{"id":4903,"date":"2015-09-06T21:36:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-06T20:36:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=4903"},"modified":"2015-09-06T21:36:34","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T20:36:34","slug":"not-watching-gogglebox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/not-watching-gogglebox\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Watching Gogglebox"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m couldn&#8217;t really tell you why the subhead of this week&#8217;s Other Side by Felipa Jodelka in the Guardian Guide annoyed me so much. Well I can. It&#8217;s the supposed phenomenom of Googlebox. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<em>Within two years Gogglebox has become on those shows that everyone loves without exception.<\/em>&#8220;*<\/p>\n<p>Er. No. <\/p>\n<p>As HTW Central noted on Twitter, it&#8217;d have 12 million viewers (as Bake Off gets for its final) if that were the case. <\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">If everyone loved Gogglebox it would have 12 million viewers. It doesn&#39;t. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/3XruPVi60z\">https:\/\/t.co\/3XruPVi60z<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; HTW Central (@htwcentral) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/htwcentral\/status\/640218324455002112\">September 5, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>In fact, I believe that 4m is closer to the mark &#8211; undoubtedly excellent ratings for Channel 4.<\/p>\n<p>Let me be very clear up front. <em>I&#8217;ve never seen Gogglebox<\/em>, and I have <em>no intention<\/em> of ever doing so.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve no doubt that the programme is very well made, with smart casting, and is cleverly put together to engage a wide variety of viewers. But that&#8217;s not enough to make the programme appeal a single iota to me. <\/p>\n<p>For the uninitiated Wikipedia describes the show as featuring, &#8220;Recurring couples, families and friends from around England sitting in their living rooms watching weekly British television shows.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Essentially, the producers have &#8220;cast&#8221; people to appear on the show. I&#8217;m not sure whether anyone truly thinks that this is giving us anything insightful. Many business use small focus groups to discuss new products or ideas. But you don&#8217;t &#8220;cast&#8221; a focus group to entertain you. You put a group together to give you insight and inform your decisions.<\/p>\n<p>So if I want to hear discussion about the prevailing medium of our time, then I need to know that I&#8217;m hearing something intelligent with people who know the medium, understand some of its history, and can put things into context. I want some insight, from someone who can tell me something I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t need conversation that I could otherwise get on the top deck of a bus, or at the proverbial pub with a random stranger. This is also why I need named, specialist critics for films, books, music, radio, theatre and, of course, television. It&#8217;s why you know that if a film poster is using very obscure people or publications to sell their film, I&#8217;m already suspicious.<\/p>\n<p>I particularly don&#8217;t need people &#8220;cast&#8221; for a television series to make us have some kind of visceral reaction towards them. Make no mistake, casting is a critical part of any &#8220;reality&#8221; show. <\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s the importance of the edit. Like most reality television, the hours of footage have to be carefully corralled together in an edit suite somewhere, where <em>storylines<\/em> are constructed and some kind of sense is supposedly made of raw footage. (Seriously: try watching UnREAL for an albeit fictional and ramped up to 11 view of a reality show.)<\/p>\n<p>And if this all sounds snobbish, then it&#8217;s really not meant to. I enjoy television a lot, and I enjoy enlightening discussion about television a good deal too. For example, there was an excellent interview with Jed Mercurio on Radio 4&#8217;s Front Row <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/b0680s8y\">the other night<\/a>. Primarily  it was about his version of Lady Chatterly&#8217;s Lover airing this weekend on BBC1, but he had some very interesting things to say about how US premium cable channels operate. <\/p>\n<p>Look: I was someone who never missed Harry Hill&#8217;s TV Burp. But I very much knew what I was getting &#8211; a skilled comedian who understands how the TV industry works, putting  a satirical spin on things. <\/p>\n<p>Gogglebox, on the other hand, features well remunerated members of the public &#8211; carefully cast &#8211; who surely have to <em>deliver the goods<\/em> if they want to stay with the programme. I know I won&#8217;t like it. Similarly, I don&#8217;t need to watch The Only Way is Essex, or essentially anything on ITVBe, to know that they won&#8217;t be up my street. <\/p>\n<p>Worryingly, Channel 4 looks like it&#8217;s getting overly reliant on the programme. When the Guardian piece mentioned six series in two years, I was quite shocked. I know that the show has shifted into peak, now dominating the channel&#8217;s Friday night schedule. But it&#8217;s true that around 26 episodes a year are now being churned out (over three years in fact). I&#8217;d guess that the programme is relatively cheap to produce, and my fear is that Channel 4 is getting overly addicted on it &#8211; if not to the extent that they did previously with Big Brother &#8211; then certainly at the expense of other light entertainment programmes. (<a href=\"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2015\/06\/dont-bring-back-tfi-friday-and-why-are-todays-most-dangerous-presenters-all-working-on-radio-2\/\">I&#8217;ve written previously<\/a> about how bad an idea it is to be bringing back TFI Friday. That too shows a lack of imagination on the part of schedulers.)<\/p>\n<p>* At time of writing, I couldn&#8217;t find an online link to the article on The Guardian&#8217;s website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m couldn&#8217;t really tell you why the subhead of this week&#8217;s Other Side by Felipa Jodelka in the Guardian Guide annoyed me so much. Well I can. It&#8217;s the supposed phenomenom of Googlebox. &#8220;Within two years Gogglebox has become on those shows that everyone loves without exception.&#8220;* Er. No. As HTW Central noted on Twitter, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[382,560],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903"}],"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=4903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4913,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4903\/revisions\/4913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}