The Triumph Of The Trivial

Over the last few months, we’ve been watching YouTube videos in the morning, as we have our coffees and ease into the day. Not just any YouTube videos, but rather a mix of international culture guides (focusing on one specific place, of which more anon), home restoration and the fixing of decrepit old objects – the sort of thing that you can run in the background as you wake up and deal with plans for the day ahead. The most interesting observation that I find myself taking from this – and from the other YouTube channels that I regularly watch – is how the idea of ‘television’ is being re-invented, and how traditional television seems unaware or unable to adapt to the changing world.

If you were to watch a TV show on these subjects – which includes channels covering old pop culture and vintage tech amongst my viewing choices – there would be a certain style that has been effectively unchanging for decades. A presenter who provides a voice-over and possibly interacts on-screen, contrived elements of fake authenticity (a personal bugbear: shows where the presenter knocks on someone’s door and the person inside fakes surprise, even though there is a camera behind them providing a cutaway angle), continual repetition and a forced sense of scripted enthusiasm. It’s a world of slick production provided by a seasoned crew, celebrity-led presentation and such painful inauthenticity that even the most serious ‘real-life’ (as opposed to ‘reality’) show feels oddly manufactured, purporting to tell you the unvarnished truth yet actually even more authored than any subjective YouTube video piece. Look at all the UKTV documentaries that begin with the belief that something is ‘bad’ and then cherry-pick the ‘evidence’ (often little more than opinion and hearsay) to back that theory up.

YouTube clips often have more authenticity to them, even if they are also opinionated, contrived and controlled. A lot of the bigger YouTube channels that we watch have production values as impressive as any TV show, yet feel more genuine because it still feels like the work of one person – a single vision (or maybe the vision of a couple of people), based around their lives, their home, their actual experience. Others strip it all down to the basics – here’s the thing that we are making/fixing, and here’s the procedure from start to finish, maybe with on-camera commentary, maybe with voice-over, maybe just with captions. A lot of this is what we would call Slow TV, if it was actually on TV – a relaxing, quiet and fascinating show that doesn’t treat the viewer as though they have the attention span of a mouse with ADHD. It’s ironic that we tend to look at YouTube as the home of the short attention span viewer, where people tune out after a few minutes or fast-forward to the ‘good bits’, and that’s certainly true – yet online video has a single-mindedness that you would never find on TV. The closest to these shows on ‘proper’ television in the UK is The Repair Shop and its various imitators, but even that works on the assumption that the viewer needs constant sensation – it intercuts various repair jobs throughout a show rather than following one thing from start to finish in the way that a YouTube repair or restoration video does. In a weird way, YouTube often takes us back to the days of the Interlude, the BBC fillers that appeared between actual programmes – when the Interlude was a thing, it was just a dull bit of nothingness – like the potter’s wheel – that you had to sit through while waiting for a show to start (or a fault to be fixed). But the modern versions, hypnotic and oddly relaxing clips of arts and crafts, now feel like a necessary alternative to visual stimuli that coked-up TV producers think have to be continually in your face and attractive to a youth market that is no longer even watching TV (and is as attracted to the slow creativity channels of YouTube as anyone else).

The problem for television broadcasters is how to reinvent themselves for the modern age, and much – if not all – of the focus has been put on competing with streaming services, setting up on-demand platforms to sit alongside Netflix, Prime and so on. But the content that these platforms host is still very much in the traditional format of television: fixed running times, presenter-led narratives on lifestyle shows and the same editing and production styles that you find everywhere. The ‘new’ streaming services have fallen into line – every Netflix show looks the same, no matter where it was produced – the dramas all feel interchangeable, while the documentaries all follow a format so identical that I have to assume that Netflix sends out a lengthy style guide to anyone commissioned to make something that cannot be wavered from even slightly. Even though these shows are all originating from different production companies in different countries, they all feel as though they have been produced in a factory. That’s not to say that the shows are bad (though most Netflix drama shows, in particular, are numbingly awful with terrible stilted acting, bad dialogue and a sense of smug superiority that makes them almost unbearable), but there is little originality at work. Every Netflix true crime documentary will have (at least) three episodes, often stretching a thin story to breaking point and all will feel rather interchangeable.

YouTube videos, on the other hand, usually feel individual. Of course, there are the contrived ‘documentary’ channels that cover music, movies, crime and whatever else is popular in a flat and inauthentic manner, designed only to pull in views and often with AI-generated voiceovers. But there are also the people doing their own thing, finding their niche and producing videos that are much more entertaining and informative than any television show, be they personality-led or informative or both. In fact, the less that people try to make their work feel like regular TV, the better it is. That format is already out there if you want it – YouTube offers a chance for people to break free of the demands of traditional TV and do something different. It’s notable that when TV companies have hired YouTube stars like Dr Pimple Popper to make series, they insist on the same production style that has always been used and the resulting shows are less satisfactory or interesting than the homemade videos that brought those people to the public attention to begin with.

I doubt that traditional TV can ever compete with YouTube. The demands of linear broadcast schedules won’t allow for random running times or awkwardly short programming and the people in charge of our TV networks are permanently wedded to the way things have always been done – everything has to be loud, fast and in-your-face, fronted by ‘personalities’ and aimed at short attention spans. Despite the fact that it is no longer necessary, even lifestyle shows will continue to be made within TV studios with broadcast cameras and a full crew. We’ll be told that this is what the viewers want, despite the fact that TV ratings now are pitiful compared to what they were at the turn of the century and the viewership of YouTube videos – admittedly with a global potential audience, but still – often outstrip them. If anything, television broadcasters seem to double down on the production style that they are wedded to and become ever more trivial and vacuous even as ratings slide. When YouTube amateurs seem like more authentic investigative reporters than the people seen on BBC documentaries, you know that something is up.

I’m aware that our own current excursions into YouTube might make us seem like less-than-unbiased observers, though we have long been vocal about the deteriorating standards of broadcast TV.  User-uploaded videos have long been dismissed as trivial, amateur and disposable – and certainly, lots of them are – but the best of YouTube frankly pisses all over broadcast TV in terms of research, informative qualities and even production values. It has democratised ‘broadcasting’ in a world where who you knew, what school you went to and where you lived (not to mention what you looked like) was a major factor in the likelihood of having a career. YouTube might not have worthwhile drama shows yet, but surely they are coming, and when that happens, what do we need television for at all? If ‘proper’ TV dies, then it’ll be because it stubbornly refused to see that times have changed and to adapt accordingly.

DAVID FLINT

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