All talk

Dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di. Sigh. Them were the days. You knew where you were with the John Peel theme music. Hairy Cornflakes, afternoon boy posses and bits in the middle had all finished for the day. David 'Kid' Jensen had warmed you up with a session from The Jags and now it was time for two hours programmed just for you by Peely himself. Maybe he'd even read out your letter in praise of Crispy Ambulance.

Well, that was then and this is now. Your obsession with all things rockular is still intact (just a little less seemly) but you just can't face music radio any longer. Which is ironic because there are about a thousand more stations these days and they're all broadcasting in crispy, crisp digital. But when you tune in (if indeed you do tune a DAB) and the second half of 'The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight' comes burbling out, your heart sinks. And what do you do? Huh? That's right, you tune away to Radio 4, or 5Live or even Radio 7.

So what in Stipe's name is going on here? You're loving the music, the radio is playing the music, so why don't you listen to the music radio? I'm not a doctor, but I'm offering a dual diagnosis. Control and contemplation. No clearer? Let me explain.

The genuine music fan has been very fortunate in the last decade. The i-pod, i-tunes, Spotify - all gift wrapped and ready to be loaded with old Slaughter and the Dogs albums and rare Isley Brothers b-sides. Almost any tune you desire is sitting on a searchable server somewhere, simply waiting for you to invite it into your bijou home and modern life. The thrill of some jock on a pop station spinning your favourite platter may have been sweet but, like getting excited by the underwear section in the Freeman's catalogue, it's a joy confined to the distant past - and it 'aint coming back. You want to hear some Throwing Muses? They're right there on your laptop. Some Thelonius Monk? Bingo - your 'late night jazz' playlist online. There isn't a DJ on the planet able to keep up with your wandering tastes. You have the control now, so when it comes to music, the wireless is as much use as a cheese motorcycle.

Which only leaves the talking bits between the tunes to stimulate your massive intelect. Now, this isn't completely unlikely - unless you listen to 'local' radio. Radcliffe and Maconie aren't idiots by any means - and you quite enjoy some of the nice folk beThese are the talk stations - and we're really talking about soothing Radio 4 and its more adrenalised cousin 5Live. They are far from perfect, of course. But you struggle to remember when you last heard a compelling play on Ken Bruce's show or an interview with Werner Hertzog on Dale's Pick of the Pops.

Sure, you're glad Dermot has Amy MacDonald in this weekend, but it clashes with a report on the SETI project and they're re-running On The Hour on BBC7. And, gosh darnit, you have a rapier like mind and it needs stimulating. What's more Amy's entire collected recordings are sitting like MP3 flavoured sweeties on more devices than you really have any need for.

It's okay. Your anxiety is needless. Relax. Music radio will get along just fine without you. There are thousands of punters out there who are genuinely happy for Steve Wright's producer to select their afternoon entertainment. Their hackles are in no way elevated when their radio set spews Simply Red's 'New Flame', because they're quite normal and for them, music is just a background ambience. For you, however, music is your mistress with a hotline to your heart and you just can't bear the experience of a media graduate taking responsibility for your listening pleasure. So radio is now a source of comment, opinion, current affairs, humour and news.

It just no longer cuts it as a music machine.

Magnus Shaw 2010

Walls come tumbling down ...

Denis Diderot has a name resonant of The Beano, but was actually an eighteenth century French bloke, who got himself into various spots of bother with his tendency to be outspoken about such diverse areas of thought as free will and shopping.

Denis (and this is what attracts our attention to him here) pondered, in his philosophical way, about the ‘fourth wall’ that is figuratively in place between stage performers and their audience. The invisible yet tangible division betwixt us ‘down here’ and them ‘up there’, and vice-versa of course, if we wish to plant ourselves amongst the talent.

The fourth wall needs to both exist and not exist. If we place ourselves back into the audience again, we outnumber the actors, singers or dancers, often by several thousand to one, so it’s important that there is an unseen barrier, beyond which, we don’t venture. Otherwise, there would have to be a moat, or an electrified fence, at the Royal Opera House.

However, as an audience, we equally have to forget that wall, because the performers are doing all they can to pull us into the action; to suspend belief, and engineer our thoughts to the point of acceptance in our minds, that we are involved; that we believe in what we see.

