What the hell...is 'water cooler television'?

Micro docs (not, as the phrase might imply, a reference to the number of health care professionals likely to be left working in the NHS after Capita get a hold of the health service, nor dwarf GPs, but an entirely new concept in educating the attentionally spanned impoverished and the subject of last Saturday’s blog post) are, possibly, a breakthrough in water-cooler friendly television. 
Whatever that is.
Ten minutes on the internet turns up LOADS of porn, but also that ‘water cooler television is an outdated cultural reference to television that people talk about when they gather around the water cooler, rather than television featuring water coolers nor television programming for water coolers.  Although, if you want the sort of people who spend a lot of time hanging around the water cooler discussing your programming, then lots of programmes about water coolers, including a soap set in the room or corner of the office where the water cooler is located, is not a bad idea and, for those who are really frequent visitors to the water cooler, a sister channel about toilets.
Thinking about it for a couple of seconds, which is a couple of seconds too long, who the fuck wants water cooler loiterers talking about their programmes anyway?  If your aspiration is to have your body of work watched and then criticised by the sort of people who use hydration as an excuse to hang around a large bottle of H2O in the hope the pretty girl on work experience has to come by to change the paper in the bottom draw of the nearby photocopier (because you arrived early to empty the tray to engineer such a visit), then aim higher. 
What does success look like? 
It looks like a BAFTA award.
But also, well, on a commercial channel it looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing whatever crap was advertised during the commercial breaks in your programme.  In other words, 50 Malibu Barbie’s arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered them, delivered by a man who is already thinking ‘peado’. 
On the BBC, success looks like people watching your programme, then talking about it down the pub, then coming home drunk and instead of playing on-line poker until they have to put their kidneys on eBay to cover their debts going on line with a credit card and purchasing the same jacket your lead character was wearing in a crucial scene after visiting the sort of web site that gives that sort of information.  In other words, a North Face parka arriving at the home of a man with no idea why the fuck he ordered it, in July, but, as it’s a North face parka, is really pleased and practically has to wrestle it away from delivery guy.
Fuck the water cooler tribe, they don’t even pay for their drink, we want the pub people.
So, what do people talk about down the pub.  Teevee obviously and, because the pub is the parliament of the people and hence a place where you want to always appear smarter than everyone else, you talk about the documentary you saw last night on some diverting subject, rather than the afternoon you spent watching back-to-back Ballamorys in your pants working your way through a Pot Noodle three for the price of two pack you bought on a whim that was supposed to last you a month.
Hence the need for micro docs.  You can’t get cooler telly.

Micro Docs

Documentaries.  Here’s the thing…who’s got an hour to invest in a, no doubt worthy, show about Jupiter’s moons, French caves or weird foreign shit when all you really need is the bit that makes you almost summon your wife from doing the washing-up to ‘see this shit!’?
And let’s be clear about what constitutes a documentary.  A programme about nature, the planet, other planets, how hard life was back when things were black and white and anything to do with caves are fine.  War documentaries are OK, but only if the subject of that documentary is anything other than Hitler Was Bad.  Any series featuring a profession and a recurring character is not. a.  fucking.  documentary.
In short, you want to 1: Reveal astonishing fact about bees/Jupiter/Clouds.  2: Have somebody snort ‘No fucking way’ when you tell them about it down the pub.  3: state ‘it’s true’.  Follow up fact, slam dunk and mine’s a pint of Large and a packet of pork scratching please Neville.
The thing about documentary makers is that they spend a looooooooooong time, and suffer quite a bit of discomfort, making their programme.  If it’s a nature documentary, it’s all about sitting freezing your ass off on a remote hillside trying to get a picture of an animal that, let’s face it, probably doesn’t even taste good so why is it so rare anyway? before trekking seventeen hours to the nearest village with an internet café, firing up something with a Pentium 486 and finding out, through a heavily censored Facebook, that your girlfriend has updated her status not to ‘single’ which you were worried about during this period of separation, but ‘married’, to a bloke that looks a lot like your brother.  Then, once you have your hundreds of hours of footage, you have to sit alone in a dark room for weeks in order to edit it down to a manageable 60 minutes, which these days includes ten minutes of ‘how we made this’.  By the way, that shot of you having a breakdown in that internet café in Nepal…BAFTA love shit like that.
The solution; micro-docs.  If John Lewis can, as they did last Christmas, essentially put together an advert that in 30 seconds had the same emotional effect on the weak-minded as other seasonal animated offerings (Snowman and Snowdog excepted, they are still the supreme Christmas offerings.  As is the ‘Doctor Who’ episode ‘The Christmas Bride’.  Or any of the Robert Powell M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas), then all the relevant information, or, at least, enough for you to wing it in the pub, can surely be achieved in a 45 second long documentary.  Plus 15 seconds of how we made it.
Example.  Volcanoes.  Everybody knows volcano basics.  If they don’t, what in the name of a green fuck are you doing talking to somebody who is so culturally impoverished that they have not seen ‘Dante’s Peak’.  So, in 45 seconds, the documentary would explain the pyroclastic flow.  The 15 seconds ‘how we made this’ would be the film crew, in a Land Rover, going 80 mph (improbable for a Land Rover I know but it’s downhill with a superheated cloud of death also propelling the vehicle) screaming ‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittttttttttttttttttttttt!’ apart from one guy at the back who is so terrified he is simply sobbing.  Nor THAT I’d watch.
And the great thing is, you can have loads of micro-documentaries about an over-arching subject.  Vents, and people who live near FUCKING VOLCANOES are just two subjects I’d like to see covered in 45 seconds, the first because hey, geology is always fascinating, and because it would have to feature the public and 45 seconds is not long enough for anyone to become a ‘break out star’.
Of course, you have to be a bit sensitive, and avoid the trinity of subjects that should never be ‘taken lightly’, Yewtree, Titanic, Hitler.  Oddly enough, FGM is the perfect fit for a micro doc as not only is 45 seconds the upper limits of the ‘oh Christ turn over!’ threshold on that subject, but if you haven’t got the message about FGM in 45 seconds, maybe somebody should be making a documentary about you.