The new entertainment culture

vanity lair vs the future

a year or two ago i made a flippant remark about television being a 'disappointing medium'. this has become a quote that is repeated often to me, in particular by my old housemate who works in tv.

i was planning a post rescinding this quote after watching paradise or bust, master chef (in which said ex-housemate got her first producer credit) and in particular having seen a case study on Picture This at the 360 entertainment conference, which combined a community and tuition on taking photos with a more traditional television competition (although not in quite as integrated a way as they had hoped).

these programmes seemed to represent a new wave of television which revolve around harnessing people's attributes rather than playing to the lowest common denominator, and which linked back to websites and the real world to make a positive difference to it.

then this weekend i decided to have a lazy day and surfed cable for a couple of hours. the high point was unexpectedly coming across an episode of the old robin of sherwood series from the eighties, which has stood time remarkably well (which the current iteration will almost certainly not).

when this had finished i flicked onto a show on that parasite of glossy american angstcoms and reality television T4, which was proudly showing off its latest experiment in social behaviour Vanity Lair. This surely has to be the nadir. Contestants on the show vote each other on and off (no inclusion of the viewer interestingly - probably following the phone vote debacle from last year) purely on the basis of how attractive they find them. there is some conceit that this is in order to explore the notion of what makes someone attractive, but of course really this is about watching beautiful people be either sycophantic or cruel to each-other. there was a brilliant comment as the first beautiful person left the house from one of the remaining contestants that she had been one of the only 'real' people in the house, and that most were really false. to which you had to ask what exactly they themselves were on the show for.

one of my favourite books - The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse - posits a future in which a Platonic society looks back on our present with amazement at how shallow and short-term everything is. i hope and trust that we will end up somewhere similar, that most often change is for the better, and that the positive, creative programmes win out over the LCDs. that the age of social media and tagging will allow people to become known for greatness rather than aesthetics, and that entertainment will become increasingly exciting and engaging as we get to play an increasingly active role within it.

360 entertainment

Crossing the void, a one day conference on 360 entertainment (which they seemed to be using the same way i use 'the new entertainment') to 'explore the changing commissioning landscape by bringing TV and new media indies together to discuss collaborative opportunities'

No one actually told us what the void is supposed to be, and to me the whole thing seemed more about the enormous proliferating pile of content and tools and services that crowd this 360 world where online, television, mobile and ourselves meet.

Everyone I spoke to seemed to be crushing in on the same space, like the waste crushing room on the Death Star in the original Star Wars. Everywhere the talk was of television content alongside websites video and audio - streamed and podcasted - photos mobile - messaging, content, communities - geolocational music games quiz shows reality television really good television music film voting shifting uploading downloading sideshifting rollercoasting freebasing. And all seamlessly crossing platforms and rolled into one smooothely integrated format. Of course.

But (at least in the stuff that was presented as already accomplished, rather than about to happen very soon) – most was pretty web 1.5. Great content being pushed out, and some direct engagement with the key audiences to push it. Sky for example showed some great content they had pushed out over web, mobile and email for the Hogfather series. But in this (as with much else that we saw) there was virtually nothing that provided the opportunity to respond, engage, customise, cut up and share. 360 entertainment indeed, but without the further dimension of full audience collaboration which would actually bring it to life.

What was encouraging to see was that everyone was very keen to get involved in this space. The conference sold out very quickly and I had to be quite persistent to persuade them to find me a seat that had been invisible. And everyone was very engaged and excited and filled with ideas. And not just the indies from tv and multimedia but also the network commissioners, who were there in refreshing force and with budgets to spend. Matt Locke, previously of the BBC Innovation labs and now educational commissioner for Channel 4 – talked up his £6m pot for new media, and the fact that the vast majority of it will be spent outside the channel4.com portal, and in the spaces that 14-19 year olds are actually spending their time.

And it was both really encouraging and disheartening that half of the day’s speakers were talking up ARGs. And finally starting to build them outside of the niche, with ambition and proper scalability. Look out for Resistance is British, didn’t see much at all but it smells like the future and Paul Bennun from Somethin Else was easily the most convincing speaker of the day. And if we can get something similar off the ground this year, hopefully we'll be on the roster with him for the next one…

who needs tv?

Interesting to see two articles on the ‘new entertainment’ (my phrase, not theirs) in successive weeks of the harbinger of cutting edge entertainment The Guardian Guide (whose vocabulary of criticism always leaves me breathless with envy).

The first article was about the evolution of the new neverending series format pioneered by HBC with the likes of Lost and Heroes; that the worlds and plots of these shows are so complicated that you have to commit to them, and stick with them every week for years as they evolve over several series. There have always been long-running entertainment formats, Quantum Leap and The X Files most memorably for me, but the over-arching story could be summed up in the first minute, and then provided just the backdrop for the self-contained episodes. Whereas now the wider story is everything, and not just in terms of the ever-convoluting television plot, but now in a wider canon that seeks to provide a contextual backdrop of character social media profiles, biographies and sub-plots – the Silmarillion to television’s Lord of the Rings (and mostly equally as dull).

The following week’s story was about the latest generation of online entertainment, online shows such as Quarterlife and Kate Modern, that blends the surrounding content more succinctly with the main show to create a world that you not only consume, but also can get involved in – interacting with the characters as if they were actually your friends (as the pioneering LonelyGirl15 on YouTube actually pretended to be, much to the horror of said ‘friends’ when they found out she was a fictional construct.

However, there is still the all important next step to be taken (other than actually making them entertaining) – that allows the audience to interact with not just the characters and elements surrounding the story, but the plot itself. That allows them to cross the line between fiction and reality and become part of the story themselves.

It will happen, my guess is next year. Well, that’s the plan anyway…