Reaching middle age, Horizon appears to have slowed down
The current season of Horizon marks the 40th anniversary of what we must still, I imagine, regard as the BBC's flagship science and technology series. But what a shadow of its former self it is today. Compared to the old days of fact-filled don't-miss-a-moment documentary television, when the series was in the hands of experts at communicating technology like Max Whitby, a typical Horizon programme today seems to be very thin on the ground.
Take last night's programme on vitamins, for example. There's no denying that it included new and interesting content. For example, scientists at the Linus Pauling Institute were commendably objective in admitting that their esteemed founder was in fact wrong about Vitamin C preventing colds and flu (it actually reduces their severity if you take it when you've got one). Also presented were research into how Vitamin E is absorbed, and the significant dangers of taking more than a little Vitamin A.
But that was about it. We spent a lot of time meeting a selection of women who took vitamins, seeing them again and again and hearing them say more or less the same thing - eventually they were employed in a tiny and statistically-meaningless (though interesting) study on Vitamin E absorption. We also spent a great deal of time running through the same stuff every few minutes. This was particularly a problem in the first half of the show - after twenty minutes or so, both my wife and I, even though we are both used to the slower pace and thinner content of North American factual programming, found ourselves saying "get on with it!" under our breaths. The pace was just too slow, there was just too much repetition, and far too little content.
Why is this? The obvious answer is that Horizon these days is a co-production between the BBC and a US-based commercial cable network, the Science Channel. American factual programming, particularly on commercial television (which means everything except PBS, Horizon's former collaborator) is certainly more reliant on repetition and shorter on content. Is that the reason?
I don't think so. There is an argument that says that producers repeat and recap to avoid the audience losing the thread after a commercial break. This is not unreasonable - except that, if this is the reason, why don't drama programmes have similar repetitions and recaps after each break? The fact is that they don't. At all. In the case of a multi-part story, the hour starts with a quick "Last time on..." recap and they're off.
And meanwhile, running on Sky One at the same time as Horizon's vitamins programme, a documentary on the theory that the Titanic was swapped with sister ship the Olympic for the purposes of insurance fraud had the merest one-line recap after each break and fairly minimal repetition (though sadly the story itself turned out to be rather of the shaggy-dog variety).
In addition, we make plenty of other factual programmes in this country that are originated for commercial television - Francis Pryor's exceptional Britain AD 'factual miniseries', for example, or even plain old Time Team, both originated for Channel 4. Time Team is, and Pryor's previous 3-parter, Britain BC, was, shown both on the Discovery Channel in the UK and in the US, where the channel is stable-mate to Horizon's current production partner, the Science Channel. In neither of these cases do the programmes run at Horizon's slow speed, nor is their content so parsimoniously ladled out with as much filler and repetition. Pryor's programmes have a mild recap after the break and tend to use the same computer graphics sequences rather too many times, but it's not too tedious. Time Team hardly repeats anything at all.
The fact that other UK-originated programming shown on the same US channels does not suffer so deeply from these defects suggests that the sluggishness of Horizon is both a production decision and one that is not the result of pressure from the US-based partner. So why is it? Maybe there isn't enough budget to originate a programme's-worth of material so it has to be continually recycled. Or maybe it's something else. I haven't the faintest idea.
I would only suggest that Horizon's producers get a move on. Not only is the pace of a modern Horizon slower by far than that of earlier times; it is also slower than other factual programming actually designed to cope with commercials. And with viewers of commercial channels increasingly skipping the breaks in an instant thanks to devices like Tivo and Sky+, more and more people aren't seeing the commercials at all, essentially going straight from one part to the next, almost as if they were watching the BBC or PBS. So if viewers are getting bored with repetition now, what will they think when most of them have a PVR? They'll watch something else, that's what, and factual programming will lose once again.
