Denise Haskew looks forward to the day when television commissioning editors can no longer rely on unimaginative newspaper editors to promote their reality TV garbage.

Article first published: Autumn 2005

If you’re a freelancer and you want a piece of work you’ve made to be broadcast, it’s easy: just don’t ask for any money. There are any number of cable and satellite channels who’ll take your content and broadcast it if there’s no fee involved. Actually, you might even be offered a cut of the advertising revenue. They’re probably on a deal whereby they run ads, but the advertiser only pays anything if the ad receives more than, say, 4000 viewers (depending on your territory). Not 4001 viewers, of course – the equipment can only measure in major increments. 4000 means one person with a little box on top of their telly is watching. If two people watch, you have 8000 viewers, and your cut of the ad revenue will go up.

I had a colleague who was putting together a cheap programme package aimed at media students – there are 160,000 of them in the UK alone (we know because the two maths students currently at university counted them). But this was a definite no-no.“We’ve tried targeting students before and the programmes get a lot of response (emails/texts, etc), but they always register zero viewers,” said the programme controller. “They don’t seem to issue boxes to students.”

So that’s one section of the population out. Who else is excluded? Clearly anyone who doesn’t want to see yet another reality TV show about terminal dullards doing mundane things in uninteresting places. Back in the late 80s when the Japanese graciously served up Endurance for Europeans’ delight, there was much anxious gnashing of teeth about just how exploitative these programmes might get. We needn’t have worried. The competitive zeitgeist of the late 80s has long since given way to the celebration of the banal, which underpins the majority of our daytime TV output and is inexorably encroaching on our evening viewing too.

Take the one set in the airport. I watched a 10-minute segment of that where a family were complaining because they’d lost their luggage. Had the scene featured John Cleese and Michael Palin it might have made interesting viewing, but seeing as it was average wannabees, painfully conscious that the cameras were on them, the net result was 10 minutes of TV drivel. What struck me about this so much was that, had I been in the airport, in a queue, or terminally bored because of a 4-hour flight delay, I still wouldn’t have been interested in the conversation. It’s coming to something when people are being fed slices of life that are so dull you wouldn’t watch them even if they were going on right next to you.

You comfort yourself that the commissioning editors know this stuff’s bollocks and in fact they’re all part of some major conspiracy involving arms dealers and oil barons; but the reality (like their TV programmes) is probably so much duller: so many commissioning editors just don’t have imaginations.

You know that the most important part of any commissioning editor’s day is when last night’s ratings appear on their computer monitor. And let’s not decry that in itself – we all want feedback, after all, particularly if it’s positive. But that instant feedback does mean people are constantly watching other people’s ratings rather than their programmes and commissioning new series based on how close it comes to the formula of another recent success.

Success, of course, is to do with ratings, and there are two issues here. First, I remain to be convinced that the technology currently available to monitor viewing habits is truly representative of what people are actually watching; and second, because you can buy viewers.

Advertising works. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t do it (is this a good time to mention that you can advertise in Newsreel by calling Vince Matthews on +44 1273 227048?). What’s more, in TV, advertising a programme means more than placing an advert – it means creating a whole culture. The tabloid newspapers and daytime TV shows take the real-life soap to their editorial hearts, and all of a sudden if you don’t know what’s happening in Big Brother you’re an outcast – which forces people to watch it. Even if the programme they’re all raving about is just a bunch of dull teenagers in a room trying to out-camp each other. Content is irrelevant, it’s the culture it generates that counts.

This is about as far from content-led broadcasting as you can get. It is a paean to the god of demographics, who will only be happy when all boys like football, all girls like shampoo and all people can be compartmentalized enough to be able to target exactly the right products at them. Finding out what people like is market research, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But TV and print media conspiring to create cultures of interest smacks of social engineering (fitting the person to the product rather than the product to the person), and I’m against it.

OK, this does start to sound like a conspiracy, but what you have to bear in mind is that this isn’t coordinated like the villainous plots in a James Bond movie – it’s largely down to TV commissioning editors and newspaper/magazine editors being lazy and unimaginative and joining together to create a culture of interest around a programme that will help them feed off each other’s ratings and circulation. And of course, advertisers love this.

But just as the internet has resisted becoming purely a shopping channel because the nature of the technology makes it difficult to control, broadcasting technology might come to the aid of those who don’t want to be told what they should watch or enjoy if they want to be normal.

Plurality of programming was supposed to make our viewing habits so diverse that this shared culture surrounding mainstream programmes was sadly going to disappear (like not having to listen to inane conversations about Eastenders on the bus would be a bad thing). But it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Hopefully, new delivery technologies and vastly increased content will truly diversify viewing habits. There are a lot of serious consequences in this, particularly for major broadcasters, but if they continue to turn evening TV into daytime TV, maybe they deserve the consequences.

Denise Haskew After 10 years as a television commissioning editor, Denise decided she needed a more intellectual challenge, so she gave it up to become a model. She has done all sorts of useless jobs, such as magazine publishing and PR. She plans to be on the first big spaceship to leave the Earth, alongside all the telephone sanitizers.