I can't say I make a point of watching every party political broadcast but I caught the Labour Party broadcast last night by accident. You’ve probably heard about it yourself by now. If you haven’t here’s a link. It’s called The Un-Credible Shrinking Man and it puts the boot into the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition, in particular portraying “Cleggy” as getting smaller and smaller as he backtracks on his party manifesto and simultaneously losing his status within the Cabinet. The punchline is a naked Cleggy being chased by the Number 10 cat while Cameron and co go off to close a few hospitals and smoke cigars or whatever Tories do in their down time.

It was pretty funny as a lightly satirical sketch but not very original. There were inevitable echoes of the old Spitting Image David Steel/David Owen dynamic with Steel reduced to being a puppet small enough to fit into Owen’s pocket. Someone at Labour HQ maybe thought it scuppered Owen/Steel, it could scupper Clegg/Cameron. There was also an echo of Harry Enfield’s old sketches in the black-and-white film spoof approach. The style and title were homages to the fifties Cold War chiller The Incredible Shrinking Man.

I saw on Facebook after watching it that it was written by Elliott Tiney of Edinburgh Comedy Award nominees Idiots of Ants. I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence, but Tiney happens to be the smallest member of his coalition, er, sorry, sketch combo. I don’t know what hoops he had to go through to get the gig or whether he wrote it alone and whether it was heavily edited by party apparatchiks who think they have a sense of humour, but it is certainly an interesting career move for him. As it was for familiar comic face Dominic Coleman, who played Cameron. 

If this mini-film had cropped up on a sketch show it would have been a pretty decent skit. The trouble was that it was supposed to be encouraging us to vote for the Labour Party in the forthcoming European elections on May 22. But even if it stopped you voting Lib Dem, there was nothing in the broadcast to encourage viewers to vote Labour. It did naff all to show what Labour could do for us, all it did was knock the opposition. It might as well have been made by UKIP.

I suppose this tactic can work. There was the famous Tory “Labour Isn't Working” poster campaign in 1979, but in advertising I thought the general idea is to get your brand name out there in the media as much as possible. I suppose there might even be some dullards out there who might have thought that mocking Cameron as a power-hungry Hooray Henry was a favourable portrayal in the same way that when Thatcher was mocked as a trouser-wearing Churchillian tyrant on Spitting Image some thought it made her look strong.

There were plenty of lovely lines in the Labour Party piece, such as a cry of “Can we hunt him?” as Clegg got smaller and smaller and hid his privates behind his rosette, but as a Party Political Broadcast it was pretty feeble. It was almost as if Labour was afraid to mention Labour or Ed Miliband in their own film. I was no wiser about their policies at the end than I was at the start. I certainly didn't spot them saying "vote Labour" at any time. I’m not saying it made me want to rush out and vote Tory, but it didn’t exactly make want to run into the street singing the Red Flag either.