Inside Channel 4’s Ambitious Election Night Plans With Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen and Brian Cox
Channel 4 is gearing up for its first live U.S. election program in 32 years.
“There’s about a million moving parts,” Ian Rumsey, ITN’s managing director of content, tells The Hollywood Reporter about Tuesday’s overnight coverage. “And this election really matters, not just in the U.S., but in the U.K. and around the world.”
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On Nov. 5, Democrat Kamala Harris will go head-to-head in the polls with Republican candidate and former president Donald Trump in what most analysts are agreeing is one of the tightest races in decades. The two trade the minimal less-than-a-point-lead in those key battleground states constantly, and Channel 4, partnering with CNN, sees it as ripe soil for an exhilarating live studio show.
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen (who reportedly paid Daniels hush money to stay quiet about her affair with the businessman-turned-politician), ex-U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson and Succession star Brian Cox are among the guest line-up for the program, split between a London studio and Washington team.
Anchored by British news presenters Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Emily Maitlis — who most Americans might recognize as the reporter from Prince Andrew’s infamously disastrous 2019 Newsnight interview — Channel 4’s thinking was to bring onboard “eye-catching and attention-grabbing” contributors.
Rumsey tells THR: “[They are] people who, even if you completely disagree with their politics or don’t necessarily even like them, you know they are going to be guests that stand out.” Others appearing on the show include acclaimed pollster Frank Lutz and James Carville, Bill Clinton’s lead strategist.
Building a live election program is a delicate ecosystem. Thankfully, ITN Productions saw the success of Channel 4’s U.K. version on July 5 and knew they wanted to gamble come election day across the Atlantic. Rumsey says: “We have to hire a team. We have to hire a studio. We have to get the tech sorted, which is a massive challenge. We’re turning this around in six weeks… We pride ourselves on doing the impossible.”
The U.K.’s summer election, which saw Keir Starmer become Labour’s first prime minister in 14 years, earned Channel 4 double the audience they had four years prior at the last election with 3.3 million viewers across the U.K. This steadied into the night, overtaking ITV News, also produced by ITN, in the early morning as votes were still being counted.
So just how difficult is it to produce a live election program and what’s the scale of the operation? Pretty enormous, the ITN exec explains. “You’re constantly spinning plates because you don’t want to miss the story. How do you get all the results and all the data from across that country 4000 miles away into a machine that generates that result within a second? How do you make that happen?”
Thanks to the team-up with CNN, Channel 4 can borrow their data feeds through the night. But it’s a huge background operation: “Everything you see on screen, from the headline straps and the graphics to the ticker crawling along the bottom and the scripts. That’s all going on behind the scenes,” he says.
Quite literally everything — the tech, the hosts, the guests — need to be working in perfect symmetry for eight hours, without a break. Rumsey continues: “When it comes out on the TV, if we make one mistake, if something doesn’t happen, if a line goes down… That’s magnified if you’re sitting on your sofa watching that.”
Maybe it doesn’t feel particularly relevant for Brits to stay up and tune in to Channel 4’s U.S. election coverage. Rumsey disagrees. “If you care about the Ukraine war, if you care about the Middle East, if you care about the pound in your pocket… Everything that happens in America affects not just Britain, but everyone around the world.” The three main issues he highlights are the economy, immigration, and America’s reproductive rights battle.
And as far as predictions go, the news boss can’t call it. “In a country of 340 million people, this is going to come down to a few thousand people in a very small number of states. That makes it fascinating. The best type of drama is real-life drama, and this is going to be an incredible night of real-life drama.”
He adds: “It’s live television, so I’ll only be able to tell you if we’ve mucked it up Wednesday morning.”
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