Check laptop, check notebook, check tea bags

I made the mistake of putting the kettle on just before 10pm. By the time it boiled, six long, deadlocked weeks of Labour and the Tories being stuck neck-and-neck on 34 per cent each had been blasted into history by that extraordinary exit poll.

How did that happen? In the few minutes it takes to make one mug of PG Tips, the predicted score was Con 316, Lab 239.

Suddenly, the Labour-supporting Mirror was preparing a funereal black front page and it looked like we might not be ruled from Glasgow, after all.

On BBCOne David Dimbleby handled the astonishing, fast-changing news with the coolness of a head waiter in a very posh restaurant. In a rare slip he had three stabs at reporter Samira Ahmed's name before getting it right.

We are told this will be Dimbleby's last General Election. A Dimbleby-free election night? What a culture shock that will be.

The Beeb's political editor Nick Robinson, fresh from his cancer operation, was as animated as ever but his voice was painfully husky and he looked older than his 51 years.

The BBC format, from a studio apparently styled on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, was far too busy, with split-screen, rolling headlines and a laser-show sort of background delivering a nasty case of information overload. ITV's screen, in contrast, was clear and easy to follow, its studio clean and minimalist.

Channel 4 opted for its Alternative Election featuring Jeremy Paxman trying hard to laugh at wacky election trivia. "Fish out of water" does not begin to describe the hapless Paxo who was not put on this earth to giggle.

Lord Ashdown injected early excitement, offering to eat his hat live on telly if the exit polls proved correct. Within 30 minutes, ever the pragmatist, Paddy insisted the hat be made of marzipan.

You couldn't help thinking back to all those past elections when life was so much simpler. Don't you yearn for the two-party tussles of the old days when, after a few years of socialism, the nation would develop a sudden yearning for Toryism which it would endure for another few years until it decided Labour wasn't so bad after all?

In the days when elections were a simple fight between Reds and Blues you could usually be sure by dawn who had won.

Not any more Today, in the early hours, with my tea cold and toast crumbs filling the folds in my dressing gown, we were still wondering if Dave the Toff would remain PM or Weird Ed and his Magic Rock would steal it. One exit poll could be wrong and the final calculation could be hopelessly complicated by all those other little parties.

"Roll on Friday," a reader emailed me earlier this week, signalling his thankfulness that the politicking would soon be over. But it might not be. The process of forming a government could drag on.

The best bits of election-night coverage? I liked the veteran commentator Matthew Parris's analysis on ITV that "a lot of people have voted Tory tonight while holding their nose."

And there was a perfect little gem from Catherine Tate as a poll clerk in the hilarious live-broadcast play The Vote (More 4).

She was asked what the likely result of the election will be. "It'll be what it always is," she said in a world-weary manner. "Unfair, just in a different way."

It was The Vote, too, which provided the sweetest commentary on this whole election business. I loved the moment when two young first-time voters excitedly stuffed their voting slips into the ballot boxes and one exclaimed: "Make a wish!"

I bet we all did. So did yours come true?