YOU might not know it from the television news, but there have been quite a few meetings recently between political people and the general public.

Across the country, activists are performing the often thankless task of delivering leaflets and knocking doors.

While large swathes of the public complain that no candidate can be bothered to visit them, another large swathe will tell canvassers that they’ve had a bellyful of elections and would appreciate it if the visitor would go forth and multiply.

Many will complain that politicians are all the same and are all in it for themselves. Ironically, that criticism is usually voiced to visitors from the armies of unpaid political volunteers. For those activists, politics offers no reward other than the masochistic satisfaction of wearing out their shoe leather for a cause they support.

But while these conversations take place on Britain’s doorsteps, the picture you’ll see on the TV is somewhat different.

There have been a lot of complaints that the prime minister’s campaign events have been highly stage-managed, with minimal risk of Mrs May running into unconvinced members of the public.

If so, the campaign reflects modern conventional wisdom, which says that unscripted, unspun encounters with non-supporters are a high risk.

I think there’s a vicious circle at play here. Politicians run highly-controlled campaigns with minimal spontaneity. If unscripted moments do happen, the broadcast media seize on them and repeat them endlessly. The response of the spin doctors is to control campaigns even more tightly, and the whole election process gets ever more lifeless.

But I’m not sure that unscripted encounters really do any harm to a campaign that isn’t already in trouble.

In 2001, when Sharon Storer harangued Tony Blair about her experience of her local hospital, the exchange was endlessly repeated by broadcasters who mainly made no attempt to investigate whether her case represented a wider concern.

On the same day, deputy prime minister John Prescott punched an egg-throwing protester. I remember hearing that on the news and thinking: “What a disaster. Labour’s deputy leader will have to resign in the middle of an election campaign.”

I was wrong, of course. Labour was way ahead in the polls. Their voters were not going to be put off by the small matter of the deputy PM lamping a member of the electorate in front of the TV cameras. The party was returned with a majority of 167 seats.

In the 1983 election campaign, Margaret Thatcher faced a sustained, forensic grilling from voter Diana Gould on the TV programme Nationwide, over the sinking of the Argentine ship General Belgrano during the Falklands War. The exchange has been replayed many times as a rare example of the Iron Lady being rattled. But the Conservatives were returned with a majority of 144 seats.

You’d be hard pressed to think of an exchange like this that changed the course of a campaign. The real risk is that a gaffe can seem to sum up a campaign that is already in trouble. At another point in the 1983 election, a table fell over while Labour leader Michael Foot was speaking. A pretty unremarkable event, but it seemed emblematic of a shambolic campaign, and has been repeated many times.

From what we read of the national campaigns (we’ve yet to see a party leader down here), Jeremy Corbyn is giving the national media the cold shoulder but is meeting some ordinary people. Meanwhile, Tim Farron had a much-replayed encounter with a fellow named Malcolm (surname Angry, I think). I’m sure either would gladly swap their poll ratings for Mrs May’s, but these encounters don’t seem to have done any harm.

If you’re a politician who’s miles ahead, or way behind with nothing to lose, where’s the risk in meeting the public on camera? You might even like them.