04/06/07

A hard bitten old cynic tells it like it is. It's not exactly going to get me any work but these days I don't care. At least what follows is true.

What is WRONG with TV these days?

The day I started this page, on 27 March 2006, I was motivated by watching "Blueyonder Broadband Internet TV" in a corner of my computer screen. It was showing a typical 'day in the life' documentary, following a nurse who worked in an A&E department of a busy hospital. Full of human tension, as the nurse and doctors tried to treat a man who was in the process of having a heart attack; visually it was shot in the 'fly on the wall' documentary style pioneered by the BBC using the new generation of 16mm lightweight cameras in the 1970s. It was a perfectly good subject for an interesting documentary. But these days, in the 21st century, could we hear what the people around the nurse were saying? No we could not; the 'crew' in this case would appear to consist of a single camera operator who stuck a radio microphone so close to the nurse's mouth that the only person you could hear properly was the nurse. So, who cares if the sound does not match the pictures?  It was cheap to make and it probably only got a few viewers anyway, as broadband Internet TV is still in its infancy.

If I chose to, I could not only watch channels 1,2,3,4, and 5 on my domestic TV set here in London but I could also watch whatever is on Freeview and I could subscribe to an ever increasing number of satellite or cable television channels. In these days of remote control zapping and the short attention spans of the 'I want it now' generation, programmes have to reach out and grab the viewer's attention and then try every trick in the book to keep him or her watching, usually with hyped promises of things "still to come". Commercial TV used to have a slight disadvantage as people could flip over to another channel when the advertisements came on. Nowadays, if they switch over to a BBC channel they are just as likely to see advertisements there as they are to see them on ITV; only these advertisements are for the BBC's own programmes; incessantly plugged with a repeated frequency that might actually put you off ever buying the product if it was for something like soap powder or instant coffee. The general dumbing down of the nation now drives many people away from TV in the evenings and onto the Internet, where they can self select their own cheap or even dubious entertainments.

It is ironic that in 2006 the BBC gave us a spoof News Programme, "Broken News", which poked fun at the styles and trends in News programmes. Having done that, the BBC then proceeded to make its own News programming look even more like the spoof. They introduced even more pairs of newsreaders, who indulge in verbal ping-pong; one talks while the other one stares at the camera and looks suitably solemn or just dumb.
 

Less is More

I see a bleak future for British TV. Yes, we have occasional gems that stand out. The British still are the world's best when it comes to making innovative comedy even on low budgets; the big British TV organisations are still the best when they throw money at a limited number of 'landmark' documentary series or 'flagship' costume dramas, so that they are as good as possible. But can you remember the days when the BBC gave a wider platform to both established and aspiring playwrights and directors, producing several hours of new and different high quality drama every WEEK? In those days there were more single plays and fewer series that depended on familiar characterisations; it was not all spin-offs from police and hospital series then.

The problem is that the UK's licence fee money combined with the revenue from Independent TV advertising is spread out too THINLY across all the available channels. They simply can't afford to craft the product any more. Too many channels, too many formats, too many methods of delivery. Too many corners cut in production. Too many people being exploited. Too many inexperienced production staff being given responsibilities beyond their abilities. Too many producers doing unpaid work and suffering too much stress just to get their programmes in on time and on budget. Too much importance given to the number of viewers per programme rather than how much they actually appreciated it. I am not resistant to change as such; change is to be welcomed always when the results are BETTER than what went before. Colour, stereo sound, wider screen formats, high definition, CGI, bring it on. But don't try to fob me off with "more choice", when the choice in drama is yet another spin-off from a hospital series and the choice in "reality TV" involves a proliferation of almost identical programmes about competing to make money from selling stuff at auction; racing against time to do cookery; house purchases or renovations that go horribly wrong (preferably abroad) and if the pressures also reveal on camera a rift in the participants' relationship with each other then so much the better; transforming someone's house or garden against the clock; confining carefully selected dysfunctional individuals together in a house or on an island... do you see the common thread here? Yes, what much of TV is all about these days is ARTIFICIALLY CREATED CONFLICT. Pitting ordinary people against one another and then sitting back and revelling in their misfortunes or their inability to cope. It is 'bread and circuses' again; let's watch all these modern day gladiators. We can even do the legendary thumbs up / thumbs down thing by voting with a premium rate telephone call or text message that helps fund this trite and vacuous yet strangely compelling anodyne garbage. Another glass of "Victory Gin" anyone? Using fewer talented writers or professional entertainers, much modern TV  "entertainment" is based upon voyeurism of cheap members of the public in the human zoo; or of 'Z' list "celebrities" trying to revive their flagging careers. And then, if "reality TV" isn't enough to remove you from reality, you can go back to watching fictional characters in soap operas having a worse time with their lives than you are with yours; so that's ok then.
How uplifting.

