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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Coming to a sofa near you Coming to a sofa near you Hundreds of tiny TV stations are springing up all the time. Can they succeed with just a handful of viewers? John Harris goes studio-hopping to find out. Saturday May 13, 2006 The Guardian At 1.30pm on Wednesday May 4, the outer frontiers of British television were populated, as ever, by a rum selection of people. On Magic, the music video channel that takes its nostalgic lead from the radio station of the same name, Duran Duran's 1984 hit Wild Boys was succeeded by A-Ha's Take On Me. The man doing the Lord's Work on God TV, meanwhile, was guiding his viewers through a handful of psalms and assuring them that "Christ and God's salvation is a personal decision". On the antiques shopping channel Treasures TV, two men were gazing admiringly at an original set of 1953 coronation coins - yours for £47 plus £3.90 p&p - and claiming that the items shed light on "the changing fortunes of the British Empire". And on Challenge, 1995 was being relived via an old edition of Family Fortunes, on which the Dalarto family won both £3,385 and a car thanks to their successful divination of the fact that "baked beans" was the most popular answer to the question, "Name a food you'd eat when camping". Who watches this stuff? According to spokespeople for the Sky Digital platform - that is, the means by which multi-channel TV is relayed into millions of British homes - the audience is larger than you might think. More than one in three households now take their pick from approximately 560 TV and radio channels. Figures from the past year suggest that new channels are added at the rate of around five a week. Multi-channel TV stations now account for more than one third of all TV viewing, which is "roughly equivalent to the combined viewing share of ITV1 and Channels 4 and 5". That's one way of looking at the numbers, though they also suggest we have yet decisively to acquire the diversified habits the statistics would have us believe. They take a bit of getting hold of, but the figures issued to subscribers to the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (Barb) show a population still loyal to a predictable handful of stations. Even in multi-channel households, ITV and BBC1 each tend to average around 20% of total viewing time. Channel 4 usually comes in at between 7% and 10%, with BBC2 hovering just below; the "5" in Channel 5 usually chimes with its share of our attention. Soon after that, things tumble into something approaching insignificance. The hundreds of channels grouped into "Total Other Barb reported" and "Total Non-Barb reported" usually register a combined tally of just under 6%. Metaphorically speaking, they are small monkeys fighting in a very tiny barrel, producing some of the least-watched television going. Surrounding all of this, there is an entire professional subculture: freelance camera operators, trainee researchers and hundreds and hundreds of would-be presenters, aspiring to be the next Cat Deeley or Vernon Kay, but temporarily stuck some distance from their dreams. On a website run by an organisation called Top TV Academy, pledged to "develop and coach the next generation of talent", you will find plenty of examples: Josephine Kime, the "vivacious and bright presenter of Tyne Tees' Hot Hotels, a peak-time six-parter"; James Callow, who "has over 500 hours of live TV presenting to his name" including stints on "Quiz TV, Dating Channel, i Buy and the TX1 Mobile Games Channel"; Victoria Picknell, "a very people-centred presenter who cares about her interviewees"; and Ronan McKenna, who simply describes himself as "a quick-witted Irish man who loves travel". On a Wednesday morning, in a warren of offices and studios behind Moorgate tube station in London, I meet Nina Sebastiane, a regular presenter on the Baby Channel. Her CV places her at the upper end of the multi-channel hierarchy: having got her first big break presenting Channel 4's coverage of speedway, she has done "travel shows, news, current affairs - a bit of everything". Her livelihood now comes from regular appearances on Thomson TV, the channel run as an adjunct to the holiday empire, and the work she's doing today: four hours spent pre-recording Baby Talk, a stripped-down chip off the GMTV/This Morning block in which every item is dedicated to parenthood and infancy. The Baby Channel, launched last October, is an amazingly compact operation. Leon Hawthorne - the station's MD, founder and senior producer - works in a bare office alongside five production staff. Downstairs, just along the corridor from the HQ of a channel called Pokerzone, is the studio: a tiny mock-up of a modern lounge in which three robotic cameras track the action on two perpendicular sofas. Next door there is an impossibly small anteroom where images flash on to a bank of screens and the Autocue is operated via a laptop. At one point, everything is put on hold by a team of workmen who are installing phones down the corridor. "The drilling's coming through on the mics," advises the director. "They'll have to stop." Today's big guest on Baby Talk is Derek Ogilvie, a nervous Scotsman who claims to do what it says on the cover of his just-published paperback, The Baby Mind Reader. He takes his place next to Nina Sebastiane and Clare Neal, who has come to talk about a homeworking business called Mums In Control, and has brought her two-year-old, William. As an added bonus, Clare has agreed to allow Derek psychically to do his stuff on her and her son. "Come on," says Leon. "Let's go - before