This evening on ITV, Tony Blair will submit himself to the latest media interrogation in this phoney war period before the official start of the British general election campaign. Don't expect too many questions about WMD or the NHS, however, writes Hugh Linehan
The questions will be put by Little Ant and Dec, aka James Pallister and Dylan McKenna-Redshaw, two Geordie 10-year-olds whose previous interviewees on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Take Away have included David Beckham (sample question: 'Are you going bald?'), Richard Branson ('Are you a member of the Mile High Club?') and Pamela Anderson ('My dad says you are famous for two things. What are they?'). Thus, the battle to control the Mother of Parliaments commences.
With four and a half weeks to go to the British general election on May 5th, even the most hardcore political junkie must quail at the prospect of the full-blown campaign. Given the huge spillover of British media into this country, we will get most of the pain and none of the gain.
With the possible exception of EU affairs, there is nothing more calculated to bore an Irish audience to tears than British domestic politics. The fatal cocktail of over-familiarity and irrelevance, the banality of the issues and the fact that they don't impact directly upon us . . . all these things give British politics their uniquely unappetising flavour on this side of the Irish Sea.
Add in the fact that Conservative Party leader Michael Howard has about as much chance of becoming his country's next prime minister as I do, and you have a recipe for a month's worth of utter tedium. Compared with last year's US presidential contest, with its big, push-button issues, its (seemingly) neck-and-neck race and its red-in-tooth-and-claw debate, this looks like a pallid, predictable affair.
But despite its shortcomings as a spectator sport, the election might yet shed some light on our own political agenda for the next couple of years. From ASBOs (anti-social behaviour orders) to Tesco, immigration to taxation, British issues, more often than not, are Irish ones too. A recent survey showing Irish people had far more in common with our closest neighbours than with anyone else was remarkable only for the fact that anybody thought it particularly newsworthy.
Whether it's because they're just too obvious, or because of some form of post-colonial cringe, these similarities are often ignored by commentators from left and right when it comes to making comparisons between Ireland and other countries. The fact is that contemporary Ireland is far less like Boston or Berlin than it is like Birmingham. And the differences that exist between our two countries are telling in themselves.
Take Jamie Oliver's well-timed and remarkably effective school dinners campaign. Not only do the concerns it raises about children's diet resonate just as much in Ireland as in Britain, they remind us of the fact that, even in the post-Thatcherite UK, services such as school meals and universal healthcare, however flawed, are taken for granted as part of the social fabric in a way they never were here.
However, that still doesn't get around the boredom factor, which is troubling British media mandarins. The absurd first-past-the-post electoral system doesn't help, effectively disenfranchising vast swathes of the population and guaranteeing a low turnout in the many constituencies where the result is a foregone conclusion. Sky News chief Nick Pollard has admitted that his channel's wall-to-wall coverage of the last general election failed the test.
"It was very fair - my God, was it comprehensive - and it bored the viewers," he said recently. "I remember there was a senior politician speaking in Elgin High Street in the rain, with about three people listening - and we still had a satellite truck there."
Pollard has suggested that this time around Sky will not run so many live feeds of stage-managed political events, instead doing more vox-pops and number-crunching on the parties' promises. And Channel 4 has picked up on the successful American idea of FactCheck.org, a non-partisan website enabling voters to check the factual basis of any claims and promises made. FactCheck.org was just one of the many examples of how the web became a significant factor for the first time in last year's presidential election.
But what the US experience surely demonstrated more than anything else is that there's one thing that gets people really interested in an election: a tight race. And that's not looking very likely in the UK. Get ready to snooze.