2008 Round Up

It has been a very turbulent year for television in 2008. It has seen very stringent rules put in place and many top industry professionals lose their job for being in the wrong place at the right time – the wrong place being in Television and the wrong time being 2008.

Ofcom, the television regulator, has become much more aggressive over the way they monitor television output leading to producers cutting out perfectly good footage because they have become scared of sparking Ofcom complaints. It would be hard to imagine now, but I would take a guess that if ‘Little Britain’ were to be released now as a new TV Show, it wouldn’t get past its pilot episode.

This spark of tip toeing around the industry has been created from some disastrous scandals that have come to light over the last few years, starting with the money scam phone-in scandal in which some of Britain’s best loved TV programmes such as ‘This Morning’, ‘Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway’ and ‘Match of The Day’ led to being either taken off air for a period of time or suspending on air competitions. At this very point, the audience began to lose to faith in the big broadcasters such as the British Broadcasting Corporation and ITV.

To follow the phone-in scandals was Queensgate. In this case, the editors of a documentary following the Queen at her royal residence edited a trailer in the order of A C B instead of the natural A B C. This lead the viewers to be falsely misguided into thinking the queen had stormed out of a photo shoot in Buckingham Palace, where in actual fact, the footage was from a completely separate incident. However, this was a step to far for the BBC thinking they could mess with Royalty, and on October 5th 2007, the controller of BBC One resigned.

The turmoil of the BBC continued and in 2008, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand upset the wrong person live on air on their Radio 2 programme. This controversial move, which, should never have been broadcast as it was pre-reordered, led to Ross being suspended of ALL his TV and Radio commitments, Brand resigning and moving to LA and on 30th October 2008, the shock resignation of well loved Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas.

The BBC re-trained ALL of its journalists with a teaching programme that literally taught them the basic Do’s and Don’ts of making television. This training programme led to BBC Jersey’s newsroom re-think the way it did its lunchtime broadcast. In the past, BBC Jersey use to record news inserts and then, in edit, put a ‘live’ sign on the footage and inserted it into the news programme to look like the news anchor was talking ‘live’ to the journalist. Now it MUST be live, no added graphics that may be considered to intentionally mislead the audience.

Moving away from the woes of the BBC, ITV has not seen its best year in 2008. Over the past 5 years, ITV has been losing revenue and viewers alike. In 2003, since broadcasting from 1983, CITV moved from the morning slot on the main ITV channel to its own digital channel, losing money and viewers. CITV offices were moved out of ITV Granada in Manchester, along with Factual and a lot of postproduction offices. In 2008, ITV also announced it was planning to cut its regional news output, cutting down from 17 newsrooms to just nine. Although
it will economically help and even save ITV from failing as a broadcaster, it will not continue to provide valuable news to small communities which is what regional news strives to be.

The recession hasn’t helped Channel 4 either who are currently in talks with Five about a merger. This would secure high-end output at a cost-effective price, however, as yet, nothing has been confirmed with the BBC calling the move ‘ridiculous’.

2008 also saw the biggest rise in return of reality TV shows than any other year from 2000. For fun, William Hill bookies have a bet running that says X-Factor will have Christmas No.1’s for the next 10 years!!

2009 seems to be the year of bring backs, with channels re-writing past shows that proved hits with the audience. For example, FIVE have brought back ‘Minder’ and ITV have brought back ‘Krypton Factor’.

2006 saw the end of long running BBC show Top of the Pops. This was due to the ever-increasing demand of online content and illegal downloads taking place. The rise of technology saw the end to Top of The Pops, however, it has a positive effect on television today as Hi-Definition cameras are in many studios and location productions, which improves the quality of the programme no end. Producers strive to make the best programmes in Hi-Def such as Plant Earth and with the technology getting better, the productions will continually to improve in quality.