I settled down last night with a bowl of popcorn, glass of wine and the twitter search on #leadersdebate to watch the second of the leaders debates on BBC News along with 4.1 million others. Not everyone stuck around from last week though; there were 9.4 million of us watching when ITV aired the first televised debate.

The first debate had me edging closer to the telly, silencing anyone who dared speak and not being able to tear myself away even to eat! This debate however just didn’t seem to have the same impact for me. I’d already experienced the ‘first ever’  aspect of the debates, heard the little jibes and witnessed David Cameron’s impressive use of make-up!

It is clear that the televised debate has struck a chord with the British public and pushed the UK electoral system in a completely new direction, but the drop in viewing figures outlined on today’s media guardian had me questioning the reasons for such a fall in viewers. We all enjoyed the gladiatorial thrashings of each of the candidates in the first round of debates, but couldn’t be bothered to switch from the football for a second round!

A point of interest for me last night however was the disagreement between the parties about the affects of a hung parliament, with Clegg being the only one to calmly point out that, “The world won’t end. We’ll talk to each other to provide the good government, the sound government, that you deserve….You deserve a government where we put your interests first and don’t allow everything, constantly, to be hijacked by political pointscoring.”  Well said Mr Clegg and maybe it wouldn’t actually be such a bad thing to happen.

As far as keeping the attention of the general public goes, maybe it’s true and the modern world really does lead to a decreased attention span.  Maybe the organisers of the debates could take a leaf out of  The X Factor’s book and start with a larger number of candidates, knocking them out week by week, or have a Britains Got Talent style buzzer for when they get boring?

Anyway, everyone knows that the third film in a horror trilogy is the bloodiest and has the most deaths… I’ll have my popcorn at the ready to see if the same applies for the third leaders debate!