The Lost TV Generation?
20 Feb 08
Steve Clarke went along to the RTS Futures event the Lost Generation? to find out how to create a hit show for young people.
For channel controllers and programme makers one of the biggest creative headaches of the emerging digital era is creating hit shows that speak convincingly to a young audience on their own exacting terms. Even before the development of rival entertainment platforms, the challenge of persuading 16-24 year olds to spend 30-minutes or an hour in front of the TV screen and watch a programme was hardly a no-brainer. Imagine, then, the task of getting young audiences to watch a TV show when their default position is to be on their laptops using Bebo or Facebook, playing a computer game or simply doing some old-fashioned web surfing.
Yet as we all know, the right programme can still make waves and generate those all too rare water cooler moments with the youth audience, as this RTS Futures session reminded us. And although 16-24 year olds may be watching less TV than before, the fact remains that some very successful shows made mainly for an older demographic, such as EastEnders and Extras, rate highly with this audience. Moreover, bizarrely, CBeebies is more popular with this age group than youth-friendly ITV2. Similarly UK Gold attracts more 16-24s than MTV1 and FilmFour, while two-thirds of this demographic watched an episode of Top Gear last year.
One of the paradoxes teased out by this fascinating discussion, chaired by Guardian TV editor Gareth McLean, was that despite living in a multi-platform era, when even older audiences are learning to interact with content, the traditional virtues of well-crafted story-telling remain critical to a show's success.
'It is all about stories. If the story is good enough people will access it and find it,' insisted Phil Edgar-Jones, creative director of Endemol off-shoot Brighter Pictures and a former Big Brother producer.
This point was amplified by Bryan Elsley, the BAFTA an RTS-award winning scriptwriter and creator and producer of E4's Skins. In terms of how it is produced, he described Skins, an edgy, sexy teen saga depicting the lives and loves of a group of friends in Bristol, as 'Despite all the interactivity…it is actually a deeply traditional comedy drama.'
Fellow panellist BBC THREE executive editor Karl Warner, whose channel is in the throes of a multi-platform relaunch, agreed adding 'There's a bit of mystery that surrounds what young people want, but I do think they want the same thing that they've always wanted. Although packaged as a youth show, it is just really good story telling. For example, Fonejacker is a really simple, neat idea, not necessarily a new one, but it's packaged beautifully, which makes it vibrant and modern.'
If some of the panel sounded conventional, what did MySpace's Jamie Kantrowitz make of it all? As the social networking site's London-based senior vice president for marketing and content, international, it is her job to oversee the outfit's overseas expansion. Was interactivity, probed McLean, a key ingredient for successful content aimed at young people? She said 'When you think about somewhere like MySpace or YouTube the demand is about personalisation and customisation too. People can make it their own, like creating your own skin on MySpace or Facebook. So interactivity can mean many different things.' Warner agreed: 'People in television haven't caught up with that yet. They think of it as eliminating someone from a reality show.'
For an audience used to accessing content via the web and other platforms in addition to TV, how important are ratings in this emerging new world?
Warner acknowledged that while audiences watched BBC THREE shows on sites like YouTube and catch-up services such as the BBCiPlayer, the number crunches at BARB remain hugely important. Elsley agreed: 'Drama is very expensive and as a producer you want to feel the broadcaster has got what they wanted. So a low number is going to make you feel uncomfortable.' He went on: 'I think the way of counting audience figures has got to change. We think the Skins audience is actually larger than the BARB ratings reflect. I'm sure lots of the programme makers here would agree that is also the case for their own programmes.'
'I do think people measure programmes success in lots of different ways now,' added Edgar-Jones. 'People often talk about edgy reality shows such as Big Brother and the 'noise' that surrounds them. So we look all the time at how many people are using our website.'
Surely, the situation wasn't this cut and dried in the cutting-edge universe that is MySpace. Replied Kantrowitz: 'If you think about it in terms of revenue and advertising spend, one of the things that is going on behind the scenes is a bigger effort from MySpace to work with the TV partner, plus the mobile partner, and try and quantify streams, awareness and ratings so that you can do cross platform and cross company advertising packages. But as all of our platforms start working closer together, like Skins where the main digital presence is on MySpace, there's a lot of incentive to make sure every partner can quantify their ratings.'
The Lost TV Generation - How to Create A Hit Show that Talks to a Young Audience was an RTS Futures event held on February 12 2008. The producers were Nick Mather, Lindsey Nuttall and Peter Spiers.
