayton, meanwhile, was in Cheltenham with a room full of “fast fingers”, Margaret Gilmore had “the best counters in Devon” in Torbay, and Wesley Kerr looked in from Pendle in front of a branch of Supercigs.

Martyn Lewis read the news, including the result of the Newsround Extra election: a hung parliament. Given the kids had rustled up a verdict in 1983 remarkably similar to the real one, Martyn wondered if they’d do it again now. “They may get it righter than we will,” muttered David. “Heaven help us if we’re wrong!” “This is going to be a bit of fun,” cried Peter as he explained why the forecasts still offered a Tory majority of 26. “Fasten your seatbelts!” Finally we landed in Piccadilly Circus – not Trafalgar Square this time – where David promised us Esther Rantzen. Instead Gavin Campbell loomed into view in a three-piece suit, hailing us from “the dress circle to the bearpit”. Of all the hundreds milling about, he inevitably ended up talking to the most unforthcoming of characters, including two old Americans over on a visit and, as is dictated by election outside broadcast law, an inarticulate student.

At precisely 11pm the first result arrived from Torbay, a change from those perennial frontrunners of the 1960s and ’70s (Guildford, Cheltenham) and what we’re used to nowadays (Sunderland). The huge floral display bedecking the declaration platform could not distract from the fact the figures now suggested anything but a Tory majority of 26, let alone a hung parliament. Sure enough, we saw Peter instantly at work at his computer, furiously bashing at the keys to issue a revised forecast of 46. So began a pattern for the night as every half hour or so a further enlarged majority replaced the last and all thoughts of the exit poll were pushed further and further out of our minds. It was striking how nobody in the studio for a moment doubted the result – a Conservative Government – while those out on the constituency beat, even Tory politicians, refused to concede the obvious until well into the night. While David was brandishing a copy of the Sun – “MAGGIE THE THIRD” – and John Cole was reflecting on how one Tory MP was relaxing with his “feet in a mustard bath”, Labour’s Bryan Gould thought it much too early to comment and Mrs Thatcher herself, bumping into John Simpson on the steps outside her Finchley count, was only “cautiously optimistic”.

The Guildford and Basildon results confirmed the trend (the forecast majority now up to 58). “We have to eat all our words,” ruminated David, before pausing to acknowledge, “Mrs Thatcher is Mrs Thatcher”. At Cheltenham all the candidates had their backs to the camera, as if in a multilateral decision to divert attention to the giant hoardings above their heads: GARDEN TOWN OF ENGLAND. Indeed, as more declarations arrived a roster of slogans passed before our eyes, including Basildon’s tantalising IT’S COMING!, ARMADA 400 at Plymouth, and the thunderous WREXHAM: INDUSTRIAL MECCA OF THE NORTH. David disapproved of these “American” devices, and would spend some time the following morning moaning charmlessly about how the election had become too packaged and stylised, but along with Supercigs and a Holyhead shop front reading WEIGH TO SAVE!, these were the most evocative symbols of the entire broadcast.

Faces of the future jostled with those of the not-too-distant past. Paddy Ashdown in Yeovil shared details of some “TVS polls”. Peter Bottomley, “Minister of Roads”, jawed with Robin about landslides (forecast: 76). We saw Larry Adler and John Williams playing a desultory tune at Labour’s HQ, John Stapleton in huge Su Pollard-sized glasses talking to Ken Livingstone, David Blunkett with a black eye (“A door hit me”), and Esther – at last! – in Piccadilly Circus interviewing a woman wearing a Thatcher mask.

There were also glimpses of BBC stalwarts of yesteryear: Vincent Hanna looking battered at Neil Kinnock’s count in Islwyn; a dapper David Davis struggling to speak to David Owen in Plymouth; Adam Raphael hearing the “fizz going out” at Labour’s HQ; Hugh Scully giggling with Ted Heath; and Fred Emery, David Lomax and Michael Cockerill representing the real old guard. With such a multitude spread over such a disparate array of locations, it has to be said the technical quality of the programme was near-faultless, making for the smoothest and most accomplished of all the election repeats BBC Parliament have provided so far (including Election 97).

“I’m in the middle of eating a Mars bar,” choked David just after 1am, ensuring at least one moment of indiscipline would pass into the annals. “Let’s go to Sheffield Brightside while I swallow it.” The result from Anglesey prompted Peter to recite the longest station name in Britain (“Llanfairpwyllgwyngwll …”), John lamented “a more divided Kingdom”, Robin observed that John Prescott “looked a bit wilted” and the forecast reached 94 (“A cracking majority”, according to David). The speed at which the declarations now toppled in was another marked difference to other archive efforts. Within a couple of hours around 400 had arrived, giving proceedings a great momentum and a cracking pace – except when Robin decided to indulge himself, of course, in another particularly wry and lugubrious exchange. Ted Heath: “I’m not bothered about you! I’m still sitting in my chair.” Robin: “Yes, I know that! Where were we? You’re looking very fit.” Ted: “I’ll see you again on Monday.”

It was somewhat bad timing that when the Tories notched up 326 seats – and therefore an overall majority – the BBC’s cameras were in the middle of Ken Livingstone’s victory speech. The news flashed up on the giant display in Piccadilly Circus. “The word ‘MAIDEN’ at the top of that screen is quite irrelevant,” drawled David with reference to the advertiser’s name, while down below Esther had vanished leaving Gavin “in the drizzle” to deal with two inconsolable Labour supporters. “A couple of differing views there,” he concluded, wrongly. A mood of inquiry was already underway in the studio, with guest after guest banging on about the North-South divide, two nations, “loony Leftism” and defence policy. Even the experts advanced pointedly partisan analysis, John as good as predicting that Labour were “never going to win” and Tony declaring, not for the last time, that the Tories were set to rule “into the next millennium”. “If you’ve just happened to come in,” began David at 2.50am, the forecast was now a majority of 104.

