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Should gay roles be played by gay actors?

Today’s social media controversy comes courtesy of former Doctor Who show-runner Russell T Davies who has gone on record in an interview that he believes gay roles should generally be played by gay actors.

As you might expect, the response to this argument has been both immediate and strong. Some people have argued that it’s against the whole principle of acting to say that people should only play people like themselves (while obviously skipping over the obvious complexities of — or analogies to — a white actor playing a black character or a man playing a woman’s experience). Others have argued that if straight actors can’t play gay, then gay actors should not be able to play straight characters either.

In the middle of a lot of this is the same sort of generalized tedious sentiment we often get in these kinds of discussions – stuff that goes along the lines of, “it’s all political correctness gone mad” – groans about the “woke brigade”.

Now, these positions are infuriating, frustrating and wrong, but for many people why they are wrong is far from obvious. Superficially, they seems simple, commonsensical, self-evidently right. So for that reason I thought I’d go a bit above and beyond the call of duty and write a little piece explaining why subjects like these are more complex and intricate than they might initially appear, and why—in my opinion—even if it may not be desirable long-term, it is far from unreasonable to argue that gay parts should generally be played by gay actors.

I’m going to break this into three separate questions which I think have bearing on who should play which roles:

  1. Is there equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors?
  2. Can (and do) straight actors accurately portray gay people?
  3. If straight actors shouldn’t play gay, does it therefore follow that gay actors should not be able to play straight roles?

I’ll then try and wrap things up with a brief summary (you can skip to that right now if you can’t be bothered to read everything) and a brief articulation of my own opinion.

But if you’re with me for the long read, let’s jump right in…

Question 1: Is there equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors?

No. The truth is that there is not equality of opportunity for gay and straight actors, any more than there has been equality of opportunity for female actors, people of color or any other non-gay member of the LGBT community.

While it has clearly become easier for gay actors to get ahead in Hollywood or in acting generally in recent years, being gay is still often an impediment to a successful acting career at the highest levels.

It is simply true that actors who are out and proud and well known as being gay simply don’t get given straight roles as often—particularly straight leading roles—in movies or TV. Out gay actors who take on these roles are often characterized as ‘not believable’, while a straight actor who plays a gay role (at least over the last thirty years or so) is more often characterized as ‘brave’.

So here is our first argument about why gay roles should generally be played by gay people. There simply aren’t very many LGBT roles on TV or film, gay people are under- and often mis-represented, and (if they’re out) they’re often simply not allowed to play high profile non-gay roles.

Surely then, if gay actors are being purposefully excluded from many prominent straight roles, they should at least be considered preferentially for gay roles?

Question 2: Can (and do) straight actors accurately portray gay people?

Our next argument is based on the assumption that it is necessary, desirable or significant for gay people to be accurately depicted in drama. You can break this assumption into two parts – (a) that it makes for better drama to have more authentic performances, and (b) that it is morally or politically important to portray gay people in an accurate, convincing or (most importantly) non-stereotypical or discriminatory way.

I think that first part is self-evidently true most of the time and barely worth interrogating. The second part depends on whether or not gay or other LGBT people are still disadvantaged in society, experience discrimination or harassment, or are under-represented in drama. All the evidence says that they absolutely are.

Gay men generally earn less than straight men, gay people still often don’t feel comfortable express affection to their partners in public, gay teens are twice as likely to attempt suicide than straight teens, and twice as likely to ‘succeed’ when they try. Gay kids also represent 25-40% of homeless youth across the US and UK, and well over 90+% of gay kids report hearing homophobic abuse in the playground on an almost daily basis.

It seems clear to me—given this situation—that there’s an obvious imperative to try and fix things, or at least to not be complicit with them. And one obvious way to fight misinformation and discrimination against LGBT people is by attempting to represent them properly on TV and film.

This obviously does not mean by any means making every gay character a paragon of virtue. But it does mean representing gay people as they actually are—in all their range, variety and complexity—rather than resorting to stereotype or discriminatory tropes.

Which brings us to our second question – are straight actors capable of doing this?

The short answer here is yes. They absolutely can. And they sometimes do. I can name a number of films and movies where I think straight people have done tremendously good work portraying gay characters.

But as always, the devil is in the details. And the longer answer is that even today, many straight actors do not truly understand the lived experience of gay people and so — rather than depicting rounded characters that reflect real life — they either portray two-dimensional figures without any richness or understanding, or they resort to codes or symbols or stereotypes to communicate ‘gayness’.

The reality is that LGBT people often have some commonalities of experience that are often invisible or simply not understood by straight people. There’s the common experience of growing up around homophobic comments, and then coming to realize that those comments are about you. There’s the common experience of having crushes on people and knowing that you have to be completely secretive about them. There’s the common experience of lying to people around you and misleading people because you’re scared of how they’ll react if they find out the truth. There are the common experiences of coming out to friends, family, colleagues – over and over and over again as you meet new people. The common experience of someone you like making homophobic comments because they just don’t know. The common experience of not knowing how much of yourself you can reveal on the street without fear of attack. There’s the different way you meet people like yourself, the different support infrastructures you fabricate for yourself. The list goes on and on.

