Presenters struggle to contain their glee at Tories’ fall as election night TV proves a turn-off

“This is your voice. This is our country deciding: we’ve had enough.” Not the words of Sir Keir Starmer accepting victory, but of Emily Maitlis on Channel 4 greeting the exit poll. I swear you could see her vibrating with happiness. Freed from the shackles of BBC impartiality, she couldn’t hide her glee at the news of a Labour landslide.

Over on the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg and Clive Myrie were careful to keep their expressions neutral. Both kept cautioning that an exit poll is not a real result, like sensible parents warning the kids not to get drunk too early. But giddy Maitlis looked as if she had already popped open the champagne, and was all dressed up in a monochrome 1960s mini-dress to get the party started.

Meanwhile, Nadine Dorries was simmering in the Channel 4 studio like a woman who’s going to get thrown out of the pub for glassing someone before the night is out, and the chances are that the someone will be Alastair Campbell. She accused him of sexism when he needled her: “Honestly, Nadine, you’ve got to get over Boris Johnson.”

Her eyes blazed when he engaged her in a discussion about the House of Lords. Occasionally, one of the more moderate guests – Rory Stewart, Harriet Harman, Kwasi Karteng – would make a fruitless attempt to guide the conversation onto more civil territory.

There were too many people in the Channel 4 studio – Ann Widdecombe and Vince Cable were relegated to a B-list table that Maitlis would occasionally visit – and it all seemed a little manic. Maitlis and Krishnan Guru-Murthy didn’t gel at all, with the Channel 4 News anchor seeming far less assured than usual. He talked over her; she pretended he wasn’t there.

Kuenssberg and Myrie worked much better together, and the BBC wisely kept things mostly to the two of them sitting behind a desk, plus Chris Mason providing analysis and regular reports from journalists around the country. Lord Mandelson kept popping up to revive memories of 1997. Steve Baker made the trip into the BBC studio, only for Kuenssberg to tell him that he had a less than 1 per cent chance of retaining his seat.

ITV’s coverage had the air of a boring middle-class dinner party hosted by Tom Bradby. Podcast pals George Osborne and Ed Balls huddled together, keeping their distance from Nicola Sturgeon (or perhaps it was the other way round). 

As for Sky News, a colleague messaged in the first minutes of their broadcast: “Are they high?” Kay Burley, Beth Rigby and their guests – Ruth Davidson and Andy Burnham – couldn’t stop giggling. Burnham asked if he could have a lager. David Bull, Reform deputy leader, came on and predicted that his party would soon overtake the Tories. “Calm yourself, will you?” hooted Davidson.

Away from the studio, the most dubious BBC decision was to have Victoria Derbyshire lurking in the dark outside Rishi Sunak’s house. “It’s very quiet,” she said, as it tends to be in the North Yorkshire countryside at 10pm. “All we could hear all night was the sound of wood pigeons. We could smell the cows in the field next door.”

She seemed surprised that the PM’s curtains and shutters were closed, but that might have had something to do with the fact that it was night time, and also because he’d noticed there was a woman from Newsnight standing in front of the windows with a camera crew.

Filling eight hours of live television is hard. Clive Myrie was already losing it before midnight, asking Angela Rayner: “You say you’re not counting your chickens – what kind of chickens might they be? What kind of chickens would you like to see?”

Who knows what gibberish they’ll be spouting by breakfast time?