Coverage continued until 4am, self-consciously winding down in a manner befitting one of the few elections in the last 50 years where the result was done and dusted before the sun rose. This meant more time for Robin to indulge in expansive debates (referred to as “Talks” in the credits) and unintentional pops at David, at one point referring to him as “Richard … I’m sorry, it’s back to 1964!” David returned the favour as he was signing off, observing that the great behemoth, slumped in his chair, was “already sound asleep.” “I’m not asleep, I’m not asleep,” barked Robin, “I’m just waiting until you finish rabbitting on.” There was just room for a look in at Tory central office – “gay scenes, or perhaps I should say lively scenes” noted David, anxiously – and the city of London, which had apparently been “open all night”. Peter recounted the events of one last time in succinct and effective fashion (“I think you’re going to be lonely without that battleground,” cooed David) before we got a long list of credits and another airing for Rick Wakeman’s majestic choral-enhanced theme.

Jumping forward to 9am the following morning, we found David sporting exactly the same suit, shirt and polka dot tie as before, which just seemed lazy. Peter had changed, sensibly, into a more relaxed, light-coloured affair, but Robin had opted for a dreadfully tatty khaki outfit, which looked hopelessly inappropriate later on when he was interviewing Mrs Thatcher inside Downing Street. 55 results were still to come, but there was the predictably long wait before anything happened, making for a lot of waffle and waxing lyrical. Fortunately help was at hand courtesy of a special airship the BBC had chartered for no reason whatsoever and which was transmitting “spectacular views” over London. David was so taken by this blimp he kept cutting to it relentlessly, as if not just presenting but directing the programme in person, at one point announcing “Let’s leave Northern Ireland for a moment and go up into our airship … that’s a beautiful view … trees green …”

Caught up in a romantic reverie, he promised we’d be talking to “our allies in Germany”. Instead we learned from Vincent Hanna of how Neil Kinnock had spent much of the morning “watching Breakfast Time“, glimpsed David Steel in a bright yellow Alliance-embossed sweater, saw Jeremy Paxman take temporary residency of Robin’s booth while he went off to Downing Street, and witnessed Julia Somerville conduct an interview with Norman St John Stevas with her hands in her jacket pockets the whole time. “God is a Conservative,” observed Norman. “God is not a man who believes in proportional representation,” replied Julia, pointlessly.

News updates popped up every hour from Moira Stuart, though these were cut out of this re-run, while Professor Ivor Crewe alternated shifts with Tony King to continually pick over the results. Time did drag between the big set pieces, and proceedings never really recovered any momentum. All the same it was entertaining watching the rigmarole of the aftermath, including a Clive James-esque link up with a “commentator” in Moscow whose earpiece didn’t work, Guy Michelmore with a load of businessmen at the Austin Rover plant in Birmingham, Steve Bradshaw doing vox pops in Grantham (“What’re we talking about?” snapped an old woman before walking off), and shots of Tom King MP being carried in a chair through the streets of Bridgwater.

Asked by Robin Day to speculate on whether she’d still be PM in 2000, Mrs Thatcher replied she could well be “twanging a harp” by then, which prompted David to remark on how at least she was “absolutely convinced she’s going to heaven one day!” to huge laughter from the rest of the studio. When Robin arrived back the japery continued, David pretending not to notice he’d returned because “normally we can tell when you’re here as there’s a great noise going on.” “Do keep quiet for a moment,” hissed Robin. It’s this incidental, throwaway business that counts for just as much as all the melodrama and hyperbole in BBC election results programmes, and here as ever we weren’t disappointed.

By the time 4pm came round and the end was in sight, it’d been many hours since anybody had even alluded to that original exit poll. It really was spectacularly inaccurate, the final Tory majority of 102 not even falling within what had been essayed a distinctly generous margin of error. Instead, people were more preoccupied with having the last word, invariably a convoluted or meaningless one, or in David’s case taking a final ride “on our magic carpet … there are the buildings of the city of London … some of them graceful, some of them not … where the yuppies live.” After 13 hours of broadcasting, he was happy to be soaring far above the murmur and the mêleé, even though, as Peter poetically observed at his Battleground, “the smoke has cleared.”

Every General Election gets dressed up as a “moment of history”, but Election ’87, with its heady brew of old names and faces, and new styles and techniques, was a true moment of television history. Seeing it again 18 years on, those feelings were no less strong and just as irresistible.

Hunkered down in a cavernous studio floating high above the Washington skyline, David Dimbleby sprawled behind a huge desk, pale blue light flickering across his reassuringly alert features. Such an understated choice of location handed our host the perfect motif for the night: that of being both symbolically and literally way up above all the pell-mell and hoi polloi of the election, and thereby able to kick back and reflect upon events with a sly, sophisticated detachment. Hence this was a poll that had been “the most fiercely contested in a generation”, but if that meant a decisive outcome in the next couple of hours we could forget it. On the horizon David could already spy “armies of lawyers jetting in”. He shuddered as if somehow repulsed by his ability to conjure up such a menacing metaphor.

He wasn’t alone in his treehouse, of course. Well, not quite. “Peter Snow is here,” David fibbed, promptly handing over to London where the titular troubadour was loitering waiting to welcome viewers to a virtual White House lawn, bedecked with a huge map of the United States. As Peter cantered off across the country, nimble footwork carrying him with one bound from the Eastern Seaboard to the Deep South, he promised “an electrifying few hours”. A giant simulated graphic of the Presidential helicopter promptly descended upon him to the sound of roaring engines, forcing him to yell a farewell and David to hastily observe he was “in danger of being crushed”. Somewhat impressively the banter between David and Peter would stay slick and well-polished all night, despite the pair being separated by thousands of miles, and in ironic contrast to their often somewhat clumsy bi-play a mere dozen yards apart inside Television Centre.

