Talk is cheap, and now it’s boring too

It’s that time of year again, when I am compelled to switch to TVM, Super One or Net on certain evenings to watch the ‘must see’ discussion shows. And I always end up wondering why as I find myself watching the same recycled guests argue and bicker with the same recycled politicians, thrashing out the same recycled arguments.

This may be considered a ground-breaking opinion – and I’m being sarky here – but I really think the time has come to move away from the tried and tested (and tried and tested, and tried and tested) formula of bringing people into the studio and having them discuss A Major Topic. Sometimes it ends up being not a major topic at all, but something insignificant and pointless, and not even remotely entertaining besides.

The discussion programme formula was never ideally suited to Malta anyway, because it depends for its success – and by this, I don’t mean viewer ratings in an environment where people watch home-grown shows by default because they don’t understand English and don’t really like what’s on RAI – but quality standards and meeting the market’s needs. Call me a pain in the butt, and lots of people probably will, but I don’t judge shows on their viewer ratings. That’s for the advertisers to do. I judge them on other things: like whether I’ve learned anything at all in the process, or whether I have at least been entertained.

Some shows pass muster, others don’t – it all depends on who’s on that night and what the big discussion is all about. But speaking in general, all you get is a bunch of men trying to use the pitch of their voices to make their point, interrupting, ticking each other off for interrupting, saying ‘Hallini nitkellem’ and arguing like people best described using the taboo H-word in a bar after one too many beers. Either that, or they’re sitting round a table in some badly-lit setting conversing with each other, so that we’re left with the impression that we’re flies on the wall at a very tedious dinner-party.
Most of the time, the points which these loud men and the occasional woman fight so hard to make are illogical, nonsensical or downright idiotic. And instead of ending up more enlightened after the show, the audience sitting at home on their sofas are even more confused than they started out, when the whole point of shows like that should be to crystallise the situation – unless they’re on Super One and have the express political aim of sowing doubt and promulgating chaotic opinions.

Discussion shows started out as a novelty back in the early 1990s when nobody discussed anything on air because we had one television station and one radio station and the only talking that got done was in kazini tat-te. Now they’re not such a novelty and with three television stations fighting for ideas and playing musical chairs with the same few guests – and trying to ring the changes with some nonentities nobody knows or cares about – things have long since started to seem hackneyed and stale. These shows have carried on in terms of popularity with producers and station-owners because they are relatively cheap and easy to produce – and here I have to stress the ‘relatively’ because there is little that is cheap and easy about this process – compared to the documentary/reportage format. The market, however, is screaming out for the shift to the latter format, and has been screaming out for it for years now.

If I were in television, rather than in print, I would be right in there doing it. Having a feel for the market and being able to pick up on shifts when they are barely perceptible, still more when they are jumping around with fluorescent lights on them, is crucial to survival and success in a competitive market. The problem is that, for all the stations and producers in these tiny islands, the television market isn’t really that competitive at all. It feels strangely static. The only competition going on is the battle for advertising. Well, I can give the production companies this advice for nothing: the first one to produce a really good show in the documentary/reportage format is going to run away cheering with the bulk of the television market’s advertising revenue. The advertisers are going to be fighting to get in and the viewers will be cancelling dates to sit home and watch it. But it’s got to be good, and nothing can be good unless you’ve got the right people to do it.

The trouble is that a show like this takes more than just time and money to produce. It takes skill, talent and lots of training. Many people have got a television camera, but as I can see to my absolute horror when I switch to Super One, Net or TVM, not many people know how to use it. Too many of the things I see, before I hastily avert my eyes, are like something produced by students for fun in a garage in a minor Sicilian town, for the local network. What rubbish, really – one wants to sit and weep. Money, or the lack of it, is invariably given as the excuse. But the truth is that it isn’t lack of money which is the root cause of the problem, but lack of imagination and lack of real ability and skill. The way things stand now, anyone with a television camera, the money to buy air-time and a sales team to sell advertising can get a show, and the effect of all this is quite horrendous.

That whole business of kitchen cupboards sponsored by a distributor and stuck in some garage-like set while unpaid guests talk about (sponsored) food and other unpaid guests sit on a (sponsored and hideous) sofa on the other half of the set talking about make-up is a separate field entirely. I’m not going to get into that. It is current affairs which interest me, and the way these are handled. When something happens in the country – or for that matter, outside it but with an influence on Malta – I want to know what it means. I want to know the facts. I want to hear the relevant sound-bite comments of people who are directly involved or who have a professional interest in what’s happening. I do not, and here I just want to spell out ‘not’ in capital letters, want to switch on the television and watch six talking-heads, the same old men in the same old suits or worse, the same old casual outfits, shouting at each other and trying to squash one opinion with another. Who cares what they think? I mean, honestly.

The discussion format is particularly ill-suited to Maltese society not just because the formality of discussion and polite discourse is completely alien here, with the result that the rare civilised guest is drowned out by the hideous noise and childish ‘issa t-tern tieghi’ behaviour, but also because discussion programmes take as a given the presence of an informed audience at home. Discussion programmes are not there to present the facts. They are there to discuss them. They are there to open up the wider implications of what those facts mean. But because the vast majority of Maltese people read nothing, not even the Sunday newspapers, and get their information through gossip and hearsay, this is a recipe for disaster.

The standard discussion-programme format used by RAI and the BBC just can’t work here with TVM, and so what we have is a tragic hybrid, mixing reportage of the facts with scenes of men shouting at each other. I really can’t stand it anymore, and the only reason I watch is because it is my business to keep in touch with what is going on. If I didn’t have to do this, I would never watch Maltese television again. Thank God I speak English, and if I had the patience for the Italian way of communicating I would watch Italian television too, but I really can’t take the ‘paroli paroli’ style of talking, though I admire the production standards immensely.

We live and operate in a situation where people need to have the facts and the implications of those facts spelled out to them. This isn’t condescension. It’s what people actually want, what they are crying out for. It is what I want, for heaven’s sake, and I’m someone who devours newspapers, books and magazines like Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster devours biscuits. With reams of information pouring at me every day I find that I would dearly love to be able to switch on the television in the evening and watch something that synthesises what’s going on, that breaks down the arguments and presents the facts clearly. I do not in any way want to watch six men shouting at each other about what they think the problem is. I do not want to watch people in a studio at all. I want to watch documentary-style clips brought together in a smooth and perfect whole – easier on the eye and more stimulating for the mind, while at the same time being more restful at that time of night.

The documentary/reportage format allows producers to make a great many more subjects interesting than they possibly could by using the past-its-sell-by-date studio discussion in its Maltese-style format. I know through direct experience that precisely because the vast majority of Maltese people live in households where there are few newspapers, books or magazines – though there is, thank heavens and the strenuous efforts of this government, the horizon-widening internet – many are thirsty for information and knowledge even if they don’t yet know it. Put it this way, if you grow up in a household where there are no periodicals or newspapers, it’s going to be a long time before you find out that there’s stuff out there which is really interesting. Television plays a crucial role here because it’s in people’s homes already, and they don’t have to form the habit of going out to buy it.

A subject that couldn’t stand the test of a one-hour studio discussion would be perfect presented in a different format. But because the discussion or the interview are the only television formats being used right now for current affairs, too many topics are not being discussed at all, and the net result is great big gaps in people’s knowledge, or not enough awareness about important issues.

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.