Dragon’s Den
Posted: Mon 5 December, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts 3 Comments »Recently, I’ve been watching BBC’s “Dragon’s Den“. While I do find it interesting, seeing the various ideas and so on that are put forward in each programme, I’m finding that there’s a lot of it that really annoys too.
First of all, the format – in all the ones I’ve seen to date, the basic premise runs that everyone fails to win any funding at all, until the final presentation of the show – which gets the money after some “hard-fought” negotiations.
But the one that bugs me the most is the apparent assumption that anyone watching has the IQ of a post-cliff lemming. First the person doing the presentation explains something, then the presenter repeats it. It’s awesomely dumbed-down, and that grates to a major degree. Yes, I fucking know that they’ve been offered the money they need, but for more of the company than they wanted. It’s just been shown on screen. I’m not a fucking goldfish.
Why do so many programmes now do this? The ones with ad breaks are even worse – it seems like after every ad break, they have to rehash everything that’s gone on previously. Maybe they think the ads are utterly successful, and I’ve just gone off on the mental equivalent of a shopping spree, and have thus forgotten all about what the programme was I was watching.
It’s patronising, irritating, and makes me thankful for Sky+’s fast-forward button.
I know why they do that after the ad breaks. As you have Sky+ you are probably blissfully unaware of just how long the ad breaks are on Sky channels! I pride myself in not being a “post cliff Lemming” (I like that!) but there have been plenty of times when I have forgotten what I was watching by the time the ad break has finished (around 10 mins long, 6 mins after the show starts!).
Ad breaks now stop me from watching TV, it’s just not worth the shitty mood they put me in…
I hate that too. I remember one documentary on Channel Four in which the presenter told me who he was and what he was doing after EVERY SINGLE AD BREAK, and it nearly drove me crackers. I recently watched ‘A History of Disbelief’ with Jonathon Miller, and it was amazing to be treated like an intelligent adult with an attention span. Made me realise how rare that is now.
I hate the constant recap. Eg the documentary on the gullible idiots who got conned by the master conman. Managed to repeat every fact three times. First in outline, then in detail and again in summary. It’s a useful technique when lecturing on a subject that is essentially dry but accuracy and detail matter eg law, but in a documentary that also has visuals and talking heads, to have the narrator tell us three times is overkill. They told us the same fact three times.