This year Big Brother rolled out its uber-trashy all-seeing televisual eyes amidst a welter of warnings – ‘kiss goodbye to your summer’ cried everyone from Heat magazine to BB’s own increasingly cartoonish Davina McCall. There’s a grain of truth in that, at least for those of us who can’t be bothered putting up an impenetrable, culturally cool acceptable front… in fact half of us round these parts of the office are already discussing Shahbaz every morning, like the bunch of gossiping old fishwives we really are.
The real-time nature of BB, and the fact that it generates those ‘water-cooler’ conversations (you know, the sort all the media journalists were going on about a few years ago), well it makes me think. There’s all this buzz online about iTunes selling episodes of Lost (another of our favourites, especially now the plot seems to revolve around people sitting in a room doing inexplicable things with computers) and the new plan to sell 24 (yeah, we love Bauer too) on myspace.
But this narrowcasting approach, treating TV shows like music, seems a little foolish – TV is completely different, and nowhere near the solitary experience the naysayers wibble on about. In fact, I think it’s the most social of modern media. Discussion of last night’s crop of big shows is a vital office bonding experience… Daz got quite annoyed with me because I missed Lost the other week, and fair enough, I was a bit miffed myself. Not because I missed it, but because we all need a bit of fuel for talking outside of the world of SQL queries and web form design. OK, and because I missed it.
Hey, if you can’t gossip openly about your colleagues, at least you can gossip openly about the people on TV – and to do that you need to be tuning in as it happens, in synch. Now where’s my copy of Heat?
That’s all well and good but in an office surrounded by men as I am, which has its pro’s and con’s I admit, how can i possible get in a frenzy on thursday mornings about Desperate Housewives …guys don’t seem to get it.
Well I admit I don’t do the whole Desperate Housewives routine Laura, but nobody else watches Neighbours here either – to fit in we must make some sacrifices and watch our quota of Office Approved programmes!
Well Laura, maybe we should all download Desperate Housewives to our iPods and watch them on the bus on the way in, that would be a brave thing to do. The only problem then is we would all be out of synch and so it wouldn’t be as much fun to talk about. The truth is I only started watching Lost and BB so we have something else to gossip about with friends and colleagues. Now I’m well into them and those who did not see the first series of lost are now desperately borrowing the DVDs to catch up and join in the chat.
Downloading TV shows is not really something that appeals to me at the moment, I prefer just to rent a DVD. For music then the only acceptable format for me is mp3, I can do without CD’s that take up physical space. Maybe soon it will be the same with DVDs, when we have huge hard drives under our tvs. Its already started so maybe it will be sooner than I think!