CBC-TV8 hit the mother lode the other night!
What a thing, since that channel often attracts justifiable criticism.
If you got your news only from TV8’s one constant – The Evening News – you would think that little that is truly newsworthy happens in Barbados.
It seems that the first thing they do in the Pine on mornings is check where Government ministers are headed that day. And after rostering reporters and cameramen to run behind them, CBC offers viewers laboured inserts of this or that one going on for a minute or more of listener-unfriendly, mind-exhausting sentences.
(Our public officials really must learn how to speak for the ear, and with polish, vibrancy and economy.)
CBC feeds us these sound meals (yuh cahn call them sound bites), often in three-course portions, like if we don’t know that unless the president of the United States is declaring war, no major newscast in that country is making viewers chew on his sound for more than 15 seconds.
The Evening News and CBC’s other staple – the talking head feature – cannot usually be called good TV.
Look, television’s prime targets (the eyes and the ears) are like a child who suffers from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Unlike the tongue, nose and skin, they treat everything coming their way as fair game for their attention. If you want their focus you have to earn it.
After almost 50 years in the business, CBC scarcely shows awareness of the always pressing need to hold the attention of overactive “children” with wandering, greedy eyes and ears.
But, on the bright side, there was the Gabby feature on Whit Monday night.
What an in-house offering!
It wasn’t the subject matter. Even intellectually stimulating subject matter nowadays struggles to keep a broad television audience engaged.
It wasn’t the “packaging”. Augmenting the interview with stills, video clips and audience shots could hardly have saved the day.
And, yes, in Gabby you had someone who was personally engaging, who oozed magnetism and confidence and ease with the milieu (in other places the guests – and not only “stars” – are prepped by both the culture and the programme producers to so ooze), who could deliver himself with verbal assurance and captivating demonstrativeness.
That helped but was not enough to suppress the viewer’s urge to “skip town”.
What could – and did – was the mother lode: story – life in living “colour” coming at you.
Gabby was story and told stories. About Jack and “Jack” Dear. About Jackie Opel. About the lady with her precious records. About that fan’s response to Calypso. About Sir Don duplicitous la-la-ing (or whatever) at rehearsals. And much more.
In the Gabby feature you had a character (not in the sense of “Town Man” or “Gearbox”, but in the sense of a protagonist or antagonist) drawing us in and then transporting us into another “world” – “living” life right before our eyes.
Mornin’ Barbados, Mid Morning Mix and Face 2 Face seldom reach those viewer heights – perhaps they are not intended to.
But with the smorgasbord of channel choice that most people now have, CBC has to find compelling drawing cards.
In this world of more than 57 Channels And Nothin’ On (Springsteen, update), people still go for the “nothin’” that brings them characters in story – whether in fiction or in creative nonfiction.
Not history. Not information. Not ideas. Yes, Gabby shared all those, but they were mere foils in the piece. The main attraction, the magnet, was bursting-with-life story.
That programme, to me, demonstrated an eminently usable template: use of an interviewee “character” and his/her narratives to grab and hold our attention, to entertain us, to connect us to others, to create a sense of belonging to something (together). Remember, stories are how we understand each other’s experience.
A few years ago, then head of CBC, Lars Stromberg, said that regional producers were asking for several times more than the cost of purchasing content from the United States.
That means that Caribbean stations like CBC have to think very creatively about how to accomplish the best television ends with their puny means. Well, since human beings are suckers for story (“we are all essentially storytellers and avid story recipients” – Kopfman et al., 1998), talking head story has much potential for good TV on the cheap.
CBC might have lucked into a niche approach to delay our itchy remote control fingers. With some prepping and the right mix of story sensitivity from host and post-production people, CBC can have many Bajans engagingly telling the stories of their experiences.
There’s (viewers’) gold in them thar fields and hills, CBC.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.
