TV on TV
Charlie Brooker’s ‘You Have Been Watching,’ The TV Show and ‘ Newswatch‘ - the new crop of TV shows about TV are still under the influence of Points of View. They need to innovate, says Michael Barnett.
Given how far television has come recently, you would imagine that it would have developed the tools to analyse its own programming in parallel with those changes. Yet despite the inexorable onward march from terrestrial through satellite to digital, interactive and on-demand, its approach to self-reflective critical comment has remained staid, the format predictable.
There can be no more damning proof than the fact that Points of View has survived into the 21st century. Terry Wogan's ever more laconic lilt and Anne Robinson's languid right eyelid long outlasted their useful lives, and the current luckless incumbent Jeremy Vine has done no better.
The longevity of the programme, on which the host wryly smirks at viewers' letters, epitomises both the BBC's puritanical Reithian seriousness and its thinly veiled disdain for viewers, but also means the formula for TV on TV has been prevented from innovating.
Channel 4's monthly The TV Show is a fairly new example of the genre, but instead of bringing the format into the new media age it looks no further for inspiration than Robert Kilroy Silk. Hosted by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, it combines audience participation with earnest, humourless explication from Channel 4 commissioners.
Talk shows often tend towards either inanity or conflict for the sake of conflict, frequently both, and it is perhaps to avoid this that Channel 4 chooses to fill the room predominantly with the young and hip, or old and placid. But neither this nor the congeniality of the host redeems it from its fatal flaw: the general public tend to be a bad source for insightful comment expressed articulately.
The BBC's NewsWatch cunningly interposes its own editorial judgement between the content and the great unwashed. However, in doing so, all it leaves us with is a superannuated media journalist attempting to care about grilling some nameless middle manager, while still channelling absent, otherworldly viewers. It has all the incoherence with none of the personality.
Which brings us at length to the current king of the genre, Charlie Brooker, who, almost solely through personality, has finally given British television the thing about which it has long fantasised - a programme comparable to cult US show, Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Comedian Marcus Brigstocke made a valiant attempt at a UK clone with The Late Edition, but never found the balance between high-minded media analysis and dick jokes that comes so naturally to the Daily Show’s incorrigibly adorable Jon Stewart.
With his BBC Screenwipe and Newswipe series, however, Brooker has found his own style: one that puts the ire in satire. There is no forum, no right of reply; only diatribe. Brilliant, brilliant diatribe.
Moreover, now the left-leaning Stewart has his man in the White House, blunting his edge, Brooker can legitimately claim to be one of the most important satirists in the English language, challenging orthodoxies that have for too long remained unchallenged, in terms of the way we learn about the world around us via TV news.
And it is for this reason that You Have Been Watching is so depressing. His new Channel 4 gameshow/talkshow hybrid brings together mediocre celebrity guests with the kind of scripted stuff to camera that, still, astonishingly, no-one can master but Have I Got News For You. Only occasionally is there a cathartic outburst like: "That's Bruce Forsyth's fucking job!"
Nobody is perfect, but if Charlie Brooker weren't Charlie Brooker, you would have to assume that the next target for his acerbic contempt would be Charlie Brooker.
Michael Barnett
Points of View returns to BBC One in the Autumn
The TV Show, Channel 4, August (TBC)
NewsWatch, BBC News, Fridays 20:45
You Have Been Watching, Channel 4, Tuesdays 22:00
