REMEMBER the moment in the movie Back the Future when Marty McFly, the skate-boarding teenager who's been transported to 1955, tells the inventor Doc Brown that Ronald Reagan is president in 1985?
"Ronald Reagan?" splutters the incredulous Doc. "The actor?"
But soon afterwards, this makes perfect sense to the Doc: "Of course the president in the future is an actor – he has to look good on television."
In the run-up to the election, looki
ng good on television could matter more than anything, as the three main party leaders prepare to take part in US-style televised debates.
Jay Leno once said that politics was 'showbusiness for ugly people'. But in the modern age, politics could become as intolerant of ugliness as any other televised talent contest. Already, it's not only the female politicians who need fear mercilessly lookist comments in the press.
Are the planned TV debates a sign that politics is in danger of becoming more phoney and shallow? Or can TV reveal political truths which elude the other media?
The Times writer Ben Macintyre recalls that when the first televised presidential debate, between Richard Nixon and JF Kennedy, was broadcast in 1960, those who heard it on the radio thought Nixon had won.
But more people saw the TV version, in which Nixon, unshaven and recovering from flu, was clearly trounced by the photogenic younger man. What we see of people on the small screen can reveal things about them that we might never have deduced from their carefully written manifestos.
Writing about Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time, Howard Jacobson found a neediness behind the BNP leader's vitriol.
"After Bonnie Greer teased him about the quality of his university degree, he blushed like a schoolboy and turned to her in an expectant spirit of merry banter – of which, of course, he won't have had much experience in the BNP.
"Reader, his crestfallen expression when she refused his proffered hand of friendship – white supremacist ideologue to liberal black writer – was such as would make the stoniest hearted weep."
Even allowing for the sarcasm, Jacobson identified the capacity of television to reveal a vulnerable side to someone who in print more often looks like a racist thug.
I'm ambivalent about this political drift towards television. One minute I think that policy matters above all else, that a dazzling smile can lure us into a sense of false confidence, just as the inelegant faltering of less media-friendly politicians can distract us from their wisdom even as they're expressing it.
(I don't, however, buy the argument occasionally put by Gordon Brown's supporters that his lack of charisma is of itself evidence of sincerity. As Michael Portillo reminds us, whenever Brown makes a budget announcement, he spins as much as anyone.)
If you want to understand the differences between the parties' policies, there's no substitute for the written word. But the performing skills of our leaders matter too.
The diligent voter would do well to sample the contenders in a variety of media.
Technology can't simply be put back in its box. The modern media is here to stay and will grow more significant. Maybe we're simply being realistic if we say that the man who can't look good on TV is a man unfit to govern in 2010.
