Thursday, May 26, 2011

TV matters: the studio audience

Graham Norton at the Baftas struggled to meet the competing needs of his studio and TV audiences

Two recent programmes confirmed that one of the hardest tricks in television is to negotiate the presence of a studio audience. The problem is that both presenters and guests can be caught between playing to the small but very visible group of viewers in front of them, or the unseen but hopefully much larger audience beyond.

The solution is to make the people on the banked seats a character that adds to enjoyment or understanding: as Graham Norton does in his talk-shows and David Dimbleby achieves on Question Time by employing the invitees as supplementary interrogators.

In the last week, though, both presenters have suffered the difficulties that a double perspective can bring. Fronting Sunday's Bafta television awards on BBC1, Norton, in order to connect with the licence-payers funding the event, had to break through a large and rowdy group of broadcasting establishment grandees being given, as prize-presenter Cuba Gooding Jr pointed out, drink but no food.

Increasing the feeling that we weren't really wanted there, most winners expressed lengthy and sentimental gratitude to the colleagues alongside them on stage and those back at the drink-heavy tables. For the domestic audience, long stretches were like watching a corporate video of the salesman of the year awards.

Forty-eight hours earlier, Question Time from Wormwood Scrubs nick also suffered from the audience getting in the way. This show depends on the quality of its panellists. So a prison transmission would ideally have had four lags at the table with Dimbers.

Televisual and judicial regulations made that impossible, so the prisoners were in the audience: sometimes identified, sometimes not, encouraging a game of spot-the-crook. The panellists also seemed unsure whether to engage with the inmates or with the party and media outside.

So, for the first time, the invited questioners became more important than the panellists or the viewers. Studio audiences should be seen and heard only intermittently.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/26/graham-norton-bafta-awards

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