A broadcast for a political party.
Unlike in the United States, politicians and political parties are not allowed to buy advertising time on TV in the United Kingdom. Instead, political parties are allocated a strictly limited number of free five- and ten-minute slots on TV per year, which they can use to get their message across to the nation. In the televisual dark age before 1982, when there were only three television channels, PPBs were scheduled simultaneously on all channels so there was no escape from the tedium; nowadays PPBs are shown on all the major terrestrial channels, but at different times so if you are particularly unlucky you may see the same message several times (if that happens, you can simply tune to a non-terrestrial channel). Related phenomena are the Party Election Broadcasts which go out nightly during the three weeks or so of a General Election campaign — each party gets some number of PEBs dependent on how well it polled in the previous election and how many candidates it's putting up, so the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties may each get four or five PEBs in a campaign, while the British National Party, UK Independence Party, or the Official Monster Raving Loony Party only get one. Because the parties are not involved in a futile arms race to increase advertising in competition with their rivals, this system means that British politics is less dependent on campaign contributions.
Common times for PPBs are:
- Before local elections
- Just after the spring Budget and the autumn "Pre-Budget Report"
- After the King's (or Queen's) Speech
Almost every last advertising trope can be found here. But all in all, most often you get the given party's leader saying general things in a likable tone in front of a montage of little kids, pensioners, single mothers and emergency services personnel saying how their party is the best thing since sliced bread.
Often, the only way to tell apart the opposition broadcasts is to look at the title, save the far-right parties.
The third dullest thing to be routinely shown on British television, after the budget speech and Points of View. Famously, a Conservative PEB from 1992, directed by John Schlesinger (of Midnight Cowboy fame) depicted PM John Major as he went back to the area of London where he grew up, and was less a Fish out of Water than a fish in deep space. He still won, however.
One very ridiculous Labour PEB in 2005 was directed by Anthony Minghella (of The English Patient fame) and consisted of lots of soft-focus shots of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown professing how well they worked together and really loved each other and so on and so forth — the Ho Yay was immediately jumped on and mocked into the ground (for example, here's a YouTube clip
of it on Have I Got News for You). Andrew Rawnsley, author of End of the Party, joked that it took an editor of Minghella's skill to present Blair and Brown as being friends, given that by then their relationship had mutated into all but open feuding.note
John Cleese, however, made an intentionally ridiculous 1987 broadcast for the SDP–Liberal alliance, the predecessor to today's Liberal Democrats.
