This is not as some will claim because one party has been in power too long
This is not, as some will claim, because one party has been in power too long. Nothing appears to happen because nothing is happening – only the dull grind of the party game. Politicians and the media are locked in a deadly and stultifying embrace. This will mean subjecting themselves to a random sample of callers – a high proportion of whom will be mad, terminally misinformed or plainly wrong – and to a set of issues that may not remotely resemble those chosen by Westminster.The good side of this is that Scott and his sample of B1s, B2s and C1s are right.
Politicians will either not get airtime or they must accept the terms of Talk. Two programmes are seen as the most compulsive players – BBC2’s Newsnight and Radio 4’s Today.The Talk response is to subvert the game by breaking the rules. Jeremy Scott, the programme director, says market research shows their target audience regards a standard interview between a journalist and a politician as a joke. It is a joke because it is boring, irrelevant and rigged, a game played by two mutually supportive halves of the same establishment and specifically designed to exclude the newly media-confident masses. Thirty years ago, if you confronted a man in the street with a camera or microphone, chances were he would freeze, or deliver a fewdeferential platitudes through his clenched, frightened teeth at best.Now everybody is in show business, and everybody is a star.
The public walks the streets or even sits at home expecting the arrival of microphones and cameras. When the hardware does appear, they will be brilliant, natural, funny and opinionated. Above all, they want to Talk.This has certain implications, some of which have been understood by TRUK. The point here – and it is the most important precondition for the success of Talk – is that ordinary people are now very good at broadcasting. As far as I know, nobody ever gets angry about this, just as TV watchers don’t get angry when Jeremy Beadle or Chris Evans invades their lives.
Stations like Kiss FM – awful music and lobotomised chat for the cultivated man to slit his wrists by – or shows like Chris Tarrant’s on Capital FM aggressively engage audiences through competitions and games.Perhaps most significantly, they surprise listeners by calling them up without warning. The form changes because, suddenly, the show’s presenter is on the side of the audience against the experts. The content changes because it abandons the whole notion of respectable subjects, going instead for the clammy, the intimate, the immediate.On radio, the same process has started here. They are uniformly dire, but all indicate a shift of emphasis in form and content. But the climate of broadcasting can be changed by the demand for audience participation.To some extent, this has happened already.