Not all LGBT people experience all of these things, and no doubt some experience none of them. But for most LGBT people, their path has been different from most of their straight peers and there will be things that most LGBT people experience that most straight people will not. And these things are a part of the complexity of the character and backgrounds of almost every fictional gay person.

For many straight actors, their experience of gay people will be via two unrepresentative samples, (a) their most confident out gay friends, (b) via previous representations of gay people in movies and TV. Forty years ago those representations were of sad, disillusioned, broken people who had horrible times coming out or were in the process of dying of AIDS, or ultra-camp flamboyant people with limp wrists and catch phrases. Twenty years ago they were more often than not very attractive and well-groomed men who were slightly bitchy best friends to nearby career women. Today they’re a lot better and more nuanced, but they’re still flawed. You only have to look at fantasy fiction to see that there’s still prejudice in movie making. How many daring archaeologists are gay? How many leather coat wearing space cowboys are gay? How many spies? How many secret agents?

So let’s summarize our second argument about why gay roles should generally be played by gay people: while there are a number of examples of particularly good straight actors who have very effectively played gay characters, they are uncommon and massively overwhelmed by bad ones. If you want to fix that misrepresentation (and in turn have a positive effect on the lives of gay people) then one thing you can substantively do is cast gay actors in gay roles.

Which brings us to our final question…

Question 3: Does it therefore follow that gay actors should not be able to play straight roles?

The two previous questions are, I think, fairly self-explanatory. But now we reach one that is a little more complicated to answer. The threads of this answer are already present in the two we’ve already made, but to make them clear and explicit we really need to address the most fundamental mistake people tend to make when they talk about minority groups.

So the commonly expressed position we’re investigating is superficially simple – if straight people should probably not play gay characters, then surely it’s only fair to say gay characters shouldn’t play straight?

But the basis of this position is fundamentally flawed. The argument is that we should treat both groups symmetrically — that the experiences of gay actors and straight actors — more still, gay people and straight people — are fundamentally the same but opposite, effectively equivalent and therefore if we decide on an action for one, it should necessarily apply to the other – ‘what’s good for the goose is good for the gander’.

The problem is this is simply not true. When you’re talking about minority groups in this way, the two sides are almost always not symmetrical. The two sides are in fact very different. And the logical consequence of this difference is that things that might be okay for one group might actually not be okay for another.

The best way for me to explain this is through an example and please bear with me here, because I think it will make things much clearer.

A position based on symmetry might be a bit like this: “It’s wrong to have gay bars if we don’t also have straight bars!”

Now—for the moment—I’m going to ignore the reality of the situation that there are often straight people in gay bars, and that most non-explicitly gay bars are effectively de facto straight bars containing an equally small proportion of gay people. Instead I’m going to take the position at face value – and talk about why explicitly gay bars are a thing and explicitly straight bars are not.

So here’s the first bit of asymmetry in the lives of straight and gay people. A very small proportion of people in the world are LGBT. It is strongly debated what that proportion is, but for the sake of simple maths let’s say one person in fifty is explicitly gay.

Now, one of the most common places to meet someone you end up forming a relationship with is at work. The percentage of people who meet their partners at work varies depending on who you ask, but it’s somewhere around 15-25% of relationships.

So let’s imagine an office containing fifty people with an equal gender split and one in fifty people being gay. That means the company contains 25 men, 25 women.

It follows then that if you were a straight person in that company, you would most likely meet 48 other straight people. And of those straight people, 24 or 25 of those people would be of the opposite sex.

Let’s compare that with the gay person in that company. They will most likely meet no other gay people. Probabilistically, to have a second gay person in the company, it would need to double in size to one hundred employees.

Now you have two gay people in the company, but they are just as likely to be the opposite sex from each other, and therefore incompatible. To be confident that our initial gay employee will likely meet one other gay person of the same sex at work, the company would have to be twice the size again (200 people). That would mean likely four gay people at the company in total.

In comparison, in a company of two hundred people, 196 would likely be straight. And each straight person at the company would meet 98 heterosexual people of the opposite sex.

And we’re still not done! It’s still the general assumption that people you meet are straight, and there are still a number of reasons why gay people might not be out at work. So let’s imagine only 50% of gay people come out. So now we need to double the size of the company again. We’re now in a company of four hundred people, where each straight person is associating with 196 heterosexuals of the opposite sex. The gay employee meanwhile knows one out gay person of their preferred sex.

