Panorama meets Eastenders?

September 27th, 2004

I’d dearly love to have been a fly on the wall when Jeremy Paxman read the latest bright approach to rendering Panorama palatable to a prime-time audience. Matt Wells in today’s Guardian spills the beans:

Panorama, the world’s longest-running TV current affairs programme, needs a “touchy-feely” overhaul because it has become “too distant, demanding, difficult and didactic”, according to a briefing document prepared for the BBC executive in charge of the series.

The “creative brief”, leaked to the Guardian, sets out a plan to restore the series to peak time that includes recruiting presenters with “warmer” faces, such as Fiona Bruce. The Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, would be used for more “analytical” subjects.

Storylines from EastEnders could be used as subjects for the programme to tackle in an attempt to make it “more accessible and enjoyable”. […]

Oh, come on! A hard news and current affairs programme is always going to be hard-pressed to compete for ratings with whatever combination of soap opera, light entertainment or feature films the commercial channels choose to deploy in prime time. The point of public service broadcasting is sometimes to put out programmes that educate and inform even if your ratings take a hit. I don’t doubt that the tabloids in general, and the Murdoch press in particular, will have a field day if a prime-time Panorama causes BBC1’s ratings to take a dip one evening a week. The proper response is to point out that at least BBC1 is trying to put out a regular current affairs show in a prominent timeslot, not to find excuses to shoehorn a soap opera storyline into the script.

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One Response to “Panorama meets Eastenders?”

  1. Martin Says:
    September 28th, 2004 at 11:01 pm

    Almost as the antithesis to this, I remember a few years back, the BBC apparently comissioned a run of Eastenders scripts from David Yallop, in a bid to increase the popularity of the soap by injecting some gritty realism into it.

    According to the story, the opening scene of Yallop’s first episode was the all-too-familiar event in 1980’s London, which has never happened once in Walford; an IRA bomb, which wiped out a dozen popular cast members.

    It rolled from there.

    I reckon Eastenders could probably do with a Panorama-style slant on it these days, not the other way around.

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