What is so terrible about experience?

Production companies these days ACTIVELY reject experienced people. I have seen the ads: "don't contact us if you have 100 years experience" (quote from an ad placed by a Birmingham based Production company in 2006). They want young people who are exploitable and keen;  these companies are scared of working with anybody older than they are; of working with anyone who actually knows what they are doing. They are go-getters who value hope over experience, they want somebody who will muddle along in the same way that they do. So if you want to make TV programmes, you don't use people who know how to do it, you find people with lower standards. Talk about cause and effect. 

What happened at the BBC in the 1990s.

The drop in standards at the BBC was politically motivated. Margaret Thatcher hated the BBC and was determined to cut it down to size and give a chance to her supporters, who wanted to set up competing television services and thereby make money. So she put Marmaduke Hussey in control (he had already taken on and beaten the staff at The Times) and Hussey then sacked Alistair Milne and appointed John Birt as Director General. The effect on the BBC was disastrous; just what Thatcher wanted. Something called "Producer Choice" was dreamed up; it was heralded as giving producers a choice of where to go to to obtain resources for their programmes. But just like the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for the Iraq war, it was just political spin. What REALLY happened was that an artificially inflated price structure was created within the BBC so that it became too expensive for producers to spend their squeezed budgets on using the BBC's highly trained in-house staff and facilities. SO they were forced to go outside the BBC to use "cheaper" freelancers and facilities houses, which were springing up like mushrooms. Consequently, there were TV studios not being used and many BBC staff no longer working to capacity but often sitting around at home on full salaries; on the very same days that more TV License payers' money was being handed out to "cheaper" outside contractors. Where was the good housekeeping there? Meanwhile, "focus groups" were set up and "management consultants" were employed at vast expense. Staff who objected to the drop in standards were encouraged to go to little meetings with "facilitators" who knew nothing whatsoever about making television programmes but knew a lot about touchy-feely counselling and how to "manage change". The implied message from the BBC to its staff was: "roll over and submit to the blue sky thinking or get used to the idea that your job is finished".

Eventually, many highly competent technical staff were paid off with enforced or "voluntary" redundancies that were, arguably, constructive dismissal. The clear message to the shell-shocked and hitherto fiercely loyal BBC staff from Liz Forgan and others at the top was that the standards were too high: "People don't want a Rolls Royce, they are happy with a Ford Mondeo", she said (or something like that). The advent of the "Video Diaries" style prepared the public for what would soon happen on mainstream programmes. Viewers were weaned away from quality camerawork and sound and slowly eased into acceptance of the home movie style on programmes where it would previously have been inappropriate. Furthermore, with philistines appointed as channel controllers it was open warfare on anything they didn't understand. That is why in the 21st Century you find Rolf Harris presenting BBC programmes about classical painters of masterpieces. If you want authoritative, intelligent, arts programmes free from gimmicks; you no longer see the Director of the National Gallery enlightening you on the BBC, you go away from the BBC to watch Tim Marlow on Channel Five. And yet the BBC still bristles when it is accused of "dumbing down". Yes, it is fine to be inclusive, to encourage people who might otherwise not do so to take an interest in the arts; if that requires Rolf Harris then I applaud it. But I feel it is difficult for the BBC to be regarded as the bastion of Public Service Broadcasting when anyone with an IQ in treble figures often has to switch to Channels 4 or 5 for serious arts programmes. Where is the 'inclusiveness' there ? Even the arts page on the BBC's online website is closed. Television wrings its hands about dwindling audiences and yet it is nothing if not self-inflicted. Of course it is far too late to go back now; the irreversible damage is done and the minds of the population have been infected by giving them the garbage they thought they wanted. Populism might be a vote winner but think about where it has led us in the past. This is not a middle class rant, it is common sense.

These days, and with a few notable exceptions, far too many documentaries follow the Discovery Channel format: First they tell you what they are going to show you, then they show you whatever it is and then they tell you what they have shown you. The amount of padding involved can easily spin out 15 minutes of actual information into a 50 minute documentary. If you can build in some artificially created dramatic tension along the style of "will the public vote to restore this really interesting old building or that one?" or "will the Oxford Dictionary be so impressed by my research into the origins of a word that they decide to include it in the next edition?" or a few computer generated anthropomorphised dinosaurs acting out some conflict that may or may not ever have happened then so much the better. Furthermore, since the population at large seems to have no attention span, the assumed level of viewer intelligence has the result of making mainstream documentaries these days seem as if they are aimed at 10 year olds watching "Television for Schools" in their classrooms back in the 1960s. Trite, patronising and repetitive; blurring the line between historical or evolutionary facts and populist crowd-pleasing fiction; 'enhanced' with background music that has a secondary use in that it is good for disguising the variable location sound recording quality; the modern day Documentary tells you little and it tells it often.