Election exit polls are ‘worst invention ever’, says David Dimbleby

David Dimbleby, the election broadcast grandee, has said exit polls are “the worst invention ever” because they take the fun out of election nights.

The veteran broadcaster announced to the nation the result of 11 exit poll projections as host of the BBC’s general election coverage from 1979 to 2019. But speaking to the BBC’s Newscast podcast he confessed that he had never liked exit polls.

The 85-year-old broadcaster said: “The exit poll is the bane of the broadcaster’s life. It’s the worst invention ever brought in – it’s like a thriller and you’re given the answer before we’ve even started on page one.”

Dimbleby recalled the last time the exit poll “completely screwed up” was in 1992, when it predicted a hung parliament in an election that John Major’s Conservatives won with a majority of 21 seats.

Since then, the increasing accuracy of exit polls has taken the thrill out of election nights, Dimbleby said.

He recalled the excitement of watching election night in the 1950s and 60s before exit polls. Dimbleby said: “I do remember way back the excitement when David Butler, who was the psephologist at the time, when the first result came in he’d take out his slide rule and he’d say very simply: ‘If the whole country goes like this, the result will be whatever majority’ – now that’s what I call real reporting.

“But stopping people as they come out of the polling booth and asking: ‘How do you vote?’ and then producing an increasingly accurate picture, seems to me entirely detrimental to the excitement of election night.”

He added: “It gives people something to talk about until three in the morning when the first serious results flow starts. But I never liked them. It takes the fun away.”

However, Dimbleby admitted that the sound of the BBC’s election night theme tune, which he hummed, still “sends a shiver down my spine”. He added: “As the curtain goes up, you have this moment of ‘I’ve got to get this right’, this first five minutes before the exit poll. And then Big Ben bong, bong: ‘It’s 10 o’clock. And we can now say … that it will be a Labour majority or Conservative majority.’ That’s the kind of heart-stopping moment. So I’ll watch that on BBC and see how they handle that.”

After that, he said he would also watch how Sky, Channel 4 and ITV covered the vote. “If I can get my television to work – it always seemed to be on the blink every time I change it.”