DATELINE: New Orleans, Louisiana

It’s one of those probably phoney bits of received wisdom that American Idol gets more votes than the Presidential election – insert your own cynical sneer about celebrity culture here if you so wish. But it is true that the American election process is fiendishly complicated – we’ve got so many hits off people typing ‘how does the American election work?’ into Google it’s not even funny. So on a long drive somewhere between Florida and Louisiana the other day, we figured out a reality TV alternative to the chaotic ’system’ of primaries, caucuses, delegates and electoral colleges: ‘Presidential Big Brother’.

This spin-off of George Orwell’s favourite elimination-based Channel 4 game show is filmed in two wings of the same house: one for the Republicans, one for the Democrats. The winner of the daily task gets to occupy a miniature, mocked-up version of the Oval Office for the evening and play at being President, bossing the others around.

Day 23: Democratic Wing
The candidates are being set their daily task by Big Brother: to prepare a basic stump speech on the hoof, but with a difference: each candidate has their own specific handicap. Barack Obama is not allowed to use the words ‘hope’, ‘change’, or ‘believe’ – which sadly leaves his speech (working title: ‘Change – the hope we can believe in’) one long deep-throated stutter. Hillary Clinton’s handicap prevents her from using the platitudes she is so fond of (”I’m against illegal guns”, she controversially pledged in one of the South Carolina debates), while John Edwards is told to his dismay that he must pronounce words like ‘opportunity’ with the number of syllables prescribed by the OED and no more. Dennis Kucinich, meanwhile, is disqualified from the contest in the first five minutes for trying to impeach Big Brother.

Day 37: Republican Wing
In the Republican part of the Big Brother house, the candidates have been set the apparently straight-forward task of changing a light-bulb. Mitt Romney tries to pay someone else to do it, Mike Huckabee organises a prayer meeting for it to change, John McCain shakes his head sadly, saying that he didn’t need light-bulbs in the Hanoi Hilton, and Ron Paul tries to dismantle the wiring on the grounds that the light-bulb wasn’t mandated in the constitution. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani is nowhere to be seen – he is apparently changing a lightbulb on his own somewhere in Florida.

24 hour coverage continues on C-SPAN and BBC Parliament. At the end of six months of this torture two candidates will emerge – one Democrat, one Republican – to be put to a national phone vote. The results will be tabulated, checked, and re-checked to ensure that the winner has been fairly and verifiably chosen. The Supreme Court will then announce that George W. Bush has been elected President anyway.

*****

Ahem. Like I say, it was a long car journey. But before we knew it Alabama was turning into swampy Mississipi, which gradually gave way to Louisiana, and eventually the dark glow of rain-soaked, disaster-cracked New Orleans asphalt, the streets gleaming the perennial reflected promise of night-time debauchery.