the kid gets antsy." "Welcome back to the Baby Channel," says Nina, who duly dishes out a three-sentence intro about Derek, before asking him when he first cottoned on to his amazing powers. "I'm 41," says Derek. "Going back to being nine, our neighbour died, and he used to visit me." "A spirit?" asks Nina. "A spirit," says Derek. "But I kept it very quiet." During the next eight minutes, Clare looks increasingly mortified. Via his telepathic communications with William, Derek establishes that Clare is getting pain in her right arm. He then takes a deep breath and claims to be divining "situations" with her "private area and periods". He goes on to focus on a miscarriage she had at 18 ("William communicates with the spirit of the child who passed away," he assures her). There is also a claim that William is concerned about his mother "testing her breasts" and that, though not yet even a toddler, he has noticed that Clare has suspiciously failed to complete a course of tablets that now sit in the bathroom cabinet. His final coup de grace, however, concerns a more pressing matter. "What William's saying to me just now," says Derek, "is that he wants to be able to go to the toilet and do a poo. Doing a poo, not a number one, is very important to William." And that's that: a wrap. While the author of The Dad's Guide To Pregnancy anxiously awaits his turn on the sofa, Derek and his PR rush off to their next appointment. If the previous 10 minutes have rather suggested the TV equivalent of fingernails being scraped down a blackboard, Leon seems very pleased indeed. "That was good, wasn't it?" he says. "I'm sceptical," offers Nina. "It reminded me a bit of a series I did on Living, called The Antiques Ghostshow. You'd have this spiritualist medium coming in and members of the public turning up with, you know, their Great Aunt Dotty's chamberpot, and he would feel the emanations and tell you where it came from, what their names were, who the parents were, what year it was made, whatever." Clare, I suggest, was quite freaked out. "Well, imagine it," says Nina. "The first time you're on national telly and it's, 'I had a miscarriage when I was 18, I've got some pills in the cupboard and problems with my periods and, by the way, my kid wants to do a poo.' It was surreal, wasn't it?" My last hour at the Baby Channel is spent trawling through the station's brief history with Leon. At various points in his career, he was a regular face on CNN, CNBC Europe and BBC World, but he says reporting the events of September 11 represented a neat point at which finally to end his time as a broadcaster and work towards launching the station, at a cost that gave him and his backers little change out of £1m. These days, he carefully watches his outgoings, claiming to be a confident practitioner of the art of stripping back resources while maintaining certain standards ("If you try to think too big, and you're doing it on a budget," he says, "it will look like shit"). When it comes to his ratings, he says the hundreds of thousands who reportedly pause on the Baby Channel for at least three minutes (and thereby make up his Barb-accredited "reach") matter far more to him than how many people might be watching at any given time, though I rather suspect he would say that. Still, on a good day, he tells me, the Baby Channel's peak output can average around 15,000 viewers. Given that Davina McCall was recently taken off the air for attracting a mere 2.3 million, this looks absurdly small. As I soon find out, however, it actually means Leon is doing pretty well. The first person I meet at the Birmingham offices of Legal TV is John Gorman, a Liverpudlian actor and comedian. Chatting to him is actually quite a thrill: as well as being - along with Chris Tarrant, Sally James and Bob Carolgees, owner of Spit The Dog - one of the "four bucketeers" who stood at the core of the 70s Saturday morning show Tiswas, Gorman's CV contains a stint as a member of the Scaffold, the 60s comedy-pop trio who scored top five hits with Thank U Very Much and Lily The Pink. But what, I wonder, is he doing at a station that styles itself "the law firm in your living room"? "I'm here to bring a bit of my flavour," he explains. Thus far, he tells me, this involves plans to leaven the station's output with snippets of comedy, part of which will be focused on two animated characters called Legal Eagle and Legal Beagle. Legal TV, located in an industrial estate in Aston, is the brainchild of a local personal injury lawyer named Davy Singh-Bal, so driven by the idea of "making the law more accessible to the general public" that he has invested somewhere in the region of £1.6m. Prior to its launch in February, the channel had plans that have since been abandoned - for a team of presenters headed by Caroline O'Shea, the Birmingham-born ex-vibrator saleswoman who enjoyed fleeting fame during the first series of Big Brother, and a flagship afternoon show called The Right Lines, featuring "an award-winning celebrity hairdresser" from Wolverhampton named Royston Blythe, who would offer "invaluable advice to consumers and other professionals". Two weeks before it went on air, the channel underwent something of a revolution, with the arrival of a TV veteran called Mike Esthop, a very genial man whose 40 years in TV have included work on The Saint, Kojak and - again - Tiswas. "What had happened," he tells me, "is that someone had come up with a great idea, but they'd tried to do it without professional expertise. You have to get in the right people." The day of our visit, Mike has just launched the station's new schedule, based around five rather dry