Just as much fun was to be had, however, courtesy of David’s permanent guest and lieutenant, Professor Allan Lichtman from the American University in Washington. Seated to the anchor’s right, Allan initially projected an air of rustic lethargy, blithely sporting a pale blue shirt with white collars and resting underneath the trademark floppy side-parted hair of academia. But then he opened his mouth, and in an instant you were gripped. “Politicians are like generals,” he burst forth, “they’re always fighting the last war!” His hands and arms flailed wildly. His eyes sparkled. “The parties have lined up, get this, 17,000 lawyers!” He instinctively addressed his comments as much to the camera as to David. Ohio was “covered by the fog of war”. Virginia was “rock ribbed Republican!”

It was impossible not to see the spirit of the late great Bob McKenzie back on our telly once more. “If it ain’t got the swing,” Alan proclaimed, “it don’t mean a thing!” This was rare and classic stuff indeed: the ability to find the very bare bones of the election process uniquely fascinating, and then to project and pass on that fascination to the viewer through a mix of non-patronising sincerity and infectious enthusiasm. Between them, Alan, David and Peter would ensure the unusually protracted stalemate that lay ahead never once threatened to become abortively boring.

Given it was already after 12am, this was self-evidently a good thing. But the very nature of a Presidential election, as compared to a British General Election, meant proceedings were always going to be far removed from that familiar rush of forecasts, breathless declarations and pompous testimony from humbled losers and gallant champions. Indeed, as it turned out none of these would make even the slightest appearance the entire night. With individual States scheduled to be “called” either Republican or Democrat at half-hourly intervals, the pace of the coverage was a world away from the breathless, manic, sometimes brilliantly hysterical results programmes of this country. Instead, news trickled in incredibly slowly, and as it became clear many States were simply not daring to announce a verdict for fear of getting it wrong, because the contest was so close, or even because people were still standing in queues waiting to vote, it began to feel like the affair wasn’t even going to be settled this side of tomorrow.

David was clearly prepared for this, having marshalled a battery of decidedly esteemed and high flying guests to help him and Alan while away the hours. Economists, statesmen, diplomats and those doyennes of US election coverage, the ex-speechwriters, drifted in and out of the studio to engage in endlessly rambling, if learned, debates on minutiae of American political culture. It was all somewhat heavy going, and needed regular interjections from Peter (“It really is nail biting stuff!”) and Alan (“It’s unfolding like one of Ibsen’s well made plays!”) to restore much-needed momentum. Saying that, a quick hop over to ITV1′s coverage revealed a much more low-key affair, resolutely based in London, and boasting guests such as that well known US expert Iain Duncan Smith. Even though they appeared to be cheating and “calling” States before some of the American TV networks, it was a relief to switch back to the infinitely more convincing BBC service.

Ohio was the problem, in more ways than one. “I’m standing on it now,” explained Peter, “though it could be Nevada.” “Could be Nevada?” queried David. “I thought for a minute you were saying ‘it could be nirvana’, such was the pleasure you were taking in it all!” A visiting pollster struggled with David’s references to “Ohio turnout”. “No, a higher turnout,” he fretted, “excuse me – it’s my English.” Fellow correspondents from ABC looked in from places the Beeb couldn’t reach, a lady in Arkansas treating us to some fine stereotyped trans-Atlanticisisms (“She’s a Democratic in-CUM-bent … Bill Clinton DID come to campaign FOR Kerry … not too LONG ago”), and a gentleman in Philadelphia momentarily being replaced by a shot of John Simpson struggling with his earpiece. “A brief glimpse of John Simpson there,” noted David superfluously. “Ah well, it’s the luck of the draw.”

There was heavy emphasis on the possibility of John Kerry being victorious during the first few hours, fuelled by regular clips of people forming mammoth lines outside voting booths. “If John Kerry wins,” cried Alan, “he’s gonna win with the MTV generation, and he’ll have to abandon all those old folk songs and learn rap.” A sombre John Simpson made a more dignified entrance on screen to announce he could hear “pre-MTV sounds” at Bush’s HQ in Washington. Jane Hughes outside Kerry’s base of operations found two supporters who testified rather half-heartedly they’d been “thinking about Kerry … nervous but hopeful … he’s done the best he can.” Simon Schama loomed into view from New York loose of tongue and rosy-faced, roaring of how New Hampshire would go to the Democrats “because my daughter was there this afternoon taking people to the polls – she can deliver thousands of votes with a blow of her nose.” David promised to consult the distinguished historian again later in the programme, but never did – even though Schama’s prediction ultimately turned out to be about the only correct forecast of the entire night.

The tension was agonizing. “What is going on in these places?” David moaned, reeling off the list of States who were being tardy in their declarations. “Democracy is going on!” shouted Alan. “It’s been an honour to do this blah blah blah with you while waiting for results,” a stroppy senior politician drawled across the studio rather unnecessarily, but even that was better than watching the hapless Daisy Sampson attempt to vox pop guests at a party in the US Embassy in London. Daisy, if you recall, had treated us to an unforgettable turn back in June during coverage of the council elections results, hailing drinkers in a Northern wine bar with the claim “Have these people turned their backs on Tony Blair, and if so who to?” and ending a conversation with two Conservative supporters with the sign-off “We’ve heard from two disaffected Tories and a Conservative hopeful.” Here she was back on the beat and back on form, calling MPs by their first names, forgetting to hold her stick microphone to her own mouth when asking other people questions, and introducing a cringing Loyd Grossman with: “Guess who I caught snooping in the cupboards?” David hastily moved things on. “We’ll have some entertainment – the Black Eyed Peas!”