That’s an example of an asymmetry in action. And it doesn’t just apply to workplaces, it also applies to bars, nightclubs, universities etc. Every environment that is simply representative of the general population will make it dozens to hundreds of times easier for a straight person to meet someone eligible and potentially interested than a gay person.

As a result, gay people create ‘gay clubs’ and ‘gay bars’ to meet other gay people, while straight people already have de facto straight bars all around them at all times and making them explicitly straight simply excludes gay people from 98% of society.

So how does this apply to our final concern – if straight actors shouldn’t play gay roles, does it follow that gay actors should not play straight roles?

Well, let’s look back at our first question – are gay actors given an equal shot at straight roles? The answer was no, there’s an asymmetry there. Out gay actors were less likely to get leading straight roles than straight actors were to get gay roles. Giving gay roles to gay actors starts to fix that problem, but as long as there are disproportionately few gay roles, making things equitable also means letting gay actors play straight roles.

Does the same apply to our second question? Are there asymmetries at play that mean that it’s less problematic for a gay person to play straight than vice versa? I would argue there are at least three worth mentioning:

  • An asymmetry of knowledge
  • An asymmetry of power
  • An asymmetry of number

First up – the asymmetry of knowledge – most straight people do not grow up or live in predominantly gay environments, whereas most gay people do grow up and live in predominantly straight environments. The entire world is a predominantly straight environment that gay people simply have to operate within. For this reason, gay people are much more likely to be comfortable and convincing and accurate playing straight – at least partly because they may have spend good portions of their lives doing precisely that.

Second – the asymmetry of power – unlike gay people, straight people generally do not grow experience prejudice because of their sexuality. This means that accidentally misrepresenting straight people is much less problematic. Instead of furthering or creating a negative view of all straight people, it’s more likely to simply make that character look objectionable or unpleasant.

Third – the asymmetry of number – because there are far more straight characters and straight roles, the negative effect of one misrepresentation of a straight person—among all the thousands committed to film and TV each day—is also much less pronounced or important.

Conclusion: So should gay roles be played by gay actors?

Okay, so let me bring that all together. In short, the argument I’ve made goes like this:

  • The argument is that anyone should be able to play anyone else and that if straight people can’t play gay roles, then gay actors shouldn’t play straight ones. This position sounds intuitive but is in fact wrong;
  • On the whole gay actors have fewer opportunities than straight actors, and if we’re not going to give leading straight roles to gay actors, then the least we can do is give gay roles to gay actors;
  • Straight actors often are more ignorant of the lives of gay people than gay actors are of straight people – and since accurate representation matters, gay actors are better placed to play gay roles;
  • These situations are built on asymmetries of knowledge, power and number between straight and gay people, which mean that straight actors playing gay roles are much less likely to be accurate and much more likely to be damaging than gay actors playing straight roles.

For these reasons, I think it is perfectly reasonable to make the argument that Davies’ arguments are not self-evidently wrong or hypocritical.

But I’d like to go a bit further. As I’ve argued throughout this piece, these positions are fundamentally based on asymmetries between gay and straight people. Some of those asymmetries just won’t go away – it’s very unlikely that we’ll ever see a time where there are as many gay people as straight people in the world.

But some of them can be fixed. We can make the experience of growing up gay or being gay in the world less alarming, dangerous and scary. We can make straight people more aware of the experience of being gay with more accurate representation and education. We can work to help audiences feel more comfortable with gay actors to take on straight leading roles. We can increase the number of LGBT roles in drama so that it’s truly representative. And here is where I think my position diverges a little from at least the summaries of Russell T Davies we’ve seen around in the last day or two.

Because if we do try and fix these things then at least some of these arguments will—over time—lose their potency. We actually can work towards a day where it is at least more okay for any good actor working in good faith to play gay or straight whatever their sexuality. Where we don’t have to think continually about how we make sure that gay people are represented and gay actors have equal opportunities and we genuinely can just give the right roles to the best people. We’re just not there yet. And to get there we probably have to follow a narrower and more complicated path – much like the path that Russell T Davies has mapped out.

In the meantime, we work and we push and we explain, in articles in the Radio Times or in never-ending blog posts, to those few who are willing to listen, always hoping that together we might get a little closer to that day.

Thank you for listening and goodnight xx

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Humour Television

How to attract Jeff Bezos' attention…

So Jeff Bezos has invested in 37signals, which follows on nicely from his previous investment in 43things.com. Biddulph and I have been thinking about this, and following the pattern we have determined that the next three companies that Bezos is likely to invest in will start with 31, 25 and 19. According to Google Sets they are also likely to end, respectively with ‘functions’, ‘description’ and ‘options’. Since there doesn’t appear to be anything at the end of 31functions.com, 25description.com or 19options.com I can only recommend that aspiring entrepreneurs should consider buying them immediately. I’m going to cut for the chase and go for 1commandsearchandexecution.com as having the lowest possible number and longest string of letters that I can find. How can I fail!