half-hour slots in which presenters quiz a succession of expert guests about employment law, property, personal injury, family law, and wills and inheritance (unlike the Baby Channel, everything is live). Today also marks the debut of two new hosts, Stacey Ellis and Donna McCabe. They both arrived here after the closure of Downtown Superstore TV, a shopping channel based in Lincolnshire that shut its doors last December, leaving - according to an article in the local newspaper, Grantham Today - an empty studio complex erected in a garden centre and unfulfilled plans for a flagship show called Shop Idol. "We were selling anything, from computers to pans," says Stacey. "And Noddy clocks," Donna adds. "But it was an amazing experience - we had guests, we got to do vox pops, all that kind of stuff. The whole thing was based in a massive superstore, just off the A1. We were live six hours a day. You learned to pick up a blender, or any piece of electrical equipment, and know exactly how to use it within 20 seconds." And now here they are, charged with the responsibility of guiding their public through the subtly nuanced minefield that is English law. Do they have any kind of legal background? "No," says Donna, "but I think that's good, because the person sitting at home isn't a lawyer. They want the presenter to be them. That's what we're here to do." "It's playing devil's advocate, isn't it?" says Stacey. What have they done today? "I did... I don't know... it sounds like turnip," says Donna. "Power of attorney!" says Stacey. "Power of attorney," says Donna. "We kind of cross-referenced it with Coronation Street and what had happened with Mike Baldwin and Alzheimer's." Legal TV's studios are relatively palatial, though their solitary set is built around the seemingly obligatory two sofas, house plants and fake fruit bowl. In their office, populated by around 30 young staff, the atmosphere is somewhere between a student media studies project and a political party's election HQ. There is also a palpable undercurrent of friction. When I sit down with Mike Esthop, he complains about "having an owner who interferes with the TV side of his business empire and knows nothing about it." Later, Davy Singh-Bal has a brief moan about his tussles with "all these ex-BBC people - production types, who have a set way of doing things and no idea of what television should be". Halfway through my chat with Mike, I raise the very tantalising question of how many people might be watching. Do they have any idea? "No," he says, "because we haven't been on air long enough to get our Barb figures back. I should think they will be minuscule. Let's not beat around the bush: we are a specialised channel. And look at where we are on Sky. We have ambitions, as soon as possible, to transfer our channel down to the 200s, which is where we should be." This is a reference to Legal TV's ignominious slot on Sky's Electronic Programme Guide, where it nestles near Teachers' TV and the Audi Channel in the "Specialist" category, and Mike's wish to be allowed into the "Lifestyle & Culture" bracket. In the meantime, I wonder, does he mind that there might only be, say, 500 people tuned in? "It's strange... Personally, I've done productions that have been watched by millions and shown all over the world. But no, I don't mind. I've never actually been given my own train set, to get up and running from scratch. So the fact that - as you say, not me - we may have only 500 viewers..." Or fewer than that. "Or even fewer than that. It could be 50 viewers. It could be 5,000. It's not that it doesn't interest me, but personally I just want to be successful. My responsibility to Legal TV is to transfer us from 500 viewers to five million viewers as soon as possible." The most entertaining output the channel can promise today is a slightly muted discussion of the closure of the Peugeot factory down the road in Coventry, with an understandably dour man from the Transport and General Workers' Union and some hastily shot footage of the anticlimactic scene at the plant's gates. But there are plans for slightly more populist material: "Celebrity panel quiz shows, profiles, documentaries, historical dramatisations." Only the latter has so far materialised, in a half-hour pilot about the Gunpowder Plot in which an evidently low budget is offset by the enthusiasm of the cast, not least the man playing Guy Fawkes, who speaks in a nasal Manchester accent, strokes a painted-on beard and delivers camped-up lines such as, "Are you telling me I'm the most notorious criminal of all time?" Having spent a morning in Aston, I'm invited on a trip to a location shoot in a people carrier driven by Davy Singh-Bal, who apparently makes a habit of demonstrating his enthusiasm for the channel by getting directly involved. When I ask whether the station might eventually turn a profit, he shrugs. "It's difficult to say," he says. "The aim is to plough back any money into the programmes. I want to make this channel great." On the way into town, he hands me a press release that fleshes out his latest plan to achieve that aim. "Legal TV presents Cook With Counsel," it says. "This 20-part series will present the human side of barristers not often seen by the general public. Barristers are invited to participate in a 30-minute episode displaying their culinary skills." Though the offices of Legal TV occasionally buzz with vague talk about a future that may lie some distance from the Sky Digital platform - video on demand, podcasting, internet TV - they are wedded to a traditional model of business in which money comes from advertising and programme sponsorship. Thus