By now it was gone 3am and still nothing was clear. ABC correspondents had developed the curious affectation of removing their earpieces as soon as David asked them a question, thereby denying him the ability to interrupt even if he’d wanted to. “We’ve all become Mr Micawbers,” chuckled Alan, “waiting for something to turn up.” Carole King followed the Black Eyed Peas onto stage at the Democrats’ rally, while Peter resorted to running through statistics from the 1888 Presidential Election.

Slowly, however, indications that the Republicans were making progress seeped onto the studio computers. John noticed, “people coming out of the woodwork” at the Bush camp. “We’re on top of this math,” insisted Alan, checking the figures and proclaiming, “I’m willing to jump the networks” and call Florida for the incumbent. Don King was certainly convinced who’d won. “First I want to say thanks to Tony Blair!” Waving a giant cigar, he invoked Churchill and looked forward to four more years of “George Walker Bush – long live the Queen.” Amusingly the studio had been cleared of guests for King’s appearance, as if a cordon sanitaire follows the ex-boxing promoter wherever he goes.

When they were allowed back in, the panel included erstwhile White House advisor Richard Perle, who David regaled with a marvellous anecdote about the time they were both at the Reagan-Gorbachev disarmament talks in Reykjavik in the mid-1980s, and Perle had placed a large salami on the window sill of his hotel room to keep it fresh, but when he’d gone to fetch it the foodstuff had fallen off and security guards, panicking, had raked it with gunfire. The man was obviously stunned at David’s power of recall, but less so with his attempts to understand Colorado’s proposed proportional voting system (“I dunno – forget it!”)

Finally, down in Florida David Willetts held up a copy of the Miami Herald, confirming the state had gone Republican. “If you’re on tenter hooks, my heart has stopped beating,” divulged an indefatigable Peter. His map, sadly absent of any colossal helicopters waiting to disgorge the new tenant of the White House, remained pockmarked with patches of grey. It was nearly dawn, and still Ohio was too close to call. David handed over to Philippa Thomas in Columbus for an update – but then never returned. When we came back to the studio, he’d vanished, along with Alan and the rest, their place taken by Dermot Murnaghan for the start of BBC Breakfast.

And that was it. No last summing up, no parting punchlines, not even a goodbye. It was all rather unsatisfactory. Though frustrating at times, even interminable in places, the Beeb’s coverage had undoubtedly been fun while it lasted. Now it was suddenly over. There was nothing left but to switch off and walk away in roughly the same condition as, for the moment, the election result itself: gripped with a nagging sense of unfinished business.

So next up came the poll of 28 February 1974. This was a rather different programme to the 1970 results service, though, and perhaps one of the most unusual election nights of all. The most obvious change came with the presenter, as Cliff Michelmore had retired from current affairs to enjoy the more relaxing surroundings of Holiday. In his place came Alastair Burnet – a rare chance to see the distinguished ITV newsman during his short spell at the BBC. Alastair was, unsurprisingly, rather less whimsical than Cliff, but certainly had gravitas and was able to make some sense of the night’s more confusing aspects.

Another unusual aspect of this poll was that boundary changes had meant many constituencies had completely changed since 1970. This led to such situations as the sitting MPs for Brentford and Isleworth both fighting it out to win the newly-merged constituency of Brentford And Isleworth. Therefore analysis was more complex than usual; rather than being told that the parties had held a seat, we were often told they had “held” them – that is, compared to what the results would have been had the 1970 poll been held with the same constituencies. As the night went out, this complicated a confusing situation still further.

But the most unusual aspect was that this was a very low-key election. Polling was carried out to a backdrop of industrial unrest, with regulations forcing TV to close down at 10.30pm only just having been lifted. With a miners’ strike still going on, Ted Heath had called the election to gain “a vote of confidence” from the public to his policies. Given this backdrop, it was unsurprising that the whole coverage was rather more serious than 1970 – less whimsy and less silliness, with all aware that the night’s events could have a huge effect on the state of the nation. There was certainly no room for the election night disco this time round.

Still, it all got off to an exciting start – Fanfare For The Common Man heralding a zoom around the studio, with the scoreboards whirring round and the legend “CON LAB LIB?” emblazoned across the screen. The set was much smaller, though – that said, given the size of the 1970 set, an aircraft hangar would have been “much smaller” by comparison – with Bob McKenzie’s swingometer sitting on his desk like an executive toy, and other graphics being picked up from the floor where they sat at his feet. Alastair set the scene by announcing that tonight we’d find out who would be running the country for at least “the next few weeks” – given that the polls had suggested that this would be one of the closest elections for many years.

There was still time for a bit of fun, though – most notably thanks to Mike Yarwood, live in the studio to recite monologues in the guise of Harold Wilson and Ted Heath. These were accompanied by gales of laughter from the crew, and shots of Alastair awkwardly laughing, but made rather less sense three decades on. Meanwhile Desmond Wilcox found himself among the thronging masses in Trafalgar Square again, and he was having fun, at one point grabbing some punters to speak and quipping, “I’ve handled more people tonight than Bruce Forsyth!” Yet some of this seemed at odds with the more serious aspects of the first hour, such as Tom Mangold at a Miners’ Welfare Club – “I’m sure they won’t mind me calling them the most militant and bloody-minded miners in the country” – overseeing an extended bout of shouting (“If I can come in here, Mr Interviewer, you’re quite wrong”) and finger-waggling.

This was an impressive effort for the era, with Alastair boasting that they had 76 camera crews out in the field, the most ever. As with last week’s replay there was picture interference throughout – though it’s a tribute to BBC Parliament that they assumed the viewers had the intelligence to ignore this – and some parts of the country were still staggering on in black and white. There was also more editing – around 90 minutes were chopped out around 1am, meaning we lost the declarations of all three party leaders, and again we lost the breakfast programme as we leapt straight from just after 4am to 10am. The biggest disappointment about that, perhaps, was that Alan Watson, who co-presented the early shift with Michael Barratt, therefore only appeared reporting from Conservative Central Office. A shame, given his obvious star quality in 1970, and that this was his last BBC election – next time round he was standing as a Liberal candidate. Perhaps Barratt’s agent demands huge repeat fees?