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Business Navigation Net Culture Radio & Music Social Software Technology Television

Who's afraid of Ashley Highfield?

Today it was announced that the BBC’s New Media operations are going to be restructured radically. At the moment most of the content creation parts of the organisation are kind of co-owned – for example, Simon Nelson who was the ‘controller’ of the part of the BBC that I used to work for (BBC Radio and Music) reported equally to Jenny Abramsky (in charge of the BBC’s radio and music operations) and to Ashley Highfield (in charge of the BBC’s New Media Operations). Ashley himself had pretty much direct control over a centralised part of the organisation known internally as New Media Central.

After working at the BBC for a few years, it seems to me that this structure was a sort of clumsy compromise that had a lot of problems but a lot of benefits. I wasn’t in the right positions to see the whole picture but there seemed to be organisational and communication problems with such a layout, and a certain splitting of resources. But on the other hand – and this is a big other hand – increasingly the divisions between ‘new media’ stuff and content creation were able to blur, creating new opportunities for each to support the other which couldn’t help but be a good thing.

The other thing which almost seemed to me to be a good thing – sort of by accident – was that it created an environment where parallel parts of the BBC could operate independently and in a rather more agile fashion. More specifically still, it meant that certain parts of the organisation with a kind of critical mass of smart and clued-up people could really thrive and generate their own culture and goals and get things done, even as others weren’t doing so well. It may be just because I worked there or Stockholm syndrome but I rather think that BBC Radio and Music was one of those places, and despite the fact that a bunch of my favourite people have since moved on, I think it probably still is.

Having said that not all parts of the organisation were similarly dynamic, despite the often amazing number of talented people working within them – specifically, in my opinion, Central New Media under the direct management of Ashley Highfield.

You’ll have heard a lot of announcements coming out from his part of the organisation over the last few years, but surprisingly few of them have amounted to much. They all made headlines at the time, but they’ve all rather disappeared. Do you know what happened to the grand plans of the Creative Archive or the iMP? They were both being talked about in press releases in 2003, but the status of the iMP now appears to be a closed content trial and the Creative Archive has amounted to nothing more than a truncated Creative Commons license used by several orders of magnitude less people and a few hunded short clips of BBC programmes. Highfield’s most recent speeches from May this year are still talking about these projects, with him showing mock-ups of potential prototypes for the iMP replacement the ‘iPlayer’ that could be the result of a collaboration with Microsoft. Are you impressed by this progress? I’m not.

And then there’s BBC Backstage – a noble attempt to get BBC APIs and feeds out in public. What state is that in a couple of years down the line? Look at it pretty closely – despite all the talk at conferences around the world – and it still amounts to little more than a clumsy mailing list and a few RSS feeds – themselves mainly coming from BBC News and BBC Sport. There’s nothing here that’s even vaguely persuasive compared to Yahoo!, Amazon or Google. Flickr – a company that I don’t think got into double figures of staff before acquisition – has more public APIs than the BBC, who have roughly five thousand times as many staff! This is what – two years after its inception? Even the BBC Programme Catalogue that came out of this part of the organisation a while back has gone into a review phase (do a search to see the message) without any committment or indication when it’s going to be fully opened up.

I’m sure – in fact I know – that there are regulatory frameworks that get in the way of the BBC getting this stuff out in public, but these long lacunae go apparently unnoticed and unremarked – there’s an initial announcement that makes the press and then no follow-up. If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!

And that’s just the past. This is a man who decides to embrace social software and the wisdom of crowds in 2006 – clearly waiting for Rupert Murdoch to buy MySpace and show the self-appointed R&D lab of the UK new media industry the way. His joy for this space is expressed in lines like, “The ‘Share’ philosophy is at the heart of bbc.co.uk 2.0 … your own thoughts, your own blogs and your own home videos. It allows you to create your own space and to build bbc.co.uk around you”, which is ironic given that earlier last year he stated in Ariel that he didn’t read any weblogs because he wasn’t interested in the opinions of self-opinionated blowhards. This is a man who apparently coined the term, Martini Media and thinks that expressing your future strategy through smug references to 1970s Leonard Rossiter-based adverts is a surefire way to move the ecology forward. This is a man described by the Guardian in its Media 100 for 2006 as follows:

Exactly how much the impetus for such initiatives stem from Highfield, and how much from the director general, was the source of some debate among the panel.

“Ashley Highfield is among the most important technology executives working in the UK today,” said one panellist. “Yes, but talk about being in the right place at the right time,” said another. “Mark Thompson should be credited with the vision, not him.”

This is a man – bluntly – whose only contact with Web 2.0 that I can find is a pretty humiliating set of pictures on Flickr of him on a private jet and ogling at half-naked dancing girls. (Note: This set of pictures has now been taken down).

