Election debate: Who cares about the nation's future when you can hear Tim Farron's life story?

The BBC Debate was less an audition for the leadership of the nation, and more an opportunity for Tim Farron to regale us with tales from his past

(PA)

What was not made clear at any point in the BBC 'leaders debate' was whether the other five and a half political leaders on stage were meant to take part in the "debate" or merely stand in silence and listen to this grand sweep through all human history and emotion as told through the life of Tim Farron, by Tim Farron himself.

It was shorter than Gandhi, though it felt longer. In fact it felt like watching a moody DVD version of it in which one of the extras is a live transmission of some undergraduate student union hustings for Chief Vending Machine Officer, which for some inexplicable reason cannot be switched off.

There will be many in the town of Cambridge at this time of year who will be realising with growing dread that they have left it too late to get fully to grips with Odysseus in the original Greek, and how grateful they will have been for this unexpected modern re-telling set in the town of Preston.

No sooner had Presdysseus himself started to explain how, “growing up, half of my mates fought and died at the battle of Thermopylae” than there was that woman Natalie again, making frankly irrelevant noises about free school meals in Wales.

Poor poor Tim, sharing his heartbreaking tales about how three of his children had once been in a Google Hangout with someone who’d seen once seen a picture of an Oasis concert at the Manchester Arena on Friends Reunited, and then on the other hand the other three had all run off to Syria to train as jihadis so “I know how you feel” and for some unknown reason, someone called Amber Rudd who wasn’t even standing for the vending machine job, started butting in with some made up rules for the game of monopoly.

This, we can only imagine is what happens when you grow up in Preston, where when you walk in to the pub the first two people at the bar have been members of Ukip since it was known as the Anti-Federalist League and the other two are European Trade Commissioners. There Tim was, patiently trying to explain how it was “My own mother, who wrote Article 50, my own mother”, and suddenly there’s some bald guy piling in, personally offering to execute terrorists who, of course, having grown up in Preston, could very well be Tim's own children.

On the odd occasion, these folk off the DVD extra got the upper hand and were allowed to talk among themselves, so it should probably be recorded that the possibility of 85.72 per cent of the participants in the BBC “Leaders Debate” have a precisely zero per cent chance of becoming Prime Minister on 8 June, and the remaining 14.28 per cent’s chances are around two per cent higher than that.

Much was made of Theresa May’s failure to attend, but her campaign, as you will no doubt unfortunately know, has been all about “strong and stable leadership” and so sending someone capable of it in her place was arguably a return to form.

Just as few members of the media in the spin room at the Cambridge Union Society were able to go two sentences or more without some breathtaking conversational contortions to modestly return matters to how the place “wasn’t like this in my day”, so too there was nothing Tim or Natalie or Leanne or some chap called Angus or anyone else could say that Rudd could not return to the impending rise of the “coalition of chaos” conspiring to crush your children’s dreams.

There were nervous moments when Jeremy Corbyn appeared set to revert suddenly to rambling free form Prime Minister’s Questions Corbyn, not the jovial jam-making Corbyn of recent BBC One Show appearances past, and that this Prime Ministerial bum-rush would backfire. But he kept calm, he didn’t hector, and patiently set out his vision for a better country that nobody can pay for.

And if you didn’t catch it, well, never mind. It’s the 2010s after all, so there’ll be another referendum, general election, civil war, nuclear holocaust or vending machine officer hustings along in the next three months and Tim Farron will have already been there to tell you all about it.