Previously on Madhouse Beyond

It's about time I did another rant. Oh yes it is. Tough, I'm doing one anyway.

Things change over time, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Television is no different - it's changed. For better because budgets are higher, special effects are better, picture quality is better and so on. But for worse because ad breaks are longer, originality is harder, and, it seems, people are getting forgetful. At least the TV shows seem to think this is the case.

Back in the 60s we had Doctor Who. It was a time when long-running radio dramas were commonplace and Doctor Who took the same path. It was on every week and each episode was part of a longer story. The first story lasted four weeks and the second, the first appearance of the infamous Daleks, lasted seven. The cool thing is that if you play each episode back-to-back, very little is repeated. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger and the next episode picks up pretty much where it left off with little to no overlap. There was no 'next time' trailer at the end, and no pre-credits 'story so far' to waste valuable storytelling time. This was commonplace.

In the 80s and 90s our TVs were bombarded with US shows, some of which were serials. Occasionally these would begin with "Previously on [name of show]" and have a really quick (ie 10 seconds) reminder of the previous episode just as a memory jogger. This was, I believe, unnecessary, but not really a problem.

Fast forward to the present. We still have Doctor Who, although the pacing has changed considerably since the early days. I recall the final episode of series 32 had quite a long 'previously...' section which, due to the series-long story arc, recapped several episodes. Part of this recap was a scene or two from a seemingly unrelated episode, and that recap basically spoiled a very carefully concealed Chekhov's Gun, effectively giving away the ending for those paying attention. Not good.

Another show I quite like watching is The Apprentice. But I don't usually turn it on until 5-10 minutes after the published start time because every episode begins with the same thing - a long intro explaining the format of the show (is this really needed after eight series?!) followed by the opening credits and then another five minutes explaining in meticulous detail what happened last week. I actually have theorised that you can just watch every other episode of the show and still follow it just as if you had watched them all. But even this complete disregard for the viewer's memory was not as far as the TV companies could push it. After all, the Apprentice and Doctor Who are both BBC1 which has no commercial breaks...

Last night, I was watching Derren Brown's Apocalypse. I'd recorded it when it was shown on Channel 4 quite a long time ago, and I finally got round to watching it last night. Of course, as I'd recorded it, I could skip the commercial breaks, but this only emphasised the problem. Not only did the second part of the two-part series do exactly what the Apprentice does, spending far too long going over what the viewer already knows, but after every commercial break there was a cutaway scene with Brown explaining what the show was about - you know, as if in the five minutes since the adverts began, the viewer had completely forgotten everything that had happened up until now. I've not got any actual science on the matter but the two hour-long episodes get cut down to 45 minutes each if you remove the adverts and I'm sure you could knock at least another 20 minutes off the total running time if you remove the scenes that are repeated as 'memory joggers'. Basically, Channel 4 have taken a one-hour show and spread it over two hours.

OK, TV companies, we're not stupid. Well... I'm not stupid. I can follow a plot even if it's broken into bits. I don't read books all in one sitting and the same is true of TV shows. I understand you need to break things up, sometimes for scheduling reasons and sometimes for commercial reasons, but stop being so bloody patronising about it. And frankly if there are people who can't remember a plot because of a five-minute break in the narrative, then either they're morons, or the plot was so shit that it probably wasn't worth spending money on making the show in the first place. So please, enough with the recaps and previews, they're just wasting valuable plot and/or advertising time.