So it is, I’m afraid, with a bit of a heavy heart that I can report that the restructuring of the BBC is going to result in a much larger role for Ashley Highfield within the organisation – managing (according to the Guardian, and I’d take this with a pinch of salt) up to 4,000 people throughout the organisation. All the new media functions that have currently been distributed will now it seems be directly under his auspices, and presumably more under his influence than those of the programme makers and pockets of brilliant people around the organisation. I don’t know enough about the nature of the restructuring to know whether it’s a good or a bad thing at a more general level, but it’s pretty bloody clear to me that it’s an ominous move.

Which is what makes me so surprised when people outside the organisation talk about how scared they are of the huge moves that the BBC can make on the internet, because the truth is that for the most part – with a bunch of limited exceptions – these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors – the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international – get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting. I want the BBC to succeed. I want it to get stronger – I think it’s a valuable organisation to have in the world and I think it sits perfectly well alongside the mix of start-ups and corporates that’s emerging on the internet. And it’s for precisely this reason that I’m concerned about these moves.

Who’s afraid of Ashley Highfield? I am, and you should be too.

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Humour Net Culture Television

Cybermen are Human 2.0?

According to Doctor Who, the Cybermen are Humans 2.0 (or more specifically, Human Point Two, which… means… very little). But I protest! I’m not sure Human 2.0 means anything at all! It’s just a stupid buzzword.

Of course it all started with that famous talk from ETech 2004, Is there a robot overlord in your future?. Then there were all those rumours about Dean Kaman showing a new invention to Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, and them riding around on it for hours. And then the subsequent stories about Steve Jobs’ skin slipping off at Apple Keynotes and his new mission to “Crush humanity beneath the heal of the Cyber Leader forever“…

And then – of course – Tim O’Reilly had to create a bloody conference. I mean, seriously! Can’t people see this whole thing is just a buzzword!? It’s just a craze! There’s no substance to it at all. All fluff.

My personal opinion is that it’s just some way of getting some more money invested in the eradication of the human race after the whole World Conquest crash of the late nineties. I mean, sure – we’ve had some hard times recently. Daleks defeated in the far future. The whole Time War and everything. But this kind of shallow attempt to market a slow evolution in science as an end to all human freedoms is just wishful thinking and it has got to stop! I mean, can you believe it?! O’Reilly have even produced a bloody book!

Face it guys, there’s nothing new here that the Slitheen, Autons, Sea Devils or Microsoft haven’t tried a million times before. There’s no substance to it! No great evolution in zombification, no super-guns on the moon eradicating parallel universes. I’m not even sure I’ve seen a stomping moonboot! Hype. Hype. Hype. Hype. Hypey-Hypey Hype-Hype.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve decided to ignore this whole cycle, bury my head in the sand and not pay any attention to all my friends disappearing until such a time that I actually see a Cyber Leader erasing the leaders of this world with some kind of sonic blaster. And then, shortly after I’ve finished celebrating, I will finally be convinced. But not before! This I swear on the databanks of my enslaved robot family until the final years of this tiny crushable human civilisation. So there!

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Television

It's all about K9 on Doctor Who…

It’s really difficult to pretend that today is really about anything else than K9‘s reappearance on Doctor Who this evening. I’m a bit nervous about leaving the house at all, just in case the tube goes down or something and I don’t get back in time. I’m particularly worried that the kids won’t understand how cool and important the little box is, and that they’ll laugh at him. Something inside me would find that incredibly upsetting, I think.

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Family Net Culture Technology Television

Is the pace of change really such a shock?

I’ve got Matt Biddulph staying with me and been hanging out with Paul Hammond a lot recently again and since they’re both ex-BBC colleagues, we’ve inevitably found ourselves talking a bit about what’s going on at the organisation at the moment. And it’s a busy time for them – Ashley Highfield and Mark Thompson have made a couple of interesting announcements that contain a fair amount of value nicely leavened with some typical organisational lunacy and clumsiness. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is this, which is a link that I’ve already posted to my del.icio.us feed earlier in the day and will turn up later on this site as part of my daily link dump. For those who don’t want to click on the link, here’s the picture:

Now this is a photo taken in the public reception area of BBC Television Centre, but I want to make it really clear from the outset that you shouldn’t be taking it literally or seriously – it’s a prop, a think piece, to help people in the organisation start think about the issues that are confronting them and start to come to terms with it. It has, however, stuck in my head all day. And here’s why…

The apparent shock revelation of the statement – the reason it’s supposed to get people nervous – is because it intimates that one day a new distribution mechanism might replace broadcast media. And while you’re reeling because of that insane revelation and the incredible insight that it contains, let me supplement it with a nice dose of truism from Mark Thompson:

“There are two reasons why we need a new creative strategy. Audiences are changing. And technology is changing. In a way, everyone knows this of course. What’s surprising – shocking even – is the sheer pace of that change. In both cases it’s faster and more radical than anything we’ve seen before.”

