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August 22, 2004
Telly addicts find new forum
Multichannel viewing makes common ground for debate hard to find. Roland White tunes into sites where fans relive their favourite shows
UK Times Online
There was a time, long before the mobile phone, the world wide web and even the Sinclair com-puter, when people would gather round the workplace coffee machine and have conversations that went something like this: “What about Steptoe and Son last night, eh?” “Fantastic. Pure genius.”
At this point, somebody might even screw up their face, hunch their shoulders and say, in the style of Old Man Steptoe: “Don’t leave me, ’Arold.” Ah, those were the days. Unfortunately, this conversation has failed to adapt to the fast-moving age of multichannel television. Its modern equivalent goes more like this: “What about TV’s Naughtiest Blunders last night, eh?” “Sorry, didn’t see it. I was watching Xena: Warrior Princess on Bravo.”
As multichannel television has moved into six in every 10 homes, there has been a gentle decline in the number of programmes we all see together and dis- cuss afterwards. There are, nevertheless, viewers out there who are aflame with passion for Sex and the City, who wish to debate the authenticity of Corporal Jones’s medal collection, or who have unanswered questions about the exact lyrics of “A finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat”.
These enthusiasts have no luck at the coffee machine nowadays, but they can turn to a growing number of television- related websites that are springing up: fan sites, listings sites, discussion sites, even one (www.tellytunes.com) where you can find out about advertising jingles and theme tunes.
The pattern is usually the same. A television obsessive with a bit of web- design knowledge decides to build a site dedicated to his, or occasionally her, favourite programme. Soon, other fans have not only discovered the site, but are taking part in furious debate about which is better: Star Trek or Blake’s Seven.
This is what happened to forty- something civil servant Laurence Marcus, of east London. “I did a course in web design, then wondered what I could do with it,” he says. His first attempt was a site called Bring Me Sunshine, a tribute to Morecambe and Wise. He grew more ambitious and, with a friend, created Television Heaven. “We drew up a list of 20 television programmes and wrote about them,” he says. “That was about four years ago. Now the site takes about 44,000 hits every month.”
Television Heaven carries programme reviews, a potted history of the medium and profiles of television heroes. Its style is rather pithy. Here it is explaining the plot, in a neat nutshell, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Takes the teenaged angst of series such as Beverly Hills 90210 and deftly interweaves it with the wonderfully unlikely concept that beau- tiful all-American teenage high-school girl Buffy Summers is the Slayer, the latest in an ages-old line sworn to protect humanity from the forces of darkness that lurk unsuspected under our very noses.” Why can’t more civil servants write English like that? Many of the inquiries sent to Tele- vision Heaven are a little on the obscure side. “People get in touch and say things like, ‘My grandmother was in an episode of Beat the Clock. Can I get a tape?’,” Marcus says. “I also receive quite a lot of e-mails from people asking if DVDs of classic shows are available. If they’re not, I pass them on to the DVD companies, which usually ignore me completely.”
Not all firms are quite so churlish. Television websites can be very influential. One in America, Television Without Pity (TWoP), is said to have influenced the scriptwriters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek. It began life as a site where a few friends could poke fun at Dawson’s Creek, but it occurred to the creators — a group of journalists and web designers — that if people had strong opinions about Dawson, then they might be interested in other programmes. They were right. TWoP now claims 800,000 hits a month, and has even been the subject of a doctoral thesis submitted to a university in Washington DC.
In her thesis, Jessica Stilwell, a Georgetown University student, says that TWoP makes her watch television more critically. She discovered the site when, during a trip overseas, she wanted to follow the latest developments in ER. Central to TWoP are the programme recaps, so detailed that up to 10,000 words might be written about one episode. “I read an
ER recap and, by the end of it, I found it hard to believe I had not actually seen the episode,” Stilwell writes.
According to her research, nearly one in three site visitors — who are mostly women — spends up to two hours a day there; 4% of visitors stay online for four hours a day or more. When do they find time to watch the shows? Sarah Bunting, a former Penthouse proofreader and one of TWoP’s creators, maintains that television companies keep a close eye on the debates that rage on the site. After all, it’s a free focus group. But do the debates have any significant influence? “Television productions have long lead times,” she says. “It would be difficult to say whether we influence plots or whether it’s just natural progression.”
One rival American site definitely hopes to have an impact on a television company. Don’t Save Our Show is a site created to raise signatures for a petition to end The West Wing, the White House drama series starring Martin Sheen as President Josiah Bartlet. The site’s creators had all worked on a detailed and well- designed West Wing fan site, Bartlet 4America.org, but are now unhappy about the way the series has gone.
“The show careers ever closer to being completely unwatchable,” they claim. “We would rather see it end now with some measure of dignity than limp on for two more seasons.”
There are some people who turn up their noses at television, who don’t think that Sex and the City, Friends or Only Fools and Horses are worthy of proper cultural analysis. Perhaps this is why television finds such a happy home on the web — a medium that also provides refuge for collectors of airsickness bags and different types of pencil sharpener.
Paul David, editor of a comprehensive television site called The Custard, says: “While it is socially acceptable for people to say they love movies or music, liking television is regarded by some as a philistine habit — so maybe they visit television-related websites to indulge that love without having to risk being regarded as couch potatoes.”
In 2002, he helped to create the site (The Custard, incidentally, is supposedly cockney rhyming slang for telly: custard and jelly), and now works on it full time. “It’s financed by savings,” he says. “A bit of money comes in from selling DVDs and advertising, but not much. We’re hoping to develop the site and perhaps interest somebody in putting some money in.”
He says that the site was established to provide the detail no longer offered by television listings magazines, through lack of space. “We all spent a lot of time looking through the television schedules, trying to find programmes worth watching — and trying to avoid missing decent programmes on the multitude of channels — and we reckoned lots of people must be doing the same,” David says. “We also provide opinions. In the past, you could watch a great programme, go into work the next day, where plenty of people had also seen it, and have an enjoyable discussion about it. Now viewing is spread more widely, that’s no longer always the case, and visitors like to see what other people thought about programmes they liked — or hated.”
Some people hate all television, and there is even a website for them. The White Dot campaign wants us to escape from the clutches of the box altogether. Which will leave all the more time to discuss your favourite programmes on television websites.
Posted by Jo at August 22, 2004 06:32 PM