A radical idea. Intelligent / creative tv. An innovation. Channel 10 owned by the Community!

By Christopher Hire On June 25th, 2007

Television drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.

Or so the rap song goes. Which in itself is a backhanded compliment.

The point is what you watch/read/see/hear creates your mind-set. And intelligent, creative people don’t want their head filled with scams, murders, Mormon sectarian love stories, Grey’s Anatomy, fart jokes, a puerile US comedy, more gory murders and more reality porn of ugly nude people (ie. Big Brother). That’s Sunday nights.

You say there’s the off switch. That there is, but at 8.30pm on a Sunday night after dinner it’s easy to watch TV, and that’s what stats say we often do. (More on the Internet surfers later). And also there’s DVDs and video games.

But if we are perfectly honest, we end up watching TV, even when there’s nothing we like. It is because many of us are living alone or in pairs, or are socially disconnected (the number one global them in our research on innovation). We need the sound of human voices long after our single-dom or 1-on-1 conversations have run out of steam.

Further, often one person in the family is a TV watcher, others are not, but at least on some occasions you are going to end up watching. Restaurants are starting to have TVs.

So let’s accept TV is important to our lives. It’s a pervasive medium. Then let’s look at what to do to make it better.

Innovation in TV

First get rid of the cr*p. Serious. Big Brother - reality TV. Bin it! (more on this and Catherine Deveny’s mouth-watering piece in the Sunday Age later in this post.) Ditto pointless violence and sex. Bin it!

That gets rid of free-to-air Channel 10 Australia…! (This is Australias’ junk - channel). And news on Channel 10, if it wasn’t for Sandra Sully’s charm and Sports Tonight no-one would watch. I have a radical crazy proposal for Channel 10 later!

And bin anything with Adam Sandler. And if you haven’t seen Chevy Chase’ various vacations by now, you have really been abducted by aliens. We don’t need shows about that later. And how about less blood & gore, less gratuitous sex.

Well mainstream TV viewers have been declining for years now. Ads (the revenue model) get scant attention. I don’t watch adverts, that is channel switch or ‘mute’ time. I probably would watch ads if they were entertaining (like SuperBowl ads or many ads in France & Italy. There’s a talking cat that drives a car, with a talking pelican in France, I used to hang on for that ad! I wanted to buy insurance afterwards!).

Anecdotal evidence supports that most people are the same. Products are purchased as a result of word-of-mouth (including internet WOM) and to a lesser extent, editorial coverage. Ads that demand attention but give nothing are long behind in ‘influence’.

Why all this rot? Innovation blocked by statistics.

It is human instinctual nature to prick up our ears when sex (mating instincts) or violence (fight or flee instincts) are mentioned.

Statistics show then a spike in numbers, this is the same rationale for why they have sexed up most newspaper websites. We all get distracted by Paris, because it’s short hand for sex in our minds. Perhaps not good sex, but still sex. This is why newspapers are focused on sex blogs, which if you don’t stop yourself you click on first…

There’s also sample bias, as the biggest consumers of media tend to be those most monitored, and tend to be those with the least going on in their real lives (otherwise they wouldn’t have time to over-consume)

Want to bring about an innovation of television and news?

As viewers, Turn off, don’t click or don’t read articles about sex, Paris Hilton or anything sleazy. If enough people stop clicking then they will stop serving it.

Remember you are monitored. Maybe not by name. But by suburb and IP. So what you click on may not be the DVD or book you would buy, but that’s how media ‘read it’. You clicking is a ‘vote’ for the ‘puerile content’. If you want to read /view that stuff, go to a site dedicated to it, don’t click on articles in newspaper sites and make them ‘popular’.

And media companies you could look at supply side arguments for standards not demand side arguments for lowest-common denominator puerile rot about graphic sex & violence. If people really want porn they’ll access that sexual media - magazines or sites. You do not need to include it in your media mix.

Shock value to stem the tide

Better yet for sex & violence: there’s a fight between two lesbians over their uncle. There you have Jerry Springer. Because intelligent people know it’s rot, they make it ironic. They still watch though. Irony is a disguise for you actually liking it!

The trick to make boring instincts sustainably interesting Irony and Plot complexity.

The twin disguisers of stupidity

Plot complexity. Think Lost or recent seasons of 24. What is the point? Plot, where?

Irony. Simpson’s ironic pop-culture references. TV1 (Australian Cable TV) promos.

So moderately intelligent people don’t get bored create complex relationships, and plot twists. Make sure these carry on for a long time, and rarely if ever get resolved.

