The decision by the political parties and the broadcasters to show leaders’ debates during the next election is welcome, but is it also a missed opportunity? Never having had televised debates before, we have no traditions or taboos to break. We could have started from scratch and reinvented the format. We could have made them something interesting, exciting, engaging. Instead, we seem to be getting an unimaginative imitation of something which is already losing popularity elsewhere.
And, apart from anything else, the picture of British politics they present will be depressingly traditional and stereotypical. Three white men at varying points of the age spectrum will line up wearing three dark suits, three plain shirts and three carefully chosen ties. Their ‘debate’ will be chaired by three more slightly older white men similarly attired (Alastair Stewart for ITV, Adam Boulton for Sky, and David Dimbleby for the BBC). Women may be present in the equally carefully chosen studio audience, and will probably ask questions if questions are to be asked, but they will not be centre stage. Neither will anybody else not meeting the implied criteria.
It did not have to be like this. The leaders are who they are, but there must have been options when it came to the presenters. There are any number of able women on television news programmes; it would be interesting to know whether any of them were considered, or whether it was simply assumed on all sides that since gravitas would be required, middle-aged white men were the only option. Or did this aspect of things not even occur to them? Are there really no women in television current affairs who can be considered seriously for serious political occasions? Was the choice based on seniority alone? Or was it perhaps decided that the egos of the big political beasts required the egos of the big beasts of television to keep them in order. Hard to tell, but the outcome is all too clear.
This is a pity. From the look of it, the format being proposed for the debates is one that needs more than the new to make it attractive to viewers. According to the Commission on Presidential Debates the audience for the first McCain-Obama debate in 2008 was lower than that for the first Bush-Kerry debate in 2004, and the average audience for all three debates was only slightly higher in 2008 than 2004. The vice-presidential debate did better, but there the prospect of what Sarah Palin might or might not say added a little frisson of unpredictability to the proceedings. In fact, the real story of last year’s US election was the new and creative uses made of online campaigning techniques rather than old-fashioned adversarial debates.
There will be nothing unpredictable about our debates this year, and no amount of clever set-building or graphics will disguise how old-fashioned they will look. Those six white men between the ages of 42 (Cameron and Clegg) and 71 (Dimbleby) will address one of the most diverse electorates in the world, and, from the look of it, will then reproduce either the kind of debate we see at Prime Minister’s Questions (which is generally agreed to be a turn-off for most people) or a sort of Question Time without the leavening of other members of the panel. The intentions are good, but the outcomes will do nothing to re-engage a disengaged body politic.
If we really want to improve political and democratic participation we will need to do better than this.
