Pompeii Live

[ewx]

Dear documentary makers:

1. Watch The World At War. Learn.
2. Do not keep telling your viewers what will happen later in the program. If they care they'll watch it.
3. Do not repeat what your talking heads just said. We heard them the first time and they said it better too.
4. Do not show any given animation more than once.
5. If your program is too short with all the above padding removed, put more interesting or beautiful things in it.
6. Do not demonstrate how fragile cliffs are by breaking bits off the bottom. This will not end well.
7. Keep the presenter off the screen as much as possible. It's not about them, even in the unlikely event that they're as good as Laurence Olivier.
8. Enthusiasm is not a substitute for exposition. Your viewers have a full set of emotions of their own.

If you follow these rules then you might avoid turning well-preserved Roman cities into unwatchably crap television.

Comments

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Are we discussing Pompeii Live!? I agree with everything although luckily for Channel 5 the subject matter itself was enough to keep my interest despite the best efforts of Peter Snow and Smokers-Rasp-Woman.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Seconded.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

9. If possible, get a presenter who knows a bit about the subject (blond airheads incapable of anything but repetition are bad; Michael Wood would be good, or indeed Boris Johnson).
10. Do some live archaeology[1].

[1] Did you watch the live Golden Mummies dig that Five did a while ago? The highlight was entering an unopened tomb, which kept the excitement going for most of the programme. Then at the very end they got in and discovered a) they couldn't do very much and b) it had been plundered already. I loved the irony.

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

Oh, amen to that. I tuned in, eagerly awaiting some good Classical archaeology goodness, and found out it was Just Another Crap Five Show. Still, they're obviously aiming their shows at the same sort of people that watch the late-night 'documentaries' about women with large boobs, so they have to dumb down I guess. ;)

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

Totally agree. However I did get some chores done.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

Dear ewx,

We're not trying to win awards or impress the educated who know all of this stuff already. We're just trying to fill up the acres of space available as cheaply as possible now that television has gone digital. That's why, for example, we make lots of documentaries on Nazi's - the television footage is out of copyright.

[kjaneway.livejournal.com]

Mmm... this is why I no longer watch TV documentaries.

[mhk.livejournal.com]

So many documentaries are of this patronising nature that one comes to expect it. How is it that if you are watching an advert, a film or a soap opera, you are supposed to be able to understand material that comes at you at the rate of 10 screeen changes including at least 2 flashbacks per minute but for documentaries you are deemed to be able to take in only 4 new facts per hour?

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Apparently the 'coming up later in the show' thing is because they actually rate viewers by minutes watched. So if you can get them to watch an extra five minutes because you told them what was coming up next, then you win. This is from a guy who works for TV, but disturbingly thinks that FOX news is the best news station, simply because they get their viewers to watch for longer. FOX even previews the *weather* report.

I don't watch live TV any more. If I can't fast forward through the adverts I'm not interested.