This is an excerpt from my Substack newsletter, The News Angle, published on July 11th 2024. Image: ITV
It’s difficult for those outside the UK to appreciate that TV leaders’ debates in the UK only started in 2010 – decades after they became normal practice in the US.
I played a small role in trying to introduce them to the UK when I worked at ITN1 and represented the commercial TV channel ITV in negotiations with the political parties in 1997. In March of that year, the then Prime Minister John Major said he would welcome a TV debate. This sparked off a series of negotiations between the parties and the broadcasters.
The Director of BBC News at the time, Tony Hall, and the BBC’s Chief Political Adviser Anne Sloman negotiated for the BBC, while ITV’s Marion Bowman and I argued the case for ITV. I remember we met Labour’s Lord Irvine in his legal chambers for one set of negotiations.
We nearly pulled it off, but the Blair camp, in the end, decided a debate was too risky when they had such a strong advantage in the polls, leading the Conservatives to pay an actor to appear at Tony Blair’s public appearances dressed up as a chicken. Happy days!
It’s astonishing, really, that it took a further 13 years before the debates finally took hold in the UK. We may have been late to the game, though, but TV debates are now undoubtedly an integral part of the UK election campaign landscape.
We’ve had a series of debates on ITV, Sky and the BBC in this election – some just with two main leaders, others with leaders from the seven main parties.
To analyse the debates, let’s break them down into the five key elements for any TV debate programme: impact, influence, production, format and moderation.
- The programmes certainly had impact. The first one on ITV, for example, was the front-page story of most of the following day’s newspapers. From The Telegraph’s “Starmer on the ropes over Tax”, to the Daily Mail’s: “Fiery Rishi comes out swinging – and lands big blows”. Sunak’s claim during the debate that Labour’s tax plans would cost £2,000 per household became the first big issue of the campaign. The other debates had a similiar impact on the tone and course of the campaign. So, impact? Without a doubt.
- I think that the debate programmes will also have had a significant influence on undecided voters. I do think it’s fair to argue that a general TV audience will include a higher proportion of undecided viewers than social media platforms – and those viewers will undoubtedly have been influenced by the content and style of the debates.
- In terms of technical production, the ITV programme was pretty faultless. A nicely designed set, good vision mixing, lighting, and sound. The camera angles on the leaders, on Julie Etchingham and the audience all worked. This was a live programme, and I didn’t see any glitches. The BBC and Sky debate production was also of a high quality. I liked the way the Sky set changed colour from red to blue for the different leaders – although, perhaps, the BBC leaders’ set had less flexibility with lighting and camera positions, as it was working within the confines of the BBC’s radio studio.
- The format? Well, for the first debate, with its time limit on answers, this became a controversial talking point. But the limit on answers at least allowed the ITV programme to cover most of the key issues in the election – tax, the NHS, Gaza, education, security and immigration. ITV would have been criticised if it had left any of those topics out. And the use of audiences in all of the debates has definitely been a plus – with some of the most challenging questions coming from members of the audience. The main problem for the ITV and BBC debates was the leaders talking over each other. Rishi Sunak did a lot of interrupting in the first debate – and Penny Mordaunt and Angela Rayner did an amazing double act of talking over each other in the BBC and ITV debates. But in many ways that was part of the mission of these programmes – to see how the leaders behaved within the constraints of the format.
- And finally, how did the moderators do? Firstly, this must rank as one of the most difficult jobs if not the most difficult job in TV presenting. Keeping the Prime Minister of the country and the leader of the opposition within the bounds of an agreed format cannot be easy. In my view, ITV’s Julie Etchingham and the BBC’s Mishal Husain both did well in their debates – running the debate in a dignified and respectful way. A lot of people on social media criticised Beth Rigby’s more assertive and interrupting approach on the Sky News debate – but I appreciate that others warmed to that style.
At the start of the campaign, there was talk of this being the TikTok election. The FT’s Stephen Bush wrote an article with the headline; “This will be the first post-TV election”, with the sub-heading, “The challenge for political parties is that televised set-piece events reach fewer people than ever before”.
But my contention is the opposite of this. Despite them being broadcast on legacy media, the live debates and the one-on-one TV interviews on the main, old-fashioned linear TV channels were centre stage in this election, and shaped much of the agenda and direction of the campaign.
What went on in TikTok and Facebook was obviously important. Newspapers still had a big influence. Political podcasts had a new and interesting role. But the 2024 UK election campaign, I would argue, was very much a TV-dominated event.