Unforeseen events – a piece of scenery falls, a prop fails, a mobile phone rings – can shatter the fragile crystal of illusion, but, in the arts, and thus in life, we are in an age of change (as politicians are keen to remind us), and so, both those ‘up there’ and us ‘down here’ are transforming the way we react to a performance.

In the Independent this week, Victoria Summerley reviewed ‘Love Never Dies', the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Despite sitting in the most expensive (an eye-popping sixty quid each) seats, she spent much of her time, craning her neck sideways, to try and see what was happening on the higher areas of the stage. At The Adelphi, the dress circle stretches itself out over half of the stalls, so denying the top price seats any sort of view of the top half of the stage. Now you and I might assume, that someone ‘up there’ would have checked that we ‘down here’ could actually see the Phantom’s fairground in Coney Island, but perhaps we have moved into a RyanAir age of performance. A ‘What You See Is What You Get’, and don’t slam the door as you leave.

For Victoria Summerley and her daughter, the fourth wall was not so much an illusion, more the floor of the dress circle.

In our rocky/poppy world of music, the rules have been written on the hoof, a joint effort between us (in the manège) and them (in the saddle). Between us, we may have got it wrong.

If I pop along to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, I certainly don’t expect the King of Navarre to turn to us ‘down here’, and exhort us to join in with his oath to forswear the company of ladies. I think I speak for all of us if I say we wouldn’t know where to look for awkwardness. The fourth wall exists here, for Shakespearean actors to maintain their place, and us to know ours.

Equally, if I toddle along to see Lady Gaga, N-Dubz or Mott The Hoople, I want them to leave that element, those bricks of the fourth wall, right in place.

Prince gets it right. When he took over the O2 Arena for a season, a couple of years ago, he performed; we watched, listened, and applauded enthusiastically. The wall was there in a good way.

Paul McCartney gets it wrong. ‘Hey Jude’ is, for my generation, as much an iconic piece of music as was Beethoven’s Fifth, Mozart’s Fortieth, and Spem in Alium, for those of earlier ages. I won’t sing-a-long-a Thomas Tallis, and I don’t want Paul to be adopting a pantomime approach to my

Beatle hymns.

“Now just the girls!” says Paul at the ‘na na na na na na na’ bit, “Now just the fellas – now all together!”

No, Paul. The wall has come down in a bad way.

We share the blame. We treat the process of going to see live entertainment as an extension of lolling on the sofa at home, and nipping out to the kitchen for a quick raid on the fridge.

At the same Paul McCartney and Prince gigs (both at the O2 Arena), I was stunned by the constant flow of people up and down the stairs, not before, but during the shows. Instead of being accompanied by rapt attention, Paul’s sensitive treatment of ‘Let It Be’ was overshadowed by the sight of dozens and dozens of gig-goers scuttling away, and then returning with heavy loads of burritos, and cardboard trays of iced Southern Comfort.

We’re only a drumbeat away from Springsteen’s ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’ being drowned by the sound of bullhorn carrying waitresses yelling out “Who ordered the Buffalo wings?”

Maybe we have already gone too far down the (Thunder) road. It’s possible that there’s no way back now. Or maybe it’s time for change. Time for a coalition of understanding between performers and audience. Entertain me; don’t expect me to provide my own amusement; don’t ask me to join in. You’re up there. I’m down here. Ask Denis Diderot. He knew.

Terence Dackombe, April 2010

Go compare: ITV and pay TV

Micropayments. It has a cute sort of ring to it doesn’t it?

“Mommy, look at that sweet little micropayment! Can we have one Mommy, can we? I promise to look after it, and take good care, and not let it die a terrifying, lonely death like the parrot Daddy brought home last Christmas.”

“Oh darling, try and forget about the parrot now. It’s been weeks since we heard any sound from the chimney breast, and I’m sure Polly Parrot has gone to a better place by now...”

“Like Center Parcs, Mommy?”

“Yes darling, the Center Parcs afterlife for parrots...”

Drifted off into a Stephen King world there, for a moment...

This week, ITV didn’t so much launch, as nudge an announcement that they would be placing their channels behind (sorry to mention the ‘P’ word again) paywalls, and asking you to pay for individual programmes through micropayments. Except they didn’t say that, it just made life more convenient for some newspapers and journals to report it that way.

If we study the detail of what Adam Crozier (Chief Executive, ITV) actually said on Wednesday, it becomes clear that ITV 1,2,3, & 4 will remain ‘free’ to the viewer, whilst they take the interesting step of placing the high definition versions of 2,3 and 4 onto the SKY HD package. That isn’t a paywall. It’s consolidation.