So here’s the argument – that perhaps broadcast won’t last forever and that technology is changing faster than ever before. So fast, apparently, that it’s almost dazzlingly confusing for people.

I’m afraid I think this is certifiable bullshit. There’s nothing rapid about this transition at all. It’s been happening in the background for fifteen years. So let me rephrase it in ways that I understand. Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at a fairly slow rate over the next ten to thirty years!

I’m completely bored of this rhetoric of endless insane change at a ludicrous rate, and cannot actually believe that people are taking it seriously. We’ve had iPods and digital media players for what – five years now? We’ve had Tivo for a similar amount of time, computers that can play DVDs for longer, music and video held in digital form since the eighties, an internet that members of the public have been building and creating upon for almost fifteen years. TV only got colour forty odd years ago, but somehow we’re expected to think that it’s built up a tradition and way of operating that’s unable to deal with technological shifts that happen over decades!? This is too fast for TV!? That’s ridiculous! This isn’t traditional media versus a rebellious newcomer, this is a fairly reasonable and incremental technology change that anyone involved in it could have seen coming from miles away. And it’s not even like anyone expects television or radio to change enormously radically over the next couple of decades! I mean, we’re swtiching to digital broadcasting in the UK in a few years, which gives people a few more channels. Radio’s not going to be fully digital for decades. Broadcast is still going to be a dominant form of content distribution in ten and maybe twenty years time, it just won’t be the only one. And five years from now there will clearly be more bottom-up media, just as there are more weblogs now than five years ago, but I’d be surprised if it had really eradicated any major media outlets. These changes are happening, they’re definitely happening, but they’re happening at a reasonable, comprehendible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don’t die if you’re not the first mover – you only die if you don’t adapt.

My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention. Because if we’re honest, if you don’t want or need to be first and you don’t need to own the platform, it can’t be hard to see roughly where this environment is going. Media will be, must be, transportable in bits and delivered to TV screens and various other players. And there will be enormous archives available that need to be explorable and searchable. And people will create content online and distribute it between themselves and find new ways to express themselves. Changes in the mechanics of those distributions and explorations will happen all the time, but really the major shift is not such a surprise, surely? I mean, how can it be!? Most of it has been happening in an unevenly distributed way for years anyway. And it’s not like it’s enormously hard to see what you’ve got to do to prepare for this – find a way to digitise the content, get as much information as possible about the content, work out how to throw it around the world, look for business models and watch the bubble-up communities for ideas. That’s it. Come on, guys! There’s hard work to be done, but it’s not in observing the trends or trying to work out what to do, it’s in just getting on with the work of sorting out rights and data and digitisation and keeping in touch with ideas from the ground. This should be the minimum a media organisation should do, not some terrifying new world of fear!

I think this is the most important thing that these organisations need to recognise now – not that change is dramatic and scary and that they have to suddenly pull themselves together to confront a new threat, but that they’ve been simply ignoring the world around them for decades. We don’t need people standing up and panicking and shouting the bloody obvious. We need people to watch the industries that could have an impact upon them, take them seriously, don’t freak out and observe what’s moving in their direction and then just do the basic work to be ready for it. The only way that snails catch you up is if you’re too self-absorbed to see them coming.

Categories
Television

The BBC's open programme information project…

Here’s an interesting development from my old employers – the project that Biddulph, Loosemore and Hammersley (and others) have been working on at the BBC is now live and playable with. It’s the full Infax archive of programme information for every programme that the BBC’s librarians have information about (running about six weeks behind live, I believe) made available on the Internet, running on Ruby on Rails and featuring all the staples of good data online (plus some other fun stuff) like very nice URLs, lots of data interconnections, date archives (impressive – if not totally complete – archived schedules), lists of contributors, sparklines and tagclouds. It apparently contains 946,614 BBC TV and Radio programmes dating back seventy-five years, which is kind of amazing. It’s currently a prototype so it’s a bit flaky in places, and (I’m sorry) but I can’t say that I’m enormously impressed with the visual design work, but as an open repository of information it’s pretty astonishing, and a great counterpoint to the Programme Information Pages (ETech PDF) project that Mr Biddulph, Gavin Bell, Margaret Hanley and I worked on together (From the archive: The New Radio 3 site launches).

You can read more about the Infax archive over on Mr Biddulph’s site right now. I believe it’s going to have APIs to build off, but I might have got that wrong. In the meantime, looks like he’s keen to get your comments, so send ’em in.

