James Weir and Sam Clench recap the first leaders’ debate

It was obvious the moment the leaders’ debate started. Something was wrong from the outset, and it distracted us for the whole evening.

The real winners of last night’s debate between Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten were the people who decided to watch something else.

We would have gone with the second half of Antiques Roadshow on Gem or, at a pinch, the footage of One Nation luminary Steve Dickson enjoying some “titty” at a strip club on A Current Affair.

Alas, news.com.au has tasked us with following each leader’s election campaign on your behalf, so we were bunkered down at a top secret location in Channel 7’s Perth offices (the cafeteria) watching Scott and Bill trade queasy smirks for an hour.

It started promisingly, with a dramatic intro punctuated by blasts of the famous Inception horn. For a brief, glorious moment our minds wandered.

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Was this hellish campaign nothing more than a bad dream, buried within a dream, buried within another dream? Would we eventually wake to a utopia in which John Howard and Bob Hawke co-ruled Australia as joint god-kings in perpetuity?

No. The horns had deceived us, we never really understood the plot of Inception anyway and the intro melted away to reveal this strange image.

Past your bedtime, Basil? Picture: Seven

Something was wrong. It was immediately obvious, and it distracted us for the whole evening.

Why were the illustrious leaders of our country perched on stools like they were about to play the world’s most overhyped game of celebrity heads?

Just like it’s hard to respect a businessman who rides a Razor scooter to work, it’s damn near impossible to respect a politician sitting on a stool.

We accept stools for other occasions. Taylor Swift performing an acoustic number at the Grammys? Yes, give her a bloody stool. It’s all about the intimacy with Taylor.

Getting hammered on house rosé at the bar around the corner from our office is another stool-appropriate occasion. We’ll probably fall off, but that is hardly the stool’s fault.

There is just something about a stool that makes drinking more fun. We’re in command. We’re not going to drink house rosè in a dining chair. We’re not the Pope.

Anyway, Scott and Bill weren’t performing intimate acoustic hits or drinking house rosè, which made their positioning on stools so perplexing.

They were discussing policy. They were engaging in rigorous exchanges about the future of our country and economy. And they were slumped awkwardly on tall Fantastic Furniture stools with tiny side tables next to them that were so short Bill almost fell off his stool when he went to reach for his notes.

At one point while he was grasping for them, a leaf of paper fell out of his grip and sailed across the stage. It was one of many clumsy moves throughout a clumsy broadcast.

Early on, the camera cut to Seven’s crowd of undecided voters. Sitting among them were Mathias Cormann and Chloe Shorten. You know Australians are getting apathetic about politics when even the leader’s wife isn’t sure who to vote for.

Meanwhile, Scott and Bill were steadfastly avoiding each other’s gaze and, weirdly, also avoiding looking at any of the cameras.

That moment when you're riding with a friend on the bus and you run out of things to talk about. Picture: Seven

Once the debate actually started, producers used split screen, even though Scott and Bill were right next to each other.

It was like the other week on Bachelor In Paradise when Richie and Alex had a very tense conversation about that subject none of us are allowed to mention. The strained conversation was aired in split screen as if they were on two different beaches in Fiji.

Bill and Scott weren’t on different beaches. They were so close they were basically sitting on the same stool.

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Some of us wanted Scott to be on fire last night. Some wanted the same for Bill. Others just wanted to watch the world burn. And there was a little something for everyone.

The PM was smug and aggressive. Think Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd when they were opposition leader.

Bill was policy-heavy and defensive. Think Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister.

You can see the problem. Some sort of Freaky Friday, role-reversal hocus-pocus was going on. The dastardly pair had switched jobs without telling us.

Which one is Jamie Lee Curtis and which one is Lindsay Lohan? Picture: Seven

Eventually, amid the standard back-and-forth about renewable energy targets and tax brackets, Scott and Bill started to argue about something far easier to follow — which of them was really mates with Clive Palmer.

Clive is the unpopular but rich kid in primary school. You don’t want to say you’re his friend because then no one will want to be your friend. That would be humiliating.

But Clive’s got all the sick new Xbox games and you want in on that action, so what’s one sleepover?

The school metaphor is actually pretty apt. The thing we often forget about our politicians is that they’re the lame nerds from our youth all grown up.

And ever the good boy — a year 11 prefect in an adult’s body — Bill approached this debate by diligently answering each question looking down the barrel of the camera.

It was awkward. Mainly because the person he was talking to was directly next to him and he could’ve, you know, just turned to him. Even glanced.

“Mr Shorten you can speak directly to the Prime Minister … you guys are sitting next to each other, you don’t need to look directly down the barrel of the camera,” moderator Lanai Scarr told him.

“Your guys told me to look down the camera. But that’s fine,” he said.

Oh Bill, only losers do what they’re told. Go wild.

Wait, what are we saying? This is what happened last time Bill went wild.

We take it back, don't go wild. Abort, abort!

It is a testament to the festering quality of policy debate in Australia that the most interesting thing last night was a seemingly innocuous clip of Mr Cormann.

Clutching at straws in a desperate hunt for excitement, some viewers insisted they spied him “checking out” Ms Shorten. He was clearly looking somewhere beyond her — perhaps, in a fit of boredom, searching for the nearest exit.

Clearly, we are all suffering a horrible case of withdrawal from Married At First Sight, and we’re projecting our desire for salacious conflict onto two drab dads.

We’re thirsty for drama and a mild cheating scandal. We’d also love a glassing and someone to bandy the C-word about, but we’ll take what we can get.

Mathias devises his swiftest possible route to the choppa. Picture: Channel 7

Spare a thought for Seven’s chosen host, Basil Zempilas. Until last night, we only knew him from the time he stood next to Jo Griggs as she tore strips off the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony last year.

First Basil explained the rules of the debate in the same earnest, forensic detail as a geek trying to explain Dungeons & Dragons to a human female.

“A timer will appear when their final 30 seconds are counting down. We won’t cut their mics, but the timings are there to make sure each leader gets a fair chance to get their points across,” he said.

We won’t cut their mics? What were you thinking, Basil? That’s the political equivalent of telling a child: “I won’t stop you from eating dessert son, but gee, you really should eat those vegetables first.”

Politicians are like toddlers, they can smell weakness. If you don’t threaten to take away their speaking privileges you end up with Question Time.

But Basil turned out to be a far stricter parent than anyone expected.

Every time the debate heated up and threatened to turn into, you know, an actual debate, he stepped in and crapped on endlessly about how there was limited time — using up all the limited time in the process.

And after cutting everyone off because of said limited time, producers actually ended up with too much time left at the end. Such irony! Such embarrassment! God forbid we go to the 6 o’clock Perth news three minutes early.

Seven tried to fill some of the intervening minutes by asking Scott and Bill to say nice things about each other. That didn’t take very long, for obvious reasons. Which meant the moderators had to awkwardly throw in another question after the leaders had finished their closing statements.

We thought Basil was going to ask the pair for a humorous anecdote, or get them to tell a dad joke in desperation.

It would have been a pointless exercise. Everybody watching already knew the joke was on us.