What they called jumping the shark in industry parlance, which used to be reserved for show close to dead, now IS the show. From the first episode. eg. Lost! Big Brother.

Compare this with excellent TV such as The Saint, The Avengers, Mission Impossible, Yes Minister, Are You being Served?, Inspector Rex, Happy Days, Denton: Enough Rope, The Nanny, Numbers, Dragnet, Four Corners, Sunday.

Now some of these you may or may not like.

But the point is in the past, and some of today’s good shows, don’t contain graphic violence (mostly) & are importantly a simple linear idea wrapped up in an episode.

Limited irony and plot complexity exist in these shows (except inferred by postmodernist thinkers). If you miss an episode no matter the next one is a closed episode.

Soap opera style plots can only be used in shows like West Wing, which aficionados will tell you are far better watched continuously on DVD boxed sets.

So can we go overseas for TV innovation?

I have the dubious honour of having watched television in most Australian cities, and more than 25 cities worldwide. I can tell you there’s still nothing on!

We had Foxtel Cable, but found ourselves watching TV1 (repeats channel) and classic movies most of the time, so handed back the box and bought the DVD player and Boxed Set DVDs instead. As the song said, 57 channels and nothing on…

Austrian and French TV have the best stories, and are most likely to play a good show irrespective of the age of the show. I also had a great respect for Aussie Channel 9 under the controlling hand of Kerry Packer up until the late 90s (who refused to give into the most puerile TV that Channel 10 now serves up), but now Channel 7 is stealing a march on 9’s former family friendly policies (with some exceptions).

How do we solve this? Innovation on TV.

We stop. Stop watching. So you internet surfers keep surfing. Buy DVDs. Listen to podcasts. Blog about how little you watch TV. Get the message out there.

Especially we need to make it clear to Channel 10 that Big Brother is puerile rot cynically served up because networks think YOU Are an idiot. Are you? NO.

My Channel 10 Innovation Plan

I’d love to run Channel 10. I’d sack the Big Brother team. Simpson’s would be put on at late night where it belongs. Variety shows with actual talent would make a come back. I’d bring back some decent cartoons on mornings, that kid’s (and adults) like.

The news would be rewritten and integrated into new media. And I’d add a few current affairs programs if anything. New media integration would continue based on the latest web communities innovations, as would web community integration. I’d make it the channel to end Social Disconnection in Australia, not encourage it like Big Brother.

My idea would be to get a group of mainstream churches together to buy Channel 10 with a few simple editorial rules (a charter) to keep it ideology-free, and family friendly. And more importantly to focus on intellectually interesting and creative TV. Interactive TV. TV is a medium where the supplier has a lot of choice, so it’s about time the supplier started using that for good.

We have to talk about community obligation and representing the majority.

My radical solution is intelligent TV majority owned by the church, with high-brow intellectual news / analysis and run by an independent board & executive. That would represent a mainstream majority of suburban educated Australians. This would represent a majority not represented by Channel 7,9,10, ABC & SBS as they are. This would be a new voice. The voice from the suburbs is often unrepresented.

Sound crazy? Well maybe a little crazy is what this media needs. Otherwise the decline of mass media will continue, and the rise of social media and blogs will continue.

Either way, TV in it’s current form is on the wrong-track and missing major markets. more importantly programs like Big Brother are assuming we are all idiots, sitting on the sofa, paying SMS fees, and being push-fed advertising.

Let’s show them different.

If You agree: To vote click ‘digg it’ at the top of this column.

Christopher-who-would-clean-up-Channel-10

PS. Here’s the Catherine Deveny quote in The Sunday Age that summed up Big Brother:

Big Brother is what’s called a reality show. Now whenever you see the term “reality show” you should simply substitute the word “sh*t” to get a more accurate idea of the genre.

A dozen of Australia’s most annoying morons are forced to live in a compound with no outside contact or mod- cons, under constant surveillance...The housemates get voted out one by one by the moron viewers until there is only one left. Who we will call the Big Moron. Big Moron wins a crap car, money and free watered-down drinks at their nightclub openings for the rest of their life. And if they are really lucky they will appear on ‘Australia’s Brainiest big Brother Housemate’.

This is ‘Big Brother (number) seven’… What did we do to deserve this? Simple. We kept on tuning in. Well, not we, I mean the people who read the ‘Herald Sun’ (a rival / tabloid)… ‘Big brothel’ (sic) is simply a bunch of vapid media whores in a televised chicken pecking experiment.

This is Deveny’s best column.

PPS. There’s also a technorati WTF on the innovation of Church & Community Owned TV here. I’d rather you vote on digg first though!

Connect to Christopher Hire.

Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.