Ed Miliband admitting to not watching TV is a big mistake
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Version 0 of 1. The month leading up to a general election offers the perfect excuse to lose your faith in humanity. If you possess even the most rudimentary bullshit radar, these next few weeks are going to be genuinely intolerable. You already know what the worst of it will entail. We’ll see one candidate after the next bowing and scraping, trying to forge nonsense adviser-prepped connections with key demographics who they’d usually cross the road to avoid. They’ll talk Snapchat with Buzzfeed. They’ll talk biscuits with Mumsnet. My local Ukip candidate just sent out leaflets covered with photos of him using a car-park ticket machine. “I’m just like you!” it screams in a naked plea for approval. “I also possess a basic working knowledge of functional machinery! Love me!” There is one exception to this lunacy. Instead of trying to get his personality across by deploying a succession of meaningless generalisms, Ed Miliband has found universality in charming specifics. He likes baseball. He played Manic Miner. He doesn’t so much eat food as haphazardly pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey it into his face. The more weird little quirks he reveals about himself, the easier he is to identify with. He’s not slick, but that’s his appeal. However, this approach has its limits. In an interview with the Radio Times, Miliband declared that “I tend not to watch the news, actually”. This, combined with hints elsewhere that he isn’t keeping up to date with Game of Thrones, seems to border upon a dangerous admission that he doesn’t watch TV at all. And this, obviously, will not stand. We’ve all met people who don’t watch television, and we’ve all been immediately creeped out by them. It’s a generally accepted fact that the only people worse than people who don’t watch television are people who don’t own televisions, and the only people worse than those people are people who use internet comment sections to tell other people that they don’t own televisions. So this would-be admission is a terrible mistake on Ed’s part. Nobody was asking for an embarrassing demonstration of populism. Nobody asked him to grade the Towie cast in reverse order of reemness or anything like that. He just needed to say that he watched any television at all. The sensible thing – the Miliband thing – would have been to claim that he only watched hoary old war documentaries or snooker retrospectives. That would have been fine. But to demonstrate a blanket lack of television knowledge – aside from dead shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Grange Hill – is ridiculous. It’s such a misstep that an overcompensatory response is now inevitable. In his next brace of interviews, Miliband is bound to backtrack by arbitrarily listing recent television programmes and unconvincingly declaring them to be his favourite. “Ant and Dec!” he’ll cry, shaking his head in mock admiration, “What are they like?”. Or “Did you see last night’s Emmerdale? That Chas is such a bitch!”. Or “Stephen Mulhern! You da man!”. And, just like that, he’ll become like all the other politicians. The lesson here, as if it needed spelling out, is that you should never be honest about anything. Hopefully Ed Miliband understands that now. |