The end of the 'noddy shot' is a ray of hope for television
Rod Liddle praises Channel Five for ending one of the petty deceits of programme-making — a trick typical of television's assumption that the viewers are absolute idiots who cannot spot a fraud Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it's a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald's Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true. It wouldn't surprise me if John Logie Baird was gripped by a feeling of revulsion and self-disgust shortly after transmitting images of his fingers wiggling up and down back in the 1920s, the first ever TV show — and, you have to say, a suitably banal and metaphorically appropriate debut for the medium. Television: a sleight of hand, which will tell you nothing. It's just fingers wiggling.
There is maybe something intrinsic to TV that automatically commands our derision; it plays to our faults, as a species — our narcissism, our impatience, our woefully low attention span. Recently, though, the fugue of discontent has grown a little louder, and particularly within the industry. It is not just the flagrant dishonesty of those rigged phone-in shows, which you know all about — the tawdry money-making scams where the public was gulled right, left and centre. That stuff made one or two people within television sit up suddenly and say, 'Christ, what am I doing with my life?'
Nor is it simply the BBC, or one of the companies which is franchised to work for the Corporation, stitching Her Majesty up like a kipper to gain a few more thousand viewers by pretending she'd had a strop. That stuff has had its impact, sure. It has, for a start, effected a sort of catharsis within TV executives — but a very 'TV' catharsis, rather than the kind of thing which might have been recognised as such by Aristotle. There has been much photogenic hand-wringing and crocodile tears, but in the end I doubt very much that there is the will to change things a great deal. Meanwhile, the bosses of the various TV channels have appeared before us and said hell, what can we do to regain the trust of the audience?
Thing is, they never had the trust in the first place: the public isn't stupid. Television is known popularly as the 'idiot box' for a good reason; the viewing public know it's a scam and a con, but it performs a function, it fills in those terrible longueurs which might otherwise be occupied by human interaction and that scary thing, conversation.
But there is a little hope for the idiot box — and it comes from an unlikely source. One of the execs who has experienced a sort of 40-second, boil-in-the-bag catharsis is David Kermode, the news editor of Channel Five. I never knew Channel Five had, or needed, a news editor — however, David is it, apparently. He announced that henceforth he was banning a whole bunch of hackneyed TV news 'tricks' which had previously been foisted upon the viewing public. These included the famous 'noddy' shots, wherein a reporter interviewing someone is later filmed nodding sagely in agreement with whatever is being said — even if it's John Prescott — to let the viewer know that the reporter was rapt and interested, rather than sitting there picking his nose or making obscene gestures, or not there at all. This requires, at the end of the interview, the reporter to sit in a chair and nod like someone suffering from Bell's palsy, while the interviewee looks on in patent bemusement. It is a device utilised when only one camera has been sent to a particular interview. If they didn't do the 'noddy' shot then it's possible the viewers might think that the interviewee just spouted his points spontaneously, sitting in his chair at home, and luckily there was a camera to hand, perhaps operated by his wife, who then sent the resultant film in to the news programmes. That's what the TV people think, anyway.
Kermode has also banned the 'contrived cutaway', whereby something wholly arbitrary, or utterly contrived, is shoved into a news report as if its presence there was of relevance. The 'staged question' is also to bite the dust — that's when a reporter is filmed sitting in a chair asking questions of a man who has just delivered a press conference on the other side of the world — i.e., it's a downright lie.
Kermode has been attacked in some quarters for disingenuous self-flagellation. The 'noddy shots' and 'contrived cutaways' are not really the point, Kermode's critics assert; these are mere incidentals, trivialities. They're not a deliberate attempt to boost the ratings by using chicanery.
Well, up to a point. But if the execs are serious about changing television and regaining (or even just gaining) the trust of the audience, then I reckon Kermode is pointing the way forward more usefully than, for example, the director-general of the BBC, who is sending all of his employees on a course to teach them the difference between truth and lies. Because the man from Channel Five has got right to the heart of the issue. Kermode said that these familiar TV devices were 'hackneyed' and also that viewers could now see through them so, effectively, they had lost their purpose.
What he didn't quite say, but must, by implication, have meant, was that they also assume the audience is utterly stupid, bone-headed, thick as a plate of mince. That's the crucial point — and it is an assumption TV has almost always made of its audience, which is why the quality of programmes we are given tends to decline year on year, rather than improve. And the more easily a TV producer can assume his audience to be stupid, the more likely he or she is to recourse to chicanery as a means to an end. Those TV phone lines which misled everyone were not, in most cases, a deliberate attempt to defraud viewers; they were simply the extension of a point of view that holds the viewer in complete contempt and assumes they are willing to put up with any old bollocks.
So, along with the noddy shots, let's consign a few more of those hackneyed TV devices to the bin. The ludicrous knockingon-the-door shot, for example — the staple of every TV documentary and something I've had to do in almost every film I've made. The audience is enjoined to believe that this is a wholly naturalistic event — the presenter, followed by a film crew, wandering up to some interviewee's front door, knocking and being admitted. I once had to do the door-knocking thing 14 times when about to interview a very thick lady in Leicester, because no matter how much we told her not to, through gritted teeth, she kept opening the door and saying hello to me and then offered a cheery 'And how are yow?' to the rest of the crew. Who, of course, the audience is not meant to know exist.
No deception is intended by this charade, of course — it's simply the assumption that the viewer is dense. TV directors, mind, will tell you that it is part of the 'grammar' of television, as if television possessed anything so rarefied as a grammar, rather than a series of primitive guttural ejaculations. They say the same thing about 'walking shots' too, where the presenter is filmed walking about like a mentalist, and cutaway shots of people's feet. These last two are used by directors operating on a very tight budget; they're a cheap and speedy way of using up film over which the presenter's voiceover can be recorded.
And this is the other point which David Kermode didn't mention, but might well have done. Television is these days a ridiculously cheap and penny-pinching medium, despite the vast sums of money it attracts through advertising and the licence fee. Most of the programmes you watch are made by young people on very, very shortterm contracts and very, very low wages. And by and large, as a rule of thumb, the more serious and important the subject matter and the more thought required, the more cheaply it will have been made. If David Kermode is serious about getting rid of those money-saving devices which, on a low level, con the viewer, then it will require an expenditure not merely of more imagination, but more money too. Send two cameras along if you want a shot of the reporter asking a question.
It has potential, this idiot box; every so often something bright and attractive glimmers through the ordure. As a medium it has immediacy and, at its best, resonance. But for too long the television industry has been mired in a self-disgust occasioned by its implacable belief that it must always appeal to the lowest common denominator, that its audience has the IQ of a lamprey. This is as true of even some of the most serious documentaries; it is especially true of evening news reports. David Kermode has recognised that it is a fallacy. It always was.
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