Sam's World Of No

My television habits are distinctly modern; I very rarely sit down at the tv praying that it will entertain me. Homer Simpson’s “Come on television, give me some of that sweet sweet pap” I am not. Like a lot of people, I now download the shows I like, either in the “illegal but who cares because it still makes us money” Bittorrent sense, or via dedicated sites such as Mr Twig for South Park. A lot of BBC programmes are available on the iPlayer, another great idea crippled by executives who fall in love with acronyms like DRM and the other usual suspects, and I know that Channel 4 have some stuff available online too.

So for me, my PC is my TV. One of my secret pleasures however, and I don’t think I’m alone in this either, used to be the stupid quiz programmes they had on late night channels. Hilarious questions, desperate presenters trying and failing to “make it” in TV, terrible effects and shoddy production - it was a winning combination. But its legality was always a bit suspect, but at that time in the morning after a couple of pints, who cares.

Strangely, they were not the biggest culprit in the recent “television self-destructing” fiasco. Nor were they the most amusing - the story of Blue Peter, the ever lovable children’s programme, faking a poll to name a cat was just awesome. It’s the story of the whole thing; frankly, it’s the story of the year.

But it’s over, we’ve had our fun and Jeremy Paxman had the chance to give one of the most memorable MacTaggart lectures of all time. Heads have rolled where necessary and television had the wake-up call it needed. Unfortunately, it’s still news, because a lot of media outlets have missed a crucial point of Paxman’s speech - that television is, by its very nature, not real. The people you see aren’t living in a box in your living room. Most of it isn’t live. Supposedly ad-hoc dialogue is scripted, stuff is filmed in a different order from which it is shown, and generally the editing process is necessarily subjective in order to meet the aesthetic necessity, time concerns and narrative effectiveness.

Top Gear is a fine example. It’s of the very few programmes I make an effort to watch at the time of original broadcast, and at the start of the new series last Sunday, after a summer off the air whilst all this “fake” commotion had started up, they opened with a joke about how the whole thing was real. By way of a punchline, Richard Hammond, noted for being short, stood on a box that was out of shot, making him look taller than the gargantuan Clarkson.

I cringed. Top Gear is one of the most heavily faked and edited programs in current production.

Now of course it is all real; the races are real, the timing is real, the interviews are real. But the bits where they are in a car talking to you, and then they come over voice over doing part of a conversation, or an introduction to a comment that they will then make “live”, are all deceit to make an effective narrative. This is good; it works well at creating a cohesive story for the viewer.

Top Gear’s news section is filmed like it’s at the pub and the banter is flowing randomly, but of course it’s all scripted. Or at least, the topics are discussed in a pre-determined order. This helps with crucial issues like the right background pictures, or graphics of the news item they are discussing, appearing on the screen in the background.

The filming of the large events is not real at all - the shots of the cars driving are done after the time, especially in the races. There are chase cars and planes that you never see; these are a normal part of filming. In the Bugatti Veyron vs Cessna race, May even had an instructor in the plane with him as he hadn’t passed his flying tests; this is never mentioned.

I know all of this because Top Gear make their production notes available. Imagine if all of these small deceits were removed - the program would be just awful. It wouldn’t fit together; it wouldn’t entertain. So we have to accept some lies, because it is what makes television believable.

So maybe we shouldn’t have too much heavy editing on news programmes, but we really shouldn’t care if the judge’s “houses” on X-Factor aren’t their own. Frankly, the people that need this much explaining to them should stick to children’s television, and the fact that this story got onto the BBC News front page for most of today is just depressing. Television has had its wakeup call. It heard the alarm, it didn’t hit snooze, it didn’t fall back asleep. It had a shower, it went to work. Now can’t we just let it enjoy a hard-earned beer at the end of a long day?

That is all. I’m going to now enjoy my own hard-earned beer.

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