Boris’s Party Election Broadcast just premiered on ITV1 London.

I don’t think I can remember a more boring four-minute broadcast in all my years of enjoying political TV programmes.

Of course, it was calculcatedly boring: Team Boris know that one of their candidate’s many, many weaknesses is that he is perceived as being (not least because he is) a lightweight, knockabout buffoon who can’t be taken seriously.

So we got Boris looking straight into the camera and talking as if addressing the funeral of the Queen. No jokes, and his minders even managed to record one take of each segment without him smirking – quite a victory for persistence. It reminded me of Derren Brown’s ‘ten heads in a row’ coin-tossing clip from The System in February (spoiler: if you film something enough times, eventually you’ll get the result you wanted).

Indeed, the key to getting Boris to look this serious for this long, and to having him not stumble over any of his words or slip up over his statistics and figures was a cunning technique which solved both problems in one go.

The longest uninterrupted appearance Boris had on screen was 26 seconds. Most shots of him were around 20 seconds in length. In a room full of laughing gas you could probably keep a straight face for that long.

So how did they break up these short clips of Boris? By plastering facts and figures (many of dubious value, of course) across an otherwise black screen in between each Boris snippet. And of course if the facts and figures were printed on screen, they didn’t need filming, so that was a few tapes of retakes saved.

The most bizarre thing about this broadcast, though, was the fact that all the video footage of Boris (and he’s all there was any footage of) was in black and white.

I mean, I know he’s standing on a platform based on taking London back to the 19th century, or at least to some mythical bygone age when Routemasters roamed the politically incorrect streets of a less racially diverse city, and the only murders committed were by lovable rogues like the Krays and therefore didn’t count, but really, black and white? What on earth are they thinking?

See the broadcast for yourself on BBC One, er, now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday 8 April 2008 at 18.54 by Mr. Stop Boris and is filed under Gaffophobia, Media, Party Election Broadcasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS2 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.