A vote no sonic screwdriver could ever fix

IF THIS was to be the SNP invasion of Earth, or at least Holyrood, there were no shortage of BBC Doctor Whos to see us through. The first was introduced by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, saying it was: "Peter Snow, who like Doctor Who has been transmogrified, given a new wardrobe and emerged as a Radio 2 DJ".
Lankier than Christopher Eccleston, suaver than David Tennant, this could only be Jeremy Vine. He hopped and blundered between the election graphics with at least some of his predecessor's abandon.
His attractive assistant was not Kirsty Wark, however, who was nowhere to be seen, but a graphic picturing Tony Blair on a tennis court. With 10 balls bouncing across the screen to represent the past 10 elections, Vine wondered whether this year's ball would soar to safety or land in the net instead.
Over on BBC Scotland, Doctor Who No 2 was political editor Brian Taylor, reassuring viewers there was no need to dive behind the sofa just yet.
Back he took us to the 1950s, where grown men wore blue suede shoes and rocked and rolled under a non-Labour majority. "No-one under the age of 69 has known anything but a Labour lead at a national election in Scotland," he declared, as the BBC dusted down various archive shots.
Everyone was trying to decide which year to go to next. Both Glenn Campbell and Gavin Esler wondered if we were in 1992 or 1997 as they discussed the SNP. There were later suggestions that it was even 1935 or 1923, when no-one voted red no matter how poor they were.
When at last there was an election result, it was Jack McConnell up first. He held his seat but there was a worrying Natward swing.
Taylor thought it boded ill, but there were other things to put his time travelling compass in a spin. Helicopter trouble in the Western Isles would prevent those constituency results from arriving until Friday noon and now a broken-down boat from Arran had left ballot boxes floating free in the Clyde.
The new automated counting system was another headache, with the numbers of spoiled ballots soaring. If only these 100,000 balls-ups could have been counted as a new party, what a king-making force they could have been.
ON STV, it might have seemed an opportune time to see where that channel's election night was headed, but alas there was no hustings in sight. In a virgin step even for this increasingly grubby moneymaker, the only election night questions were at the end of its premium quiz lines.
So back to the Beeb, where Salmond's Gordon result was among the first to be called even though it had gone three o'clock. Something was seriously wrong.
Taylor was soon talking of "calamity" and "disaster", as more and more counts were postponed. Alan Cochrane, Scottish editor of the Daily Telegraph, called the problems a "national disgrace" almost on a par with the building of the parliament.
But if these fellows had been forgetting themselves in the green room, they had not quite become true Doctor Whos. For all the travelling backwards, no one had worked out how to move forward instead.
The programme ran out of airtime before anyone knew the result, and it would be 12 hours before viewers were treated to Huw Edwards getting the result over his earpiece when the rest of Scotland already knew. Up-to-the-minute television for the internet age this was certainly not.
But that was all much later. At that time in the morning, the invasion was incomplete. Forty-seven might have been the secret of the universe, or at least some number like it, but it would still be many hours before it became magical for the SNP.