BBC Volcano Live
The BBC do event television very well. Timeslip television has been with us for decades now, with video recorders giving us dominion over when we watch our programmes, a process that has become acute as bigger and better set top boxes give us more or less a free choice of when we watch telly from the last week, the next innovation probably being a premium rate service to watch telly from the future.
Timeslip telly put paid, for a while, to everyone watching the same flickering from the idiot lantern at the same time on the same night and then discussing it in the workplace, playground or prison exercise yard the next morning. Now, if you want to make sure that everyone is sitting comfortably at 8:00 on a weeknight you have to create event television.
This is done in a couple of ways. The simplest is to have each episode of your programme include a plot development so important that people will not be able to resist blurting it out the next day in the presence of somebody standing with their hands over their ears, singing the ‘nar nar nar’ song and wearing a badge reading ‘Don’t tell me who Lord Sugar fired’. This applies to sporting fixtures as well, and indeed formed the plot of an episode of ‘The likely lads’.
The second way to produce event television is to make it interactive. ITV do this by making troubled souls caper for your entertainment and charging you to vote to keep people in a talent show or be sent home with, presumably, the consolation hamper of a bottle of vodka and a handful of pills. You feel you can determine the outcome of the show by watching live and voting, although recent newspaper reports on vote rigging revealed that the only way you could actually influence the show would be to dive bomb the studio in a 747 loaded with flaming horse shit.
The BBC route to event television is the simple formula of live television with a large element of unpredictability and interaction via e fail and Twatter. Previously they have done this with Springwatch Live, where the unpredictable element was bashful badgers, and Starwatch Live where the unpredictable element was the British weather.
This week they went for seismic event television with Volcano Live. Guess what was unpredictable? This featured Kate Humble in trademark fleece and some Scottish bloke in a variety of checked shirts broadcasting from the lip of a live volcano in Hawaii, trying not to display their shit eating grins that conveyed to a shivering nation back home that they had seen the forecast for England, were broadcasting this at seven in the morning their time, and were about to spend the rest of the day on the beach.
The programme, over four weeknights on BBC2, was actually very good. As well as live reports from Hawaii there were film reports of geologists travelling to some truly remote and exotic places, visiting areas covered in ash, lava or rebel fighters. There were also reports from Ed Byrne in the lab, which showed lots of interesting experiments to explain the science but also demonstrated that if you bulk buy groceries that if mixed together in the right quantities can go boom, yet wear a white coat, this lends respectability and prevents you going on some sort of watch list at Tesco.
There was also a clear choice made not to try and make science fun. Instead, they made it bloody terrifying. Volcanoes are mountains that explode, then fall on you, on fire. Top that!
The other point of note, among the stunning footage, the always fabulous films of experts enthusiastic about their subjects and the slightly uneasy feeling one gets when confronted with the raw power of nature, is that some thirty years after ‘Magnum PI’ ended, all the men interviewed on Hawaii had moustaches.
Timeslip telly put paid, for a while, to everyone watching the same flickering from the idiot lantern at the same time on the same night and then discussing it in the workplace, playground or prison exercise yard the next morning. Now, if you want to make sure that everyone is sitting comfortably at 8:00 on a weeknight you have to create event television.
This is done in a couple of ways. The simplest is to have each episode of your programme include a plot development so important that people will not be able to resist blurting it out the next day in the presence of somebody standing with their hands over their ears, singing the ‘nar nar nar’ song and wearing a badge reading ‘Don’t tell me who Lord Sugar fired’. This applies to sporting fixtures as well, and indeed formed the plot of an episode of ‘The likely lads’.
The second way to produce event television is to make it interactive. ITV do this by making troubled souls caper for your entertainment and charging you to vote to keep people in a talent show or be sent home with, presumably, the consolation hamper of a bottle of vodka and a handful of pills. You feel you can determine the outcome of the show by watching live and voting, although recent newspaper reports on vote rigging revealed that the only way you could actually influence the show would be to dive bomb the studio in a 747 loaded with flaming horse shit.
The BBC route to event television is the simple formula of live television with a large element of unpredictability and interaction via e fail and Twatter. Previously they have done this with Springwatch Live, where the unpredictable element was bashful badgers, and Starwatch Live where the unpredictable element was the British weather.
This week they went for seismic event television with Volcano Live. Guess what was unpredictable? This featured Kate Humble in trademark fleece and some Scottish bloke in a variety of checked shirts broadcasting from the lip of a live volcano in Hawaii, trying not to display their shit eating grins that conveyed to a shivering nation back home that they had seen the forecast for England, were broadcasting this at seven in the morning their time, and were about to spend the rest of the day on the beach.
The programme, over four weeknights on BBC2, was actually very good. As well as live reports from Hawaii there were film reports of geologists travelling to some truly remote and exotic places, visiting areas covered in ash, lava or rebel fighters. There were also reports from Ed Byrne in the lab, which showed lots of interesting experiments to explain the science but also demonstrated that if you bulk buy groceries that if mixed together in the right quantities can go boom, yet wear a white coat, this lends respectability and prevents you going on some sort of watch list at Tesco.
There was also a clear choice made not to try and make science fun. Instead, they made it bloody terrifying. Volcanoes are mountains that explode, then fall on you, on fire. Top that!
The other point of note, among the stunning footage, the always fabulous films of experts enthusiastic about their subjects and the slightly uneasy feeling one gets when confronted with the raw power of nature, is that some thirty years after ‘Magnum PI’ ended, all the men interviewed on Hawaii had moustaches.
Labels: BBC, Kate Humble, Volcano Live, Volcanos
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