Zapping, grazing and the Three Minute Culture

Press, 10 February 1989, Page 7

Zapping, grazing and the Three Minute Culture

By

DAVID LEWIN

Some of the more interesting and intriguing films being shown on television at the moment have no cast list at the end and are credited to no particular writer. They are strong on implied sexuality — women’s legs feature prominently — and lingering glances over coffee cups. Each story takes a minute to tell because that is considered to be the amount of time needed to get the message across. They are, of course, certain commercials and they are a key ingredient to The Three Minute Culture, which started in America and is due, inexorably, to arrive in Britain soon.

Three minutes is the amount of time the average television viewer in America will stay with one channel before zapping the remote control button on his set and starting to graze over the rest of a dozen programmes, to see which, if anything, he will settle down with — for a further three minutes.

To help cope with grazing, most television producers in Hollywood now create a specially edited teaser hook to appear before every major show which crowds together all the highlights of the next 50 minutes.

The 8.8. C. is devoting a new series to an analysis of The Three Minute Culture. The evidence from Michael Grade, a former controller of 8.8. C. TV and now in charge of Channel 4, makes particularly depressing listening. He says that when zapping and grazing get going in Britain it will mean the end of “the golden age of broadcasting.” "I don't think people are going to give television the attention that they have,” he says. “To sit down and watch difficult programmes.

“When there is something difficult, you reach for the buttom because there will be too many easy alternatives. What can a programme maker do about that? Nothing. What can a scheduler of programmes do about that? Nothing. Why? Because the market place will not allow you to make those programmes any more.

“There will be a gentle but inevitable descent. The force that television has been will be eroded. We will become just a magazine rack.”

This in Michael Grade’s judgment has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with technology. It is the new technology of offering unlimited channels on your television set which will destroy the powers of concentration of the audience.

Already something new from America is on its way, to make zapping and grazing even easier.

The Americans call it PIP — which stands for Picture in Picture. On a 27-inch television screen, it is now possible to summon up 12 different pictures from 12 different television shows at the same time.

The pictures are arranged in an L shape at the left-hand side of the screen and along the bottom. In the remaining space, the viewer can summon up a larger image from any one of the 12 shows which interests him.

This is all part of the new Three Minute Culture, in which a quick image is all. Some of the new group of British film directors most wanted by Hollywood come from the training ground of English commercials. Adrian Lyne came from pop music video, where the fast image and vivid lighting are more important than the sound.

It took Adrian Lyne some time to get the hang of how to tell the story in more than three-minute bites, but he finally managed it with “Fatal Attraction;” Michael Grade has this warning: “We are becoming a society — we are breeding a society — that is only visually literate. Not written literate,” he says in the 8.8. C. series. “It is a depressing prospect leading to a pop video culture of the fast cut. “Television will not be for watching, but for flipping through.” So PIP with nine or 12 images on the screen at the same time is on its way. Fast images to go with fast food. —DUO copyright