There were many eye-opening moments during the replay. During the early part of the programme we paid a number of visits to Ladbrokes for news of the latest odds – reported on by none other than BBC racing presenter Julian Wilson. Meanwhile Magnus Magnusson was anchoring proceedings in Glasgow, and at 4am, Esther Rantzen attempted some vox-pops in Covent Garden with a number of pissed-off market traders (“Do you have a message for Robin Day?” “Not really.” “Do you have a message for Alastair Burnet?” “Not really.”) Esther showed up again the following morning in Chelmsford, partaking in some rather unpleasant toadying while interviewing Norman St John Stevas.

There were also some prime cock-ups. During the traditional scoot around the seats hoping to declare first, Alastair talked all over Guildford correspondent Paul Griffiths (the race was a bit of a damp squib this time, though, with Cheltenham and Newcastle both losing ballot boxes and Guildford running away with it). A crappy slide of Labour gains saw Alastair announce that “I’m not sure the spelling’s all that good, so sorry about that”. Meanwhile an attempt to speak to Michael Charlton (sadly underused here) in Huyton on the phone had to be abandoned, though 10 minutes later we did get him in vision (Charlton’s opening – “What?”) Robin Day didn’t show up for over an hour, and spent most of the time coughing, while Alastair repeatedly messed up the Moray and Nairn result, taking three goes to confirm the SNP had won it.

Yet as the replay went on, the crude presentation and archaic chat began to become less noticeable as you realised that what you were seeing here was a huge news story developing. Almost from the off, everyone involved knew that the result was going to be tight – the Tories and Labour were neck and neck, the Liberals were making huge gains, and the other parties all had support. David Butler suggested that it was going to be a “long hard night”, which came true when even five hours in they still weren’t able to predict a winner. After a while it looked as if Labour would be the biggest single party (contrary to the opinion polls, as usual), but even then nobody knew if they’d be able to govern. By 12.30am, Alastair was already placing bets on them all coming back for another election quite soon, to which David replied, “Good, I enjoy them, though I don’t know if the viewers do!”

When it became obvious that the vote was going to produce a complete stalemate, Alastair wondered aloud if we were heading for “one of the most serious crises of our time”. With the miners’ strike continuing, David Butler despaired as there was apparently only two weeks worth of coal left – though this was later disputed by the energy minister, who claimed that there was enough to keep the country going until April. Robin even asked one of his guests, “Are we not in an economic 1940?”

The other big story of the night saw Bob McKenzie continually point out that while the Liberals were getting half as many votes as the two main parties, they were only winning a handful of seats. One lecture on the injustice of this saw Alastair announce, “That was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Robert McKenzie campaign for proportional representation”.

As we entered the small hours, things were getting tougher, with an atmosphere unlike virtually any other results show. The odd gag – such as Alastair asking Bob if he could come back next week for another election – was normally followed by everyone looking glum and saying “Of course, this is a very serious situation”. Everyone was at it; some banter between Graham Pyatt and Bob McKenzie as to whether the computer had been more accurate than Bob’s arithmetic was followed by Robin telling everyone to stop arsing about. Desmond Wilcox had a different take on it – “It’s a score draw, and a replay at Aston Villa next Wednesday!”

If the night itself was grim, the following day was even worse, with everyone now resigned to a tie with no overall winner. Worse still, nobody had a clue what the result actually meant, nor what would happen next. There was still time for a bit of whimsy, such as Robin interviewing cartoonist “Jak”, or David Lomax standing around outside Jeremy Thorpe’s garden gate hoping for an interview, which he eventually got, but only after Thorpe’s mother had told him to go away. We also got what some of us had been waiting for – Alastair announcing that the children’s programmes had been moved to BBC2, something that every BBC current affairs presenter has to do at least once.

For the most part, though, this was a time for serious discussion. David Butler was blaming Enoch Powell for the result – he’d withdrawn from the race telling everyone to vote Labour, and around his constituency in the West Midlands, 11 seats had gone to Labour with much larger swings than average, thus creating the deadlock. Butler quipped that “Isn’t it ironic we’ve now renamed the Black Country, Powell Country?” Bob McKenzie was still rallying against the electoral system, though Alastair assumed there’d probably be “one more election” under the current one. Robin thought the UK might be “right on the edge of a ghastly disaster”, while David said that the entire country had, given the chance to vote, all opted for “don’t know”.

As the coverage continued into the early evening, there was still utter confusion over what would happen next. Alastair summarised that, “All can claim to have won, but not all can claim any prizes”. David Butler called it an “irreconcilable situation”, while Alastair felt a climate of “doubt, indecision, maybe fear”, and that the results were “the end of the beginning”. David Dimbleby was watching cabinet minsters show up in Downing Street while Ted Heath was trying to work out what to do. Nobody knew whether he would try and carry on as Prime Minister, set up a coalition, or resign. At 6.45pm, Alastair signed off. “We will return at 9.25 with a programme called ‘Back To Work’, although it should perhaps be called ‘Carry On Worrying’ or ‘Carry On Voting’. This is the indecisive General Election of 1974″.

The 1974 replay hadn’t been as entertaining as 1970, but in its own way it made for equally compelling viewing. It was fascinating to see a news event unfold in real time, with a general feeling of chaos and uncertainty gripping both the studio, and the nation as a whole. Seeing a political situation unlike nothing we experience now was particularly eye-opening. Well done to BBC Parliament for providing a riveting history lesson.

