Television hell as candidates line up to seize their 45 minutes of fame

There is a man on television wearing a dark suit and standing in the middle of a wood. He speaks at top speed of the need for "balanced ecology". He looks like a rabbit caught in headlights.

This is the party political broadcast of the presidential hopeful Frédéric Nihous, of the Hunting, Nature and Traditions party, and French television viewers are hard pressed to avoid broadcasts like these. With eight days to go until the first round of the presidential elections, the public are bombarded with broadcasts from each of the 12 candidates, thanks to a campaign system that prides itself on egalité. This is a system that gives the audience just as much of front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy as of Gérard Schivardi of the far-left Parti des Travailleurs, who has so far amassed under 0.5 per cent in national voting polls.

While this system could never be accused of playing favourites, it is running the risk of boring the French voting public to death. The candidates each have 45 minutes on air, split into "spots" of one minute, two and a half minutes, and longer broadcasts of five minutes. The short films appear on state-owned television channels and radio stations, in machine-gun sequence, one candidate after another. In an attempt to avoid viewers' boredom, the rules have been relaxed this year, allowing the presidential contenders to film in locations of their choice.

So it is that we are presented with Mr Nihous (who currently has around 1.5 per cent in the polls) and his woodland setting. Mr Nihous said: "The film clips are the worst thing I've had to do in this campaign".

The candidates who are leading in the polls, Ségolène Royal and Mr Sarkozy, have remained in the studio.

Presumably this is to avoid the perils of outdoor camerawork, which plague some of the smaller candidates. Mr Schivardi is pictured next to the busy Place de la Repub-lique, where traffic noise drowns his words. He finishes his broadcast by saying, almost inaudibly: "they will not keep me quiet".

Interesting? Click here to explore further