Categories
Technology Television

A brief follow-up on TV distribution…

I wrote a post a few days ago called Quick observations on TV distribution in which I made a number of outrageous claims that I pretty much stand by. It was a bit of an off-the-cuff and not entirely digested attempt to throw out the core bits of the stuff that’s been in my head for a while, so I thought I should briefly mention that I’ve posted a couple of comments in the thread responding to some other people’s opinions and expanding briefly on a couple of the points:

(1) My assumption is that you pay these companies for a whole bunch of television you never even watch – that in terms of ‘must-see’ TV, people probably only really care about five – ten shows at any given time – and that most TV series arcs are between twelve and twenty five weeks, so that’s between a quarter and a half of a year. So even at today’s prices, you’d be paying what – $350 every six months – sixty dollars a month equivalent for ten new fresh shows downloaded every week of month. Now that’s clearly too much money, but it’s not too much by an enormous margin. Drop it down by a third and, you know, you’ve got yourself a deal – between eight to ten shows a week distributed down to my equipment for me to own and use immediately and for as long as I like for about $10 a week? That doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

(2) Think about it this way – the motivation for the content producers is not to give all the revenue to the content distributors, and they may not have to – you only have to see the straight-to-DVD market that Disney exploits to see that, and many shows recently (Futurama / Firefly) make more money on DVD than on TV distribution. There’s already a market (albeit relatively small) for people to buy programmes that have never been (or barely been) on TV. And there’s a huge market for buying media outright. So if it’s in their interest to try and get rid of the middle-man (or find a new one that’s more favourable to them), then they’re eventually going to start working in ways that make things difficult for the TV channels who obviously don’t want their audience balkanised. So they’ll either form partnerships with the content distributors for revenue sharing or they’ll gradually look towards different types of content that don’t suit download so well (Big Brother, perpetual rolling news, radio-style programming, live broadcasts).

(3) In terms of how you promote things if you just avoid broadcasting the shows themselves – well the same way you promote everything else that isn’t a TV show. They promote films without showing them on TV first, they promote albums without people hearing them first. You can buy ads on the TV that’s left, you can put things in the papers, etc. etc. My personal favourite – the US pilot season currently produces dozens of throwaway episode that never get shown, where instead every episode produced as a pilot is released to the public for free download (for the first month) and then if they get enough interest in the show in terms of direct subscriptions or individual pay-for downloads then they produce a full series. All TV shows are risks obviously, so this might move the burden of risk more onto the content producers than the networks, which might produce a more risk averse environment and a need for those companies to get in more revenue with which they can support the failures, but this is only a shift in money generation from the networks to the studios, and that often happens with middle-men anyway. And on the other hand, self-financed projects might get more access to the mainstream, fan favourites could be supported literally by the fans rather than by the advertisers. Componentised, smaller, more nible, more responsive media focused on meeting every niche need. It could work enormously well.

And I should also point out to the people whose post I can see on Technorati but not on their own site for some reason, that I’m not so much predicting that, “Internet TV will move from pay-per-episode to a pay-per-season, one-time subscription model” but that pay-per-season, one-time subscription is the best way to get down the programmes that you actually always want to watch, and that implementing the podcast-like functionality alongside individual downloads at a higher price is the best way to meet user needs and to make downloadable programming a real partner to traditional broadcast.

Categories
Television

Quick observations on TV distribution…

I observed today that it’s now possible in the US to not only buy individual episodes of Lost via iTunes but that the Season Pass functionality now includes automatic delivery of all future episodes of the show for a massively decreased total price of $35 (about ¬£20) rather than for the nearly $50 that it would cost to buy each individually. I think that price reduction really points to the future of this kind of media distribution. I’ve been talking about this kind of pay-for podcast-like distribution mechanism for TV shows for a while on this site and in various work-related contexts over the last couple of years – and I really think this model is the way forward. It’s almost such an obvious thing to say that I can’t believe I’m writing it down, except that I know for a lot of people working in the media it still appears to be some weird pipe-dream of weirdo techno-futurism that’ll never catch on. But then you should see the faces of many of my media-working friends in the UK when I tell them that Battlestar Galactica in the US is run with a note onscreen reading, “Buy this episode tomorrow on iTunes”. They barely believe that’s true either. The future is here, dudes. The model is working. A change is gonna come.

As I’ve said before, I think we’re approaching a world in which a near-live media distribution environment will be a major partner to broadcast TV within five-ten years. This environment will be focused on show-by-show subscriptions and ultimate personalisation to get stuff down to viewers over normal broadband and mediated by the bog-standard boring old internet – probably even through the web. And it’s my suspicion that there may only be enough room for five or six major (partially democratised) distribution hubs (at a complete guess as mentioned in the above post: Amazon, AOL, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google). The group that’s going to have the most trouble with this is the public sector broadcasters – they need to be trying to work out how to influence and work with that environment and find a space for free or publically supported content as soon as is bloody possible, rather than trying to develop their own necessarily prescribed and undersupported media distribution platforms. They’re going to be under enough pressure to figure out how they’re helping compensate for market failure (in an environment with a space for every niche and genre interest) without having to deal with all these distribution questions too. Or at least so it seems to me.