Now, 12 months on, the channel is returning to the archives for more of the same, but on a far grander scale. This time round we’ve a trio of polls, spread over three weeks. Still to come are the ballots from February 1974 and June 1983, but the sequence kicked off with June 1970 – Harold Wilson squaring off to Edward Heath for a second time, and opinion polls predicting a comfortable Labour victory.

With a keen eye for historical significance, the coverage opened with some clips from a 1945 election newsreel boasting a suitably jocular voiceover and bombastic, if rather wheezy, footage. “Bobbies paused before a conveniently open window and heard that the government was doing nicely!” chimed the off-screen announcer over a silhouetted constable, before the here and now abruptly hoved into view courtesy of some crude computer typeface. Text scrolled across the screen to announce the arrival of Cliff Michelmore – and what an arrival. Perched high in a gantry above a mighty cavern of a studio, Cliff set the scene. “We’re all settling in,” he declared cosily, and cut to Robin Day in earnest but silent conversation with a complete stranger.

Next came a truly awesome sight. An absolutely huge panorama of technicians, monitors and desks unfurled before the camera, together with an embankment of painted charts and cardboard towering high into the rafters. The entire structure was so tall it had a real door built into it. As if this wasn’t enough, a massive blue screen curved round the ceiling, presently boasting a somewhat impressive vista of a Scottish sunset.

Looking somewhat adrift amongst the battlements, Cliff nonetheless got straight down to business. Down in Southampton “the QE2 is in port,” while “waiting in a London discotheque” were Tony Blackburn and Julie Felix, though we’d see no sign of either at any point during the entire programme. Over in Trafalgar Square was a man who’d landed the most dangerous job of the night: a crumpled looked Desmond Wilcox, determined to upstage anyone or anything in his way. He began work, observing, “The fountains look like becoming the number one target for political cooling off … so far the police have been gentle.” His psychedelic tie jostled for attention with two giant screens, one relaying the Beeb’s coverage and the other, which he studiously ignored, the property of ITN. Spying a visitor to the capital, Desmond then launched off on a monologue about, “the problem that Harold Wilson outlined … too many people going away on holiday.” “I’m not on holiday,” his companion retorted tartly. “You’re not on holiday?” repeated Desmond unnecessarily. “No, I’m a driver.” This exchange was promptly abandoned for a gentleman who insisted he always followed opinion polls then claimed he didn’t, and finally, one last throw of the dice, a punter who snapped, “I would’ve like the cost of living more discussed.” “Well, it was,” snorted a thoroughly enraged Desmond, and with that it was back to the studio.

BBC Parliament had slightly trimmed the coverage in places, presumably to edit out moments when the original videotapes had been changed or damaged. There were, however, two big cuts: we lost the entire morning-after breakfast programme helmed by Michael Barratt, which was a shame as he consequently ended up having a very minor role, and he even had his trademark bank of Nationwide monitors to hand as well. The semi-notorious extended sketch The Campaign’s Over! was also ditched, unsurprisingly, replete with Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett, Eric Sykes as “The Foreman”, and Spike Milligan as “Paki-Paddy”. Only a portion of this reportedly exists now anyway, but to be honest the evening was none the poorer for its absence, especially as posterity records it was distinctly unfunny and technically near-incompetent.

We still had Cliff’s rather hesitating intro into it, however – “We’ll take you to Alf Garnett … the first return of the night!” – and when we came back Cliff was now down at his main desk, an impressively shiny grey bureau. On his left was, as ever, David Butler, fixing the camera with his slightly glazed expression to reel off statistics in gripping, endless fashion. On Cliff’s right, however, was a new face: Alan Watson. Here was the unsung star of the night: a dapper, avuncular commentator with an anecdote about every single MP and every one of the country’s 630 constituencies. Harold Lever, therefore, was “the richest man in the Labour cabinet”; Desmond Donnelly “ran his entire campaign off a yacht”; and Edward Fletcher was “one of the few members of Parliament to have fought in the Spanish Civil War. As the night wore on Alan’s wry asides made for a wonderful complement to Cliff’s own cheerful bonhomie and David’s exhaustive analysis. Completing the team Bob McKenzie was hunkered down by his wall of facts, plus “City”, “Industrial” and “Foreign” desks for further elucidation, and a special “Comment” desk where visiting pressmen and broadcasters delivered homely monologues straight to camera.

It was a little while before the first results came in, so Cliff took time to lay out this “vast and complicated programme – we won’t try to explain it to you all at once.” Most of the country, it turned out, was still in black and white, including Wales and Northern Ireland, and every single time coverage cut between monochrome and colour, or indeed anywhere around the studio, spectacular picture interference raged for three seconds. Yet this all added to the feeling of the Beeb pushing the envelope, of this being a singularly innovatory live event – and the danger of things forever on the edge of falling off air.

Despite Bob hazarding a guess that “one or two pollsters may be on the chopping block tomorrow”, virtually everyone in the studio tacitly entertained the possibility of Labour remaining in power. Then came a note of caution from Gravesend. “We’re going to try something entirely new,” Cliff began, and what followed was, remarkably, the Beeb’s first ever exit poll, from a place “shown by a computer to be the most ordinary constituency in England … typical cars with typical traffic jams.” Intriguingly, evidence pointed to a Tory victory.

Out on the beat and oblivious to Gravesend was a somewhat tetchy David Dimbleby in Huyton, Harold Wilson’s constituency, and the debonair Michael Charlton down in Bexley with Edward Heath (“Party morale remains indestructible”). Charlton had, inevitably, great material to work with, not least the fact that standing against Heath was a man who’d changed his name only the week before to, yes, Edward Heath. Reporters had also been assigned to various key counts, including several competing to declare first. Indeed, this was to become the first big event of the night and really helped proceedings off to a cracking pace.

