Some reaction in the Media Guardian to Panorama's new length (half an hour) and location (8.30pm on Mondays, BBC1) - Owen Gibson talks to the people involved - presenter Jeremy Vine and series editor Sandy Smith. Some interesting quotes re influences on the show:
Its tone will resemble Radio 5 Live, of which Smith is a fan. The radio network's informal, yet informed, take on events, together with its mandate for audience interaction, has infected every area of the BBC's televised output.
"It has to be serious but it also has to be entertaining and relevant to people's lives. We've got to connect to what they're interested in, as opposed to following our own pet agendas," concludes Vine.
And Smith says another test will be whether the show excites debate on phone-ins, on the news and among politicians. "It's lazy to say that by shortening the length you're just telling more simple stories. Newsnight tells impactful stories in 12 to 15 minutes," he says.
This shows the way Web 2.0 approaches have now been incorporated as standard by would-be pop media. You can't switch on FiveLive these days without being exorted to contribute your news reports, have your say, text vote on this or that, blog about something blah blah blah... Smith suggests that this approach is now influential across the BBC. Interaction, debate (e.g. buzz across different networks), celeb presenter and always some sort of direct personal connection to the audience's lives - this is now the way current affairs is done on mainstream TV.
I think this could be useful for one of the Year 3 students who's writing a dissertation about the way current affairs TV has changed in response to the expansion of media choice. As could the response from Dorothy Byrne (formerly of 'World in Action' and now head of news and current affairs at C4). She attacks Panorama's new time slot (up against C4's 'Dispatches'), worries about its shortened length and bigs up Dispatches and its hour long committment to serious hard news.
Most interesting are her reflections on past current affairs TV and the narrow consumerist agenda of modern equivalents:
There was a period in British current affairs television - some people think of it as the golden age - when three quite similar programmes, Panorama, World in Action and This Week, provided viewers with three heavyweight options. Of course, because I worked on it, I thought World in Action was by far the best. World in Action was there by Steve Biko's grave, but it also invented the contemporary drama doc and the current affairs stunt like getting a village to quit smoking.
And Dispatches has continued that tradition - creating the spin-off series Can You Live Without and demonstrating cures for kids' asthma. But World in Action always knew what it was there for - serious current affairs. We liked good ratings, we liked to make entertaining films - but the serious journalism was the driving force. It was probably inevitable that current affairs like that would become unsustainable on ITV. I admire Tonight with Trevor McDonald. And I especially admire the young journalists who constantly re-invent what is, taken in total, a very narrow consumer agenda. Supermarkets, cars, sick kids, sick kids going to the supermarket in cars, supermarkets which make kids sick, kids' car sickness. They certainly deserve an award for that.
But I have to question whether what the public needs is another half-hour programme with a populist consumerist agenda.
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