It is often said that TV ratings are going down and down. And TV execs fall over themselves to explain why and how. It's never the programmes. Never. It's trends. It's the Xbox. It's the fragmentation of families. It's multi-platform interactive media. It's,... it's... something else. It must be. It has to be.
And yet there are some TV shows that get monster ratings. Britain's Got Talent is, sadly, one of them. The Apprentice, also sadly, is another. But one BBC2 show trounces everything else in terms of audience and buzz. Top Gear's Stig unveiling got 7.1m viewers. That's a lot for BBC2. Okay, it's not the same as X Factor or whatever, but it does tell us that 7.1m are prepared to watch something on BBC2. So when a show gets less than 1.5 million, which is rather often, it may be because the programme isn't actually all that good. Just a thought.
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2 comments:
Jam, do you think that good necessarily equates to popular? Because it seems to me that programmes like Britain's Got Talent (though I love it) and The Apprentice (ditto) aren't really good television in any worthwhile sense of 'good'. But they are exceptionally addictive and thus popular.
I can't really comment on Top Gear since I've never seen more than a few minutes of it without wanting to throw something at Jeremy Clarkson, but I know other people rate it. It does seem to me, though, that while some of those programmes getting low ratings may not be very good, others may just be underappreciated. I'd be interested to know, for instance, what sort of ratings some of the recent poetry programmes got. There really were some excellent things, but I bet they didn't get anything like the ratings of Top Gear.
Certainly rubbish TV programs are the major factor in moving people way from TV. The reason I ditched TV is that anything good finds it's way to DVD. And the internet is better for the topical stuff.
How do we decide what is a good program? The easy answer is to say what gets the ratings, let the market decide! It's objective, and it will certainly filter out a lot of the trash. The problem is it will also filter out some really great stuff.
When working out how we should decide what is a good program we must take in to account the medium. It's unfair to expect a program to do things the medium isn't suited to. But we shouldn't let it off the hook and let it descend in to the gutter.
It's not the first time I've posted this link on a blog but its a really good article and worth a read.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,1125902,00.htm
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