Dream teams

One thing I forgot to mention earlier when discussing last night's by-elections was that I spent most of the time after midnight flicking between BBC News 24 and Sky News to try and create some bespoke election coverage. The problem was that while the BBC had the best line up of politicians commenting on the results (John Reid, Matthew Taylor and Liam Fox compared to Ian McCartney, Tim Collins and Navnit Dholakia), Sky had the best reporter/analyst combination with Adam Boulton and Peter Kellner compared to the BBC's newsreader/presenter-whose-name-I-can't-remember, and a swapping double act of John Curtice and Anthony Howard.

I probably would have stuck with Sky, but it was just that the McCartney/Dholakia/Collins triple act was incredibly dull - despite being Chris Brooke's favourite Tory MP, Tim Collins didn't really seem to be up to the up to the job of saying 'while it may be a mad night for us, it's obviously worse for the government' as though he meant it, McCartney makes John Prescott seem unitelligible and Dholakia is just too nice for the job. Meanwhile, though, the BBC's panel were much more enjoyable viewing with Taylor able to be as sumg as he wanted to be, Reid acting as though Tony Blair had just been given the mandate to be Lord High President of Everything for Life and Fox able to say with a straight face that of course the Tories weren't expecting to win seats where they came second at the General Election.

One day, someone will create digital TV technology that really will allow mix and match like that, I hope. Till then, I was just glad that our Freeview box doesn't pick up the ITV News Channel, thus sparing me having to flick through repeats of yesterday evening's news while mixing and matching.