Television: style

Although the advent of ITV did not affect television coverage of news and current affairs, it did cause a change in the style and content of other programmes shown on television. The amount of money that a television company can charge an advertiser depends on the expected number of viewers at the time when the advertisement is to be shown. Therefore, there was pressure on ITV from the start to make its output popular. In its early years ITV captured nearly three-quarters of the BBC's audience. The BBC then responded by making its own programmes equally accessible to a mass audience. Ever since then, there has been little significant difference in what is shown on the BBC and commercial television. Both BBC1 and ITV (and also the more recent Channel 5) show a wide variety of programmes. They are in constant competition with each other to attract the largest audience (this is known as the ratings war). But they do not each try to show a more popular type of programme than the other. They try instead to do the same type of programme 'better'.

Of particular importance in the ratings war is the performance of the channels' various soap operas. The two most popular and long-running of these, which are shown at least twice a week, are not glamorous American productions showing rich and powerful people (although series such as Dallas and Dynasty are sometimes shown). They are ITV's Coronation Street, which is set in a working-class area near Manchester, and BBC1's EastEnders, which is set in a working-class area of London. They, and other British-made soap and popular comedies, certainly do not paint an idealized picture of life. Nor are they very sensational or dramatic. They depict (relatively) ordinary lives in relatively ordinary circumstances. So why are they popular? The answer seems to be that their viewers can see themselves and other people they known in the characters and, even more so, in the things that happen to these characters.

The British prefer this kind of pseudo-realism in their soaps. In the early 1990s, the BBC spent a lot of money filming a new soap called Eldorado, set in a small Spanish village which was home to a large number of expatriate British people. Although the BBC used its most successful soap producers and directors, it was a complete failure. Viewers found the complicated storylines and the Spanish accents too difficult to follow, and could not identify with the situations in which the characters found themselves. It was all just too glamorous for them. It was abandoned after only a year.

It became obvious in the early 1960s that the popularity of soap operas and light entertainment shows meant that there was less room for programmes which lived up to the original educational aims of television. Since 1982 Britain has had two channels (BBC2 and Channel 4) which act as the main promoters of learning and 'culture'. Both have been successful in presenting programmes on serious and weighty topics which are nevertheless attractive to quite large audiences. BBC2 is famous for its highly acclaimed dramatizations of great works of literature and for certain documentary series that have become world-famous 'classics' (the art history series Civilisation and the natural history series Life On Earth are examples). Another thing that these channels do well, particularity Channel 4, is to shown a wide variety of programmes catering to minority interests - including, even, subtitled foreign soap operas!

Дата добавления: 2013-12-13