As anybody who’s ever stood in a padded cell, bellowing into a microphone in a staccato voice will concur, live subtitling can be a fraught and unpredictable business. But, as the dust settles on the 2015 general election, perhaps we can say the preparation side is somewhat easier than it used to be.

The first subtitled election the BBC ever covered was way back in 1992, on April 9th. It was 18 years before Gordon Brown “agreed with Nick”, 21 years before Andy Murray won Wimbledon, back in an era when a British singles player making it in to the second week of Wimbledon was a cause for celebration (never mind winning it!). Equally fanciful back then would be the idea of condensing all 650 constituency seats into a single electronic spreadsheet, with tabs on candidates, their track records and BBC regions.

Back then, our live subtitling team was almost exclusively stenographers based at BBC premises. All salient points had to be gleaned from Who’s Who-style reference books, with further information extracted courtesy of Talkback and Basys, a forerunner of ENPS.

Fast forward five years to May 1st 1997 and D:Ream gave us the sense that things could “only get better…” John Major and Back to Basics was out. Later on that year, two British singles players made it to the second week of Wimbledon (Henman and Rusedski) while Katrina And The Waves won Eurovision for the UK. But, while the landscape had changed, the art of subtitling remained broadly similar. Live respeaking was still four years away and internet use had yet to become widespread. Live subtitling remained predominantly the domain of stenographers and information was gleaned from recorded video feeds and card indexes, typically checked against three sources.

Veteran subtitler Steven McDevitt, who helped to subtitle the 1997 election, much prefers today’s resources:

“Because the coverage tended to cut from panel-based discussions to ‘the count’ as it came in for various constituencies, it was possible to scan to the relevant part of the spreadsheet when it flagged up which constituency result was being announced, and read the candidates’ names off the spreadsheet, rather than having to take a chance with reading their names out live…”

In Spring 2010, we knew the election would be set for May 6th, courtesy of a minor gaffe by then Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth. By now, Red Bee Media (formerly BBC Broadcast) was based in the Broadcast Centre, and the demands on live subtitling were far greater than in 1997. Subtitled rolling news and regional news at 1pm, 6pm and 10pm had long been established as, since 2008, the BBC had committed themselves to subtitling 100% of live output (except on BBC Parliament). During the campaign, the running times for Newsnight, Daily Politics, The Politics Show and News At Ten were all extended. The demand to research, deliver and redistribute data was greater than ever. Subtitler Nitole Rahman recalls: “There was such interest around the 2010 leaders’ debates that the BBC asked us to provide transcripts of our subtitles to attach to their politics website. Viewers could type in a word or phrase and be taken to the points in the debate clip where that phrase was said.”

But in the days of KLive and ViaVoice this task was much harder to achieve. Recognition was good, but not quite as strong as Dragon, and preparatory vocab lists were more dense. Obscure phrases like “Cleggmania” could not be dealt with so easily in the heat of the moment, had they not been picked up in the live assistants’ wordlists. These days we can create temporary macros on the air, comfortably taking in our stride such gems as “Milifandom” or “Cameronettes”.

Live election coverage will always remain unpredictable, as the 2015 exit polls and high profile MP departures demonstrated. But this time, with more effective speech recognition, the ability to reuse subtitles, and armed with a spreadsheet of constituencies and candidates, we were far better prepared than ever before to support the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 on election night.

As one of our team leaders, Martin Rayner said: “Without wishing to sound completely naff, covering something so big, and watched by so many, makes you feel like you’re a (tiny) part of history so it can be a bit of a buzz. Though that might have been the caffeine.  This was the third election I’d covered live and, from a prep point of view, by far the most stress-free. I felt ready for everything, basically. Even Paddy Ashdown not eating a hat.”

Ben Pheazey, Subtitler