Leaders’ TV debates like a bad episode of Britain’s Got Talent

BIG debates between party leaders may create headlines and lots of commentary, but they’re a complete waste of time.

They’re like party political broadcasts, only worse, because nobody expects anything of a party political broadcast. They know it for what it is: one of those paradoxical pointless survivors like those fish that live hundreds of kilometres deep in the ocean and have no eyes because the pressure that far down would make fish eyes pop. Nobody in this country would be upset if party political broadcasts were discontinued, except perhaps the independent production houses that make them. They have neither merit, memorability, purpose nor function.

The big debates are equally useless. They’re the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. Viewers who watch them do so in the hope that one of the participants will put his foot squarely in his mouth or that one participant will deliver a killer blow. The lust for the killer blow never eases, despite the fact that never, in the entire history of international big debates, has there been one. Yet you hear media people reverently quoting Ronald Reagan, whose attempt was the feeble “There you go again”, or the other bloke, who told that moron, Dan Quayle, using a carefully prepared line, that “You are no Jack Kennedy”.