Unlike the United States, Britain has not been doing leader debates for very long — and it shows. Aired live from an ITV studio, the aesthetics of last night’s leaders’ debate hewed closer to a game show (with computer graphics for a backdrop and even a quick fire round) than to the comparative grandeur and high production values of US presidential debates.

With a Q and A format — which hardly seemed to necessitate Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn even being in the same room given the lack of space for rebuttals — it was a piece of television that seemed well designed to provide material for the wearisome “gosh, aren’t both sides awful!” thinkpieces churned out with metronomic regularity by Britain’s centrist commentariat.

Nonetheless, in spite of the format, the debate revealed much about the two candidates and the respective strategies of Labour and the Conservatives for the coming election. Johnson is of course most at ease when he’s talking about Brexit — indeed, he’ll try to steer every conversation back to it. Corbyn and his party have strong answers in response. But they will have to make their case, both on Brexit and the plethora of Johnson’s lies on every other topic, much more forcefully in the continued lead-up to December’s election.

UK election leader debates are not mandatory and the format is subject to lengthy negotiations between the leaders’ offices and TV broadcasters. In the run-up to the 2017 election, Corbyn’s approval ratings — and that of the Labour Party generally — improved dramatically over the course of the campaign. The more Corbyn was in the public eye, the more the public seemed to like him. He thrived in the televised debates. With Labour behind in the polls again, the party had a lot to gain from the debate. Less clear is why Boris Johnson agreed to partake, since he risked aiding another Labour campaign resurgence.

Perhaps Johnson felt encouraged by the format of the debate, which devoted the entirety of the first half to Brexit while such apparent trivialities as inequality, Britain’s stagnating economy, the long-term funding crisis of the NHS, social care, and the climate crisis were relegated to the last half hour. Notably British foreign policy — and in particular Britain’s material contribution to the humanitarian disaster in Yemen — wasn’t mentioned at all.

The UK’s election-time broadcast rules are supposed to ensure that the two main parties are given a fair hearing during the campaign. This particularly benefits Labour, which is subject to unremitting hostility from most of the print press. But the focus on Brexit in the first half of the debate was to the obvious advantage of Johnson and the Conservatives, whose entire electoral strategy is centered on making the vote a referendum on Johnson’s Brexit deal, while Labour seeks to broaden out the debate to discuss the general state of the economy, public services and Britain’s fraying social fabric, stagnating wages, and the climate crisis.

Not content with having the first half of the debate conducted entirely on his favored terrain, Johnson sought to turn virtually every question in the second half of the debate back onto Brexit. Asked who his favorite world leader was, Johnson avoided any of the obvious candidates one could imagine him favoring (Trump, Bolsonaro, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the leaders of the Bolivian coup) and instead chose the EU27 leaders en masse, because they have signed off on his Brexit deal.

Asked what Christmas gift he would leave Corbyn under the Christmas tree (in fairness to Johnson not a question that invited a particularly serious response), he took the cue and suggested a print copy of his Brexit deal. Depending on one’s point of view, this was either impressive message discipline or self-parody, but there were increasing groans and mutterings from the audience as Johnson persisted in shoehorning Brexit into almost every response.

For his part, Jeremy Corbyn was surely glad to get through the Brexit discussion relatively unscathed, and it was pleasing to see him lay out Labour’s Brexit policy — negotiate a deal within three months and then put it to a public vote with remain as the other option — without this being portrayed as the height of arcane, convoluted complexity. (This tallies with anecdotal reports from Labour canvassers that voters seem perfectly able to grasp a policy position that seems to so befuddle Britain’s most esteemed journalists.)

Less comfortable was Corbyn’s dodging of the question as to which side of the debate he would campaign on in a second EU referendum. But Johnson’s repeated pressing of the point afforded Corbyn the opportunity to several times simply restate Labour’s position on a second referendum. As a result, we may be hearing less about Labour’s “confusing” Brexit policy in the coming weeks.

Though Brexit is more comfortable ground for Johnson, Corbyn was also able to effectively challenge his narrative of a swift trade negotiation that would follow the passing of his Brexit deal by pointing out that any trade deal would drag on for years and, in one of the more effective scripted moments of the night, held up the almost entirely redacted text of negotiations between the Trump administration and British civil servants as he insisted that Johnson planned to sell out the NHS to the United States and the pharmaceutical giants.