THE longest-running election's long-running soap is about to wind down but not before providing us enough drama to take us to the next set of commercial breaks. From India Today's Prabhu Chawla's infamous assertion of Uttar Pradesh being an ultapradesh (why, because it didn't vote wholeheartedly for the BJP) to Congress Joint Secretary Jairam Ramesh's 28-hour non-stop grandstanding performance which took him from DD Metro to National Network to Star TV to Zee TV to DD Metro to Star TV, the saga has been in turns angry and ironic. There's comedy too -- some of it unintentional, from Nik Gowing's ``defeat of La-looo'' to Riz Khan's description of professional NGOists as ``anti-poverty activists''.

And though the political biggies have yet to descend on the TV studios (except for Jaswant Singh who made an evening appearance at DD and Star, where he was duly greeted by a deferential Prannoy Roy who called him Sir precisely every 30 seconds) there has been no dearth of quotable quotes. Especially from the marathon man Amar Singh who spent 10 hours each in various TV studios -- National Network, DD Metro, Eenadu, DD Metro again, Star TV, Jain TV, Star TV again and BBC World -- on Thursday and Friday.

Such is the frenzy that TV studios havegiven the victorious Murli Manohar Joshi just a couple of hours with visitors after he arrives from Allahabad at 6.45 a.m. on Friday -- after that it's 10.30 a.m. at Star TV, then a drive to Noida to Zee TV, then to the DD studios at Siri Fort, then to Asianet, then again to Noida for another Zee TV show.

For the first time, though, the saga has been as much about the politicians as it has been about the anchors. There's Sitaram Yechury saying how for Swapan Dasgupta everything is Ram Ram, when the India Today Deputy Editor mistakenly called him Jairam. There's Vir Sanghvi taking umbrage at being called Karan by Arun Jaitley (``I don't call you Govind or Pramod, do I?''). Then there's both Dasgupta and Sanghvi congratulating each other on their common friend Mani Shankar Aiyar winning in Tamil Nadu. And there's Vinod Dua publicly apologising to his niji mitr Shatrughan Sinha for calling him a filmi sitara. And then there's also Prannoy Roy admonishing his correspondent Barkha Dutt for``always'' counting her chickens before they're hatched. Oops.

And then, of course, there's the Tavleen effect, which saw even the gajra-clad, Bellary-based Sushma Swaraj saying `iss-yoos' -- DD Metro Tavleen Singh's favourite word to describe what people really want: bijli, water, roads.

So here are some stock phrases we hope we don't hear in the next election: people here are tired of elections (Daniel Lak, BBC World); it's early days yet (Prannoy Roy and practically everyone else in his `we rely on experience' NDTV team); there are two elements to this (Mahesh Rangarajan, before telling us of four, on Vote 99); the elitist media had written us off (Amar Singh, on every network); these are just projections, they are not actual results (Yogendra Yadav, National Network and DD Metro); and we're getting to the climax (Swapan Dasgupta, DD Metro). Gulp.