Me, Jeremy Vine, Kay Burley and a long night of bantergeddon

The election coverage on TV ranged from the totally futuristic to the totally pointless

Paddy Ashdown speaks to Andrew Neil on the BBC about the exit poll on election night (BBC)

The super-efficient 10pm exit poll results were no true friend to Dimblebot, Paxo, Boulton and all the other mostly male stuffed shirts in charge of 2015 election telly. They seemed too outlandish to be fully believed. It would be at least three more hours until the true meat and bones of the night would be revealed, aside from those try-hard crackpots in Sunderland who run their vote count like 1970s game show It’s A Knockout, only without the ice-skating penguins.

Three hours – as hosts over all channels proved – is a bloody long time to fill butting heads with Paddy Ashdown, fiddling with your swingometer and secretly praying Nigel Farage might liven events up by arriving at Thanet tanked up on Skol and punching someone.

As ever, the BBC’s offering was the sensible, cosily familiar option. Jeremy Vine, as we now expect, was at the helm of the Beeb’s totally futuristic state-of-the-art tech-generated graphics – Wow! Imaginary Downing Street! – which have dated so rapidly they look like Judith Hann whipped them up on a 32-bit Acorn Archimedes.

By 1am Vine was erecting a “House of Cards” to represent Lib Dem territory, before removing the predicted losses and smashing it to the ground. Ashdown looked on forlornly, dearly wishing he had not offered to “eat his hat” if exit polls were correct. For him, it would be an especially long night.

Channel 4’s comedy approach to live political coverage – featuring David Mitchell, Richard Osman, Paul Mason, The Last Leg crowd, and even the occasional female – was largely unwatchable. This endless bantergeddon featured Jeremy Paxman delivering scripted satirical monologues, fist-bitingly bad whimsical debates and, of course, faux-dramatis from the Gogglebox goons, frantically mugging shock-and-awe reactions to the leaders’ debates. It was a “brand mash-up”, as Siobhan Sharp from W1A might say in one of her Perfect Curve PR thinkstorms.

During the day, youth channel E4 had been switched off to patronise young people – sorry, I mean “encourage” young people to vote. By night, Channel 4 believed the best reaction to weighty news trickling in, like the SNP taking 56 seats, might be Adam Hills doing a Blurred Lines spoof.

Sky News offered little novelty during Adam Boulton and Kay Burley’s long nocturnal stint. Burley tried her best, on all our behalves, to start a scrap with at least one passing politician. “It’s much too early to call,” sighed David Lammy, batting off talk of defeat. “Well you would say that,” she replied.

At this point, I’m sure many viewers were thinking, “Gosh, I wish I could see what was going on behind the cameras. It must be so exciting and glamorous hanging out with political nerds in Isleworth staring at their laptop in a grey hangar that clearly smells of Pot Noodles and Dominos dough-balls”. Thankfully, Sky predicted this demand and devoted the Sky Arts channel to live footage of the election night newsroom.

On ITV, Tom Bradby and Julie Etchingham escorted us through the evening. George Galloway’s Bradford West recount and rumours of Ed Balls being neutered merely warmed us up for the main show: Good Morning Britain with Ben Shepherd.

Over breakfast muffins, Antony Worrall Thompson basked in Tory victory, Brian May ranted on behalf of Tory-threatened woodland creatures, and Labour supporter Richard Wilson – Victor Meldrew from One Foot In The Grave – was asked for a sentence to sum up his reaction to the evening’s astounding red defeat. If only Wilson had a go-to catchphrase. In this case, he was lost for words.