Keith Kyle was at Wolverhampton where “there was all-in wresting two nights ago”, a subdued Denis Tuohy skulked in Guildford, while a decidedly pissed-off looking James Burke lurked in Cheltenham. “It really is warming up, this,” chuckled Cliff at the prospect of the race ahead, “grapevines spreading out their tentacles … we’re going to have the most ghastly crash!” After flicking between various scenes, all of which promised a declaration in “minutes”, suddenly we dashed over to Guildford. A man, desperately out of breath, ran onto a stage and flung bits of paper at his colleagues. A massive “CON HOLD” legend appeared on screen, accompanied by a 4% Tory swing. Back in Cheltenham James Burke was so gripped with emotion he started yelling “here in Guildford!” The studio was convulsed with drama. David Butler started gabbling. Bob McKenzie boomed. In an instant everyone realised the polls had been entirely wrong, and that Heath was heading for victory.

It was all precious information for Graham Pyatt seated in his black suit and black tie with, according to Cliff, his “computer stuff” to get to work on. Cliff then interrupted Robin Day, newly settled up in the gantry, to bring us an update on rumours of a low turnout in Devon North. “There are no rumours,” countered David Lomax from the counting hall. Whenever technical problems persisted, which they did frequently, Cliff immediately stepped in with calm, sincere authority. “I’m not going to allow it to continue”, he declared on sitting through footage of absolutely nothing happening in Salford East. As other verdicts began to seep in and Bob labelled it “the most startling result since the war,” we had on-the-spot comment from various regional cities including a bumptious Jeffrey Preece in Birmingham and, a nice surprise, a charged-up John Humphrys in Manchester, who launched into an anecdote about Winston S Churchill “going into a pub” in Stretford only to suddenly get cut off, to Cliff’s audible amusement. Other places, however, had to settle for a colour slide. Torquay was represented by a nice view of its attractive bay; Nelson and Colne had to settle for a drab shot of a dirty high street.

All of this meant little back in Trafalgar Square, where things were getting a bit out of hand. People had started dancing in the fountains. “Cooling their ardour I suppose,” began Desmond petulantly, before spotting a black gentleman nearby. “Now, you’re an immigrant,” he began. Up in his balcony Robin grilled Enoch Powell down the line from Wolverhampton. “I would hate to bandy words with my leader, let alone adjectives,” drawled the MP, an exchange that reduced Cliff to a fit of the giggles. Yet for all the gags and puns and punchlines – “That’s a result from Labour, er, Liverpool Exchange. Labour Exchange! Someone will be there before the night is out!” – Cliff retained a firm hold on the sheer drama of the occasion throughout. Gravitas, mixed with sheer exuberance, was never far away, and it made for a stunning mix. “And … standby!” he yelled suddenly just after midnight. “The Conservatives gain Keighley!” “Do you ever wish you had 16 heads,” he asked the viewer, faced with a torrent of information and bemoaning the fact Graham Pyatt’s computer had been “fed with blue print-out.”

Faces and names with potent contemporary and topical resonance drifted by – Gywneth Dunwoody losing her seat in Exeter, Robert Maxwell in trouble in Cheltenham. There were charming displays of returning officers struggling with their moment of glory and blinking in the lights of national television. In Birmingham Ladywood an elderly councillor kept enquiring, “Right now?” to no-one in particular before repeatedly mixing up the candidates names to general uproar. A desperate official in Devon North could be heard pleading, “Check, check the bundles, bundles of 50!” But the returning officer at Cardiff West took the honours for the most belligerent public servant of the night: “Ah, keep quiet,” he barked at some hecklers, “keep quiet, for goodness sake!”

The iconic moment came just after 12.30am, when the camera cut to Bob McKenzie standing by his swingometer where a BBC set designer was busy painting on new numbers to reflect the unexpected Tory success. As the time came for both party leaders to hear their respective results, we went back to Dimbleby in Huyton, whose desperate ad libbing waiting for Wilson to arrive – “scrambler telephones … hot lines … we were reliably told he was about to drive up to this entrance …” – recalled Michael Cockerell’s doomed improvisatory efforts in 1979 at Jim Callaghan’s count. Michael Charlton, however, was revelling in the occasion. “He looks a bit more secure than the Drill Hall at times,” he waxed, as Heath swept into his declaration, before grabbing an audience with the man himself and entertaining Heath to a cross-examination with an off-screen (presumably ITN) colleague (“I’m not on the air, Michael, so you better go on”).

“Caught!” boomed Cliff just after 1.30am, “Caught, caught – there’s a little whisky in there,” he apologised, hastily replacing his glass. Election telly tradition dictates the host is caught mid-slurp or mid-chew, and for Cliff, inevitably, it was both as sure enough a sneaky bite of sandwich followed an hour later. Moments of good humour were forever giving way to great melodrama, though, with particular significance heaped on the defeat of Labour Deputy Leader George Brown in Belper. By this point it was clear a substantial Tory victory was on the cards, and just as in 1997 some key Labour figures were in danger. But Brown’s departure seemed to affect the studio and guests more than any other. Alan Hart was at the count and spoke in hushed tones of how Brown had, “at times, been offering his hands in a gesture of prayer.” Cliff joined in, miming how he’d seen Brown biting his nails. “The situation is, as you know, a developing situation,” he concluded memorably. Once Brown had gone, David Butler mourned the loss of “one of the most outstanding people in Parliament.” The comment, by being both so obviously subjective and uniquely heartfelt, seemed a little out of place.

The entire coverage was steeped in faces, names and above all language of another age. David spoke of the defeat of the Clapham Labour candidate, who, if he’d won, would’ve become “the first negro MP in the House of Commons.” Harold Wilson referred to an “anti-racialist” candidate in Smethick. Giant “No To Common Market” placards hoved into view at various counts. Robin Day joked with union leader Clive Jenkins over how much overtime BBC staff would be getting tonight – “We mustn’t go into that anymore!”

