In View
Edited by Dick Emery UK TV, 88pp, £9.99 (for orders call: 020 7765 2907)
Once there was just one TV channel. The arrival of ITV changed everything; BBC2 opened up a new world, Channel 4 a new universe. Yet recent years have seen the launch not of one new channel, but 300. Already 10.5 million homes have multichannel TV, and the government insists that by 2010 this will be the only kind available. As our dominant cultural medium proliferates, it is turning into a different kind of beast.
Since families gathered in neighbours' homes to watch black-and-white pictures of the Coronation, the box has been the anvil on which national consciousness has been forged. How better to define our tribe than as the people who watch shows like Coronation Street and Have I Got News For You and talk about them afterwards? Yet such programmes have been shaped by spectrum scarcity. To attract mass audiences, TV has had to appeal to all age groups and classes at once; the era of abundance requires the opposite approach.
Today, if you really like food programmes or cartoons, you need never watch anything else. A whole channel can be devoted to one football team. Already, multichannel output has 22 per cent of total viewing, while in multichannel homes 40 per cent of all viewing is multichannel. Steam channels are responding by refining their own identities. As a result, the medium that brought us together is starting to split us apart. Just a decade ago, the average audience per channel at the average moment was 350,000; now, the figure is 23,000 and heading much lower. It's a cultural revolution. What will it mean?
You might have thought that with academia now awash in media studies, the matter would be well documented. Not so. The trees are getting attention, the wood less so. Which is why Dick Emery's crisp, readable and penetrating dip into these deep waters is so welcome. Here be no jargon-riddled and fuddle-brained lecturers from former polytechnics. Insights are culled from practitioners blooded in the territory and observers drawn from worlds deemed laterally relevant - for example, the director of strategy at British Gas (which, like television, sells warmth and trust into the home).
The media sales brokers Mark Howe and Beverly Clarke say the arrival of multichannel TV transforms household dynamics overnight, as formerly passive viewers start to control their own consumption. Even those with access to 200 channels rarely use more than the 12 or so that they single out. Yet the forecaster Andrew Curry detects a sharp fall in attentiveness. Instead of being transfixed by what is on screen, people now do other things at the same time. Conventional channels have yet to face up to this reality, but music channels such as MTV and shopping channels such as QVC have been shaped by it.
Michael Grade, now the chairman of Pinewood Studios, suggests that where people do bother to flip from channel to channel, they look for the familiar, so the extraordinary and different become less likely to be found. Longer runs of successful shows make more sense than try-outs, and thus variety can diminish even as the number of channels increases. For the consultant Adam Morgan, TV people know too much about their business to see it afresh. To win viewers in the newly atomised TV universe, they should spend less time studying viewers' tastes and create "lighthouse brands" such as Apple, Ikea and Orange, which are so self-confident that consumers find them irresistible.
And the man from British Gas? Nick Smith reminds us that the energy market has already had to confront the proliferation of suppliers. BG has sought to stand out from its rivals by assembling so much data about its customers that it can give them what they want before they know they want it. Does this sound like the opposite of becoming a lighthouse? Well, no one promised that multiplicity would bring clean simplicity to television, even if that's what it has done for gas. Emery's essays hail the work which multichannel TV has pioneered in corporate joint ventures and public-private partnerships, but point out the unexpected pitfalls involved. Meanwhile, it turns out that even with 300 channels available, £3bn of annual investment in programming and the dominance of the English language, the industry is making a hash of exploiting creative rights.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the new TV world is the way the role of advertising is changing. Now that advertisers can no longer reach everyone through a spot in the middle of Blind Date, they are having to think again. Meanwhile, broadcasters need ever more stuff to fill all those yawning channels. The mutually satisfactory answer? Perhaps a gradual merger of ads and editorial through product placement, sponsorship and infomercials, producing the world of branded entertainment heralded in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.
The admen David Pemsel and Andrew Hill see advertiser-funded programming becoming ever more dominant in the market for eyeballs (otherwise known as "the attention economy"). Don't even expect you will be able to spot and reject it. Relationships between editorial and advertisement will be subtle and ambiguous, as in Jamie Oliver's relationship with Sainsbury's, which does not depend on anything as crude as requiring Naked Chef to restrict itself to Sainsbury's ingredients or transmit from a Sainsbury's store. Pemsel and Hill promise ambitious formats, creative talent and high production values. It's just that you may no longer know who is telling you what and why.
Abundance, it emerges, will certainly change our lives, but it may narrow rather than broaden our horizons. Sadly, it seems that in television, as elsewhere, more may in the end mean worse.
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