FOR years the latest Coronation Street plot line was a standard question for trainee journalists seeking their first job, not because they’d be on the Weatherfield beat but it was a test to see how much they kept up with popular culture and were in tune with the shows their readers might follow.
With the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982 came Brookside, Phil Redmond’s Merseyside caper set in a specially built housing estate which first put together The Royle Family’s Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson. Surely Jimmy Corkhill and Sinbad should still be up there as great British comic creations with Jack and Vera Duckworth.
Just when we thought soap operas should be about humour as well as drama, in stepped the BBC in 1985 with EastEnders and the unrelenting gloom and misery from the badlands of Walford are with us still. “Oi’ll get you, Wilmott-Brown” as Pete Beale sought revenge for the assault of his missus Caff still jumps into my head every time I hear the “doof doofs” that signal the start of half an hour of depression.
More than six million people still watch an average Street and or EastEnders episode, but surely the era of the soap as the motif of popular culture is over. In its place is reality TV, in a new phase that dominates the airwaves in ways we have never seen before. You thought Davina McCall was ubiquitous after Channel 4 launched Big Brother in 2000, or Ant and Dec with I’m a Celebrity? That was until the behemoths that are the Great British Bake Off (13.4 million viewers) and Strictly Come Dancing (10.4 million for the launch show this month alone). If there was ever any threat to the BBC’s new-found hegemony as keeper of the Great British sense of nationhood, these shows saw it off.
This is why the Corporation’s news channels have been plunged into doom-laden hand-wringing to the extent that it’s as if a week of national mourning has been ordered. Stop all the clocks, muffle the bells, polish the livery for the black-plumed horses; the Great British Bake Off is leaving the BBC.
Presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc have already announced they will not be crossing the kitchen floor to Channel 4, Mary Berry’s husband popped up yesterday to indicate she wasn’t going either and the nation waits with bated breath for Paul Hollywood’s decision.
So it looks like there will be something called the Great British Bake Off on Channel 4, but it won’t be the Bake Off and the BBC will come up with something else. In the other direction went Top Gear, with the BBC keeping the multi-million pound franchise but losing the presenters who made it tick. But, thank the stars, even without Brucie and the impending departure of judge Len Goodman, Strictly Come Dancing foxtrots on. Meanwhile, Alan Sugar growls in the corner awaiting the next batch of international quality eejits for The Apprentice.
What is different now is the extent to which the BBC squeezes every last drop of news potential from these shows, carefully scheduling the appointment of every presenter and judge, controlling the information about participants and fitting it all into a news grid more akin to political campaigning than the launch of a TV show.
So out of the wreckage of Top Gear, came a media frenzy about the new presenting team in which the BBC was the story, source and conduit. For Strictly Come Dancing there is the drip-drip of information about the latest set of celebrity contestants as if any of this really matters. It will be the same for the heir to Bake Off.
TV promotions, websites and radio-show content are all part of the bandwagon, with the Chris Evans breakfast show on Radio 2 in the vanguard. More than 10 million people tune into Evans every morning for a programme predictably packed with features about the BBC’s output, most perversely the hype surrounding Evans himself and his stab at Top Gear. Call it watercooler chat, but you don’t have to actually watch the shows to be sucked into the BBC’s reality TV vortex.
This goes beyond simply launching light entertainment programmes. It is the harnessing of news schedules to maximise audiences, and so maintain political support for the license fee. On taking over in 2013, BBC Director General Lord Hall said this: “We want BBC Two to be broad and popular, finding the next Great British Bake Off as well.” No wonder.
* In other news, the chairwoman of the BBC Trust, Rona Fairhead, yesterday announced she would be standing down after she faced re-applying for her job.
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