Meantime Desmond continued his vigil under Nelson’s Column. “Several people turned up here,” he rued, “with balloons filled with helium, and weren’t too happy when other people put cigarettes into them.” He had the misfortune to be filmed entirely from behind, his face always obscured, which just made his grillings seem all the more seedy and suspect. In the studio, though, things became ever more jovial. Robin questioned a very upbeat Jim Callaghan about likely candidates for the Labour deputy leadership (“Give me a chance, I’ve got to drink a cup of tea first!”) and for the first time we went back to the discotheque, heralded by a giant image of a scantily dressed gyrating woman with the Beeb’s Election ’70 logo tattooed across her chest – “we’ve denied you that pleasure for a long time,” drawled Cliff. Bernard Falk lurked uneasily amongst the dancers at La Valbonne, restricting his polite enquiries those non-dancing upright guests only.

“I really think it’s time, Michael Barratt, we went Nationwide!” Cliff began, cueing in – at last! – Mike and his monitors. Technical problems persisted, with Jeffrey Preece in Birmingham complaining “I missed the question – someone was opening the door of the studio.” Christopher Brasher was at the Oxford Union where a bold psychedelic disco was in progress and an even bolder Gyles Brandreth had just finished his finals. Dawn broke over Trafalgar Square, where a cold Desmond Wilcox, down but not out, noted with relish, “our rivals in the fairground from ITV have already departed.” Indeed, Cliff chimed in “if you’re thinking of joining Independent Television, they’ve gone to bed.”

The scene was set, at 4am, for a splendid finale dash around virtually all the results so far. Cliff read the figures, David followed with a line or two of analysis, and Alan chipped in with yet more bon mots. Kenneth Baker was “the best dressed man in the Commons,” to which Cliff snorted, “Ah. Well. Whoopee,” which seemed a little unkind. Robin interviewed Anthony Barber puffing on a cigarette, and Eric Lubbock predicted another election in October. “Well, we better keep the studio in being,” concluded Robin. “Producer Dick Francis, keep a note of that will you?”

A little after 4.30am Cliff began to wrap things up for the night, informing Robin, “You may now have some of your iced coffee and your solid pork sausages than you brought all the way from a famous store that I dare not mention.” Violent classical music played us out over the requisite long list of credits (and there were a few famous names in there, including Ron Neil and Brian Wenham), then, a few seconds later, it was 9am and Robin’s cold meats had been and gone. So had Michael Barratt, who we saw on his way out the studio. A third of the results were still to come, but it being the morning after there was time and room for more expansive features – a ponderous debate between Oxford academics, for instance, and visits to numerous suburban covered markets, including one in Barnstaple where David Lomax encountered some delightfully outspoken old women. One dismissed the pollsters with contempt, concluding, “My own opinion is good enough for me,” a comment which particularly tickled Cliff.

The stock market opened, with shares rising “between two shillings and five shillings right away!” Richard Baker dropped by to read the news, including details of Barry Humphries getting arrested in Australia on account of being drunk and disorderly, and Graham Parker read the weather with cigarette smoke billowing across his face. Bob McKenzie was now in shirtsleeves, resplendently smoking his pipe on screen, but after being addressed by erstwhile commentator turned MP Geoffrey Johnson Smith as “old friend”, and perhaps feeling things getting a bit too whimsical, Robin felt moved to deliver one of his trademark pompous summations to camera. “What we have seen today,” he intoned, “is an example of how British democracy works – peacefully, non-violently … something that happens in very few countries of the world today … something that we can be proud of.”

Such self-indulgent editorialising was almost forgivable in the light of his later efforts at interviewing the Welsh Independent MP SO Davies, 83 years old, on a very bad line, and who decided to answer most of the questions in Welsh. Cliff showed us the London evening papers (“This’ll save you a ha’penny”) with the London Evening News proclaiming “TED SAILS IN”. Michael Charlton related how the new PM had earlier been accidentally stabbed in the throat with a cigarette butt – “the least troublesome pain in the neck that Heath is likely to get.”

The vast gleaming arena that was the BBC election studio began, just a little, to feel the strain. “If you heard a loud bang there, and you know what it is, let us know because nobody here knows what it was,” grumbled Cliff at one point. “Didn’t half go off pop …” Over on the Industry desk a call came through for correspondent Harold Webb. “Just a moment, the phone’s ringing,” he dutifully announced, but there was nobody there. “A lady has just got straight through to me,” Cliff countered, “thinking I was a house agent. Now I assure you that it wasn’t Mrs Wilson, because she doesn’t have the number. Probably looking for a charming little place near Westminster at the moment. If you’ve got my telephone number, don’t use it …”

This reviewer’s access to BBC Parliament ended with roughly three hours of coverage to go, thanks to the machinations of Telewest who, in their silent wisdom, decided to switch to the Performance channel. But up until then this special presentation of Election ’70 had been near exemplary, with only the interference from the original recordings disrupting the picture quality. It had been possible to get completely immersed in the drama and emotion of the original transmission, and soak up its pace, excitement, and vibrant, ever-present boisterous humour minute by precious minute.

Being able to see Cliff, flanked by a mighty ensemble of experts, seated in the middle of such a dazzling construction, was a true privilege. The lasting image of Election ’70 will surely be of the veritable army of the BBC rank and file bustling all over the studio complex. You certainly never see this many on hand for an election nowadays, but that just added to the spectacular sense of occasion. The entire programme fizzed with heady camaraderie. It must have been fantastic to work there, on the biggest political TV operation ever mounted, with all the BBC’s resources at your disposal, and the best presenters in the business up front. The gentle chatter, the hum of feverish activity, the buzz of people milling around, getting in shot, while processing information and mapping a moment of history – this was all, quite simply, wonderful, unforgettable television.