ITV executives will be fully aware that the attraction for placing those channels behind a pay per view barrier, on their own merit, will attract subscription rates struggling to achieve double figures, never mind the number of sign-ups to make them self supporting or even viable loss leaders. However, by positioning them in a banded link up with a (growing) series of high def brother channels, ITV will be far better placed to develop and blend income.

The Holy Grail, the cash cow if you will, for SKY, remains the Premier League and Champions League football. The House of Murdoch is built upon the desire of the nation to watch live coverage of Wayne, Fernando and Didier. For any of the less desirable channels, any link with the golden goose is welcomed, both in terms of building credibility, and more importantly, to snatch the financial crumbs falling from the goose’s lips (do geese have lips?).

SKY’s football coverage is now fully immersed into the pitch of high definition. Getting any foot under the same table is a comfort to fellow broadcasters in these challenging times, but to present an opportunity to play a delicate game of football footsie under that same table, is too much of a temptation to decline.

In these changing times, today’s clear sighted vision of the future for media becomes tomorrow’s hangover, which is about as far as ITV dare look. If we strain our vision to the horizon, where all television is presented in high definition and in three dimensions, then those same ITV executives’ shudder of doom can be felt along the entire south bank of the Thames. That package would no longer hold its niche appeal, and (nightmare scenario) all ITV channels would have to support themselves through advertising; and advertising on television is going through a bigger crisis of confidence than the world’s most neurotic teenager.

So step forward micropayments. As with the reporting of the plans for the high definition channels, there have been misunderstandings in the reporting of these ‘one-off’ payments. Although the merits of attempting to milk even more viewer money from the Simon Cowell talent shows must have been considered, ITV have no plans to present the viewer with pay and display programming. They can’t afford the risk. Shows such as ‘X Factor’ and ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ need to engage with the biggest possible audience to maximise emotional buy-in and the concomitant ‘need’ to vote (and by default, pay) for that emotional choice. A ninety per cent loss of viewers, despite the revenue from the remaining percentage, would be catastrophic for the business plan.

So what exactly do ITV mean by micropayments? How strong is your devotion to those ‘Go Compare’ commercials? The Iggy Pop insurance ad? Those ‘send us your gold teeth and we’ll send you a cheque in return’ ones? Micropayments will give you the option to watch (for example) Coronation Street without the usual accompaniment of the jarring, clattering parade of salesmen knocking on your screen.

No announcement yet about the envisaged fee, but let us undertake a touch of surmising, and continue with the example of Corrie, which airs five times each week.

We’ll pretend to be ITV executives, so dress down a bit, and hang your legs over the side of the chair.

Let’s give the viewer three options for watching Coronation Street: firstly, we’ll let them carry on as they are, everything remains the same; they will get the sponsorship stingers and the commercials for the most dumbed down products we can shove at them, and we won’t charge them anything at all for the ‘privilege’.

Secondly, we’ll offer them the choice of paying for individual episodes during the week. Let’s charge them fifty pence per show. For this, we may still show them the ‘sponsored by’ logos, but absolutely no commercials will spoil their enjoyment of Kevin, Tyrone and Molly’s Shakespearean love triangle.

Thirdly, we’ll offer packages; a pound for a week and five episodes; three pounds for a month, twenty five pounds for a commercial free year. Did we mention that for the packages we’ll make it easy for you by setting up a direct debit agreement with your bank? So, don’t worry about forgetting when your payment time is completed, we’ll automatically renew your payments for you (and guarantee our income).

OK, that’s our time for pretending to be high powered executives over with. Now let’s go back to our usual place as consumers. Will we buy into it? Maybe you hesitated. That’s the problem ITV, and every other media outlet faces at the moment. Nothing is clear. Nobody knows.

Just as Mr Murdoch is gambling that sufficient readers of The Times will pay for viewing their output online, so Mr Crozier is stepping into the unknown with his HD and micropayment plans. And just as newspaper proprietors watch anxiously for the outcome of Mr Murdoch’s leap of faith, so any number of audio and visual providers will keep a very close watch on the strategy being developed at ITV headquarters.

Meanwhile, “Go Compare, Go Compare; you can be sure when you insure with Go Compare you get the lowdown and costs can go down; and you'll thank you're stars that you went to Go Compare”

Terence Dackombe, August 2010