Why TV Promos Need Moderating

Ofcom yesterday published its assessment of two TV trails or promos that appeared on Comedy Central a while ago.   Even though the promos aired at 10.00 p.m., an hour after the watershed, Ofcom thought they were inappropriately vulgar - for any audience.

As a Promo Producer for Bravo, I often worked with what could be considered contentious material. Our promos for such material had to fit within one of two designations: 'SAT' and 'SWC'.

'SAT' stood for "Schedule Any Time", which mean that the material, approach and style of the promo was light enough to not cause any concerns for any part of an audience that might be expected to see it. The promo could therefore be slotted into the transmission schedule at any time the channel was on air.

'SWC' was the acronym for "Schedule With Care" and, as such, was self-explanatory.  Usually it indicated the promo would only be transmitted during post-watershed hours - which in the UK are between 9.00 pm. and 5.30 a.m. on free-to-air channels.  (On premium and pay-to-view channels the timings are slightly different: 8.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m.).  However, isolated instances could arise whereby the scheduling of a particular item not restricted to post-watershed hours would still require deliberation or sensitivity.  One such instance was when one of our promos for a thriller about a hijack situation on a North Sea oil-rig had to be hastily re-edited because a real, live catastrophe was actually taking place simultaneously on an oil rig in the North Sea.

Ofcom only gets called in if offence is taken, and offence in promos usually relates to a viewer being unhappy about what he or she has been shown.  This is because viewers elect to watch programmes: it's for them to find the 'off' button if they don't like something.  They don't, however, elect to watch promos and they have little control of being exposed to them - which is why Ofcom can be expected to moderate promos on their behalf, albeit usually after offence has been taken.

It works like this.  Once you are happily esconced in a programme, you'll understand the context and parameters within which it operates.  If outrage is promised - and you're looking forward to seeing some - then when it happens, you'll find it totally acceptable. 

But promos aren't something you can settle down into.  You don't know when to expect them: they are discontinuous, full of surprise and content not seen before. They are a stand-alone advertisement for a programme you haven't yet watched - nor possibly will want to.

Promos usually appear at a programme junctions or in commercial breaks, when the viewer is more distractable and less committed to watching that particular moment of television*.  To grasp the viewer's attention, promos have to be different - sensational, even. 

Promos will be watched by all sorts of people - including many who won't be interested in the programme's content or subject matter - and a few who might even find it offensive. They are designed to attract viewers to a programme, even if the viewer gives up once they start watching.  They are not designed to repel them.

Comedy Central overstepped the mark on his occasion because they didn't bear this in mind.  On the viewer's behalf, Ofcom stepped in and reprimanded the channel accordingly.

Promos are happenstance.  Viewers don't make an appointment to see them - and they can't necessarily avoid them, either.

The Amy Schumer clip was extremely crude but in context it was also outrageously funny.  However, like the viewers who complained to Ofcom, I'd be incredibly offended if it was shown to me when I wasn't expecting it.






*As a footnote, the BBC runs no commercial advertisements but runs many promos at programme junctions, cross-promoting its own services.  Initially the BBC saw on-screen promos as being an effective means of extending programme blocks to fill a half- or one-hour slot: much of the external programming it inherits are also  made for other TV markets, and as such would be short in order to accommodate paid advertising.  These days, this is less of a problem as the BBC makes its own programmes for sale to commercial broadcasters as, as such, therefore incorporates 'break opportunities' into the programme format.  As its programmes are shorter, it can use the airtime this frees up to promote its own services.  For example, the on-screen advertising for Radios 1 & 2 on BBC networks is currently estimated at a market equivalent of £80M per annum. 

I Shall Not Be Re-joining The BBC Club....

I was interested to learn of the recent offer to BBC Alumni of (re-)joining the BBC Club.  However, I won’t be applying because I found the place to be a hotbed of physical danger, crass mismanagement, insult and crime.

When I worked at Alexandra Palace back in the mid-70s, I was a constant habitué of the club there and, one lunchtime, ended up in A&E  with a broken nose as a result.  “Sporting injury!" claimed my colleagues as they propelled me into the Whittington Hospital, blood streaming down my face. Horrified emergency staff appraised the situation: “Gosh!  Rugby? Boxing? Ice Hockey?”

“Er, no”, I replied nasally, “Snooker”.

