Grumpy Old Woman series writer and TV producer Judith Holder on her growing distrust of politicians

Is it just me or are we all finding it hard to work up the enthusiasm to vote for any of them?

Living in David Cameron’s constituency doesn’t help, since I imagine nothing I do will make a fat lot of difference.

But this time more than ever before a general election, all of them feel like a waste of food to me.

My distrust of politicians has been building up for a while.

I mean how many scandals and muck-ups and cover-ups can an electorate take before we say – do you know what, I am not sure we want to play anymore?

I wouldn’t trust most of them with a pair of scissors, let alone running a country – steering us round more economic, social and international problems than I can ever remember.

I try to listen to what they’ve got to say. I watch the news and read the papers and I’m not a hermit or an imbecile. Well, not entirely anyway.

Trouble is the superficial things bog me down. The fly-away hair, the affectatious smile, the jaunty jacket and pose, and worst of all the studied look and delivery which they’ve worked on in a mirror and been coached in.

Call me a hard bitten old witch (and you might be rather accurate) but nothing they suggest or promise with feels like a great idea. Nor have they come up with anything to solve a tricky problem.

Imagine all the energy they waste on trying to outwit one another and second guess one another’s next move while they should be getting on and doing something USEFUL.

The media doesn’t help since gaffing politicians are the new showbiz.

On the one hand we all say we want them to be real and speak from the heart, and then poor Natalie Bennett does a radio interview about how she would pay for her new housing policy and it is so embarrassing it was a car crash.

No, really the sort of thing that makes you want to curl up and die for her. We can’t have it both ways. Either we want them to be real and make some mistakes, or we want to keep the robots. I’m for getting real.

What we need is a real competition – one that tests their strengths for real. A bake-off. A paint-off. Or a jungle-off. A four or five week series in the run up to the big day.

Politics would be banned as a topic. They can do all their party political broadcasts in turn in the ad breaks if they like instead.

They could throw themselves out of helicopters or struggle to make a Victoria sponge in the shape of the Tyne Bridge and we might then get to trust some of them and believe in them as human beings.

Now that’s the best way of finding out who they really are.

Are they the sort of person you want to be standing next to in a typhoon? Can they take control? Do they know how to tie a reef knot?

Are they good listeners? Do they do their share of fire wood duty? Can they eat kangaroo balls?

Do they know one end of an icing pipe from another?

And most important of all are they clever?

While we’re at it we might as well use this new TV series for voting too, save all those voting booths and counts and then Ant and Dec can amuse us all between the boring bits and we’d all watch.

Think of the viewing figures. Better still do you know what – we’d all vote!

It’ll happen one day. I would put money on it.