TVGrouting

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I've realised that talking about good ideas for tv shows and awards do's and stuff is not quite in keeping with the remit of this blog, so here's something really boring - the Aspect Ratio.

When a tv show is finished, ie edited, it has to be turned into some kind of hard copy from which it can be played out to tv sets – either a tape or a dvd which gets sent to a broadcaster – the really boring bit is sorting out the correct aspect ratio in this crucial transfer process, so that the picture doesn't appear distorted or heavily cropped when it hits the screen.

These ratios 4:3, 14x9, 16x9, super wide etc etc, offer a number of different ways you can view moving pictures incorrectly. This is an infuriating but unfortunately necessary bit of techno rubbish, brought in by the advent of widescreen tv; widescreen - which is only good for watching films and maybe football, although even Sky Sports don't bother shooting football in widescreen, so do we bother with any of it?

Technology is moving the wrong way for the medium. Apart from films and wildlife programmes – what is the point of High Definition tv? Sharper and sharper pictures of property shows and ice-dancing? Anyone who works in tv will vouch for the fact that production budgets are only going one way and that's down. So the production values of conventional television are hardly likely to improve much.  And given that the growing demand in moving images is for the UGC stuff you might watch on a window on your laptop or on a tiny mobile screen, HD seems the very worst way to absorb it.

We recently piloted a show which, in part, scoops up funny/shocking internet stuff for people who can't be bothered to find it themselves. Even in an edit suite on a small monitor, the internet stuff looks terrible. But imagine watching this stuff on HD.

There's only one solution - Sony and LG and Hitachi and the rest are going to have to introduce retro technology, maybe an analogue replicator box or have a fuzzy button on the HD telly to be able to enjoy low quality vt properly. And maybe this is Alan Sugar's chance to get back into to the market by re-introducing his classically shoddy tv-cum-video-cum-dishwasher unit for £29.99.

Fiction Man

Life on Mars was back on this week after an FA Cup-enforced absence. I get quite excited about this, because apart from American-made stuff like the Sopranos and The West Wing (which I don't watch even though it appears to be obligatory), there is not a lot of drama on tv for men to watch. This may seem a bit of a provocative thing to say but I think it's true: most tv drama is made for women - classic serials; gritty Northern dramas like Playing the Field, Clocking Off; all soaps; anything on ITV on a Sunday night. There's a lot of clothes and scenery and shouting and snogging but not many car chases or guns or fighting. Obviously this is not really down to a lack of imagination on the part of the programme-makes but on the part of men.

Most men, when they get past 30, seem to stop liking stuff that is made up. I don't know any 30 plus man who reads novels. Older men will read popular science, conspiracy stuff, Jeremy Clarkson, Does Any Wasp Eat Shit list-type books, biography - anything but cleverly woven star-crossed wartime romances; tales of kite flying in Afghanistan; deprived  childhoods in London-based immigrant communities or Jane Austen. Book clubs don't appear to have men in them and Richard and Judy's selections appear to be aimed purely at people who want something else to do while topping up a tan.

Why is this? The other night I asked some mates why men don't read fiction and one of them quoted a stand-up comic, whose name I forget: "I don't read novels because the acting in my head is shit."
Funny but not really representative. Another said: "It's an emotional investment, 300 pages in the company of strangers." So is the cliche about men being incapable of emotional equipment true? I think it may well be quite the reverse. Most men when they approach forty tend to be in some kind of  permanent relationship. This must be true, as single women of the same age are always complaining about it.  So what is happening is the potential for emotional commitment in these men is being soaked up by a real-life relationship, so they don't have the time for getting know new people in real life, never mind characters in a novel. This is evidenced by the fact that most men in this age group don't go out much; are very poor at making new friends and if they do have hobbies or interests, they are ones which don't involve talking to anyone else.

So to lure men back into fiction, people who make stuff up should remember the short-story format, which, like the really good tv ad, is both rewarding and not too long so that you forget what happens. Maupassant, Somerset-Maughn, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett - these are all pretty good, and would make good tv adaptations, too. Some of them even have guns and car-chases in them.

Werther's Original

We all know this toffee. It is a byword for old, sentimental and a bit boring. I have been called Werther's Original by young people on occasions. The toffee itself isn't great, it's not the definition of a toffee for me; I prefer Thorntons or the round one in Quality Street. What gives Werther's the right to call itself original? It's not even the oldest Werther's, as you can find out here.

So if you can't have trust in the world of toffee, what hope is there for t.v.? Well actually, in tv, originality is not a particularly revered attribute. In certain genres, two networks may well be working on exactly the same idea - no one at network A will be that bothered if network B's show gets on air first, in fact they will usually be praying for it to be a hit - their own show is more likely to find an audience who will know what they're getting, because the bottom line is, the audience aren't that bothered about originality either. I mean if they were, Werther's wouldn't have been able to laugh off the "Original" scandal, would they?

I was having this sort of conversation with a very funny tv producer called Jo Bunting, who you can occasionally see on ITV's Loose Women (I watch a lot of daytime tv) who gave me a great tv tip which has applications in life generally. We were watching Car Boot Challenge in the office, which is one of the many identical daytime shows about going around Britain's car boot sales and selling your old junk. They are all the spawn of Bargain Hunt, which in its early days was a terrific programme, up there with Watercolour Challenge , until David Dickinson jumped the shark.

What all these shows do, to give us a "feel" of Trowbridge, or wherever they happen to be rifling through bric-a-brac this week, is play in a vt package featuring sites of local interest, cut to some inappropriately funky music. But as the the director and cameraman spend a lot of the time gossiping and having a smoke, they don't have long to get all the GVs (General Views, apparently) in the can. So Jo Bunting's tip, if you ever find yourself in this situation, is go to the nearest gift shop and buy a tea-towel. It will have all the sites of local interest lovingly depicted from the most photogenic angle. If it's a good tea-towel it will have a map on it, so you know how to get there. Brilliant.

I thought I'd test this by having a look at some tea towels on the internet and do you know? It's true. Look.

I particularly like this one for Norwich - nice black and white illustrations. I actually didn't know the palette of tea towels was so rich. I'm not talking about the Rules of Cricket, or Rudyard Kipling's 'If', but a whole colourful reference library of fascinating stuff. By definition, anyone who puts information on a tea-towel will have a lot of unusual information going around in their head, so it's a guaranteed gold-mine of trivia.

A Confederate Ghost Air Force!? Who knew? as they say. So, after a decade of having to leave the "hobbies and interests" box empty on registration forms, I have something to throw myself into. There might even be a blog in it. I wonder if it's been done already?