Anyone watching the unedited Ed Miliband interview that was leaked online will be offended by its contentless, repetitious drone. It's like a Moby record. Right now, there's an angry Tweet about it every thirty seconds or so. On the Twitter scale, that puts the story somewhere between a member of Take That coming out and Gok Wan appearing on television in some capacity- pretty big news.
The main source of anger is that "this clip shows how PR has destroyed politics", with the Labour leader being "more obsessed with sound bites than policy". Thankfully, the Twittersphere is concentrating huge amounts of energy and debate onto this sound bite, mercifully ignoring the government's public pensions policy (you know, the one that's cutting money for careworkers and teachers and other such fat cats).
Both Twitter users and the mainstream media are united in thinking this is a pretty serious political blunder. On The Sun's online news page, next to an urgent update on how Pippa Middleton has an arse, there's a story comparing "Red Ed's telly gaffe" with Michael Howard's Paxman moment (the political interview equivalent of a bukkake video). Far below that is a piece on the strike, which just describes the action as a "flop".
I don't remember the same fascination back in January, when George Osborne gave a nearly identical interview to the BBC defending the unexpected shrinking of the economy, giving exactly the same answer several times in three minutes. But that was different. George looked less like a robot, and more like a boy standing next to the family piano going 'amo, amas, amat' for father's work colleagues. That's fine. But we're all finding it hard to justify Ed's less confidently trotted out repetitious interview.
I have various credible explanations for his behaviour. Either he's just doing what lots of politicians do in pooled interviews, only in particularly badly-executed way. OR just off camera, there was one of those memory-sucking The Silence monsters from Dr Who, forcing Ed into a terrifying amnesic loop. The implications for galactic peace then become pretty major.