far, their most regular advertiser is Claim Today Solicitors, the law firm owned by Davy, which perhaps points up one of the industry's biggest current anxieties. Crudely put, it is this: as the number of channels multiplies, so the ratings fragment and the opportunities to make money via traditional TV means evaporate. Sponsorship and advertising dry up. Though it involves kissing goodbye to the quaint idea that broadcasters must always endeavour to educate, inform and entertain, there may be an answer. To hear some people talk, it lies in the snowballing number of quiz channels and their premium-rate phone lines. It would have been interesting to visit one, but an afternoon on the phone suggests they can do without the attentions of the press. Quiz Call, owned by Channel 4, claim that "everything is a bit up in the air at the moment" and they would rather not see us; the PR man for Quiz Nation, among the longest-standing of the new breed, says that despite the fact that his clients' live broadcasts suggest they have a permanent base of operations, "they're out and about quite a lot at the moment, so it's difficult to nail them down". Another version of the future lies in a scruffy set of buildings in Wapping, where a very profitable company called YooMedia sees to two stations: Channel 854, a joint venture with William Hill that concentrates on poker and dog- and horse-racing, and Avago. In my innocence, I had assumed this latter brand name was a stab at upmarket sophistication, to be pronounced like Iago from Othello. But no: as with so many satellite channels, the name incisively tells you what the channel wants you to do: they offer a diet of quick-fire interactive bingo and the viewing public is invited - oh yes - to have a go. Should anyone get bored, both channels also offer the same range of interactive gambling options - roulette, computerised horse-racing, "Super Keno Bingo" - that are accessible at the touch of the Sky remote's infamous red button. Later this year, Avago will be rebranded as the TV wing of Gala bingo. For now, its studio is a small, darkened space dominated by the illuminated machine whose contents give their name to the beautifully-titled Avago Balls show, on which presenters work half-hour stints picking out the numbers, flagging up the prize money - though Ofcom rules dictate that pounds be euphemised as "smiles" - and ad-libbing about showbiz gossip, viewers' text messages or whatever comes into their heads. Should they dry up, they have a photocopied briefing paper; today's possible prompts include the anniversaries of Copernicus's first observation of Saturn and Arsenal winning their first FA cup, and the birthday of Rudolf Hess, "Nazi leader, who was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials and died in Spandau prison in 1987". According to the station's controller, 33-year-old Remy Minute, during the peak hours between 10pm and midnight Avago's on-screen games can register somewhere in the region of 1,000 players. Do the maths and you can see why such apparently piffling ratings are no problem at all: there are 28 games an hour and players can buy up to eight bingo cards for each game, at £1 a throw (they can apparently win up to £100,000, though prizes under £25 seem to be the norm). This afternoon, however, things seem a little quieter, therefore that bit less lucrative. From the channel's production gallery, I watch two rounds of the game, during which information on a couple of screens reveals that the number of players - such as George from Halesowen, Grant from Birmingham, Gillian in Basingstoke - declines from seven to six. Downstairs, in a dressing room festooned with greetings cards from more hard-bitten viewers, two regular presenters are getting ready for duty. Jodie McMullen is a 32-year-old former Miss Australia who came here via Cash Quiz, another game channel that recently folded; 23-year-old Sylvia Viosna sent in a self-made show-reel and was given her first job in TV. Already, though, she has big plans. "I want to produce. Ideally, I want to get into travel and sports, snowboarding, skateboarding, that kind of stuff. Obviously, in front of the camera, you've got a limited amount of time. I want to learn as much as I can here, put all that together and see what happens." "Same for me really," says Jodie. "I want to do holiday programmes and things like that. I have a friend who's a producer, so we have loads of time on our hands with cameras, and we're going to do some filming in Hyde Park and Portobello Market. Just making little documentaries, just to keep busy, just to kind of keep going." "I've been researching quite a lot, all the different channels and stuff," says Sylvia. "Just on the Sky channels, they've got so many things to get involved in. If you have the ideas, and you have the concepts and the backing behind you, you can make anything happen. That's the way I see it." So there it is again: the future of limitless choice, endless specialisation and a final end to that cheerless world in which we all tend to watch the same channels; of gleaming prospects for the Baby Channel, Legal TV, Toonami, Gay Date TV, Avago and Quiz Call; of travel, and music, and cartoons, and sport, and bingo, and religion, and money, money, money. It's not for me to dampen their dreams, of course, but as they fix their hair and set off for the studio, I wonder whether the future might actually be much like their present. Today, after all, Jodie and Sylvia are two faces among thousands smiling into the digital wilderness. And the question nags away: is anybody actually out there?
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