The club at AP had an excellent snooker room and during a game with a fellow member of the Graphic Design team, I questioned the viability of a shot he was proposing to take. It required a lot of edge and a bit of bottom to get the cue ball to glance one of the colours and send it sideways into the pocket.  “It’ll never work” I thought, as I moved to stand behind him and peer along the length of the cue to see precisely where he was going to hit the white, “although, it migh-“.

At that moment, (as should really have been expected), he pulled back on the cue to take the shot.  About eighteen inches.  So all I saw was the rapidly approaching back end of the cue travelling towards me at a rate of knots before everything went black as it smashed squarely into my nose.  Symmetrically, fortunately, because it broke my nose straight on.  You’d hardly know from looking - if I hadn’t been perfectly positioned behind the shot, my nose would now be all over the place. 

Ever since, of course, I can’t stand behind anyone playing snooker without a horrific welling of the sinuses, in anticipation of the great pain this noble recreation can bring.  Even mention of the game brings on a bout of neuralgia.

So for this reason, I won’t be applying to re-join.  That, and guilt; for when I was social secretary of the BBC Railway Society, I sent everyone to the wrong signal box one day, which didn’t go down well with BR management.  They didn’t need a great horde of grumpy anoraks cluttering up the end of platform 8 at Kings Cross.

And then there was insulting the bloke standing next to me in the club at TC one day when he asked my what I thought of the pint of Ruddles County I had just bought. “Not much,” I said, “Tastes like dishwater”.  “Oh”, replied John Ruddles, chairman of the brewery, “Thanks very much…’.

And I still feel unsettled about the time while watching the Test Match on the TV in the club at AP, two blokes in brown coats wandered in and said “Sorry everyone - we’ve got to take this television away”.  They turned the set off, unplugged all the wires, lifted the mighty beast and, leaving us sitting around disgruntled and wondering what else we could do now there was no cricket to watch, carted the TV through the club, out of the doors, through reception and into a van parked outside.  They drove off and neither they, the van nor the television set were ever seen again.

No, life is menacing enough these days without rejoining the BBC Club…

Just So Far...

Ventimiglia, a couple of days ago.


As usual, outside the big frontier railway station, the locals sit chatting over their espressos in the pavement cafés.  Inside, and as usual, across the concourse to the solitary ticket booth, straggles a meandering queue of tourists.

Although it depends what you classify as a tourist.

For, this year, the area around this border station in Italy is much more crowded. It has many new occupants and not just the ranks of regional carabinieri, armed, talking to each other animatedly and directing wayward jaywalkers just for something to do. Rather, most of the new occupants are a quiet swarm of bedraggled souls camped as well as they can on the flower verges and the roundabout.

These are the boat migrants from north Africa, the people who paid extortionate prices for desperate journeys across the Mediterranean to a strange and different continent to leave their difficult pasts behind.  They have made their way up through Italy and now they sit, waiting at the border into France.  And no-one is letting them go any further.




Other than a half hour wait at the ticket office, western tourists have no problem boarding the regular trains that start in Ventimiglia and head west across the frontier to Monte Carlo, Nice and beyond. But the boat people can't.  Even if they were able to stray onto the platforms and climb on board a train into France, at the first stop, Menton Garavan, every train endures a prolonged delay as the French Gendamerie Nationale makes a slow and deliberate inspection of each carriage. The migrants and asylum seekers aren't allowed into France.

Meanwhile, down on what used to be where Italy's SS10 joined up with the French N7 at the frontier, the crowds are even bigger.  Colourful clothes, flags and banners flap in the warm sunlight as photographers, television crews and would-be immigrants jostle for the shots. Local commerce is thwarted by inaccessibity that the crowds have brought. The road is jammed and any trans-border crossing is slow and very deliberate. You need the paperwork to cross. And the Africans haven't got any.  They hardly have anything.
  
 

But it's back in the marble brutalism of Ventimiglia railway station where the situation reveals its true hopelessness. A major corridor has been allocated as a dormitory, and bodies lie on the floor, resting, sleeping and waiting.  But waiting for what?  The hours pass, the people sit.  There is nothing to do. Physically, it is not squalid, but the dilemma is.  Desperation is palpable. And there’s no indication that frustration - or worse - won’t be imminent.

It appears that no-one is moving out of Ventimiglia soon.


 

copy/photos © Chris Wood-W3KTS June 2015