Categories
Film Television

Watching the Oscars…

Watching the Oscars in the Manchester Grand Hyatt with assorted fun people is a very different experience from trying to stay awake in the UK as it stretches into the wee hours. It’s actually fun for a start. And Jon Stewart is really funny. So far we’ve had a couple of neat skits, a full on Clooney charismathon (plus Supporting Actor win) and Kong‘s got Best Special Effects. Wallace & Gromit have got best Animated Feature, which doesn’t suck too much. I was a bit disappointed about Jake not getting Best Supporting Actor – apparently the rumours are that Crash is building up a head of steam and may depose Brokeback, and this could be the first sign of that collapse. But I’ve watched enough episodes of the West Wing to know a bit about expectations management, and I’m trying to work out if the Crash rumours are part of a campaign to remind the Academy that Brokeback is not a done-deal. Get the vote out, if you know what I mean…

A little bit later and we’ve had a couple of shorts, a few really creepy adverts, a great Scientology line from Stewart that won’t win him any favours in his later career and ooh… ooh… Jennifer Aniston. Wow. She looked really grouchy. Almost as grouchy as she looked in the pre-Oscar show when you could tell that in the back of her mind she was reciting to herself, “never gonna get an Oscar, never gonna get an Oscar”.

Hm. Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting Actress for the Constant Gardener which is a bit of a funny thing to happen. I mean I watched the film and she was okay in it, but there were a great many times when I couldn’t decide whether the character was just really objectionable or whether it was the actress. Seeing her on stage makes me think it’s more likely that I just don’t like her very much. On the basis of the clip alone, I think I’d have gone for Amy Adams. In other news, what the fuck is up with Narnia?! It was a bloody terrible movie and the effects were a complete rip-off of Lord of the Rings – visually there was no creativity there whatsoever. What is wrong with people that it wins anything!? More troubling even than Narnia was Lauren Bacall, who looked far from well when she came on-stage, and then proceeded to stumble over most of her introduction to her section on Film Noir.

First notable comedy moment – the awesome Best Actress campaign skits, as voiced by Rob Cordry from the Daily Show including those that declared Judy Dench to be a bad Dame and Reese Witherspoon to have a good proper American name. Second notable comedy moment – the unintentional WTF interpretive dance thing with the burned out car and the mist and the racial tensions represented by people moving. really. slowly that accompanied the best song nomination from Crash. Jon Stewart on the latter, “My suggestion if you’re trying to escape from a burning car… Don’t move in slow motion…”

Only an hour and a bit to go and… well… wow, this is long. Every year you forget. So some guys have won sound design for King Kong, Jennifer Garner nearly fell over, there was some stuff that happened. The best song went to a song about a pimp which was interesting. Lots of people died. They used that terrible font from Keynote for the ‘In Memoriam’ slide. Jon Stewart is uniformly a good host so far, mainly because he’s been quite understated. Some highlights – Robert Altman’s honorary Oscar and tremendous speech and Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep’s performative introduction. We’re nearly out of snacks but SMS’s are coming in from various other nerds who are gradually arriving at the hotel, so there’s a concern that we might not have enough to eat. Simon’s sitting in the corner of the room by the loo working on his presentation because he thinks that’s the only place he can get a good wifi signal. Even though I’ve got a perfectly good one and I’m sitting on the comfy comfy bed. Silly boy.

Best Actor has gone to Philip Seymour Hoffman, which is not a shock and probably isn’t even a disappointment given how great an actor he is and what an extraordinary performance he gives in Capote, but godammit Heath Ledger did an astonishing job and it was a destroying film and Brokeback has to win something substantial. It’s hard to begrudge Hoffman though, particularly after his wonderful and affecting speech to his mother. And Ledger reacted really well to the whole thing. But I need some Brokeback action. Crash simply doesn’t deserve the recognition it’s got, and Brokeback is … astonishing.

This is a seriously weird ceremony – Reese Witherspoon’s got Best Actress? Wow, that’s a bit random and unexpected. Most embarrassing moment – her speech, “I’m just trying to matter”?! References to every major relative on the matrilineal line since Eve?! I rather think that one’s going to stick in her memory for the wrong reasons. Twenty pence on that being significantly mocked across the media over the next twenty-four hours…

Crap! We’re up to Best Adapted Screenplay and yes! Brokeback Mountain has won something decent at last! Yes! About bloody time and it’s a bloody great one! I’m pretty delighted about that one, although can I just say at this point that Simon and Yoz are being really annoying and talking to each other too loudly about Django and I might have to kill em! Ack! Now Crash has won Best Original Screenplay. It’s all going to come to the wire on this one. Fingers crossed. Crash sucks!

Ang Lee wins Best Director and that bodes really really really well. Apparently Director and Film tend to go together. I’m so happy about this one. Come on you bastards!

FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Right. You fucks! Fucking hell! Fucking Crash wins?! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Right. I’m done. Screw you, Oscar! I’m going home.