The Benefits of Digital Multi-Channel TV

For as long as I have been able to vote, I have stayed up on Election night with a pot of strong coffee to watch the results come trickling in via the TV coverage. (In 1992 I was so discombobulated by the result that I actually broke the coffee pot.)

Before the advent of digital TV this meant choosing between the BBC's usually excellent coverage and ITV's often more patchy offering. Last night's results programmes brought home to me one of the benefits of digital multi-channel TV (in my case via Freeview).

In Wales, BBC1 had Pembrokeshire's own Jamie Owen, who surpassed himself in keeping things running smoothly on a night when the first results were very slow to be announced. He was backed up by two of my favourite commentators on the Welsh political scene, Betsan Powys and Professor Laura McAllister, making BBC1 the channel I stayed tuned to for most of the night.

On BBC2 in Wales we had the UK-wide coverage presented by David Dimbleby. I flicked over to this occasionally and was impressed by the amount of coverage given to the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament elections. I'm a big fan of Dimbleby usually but didn't feel he was at his peak last night.

On S4C, presenter Dewi Llwyd, a mainstay of political and current affairs programmes (he hosts Pawb a'i Farn, the Welsh-language version of Question Time) did his usual excellent job of presenting the election results for Welsh speakers, but somehow almost every time I switched over to S4C they were in the middle of an advert break (I will rant on some other time about my views on the crassness of English-language advertising intruding in the middle of Welsh-language programming).

As a Scot living in Wales, however, I found that the icing on the cake was the BBC's creative use of its Parliament channel (Freeview 81) to show the Scottish election results programme, presented by Sally Magnusson. On an extraordinarily successful night for the SNP (and a poor one for Plaid Cymru) it was fascinating to compare the results as they came in from Scotland and Wales.

It was also interesting to compare the Welsh, Scottish and UK-wide programmes in terms of their coverage of other regions. BBC1 in Wales quite rightly concentrated on Welsh results, but flashed up interesting results from Scotland every now and then (very often these were SNP gains!). BBC1 in Scotland, on the other hand, didn't appear to be aware of local elections in England, and I don't think I heard Wales mentioned once. The Dimbleby programme concentrated initially on councils in England but gave reasonable coverage to Wales and Scotland, focussing especially on the latter when it became clear that the most interesting results were emerging from there.

Northern Ireland and North Wales constituencies, quite understandably, received little or no coverage as there were no overnight vote counts taking place there.

The winner for me was the BBC1 Wales programme, and I was sorry when it came to an end at 5 a.m., just too soon for the announcement of the result in my own constituency. When that came, however, I was sorry to see that my voting record remains unblemished: no candidate I have voted for has ever been elected...