Richard Baum

I am concerned that Nick Clegg is watching me.

Last night as I was walking through Manchester on the way to the City game (Awful match. Defeat. Cold. Unpleasant) I passed a bank of TV screens in the foyer of an office building, and there he was staring back at me from the BBC News 24 studio. Nine versions of his face, speaking in unison from a massive three-screen by three-screen TV display.

Why do these TV arrangements exist, I wonder? Why invest in nine screens in a big square, only to have the same, regular sized picture beamed out nine times? I want a massive Nick Clegg nine times his normal size, or else you may as well just have a single TV set. Is it just big companies showing off?

I don’t know… One of life’s great mysteries.

So there he was last night. Then on the way home I had the radio on, and he was there again, being interviewed. This morning I stumbled downstairs at 7am, cursing the both the invention of work and our boiler which has no setting between “off” and “boiling point of granite,” and there he was again. On Breakfast News. I set about my Coco Pops and made my way upstairs. In the time it took me to have a shower and brush my teeth (11 minutes, honed to a fine art) Nick Clegg had moved from Breakfast News to Five Live and was waiting for me there. Everywhere I turned. There he was. The world’s first Liberal stalker.

His voice was becoming inextricably linked to my conscious life. I hadn’t been awake without him talking at me for the better part of twelve hours. I’ve been complaining about no media exposure for the party for ages, and here we have the new leader turning up on every audible and visible plain in Britain. Great stuff!

The Five Live interview must have been a nightmare. The aim was to get Nick’s views on a range of issues. So this wasn’t a typical interview on a single topic, but instead a quick-fire round of jabs on every topic under the sun, shot his way by the tag team duo of Nicky Campbell and Shelagh Fogerty. What did Nick think about the nationality of the England manager? Oh, that’s nice, what about the right of return for Palestinians? Hmm, good. Private education? Our role in Europe? Quick! Quick!

An impossible interview – impossible to prepare for because nobody can know enough about everything to be able to give cogent answers. And impossible to give reasoned responses to because after one question it was on to the next topic.

It was, I felt, less about getting to know Nick then a chance to trip him up. It’s no wonder politicians deal in spin and sound-bites when they’re given ten seconds to answer a question about an ages-old conflict having been in the job for 15 hours. You can’t cure the Middle-East in thirty words or less.

We have 24 hour news channels these days, giving us more time than ever to discuss the issues that matter in a sensible way. And yet instead of having detail and reason, we have the same fifteen minutes of all-the-news-in-the-world repeated 96 times a day. So the need to get an instant, five second solution seems all the more urgent. It’s like the big TV ensemble in the office foyer again. All that effort into producing something capable of giving a big picture, but it’s just the same little picture repeated over and over again. Why bother? If you’re not going to use it to its full potential, all you’re doing is creating a manic whirling flash-fest that leaves the viewer feeling a bit dazed.

It’s great that Nick Clegg has been on the TV and radio so often that it’s like he’s stalking me, but it’s a shame that he is forced to repeat the same superficial answers over and over rather than take the time to expound his vision. Hopefully that time will come. Not just for Nick, but David Cameron and Gordon Brown as well. People aren’t stupid. They can concentrate longer than the end of one sentence. So why not give us all the chance to hear what politicians really think, rather than going to the sport at twenty past the hour?

Rick