TV election debates: the new theatre of the absurd | Peter Bradshaw

I knew the whole ‘I agree with Nick’ show reminded me of something. Now I know what it was

It is fast becoming the most tiresome pre-election tradition in British politics: the mind-bendingly dull TV debate. Ed Miliband has threatened to make them a legal necessity; Conservatives countered by complaining about the Labour links of the BBC’s debate negotiator, Sue Inglish. But while watching the dire “I agree with Nick” event on YouTube recently,(the first debate in this format, which made a star of Mr Clegg and created this coalition government) I realised what the TV debate as a genre really resembles: something by Samuel Beckett, particularly his desolate one-act piece Play, from 1962.

In this work, we see three funeral urns on stage with three exhausted faces poking up, with an apparent emotional connection but always looking ahead, never at each other. Sometimes they babble together; sometimes they take turns. But their language is an agony of non-communication. The pre-election leaders’ debate is the same absurdist drama of unmeaning, an immobile ballet of wretchedness in which the three (or two, or seven) politicians have an inert, waxy hopeless quality, with a flash of existential panic in the eyes. They are paralysed with self-consciousness and anxiety, each facing front, each of their puppet faces plonked on top of a suit, frozen with the tension of remembering all those lines to take, all those unfunny pre-prepared zingers. Perhaps the Royal Court can ask the Beckett estate for permission to restage Play with Nick, Dave and Ed’s faces in those urns, with maybe one or two more urns for Nigel’s head and one for Natalie Bennett’s.