“I’m Wolf Blitzer, and you’re in the THE SITUATION ROOM!!!” Duh-duh-du-du-duhhhhhhhhhh.

Poor old Dimbleby over on the Beeb didn’t stand a chance. He was doddery and indecisive, while the hapless Jeremy Vine stumbled around his CGI results room like a bad weatherman, eyeing the monitors as he fumbled to touch areas of a screen that clearly was there but had been made to look like it wasn’t there, if that makes any sense to you. No? Me neither.

Over on ITV, Alastair Stewart tried his best, but in between every sensible guest he was forced to put questions to the insufferable “comedian” Jon Culshaw, whose Obama impersonation was indeed true comedy, being suspiciously similar to his Bush impression and his McCain impression, both of which sounded like his Gordon Brown, all of which sounded like Jon Culshaw.

But CNN was there to rescue us all from election night Hell. Despite the most brilliantly inappropriate name on TV, Wolf Blitzer proved a slick and knowledgable host, helped by a team of thinly disguised body-builders whose parents never quite grasped the concept of first names. The heavily chiselled Anderson Cooper put the questions to the guest experts (and appeared in the ad breaks hacking his way through jungles to rescue sick children – whattaguy!), while Campbell Brown (that’s a woman) and a lady called Soledad (is that even a name?) dealt with the stats and exit polls.

But the real winner was touchscreen technology. While Jeremy Vine struggled with a device he’d clearly spent all of eight seconds practising over dinner, over on CNN the same technology was used to great effect. The reassuringly-named John King used CNN’s “magic wall” to touch, drag, zoom and highlight the key counties in each swing state. Like a giant iPhone screen, he pinched and slid the images around, drawing lines around key battleground counties and giving more idea of the current situation in five minutes than any other coverage managed all night.

With instant comparisons to 2004, and breakdowns of exit polls and incoming figures, it was an example of technology being used in a sensible way to add to the content elsewhere. It wasn’t blown up to the size of the studio for King to walk around; they didn’t turn the states into a huge CGI Capitol Hill to turn blue and red in an attempt to capture our simple attention spans – it was just a knowledgable presenter who knew exactly how to get the analysis he needed from a device he’s clearly confident using. And it was absolutely fascinating – BBC and ITV should take note.

But CNN didn’t get everything right last night – in fact, it also demonstrated the other, painful side of TV technology by using something very expensive, awkward and utterly pointless just to show it can.

Wolf Blitzer interviewed a reporter in the field by beaming her into the studio as a hologram. Yep, it was as ridiculous as it sounds – a total of 30 HD cameras took several weeks to set up in a tent, calibrated to move whenever the studio cameras moved. And all so we could occasionally see the reporter from a different angle in the studio. She didn’t move, she did nothing that required the use of space or direction, but we got to see her from the front and back at regular intervals, and all with an artificial blue glow to add to the Princess Leia effect. “Help us Wolf Blitzer, you’re our only hope!”

Let’s hope the BBC execs weren’t watching that bit. But the rest of it was great, and with Microsoft’s Surface already being rolled out into hotel lobbies and shopping centres, and multi-touch slowly making its way into all sorts of phones and laptops, not to mention support in Windows 7, last night’s coverage was another fine demonstration that the future’s looking very bright indeed for touchscreen technology.