Election night tele

The art of desperate flannelling was alive and well on election night.

David White

Election night. What with lurching between TV1, TV3 and Maori Television, keeping one eye on the Listener’s live blog and keeping up with John Campbell – “Holy moley!” – it was exhausting.

The early MMP referendum results rather spoilt the fun for connoisseurs of old-school election-coverage tedium. There was little time for traditional reminders about it being “early days yet!” or for the ritual sausage-roll sightings. John Key in short pants taking possession of a pizza wasn’t quite the same.

Still, the art of desperate flannelling is alive and was at its most desperate, appropriately enough, outside Phil Goff’s place. There was the cow monologue – “Out with the cows at Phil Goff’s!”; “We’ve got six cows keeping us company!”, etc. By the time One News’s Greg Boyed was driven to report, “The cows behind me moved from one end of the paddock to the other!”, the movement of the cows was in danger of becoming a metaphor for Kiwi voting habits.

Meanwhile, TV3 delivered the most easily digested information and quickly became the most entertaining option. John Campbell, introducing his team of “crack” journalists on the split screen: “Look at them! They’re like a modern and extremely expensive Brady Bunch!” His kamikaze live crosses – “Rebecca Wright is looking like a 30s film star … Sorry to objectify you. It’s totally inappropriate!” – confirmed that The Jaquie Brown Diaries was always more reality than fiction.

3 News’s Patrick Gower, who reports with such poker-faced subversion it’s as if he’s auditioning to play a news reporter on Flight of the Conchords, came upon some Young

Nats having a celebratory drink: “Today’s about John Key and National and building a brighter future … It’s bloody exciting!” declared one scary young chap. Gower was worried whether they were old enough to drink. “I think Judith Collins is going to arrive soon and I don’t want them to be tasered.”

When things threatened to get dull – there wasn’t a lot of suspense, to be fair – I passed the time by compiling a music track for the evening. John Banks was particularly good at setting off long-repressed musical memories. “I told you in the mornings. I told you at lunchtime. I told you in the evenings,” he banged on and on in his victory speech, until you feared he was about to break into a chorus of Peter, Paul and Mary’s If I Had a Hammer. By the time he finished addressing his Act on Campus supporters – “I told you in the late evening!” – viewers who did have hammers handy were probably using them to destroy television sets all over this land. But then he was off again, surging in a more geographical direction in homage to “the people who live in my street, across the road, around the corner, down in the valleys and on the hills …” Dear lord. After three years of wondering what it is John Key is trying to say, now this.

Banksy certainly hit all possible bases, striking a festive note earlier on with his “Can you hear what I hear?” It wasn’t, as in the similarly named carol, “A song, a song/High above the tree” that Banksy was hearing but “The flapping of wings as Epsom voters come home to roost!”

This may, come to think of it, have been more of a Wizard of Oz reference, with Epsom’s voters standing in for the Wicked Witch of the West’s biddable winged monkeys: Fly, my pretties! (I always prefer the misremembered quotes.)

Certainly, large numbers of voters were off to see the Wizard, seeking a heart, a brain, a brighter future. The next three years will reveal what’s behind the curtain.

Meanwhile, the most paradoxical result, apart from the Greens showing signs of looking like a more plausible and united centre-left party than Labour, was New Zealand First. Someone had to say it, and Pita Sharples duly obliged: “Nek minute, Winston!” Winnie did his bit for the election-night soundtrack, invoking the Little River Band with his refrain of “Hang on, help is on the way!”

The next day, on TV1’s Sunday election special, the ubiquitous Mark Sainsbury asked him what he planned to do in opposition. “To do what oppositions do do,” vowed Winston. Sainsbury missed a golden opportunity here to warble “Do do that voodoo that you do so well”, but if past actions predict future behaviour, that’s exactly what Winston will do do.

As for Don Brash, the poor chap couldn’t even make his bowing-out speech without something going wrong. Somehow there was a large letter “R” projected on his forehead throughout. “He’s a passionate but somewhat clumsy politician, isn’t he?’ mused John Campbell. “Bewildered,” noted Paul Henry. Much of the evening teetered on the edge of farce. But then election night is always a fairly accurate measure of the state of the nation.