{"id":1417,"date":"2006-03-06T20:18:26","date_gmt":"2006-03-06T20:18:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2006\/03\/dispatches\/"},"modified":"2006-03-06T20:18:26","modified_gmt":"2006-03-06T20:18:26","slug":"dispatches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/dispatches\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispatches"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new run of the Channel 4 series, Dispatches<\/a>, has started up recently.
\nI’ve only watched a few, Peter Oborne’s report on losing our liberty, and this evening’s report by Rod Liddle on evangelical Christians. I also saw the Ryanair exposé.
\nNow I won’t get into the rights and wrongs of the content of the programme – in many cases being pretty defendable and worthwhile. But I do think that the “quality” of the programmes has been pretty poor.
\nWhat do I mean by that? Well Oborne’s programme was very poorly structured with it simply comprising of a series of segments covering wildly different issues with little linking. In fact, I agree with everything he said, it’s just that he said it poorly.
\nThe same could be said for the Ryanair programme which really was simply a string of reported shortcomings a couple of undercover reporters discovered.
\nThe Liddle report had less problems of this type but suffered from something else the Oborne programme also had problems – technical shortcomings.
\nEssentially, the camera work was poor and the programme seems to have been rushed. C4 have not spent on first rate camera crews with the secondary camera seemingly of a lower quality to the main camera in interviews (a typical interview set-up has one camera pointing at the interviewee while the other points at the interviewer). In this case, the camera pointing at Liddle had a soft picture, that was sometimes out of focus. At some events while one camera was firmly affixed to a tripod, the second certainly wasn’t. That meant a lot of wobble.
\nIn one case an entire sequence outside a church had been shot with a very distracting great black smudge on the screen. At other times the white balance was poor and faces of interviewees were bleached out.
\nHas someone just given a work experience a PD150 and told them to get on with it?
\nGood programmes can be undermined by poor technical prowess. I don’t know what the budgets are like for Dispatches, but I’d hazard a guess that they’re not that much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new run of the Channel 4 series, Dispatches, has started up recently. I’ve only watched a few, Peter Oborne’s report on losing our liberty, and this evening’s report by Rod Liddle on evangelical Christians. I also saw the Ryanair exposé. Now I won’t get into the rights and wrongs of the content of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}