| Age of Abundance | Page 1 / 1 | Print this article |
Russell M Davies
, new media aficionado, looks to an all-access future at Channel 4
I was on Right to Reply once. Remember Right To Reply? There were these strange video-boxes around the country – basically a box with a video camera and a big button in which you could vent your spleen about televisual matters. Some of them would then show up on the programme, along with viewers complaining about this and that and programme-makers doing that half-stonewalling, half-apologising little dance they’ve become so good at. It’s a measure of how far the world has changed that these dribbles of audience voice felt revolutionary and special. Amateurs on the telly! And not just on Candid Camera and Game For A Laugh. It all seemed part of Channel 4’s mission to challenge the orthodoxy. The BBC would have a jolly programme like Points Of View with viewers’ letters filtered through the reassurance of RADA-modulated accents while Channel 4 let actual real people appear on the box.
You have to give Channel 4 credit for a history of doing this kind of stuff. When television bandwidth was a scarce resource they were probably more generous with it than anyone. Various little programmes and initiatives let real lives leak onto our TV screens, relatively unmediated by the received wisdom of the broadcasting experts. As well as Right To Reply there was The Slot – a chance for people to express themselves. Now replaced with Three Minute Wonder, another platform for the unexpected and unregarded. And if you’re talking about the conventional world of UGC they probably led the way with things like E-stings – an open competition allowing people to create promotional stuff for E4. It wasn’t exactly for your average viewer but it broadened the definition of who was ‘allowed’ to create TV content. They breathed life into and nurtured the independent sector; more people than ever before were making television; a more diverse, different bunch of people. This seemed to me a central part of what made Channel 4 different and interesting. They had a broader view of what and who should be on television and they let it happen.
But then, all of a sudden, everything changed. The thing that had been difficult and scarce – access to television – suddenly became easy and free. (And by access to television I don’t mean the sort of access that David Starkey or Basil Brush have, I mean the ability to film yourself and let millions of people watch it, if they want to.) This wasn’t something television did, it wasn’t Ofcom or Hat Trick or Michael Grade, this was something technology did. A bunch of engineers and coders just invented a way that everyone could make and receive video whenever they wanted. Some of them called it YouTube, others called it other things, but it didn’t matter. It changed everything.
And what is this UGC that everyone’s so het up about? It’s real people, using video as a way to talk to each other, to entertain each other, to piss each other off, to have a laugh. It’s nothing more complicated than that. What confuses matters is comparing it to the stuff that gets made in the world of televisual scarcity, that’s what gives telly folk the impression that UGC is all crap, but they’re missing the point. YouTube isn’t about virals and talent discovery and prgramme-makers earning a buck from pilots they can’t get made. It’s personal TV. If you upload some footage of you and your mates getting drunk and having a laugh in a bar then to you and your mates that’s the best telly in the world; cleverer than The West Wing and funnier than Green Wing. It might look like rubbish to everyone else but it doesn’t matter, that’s what televisual abundance does; it creates personal TV. And it’s really hard to fight for eyeballs against something that intimate. How do you make a programme that’s more compelling to a granny than watching her little angel in the school play?
There are all sorts of interestingly generous things bubbling under – things like FourDocs and all the online education initiatives
That’s the challenge for the next twenty-five years of Channel 4. How can they be as generous in an age of abundance? If their mission, and a lot of what makes them different and interesting, comes from giving voice to the disenfranchised, the unheard and the unexpected, what happens when they’ve got all the access they could ever need? We’ve already seen how phonecams and YouTube are changing presidential elections and news, what will they do to sports coverage and chat shows? What’s now precious and scarce that Channel 4 can be generous with? Clearly their cultural nous is valuable; they’ve got a good ear for the zeitgeist and a sense of the stories people will love. So I’m excited by the channels they’ll curate when everyone is creating. And there are all sorts of interestingly generous things bubbling under – things like Four Docs and all the online education initiatives. Things that don’t necessarily assume the broadcast moment is paramount.
I suspect the big contribution will be their sense of spectacle; that ability to get lots of people watching and even more people talking. That’s something that personal TV can’t do, that’s content that users can’t yet generate; the big, mouth-watering, you-had-to-be-there moments of cultural history. That’s going to be the new scarcity, the ability to get lots and lots of people all looking at the same thing at the same time and that’s valuable. Not just economically, but to our sense of self as a nation. I’d love to see Channel 4 being generous with that scarcity, offering new people opportunities to be at the centre of those rare, delicious national moments.
