The Telly – is its greatest century still to come?
In our latest Research Focus report, Future Foundation explains why this is the golden age of telly and how the box in the living room corner still manages to keep such a hold on the national imagination…
All Set
In times to come, historians will, we predict, marvel at the mix of technological innovation and content creativity which characterises today’s television culture.
In a world of multiple channel options and the boundless entertainments of the internet, who would have thought that the box in the living room corner and magazine-format scheduling could keep such a hold on the national imagination? If Charles Dickens were alive today he would be writing for television. Coco Chanel would be cutting the frocks, Alfred Hitchcock would be pushing the camera. For this is what so many of the best talents are currently doing.
The recent showing of Sherlock enjoyed the Sunday night support of eight million viewers – thus doing a wee bit better than the most recent Dr. Who, which was still drawing a respectable six million. And (as we write) the planned cull of Coronation Street stars in the terrible Weatherfield train disaster is a serious tabloid ‘news’ story long before the big episode is actually aired – with every prospect that viewing figures for the big day will stretch beyond the current average of around nine million. And do we care who is fronting The One Show? Yes, it rather seems we do.
It is simply impossible to deny the verbal and the visual quality of so much collectivised TV viewing these days. To anyone who hesitates before such a conclusion, we have only two words to say: Mad Men. Yes, there is plenty of Grimsby’s-next-top-model, ferrets-do-the funniest-things, shark-fishing with nuns etc out there, but mainstream TV seriously competes on quality these days. This would be hard to deny.
Meanwhile, there does not seem to be too much consumer resistance to an ever more enriched in-home viewing experience. HDTV is edging towards a majority presence in British homes (as our latest nVision Research has shown), thus inviting more of us to stay in the living room and have fun with the family, perhaps eschewing the pub, Facebook, and the gym along the way.
Not so long ago, nVision Research found that 30% of us were ready to admit that when we get home in the evening, we turn on the television and, without too much thought, watch what is being offered. There is perhaps just as much incentive to think and act this way as ever before. And as we have often argued, the commercial battle between in-home and out-of-home leisure offers is now the fiercest in the British marketplace. Hollywood has an new Avatar, Toy Story, Iron Man or Shrek coming along every week. And TV battles like fury to keep us out of the multiplexes.
The Culture of Innovision
Television is indeed proving as resiliently creative as any alternative. The use of live split-screen visuals in TV coverage of track-and-field events at the London Grand Prix is a stunning case in point. And popular programmes such as Coronation Street now run online forums in which characters and plots can be freely discussed and indeed freely critiqued – an audience-management device, which seems all the more apposite now that, as we are seeing in our researches, almost 50% of people in the UK are now active social networkers.
Moreover, it remains the case that some newspapers devote an entire page to reviews of last night’s or last week’s schedule – acerbically recording all the turkeys, affectionately noting all the hits. TV output remains as culturally scrutinised for quality as ever.
Meanwhile, perhaps some commentators have been too pessimistic about the impact of new forms of programme delivery. In 2008, we asked people if they would like to own a device that allowed them to watch telly when out-and-about. Only 10% agreed. But these days, the days of laptops and web-enabled phones and of iPlayer, Sky Plus, ITV Player etc, more and more are growing used to engaging with mainstream TV in ways and at times that suit them and their individual lifestyles.
In a way, TV viewing these days might be described as ‘couch-plus’ rather than ‘couch-replacing’ – in other words, the culture of shared experience on which TV viewing has been based since the 1950s is not necessarily undermined by the rise of whenever-you-want broadcasting. And websites (such as the BBC) only stock programmes for a short time, which means we can only watch them when they are still reasonably fresh and topical.
Furthermore, as we can see from the chart, the popularity of PVR devices is growing all the time, once more reinforcing the sheer versatility of the set. As TV innovates even more at this technical level, it enhances the visual quality of the viewing experience and keeps inventing programmes that become cultural events in their own right, then it does not seem entirely logical to anticipate a world in which millions of individual viewers organise their own private schedules. In a sense, the devices which allow us to watch programmes later in the evening / on the bus are more likely to make us keep abreast of what our friends and families are watching than take us in new directions.
The Rise of Narco-Telly
And finally, the modern phenomenon of the box-set (DVD or Blu-Ray) allows us to catch (sometimes at a very considerable but perfectly pleasurable investment of leisure time) some terrific series – much of which we will have doubtless watched when they were first broadcast, as it were, live.
Future Foundation has sometimes argued that this is the era of narco-television: so many ‘feuilletons’ that are really power-injections of such artistic quality that millions simply cannot stop clicking that remote. How many in our midst got addicted to The Wire or Gossip Girl and longed for those languid Sunday mornings when we could have our three-hour fix?
Is this the golden age of telly? Yes, we rather think so.
The Future Foundation is a leading consumer insight and trends think-tank. For more information , contact Karen Canty on 020 3008 5772 / karenc@futurefoundation.net.