VOLCANO LIVE(ISH)

We finally got around to watching all four hours of “Volcano Live” (BBC2’s latest attempt at stretching the “Springwatch” format into other areas of interest) at the weekend. Yes, I know it took us four months and so the “Live” part was rather redundant, but, hey! Get used to it… This is how we live now in our rinky-dinky brave new digital era.

The “Live” experience is only as “Live” as we choose to make it, and they broadcast their programmes “Live” from Hawaii during a week when my “Free time” was limited, and so my experience of their experience happened three months after they experienced it.

To be honest, it was touch and go as to whether we ever bothered to watch the things at all. After all they were clogging up 4 honest hours of good time on the DVR which could have been used for Gordon Ramsay’s latest cookery series or something else equally vital. In the end, we were on the very brink of just hitting “delete” because we were “never likely” to actually watch the thing, when I suggested that we just give it ten minutes and, if it was really annoying in the way that only shows like this can be, then we’d delete the rest.

So that’s what we did and we sat through four hours of it, and made a mental note that we really ought to visit Hawaii one day, so it can’t have been all bad.

It doesn’t really matter that we never saw it “Live” anyway. I’ve never been much of a one for the “Live” experience, even when it comes to music, so on a TV show about Volcanoes, the fact that it was being transmitted “Live” was never going to be the biggest draw for me. In fact, it’s not one of those ideas that focus groups have that strikes be as being the brightest anyway, as it’s not quite as unpredictable as all those trailers might have had us believe in the same way that something like “Springwatch” might be with all those animals dropping dead unexpectedly and so on, and I suppose that only about 15 minutes of each hour was actually taken from the “live” feed anyway…

Ah well, perhaps the powers that be just thought that people would tune in on the off chance that they might get to see Kate Humble or Dr Iain Stewart (reunited from “Rough Science”) get burnt to crisps live on air…? You should never, ever underestimate the fact that spirit of the spectators at the Coliseum isn’t still alive and well in modern humans, and any car crash (or even potential car crash) is bound to bring ’em running…

Still, by watching a recording, all I really missed out on were a couple of “Live Web Chats” which I wouldn’t have involved myself in anyway and the chance to send in some inane question that had been carefully filtered by the researchers to carefully fit in with what they already had planned anyway.

Hmm… Does that seem a tiny bit cynical, or are my “Media Senses” tingling…?

You see, whilst there was an awful lot to like about a primetime show about geology being stripped across four evenings in June, there was an awful lot of the things that so very precisely annoy me about these kinds of shows.

Don’t get me wrong, about 85% - okay, maybe 75% - of it was wonderful with some spectacular images being broadcast from some of the most astonishing places on Earth, and somer fascinating films made about the subject in hand which wouldn’t have looked out of place in one of Dr Stewart’s pre-filmed documentary series. By the way, whilst he is one of TV’s great communicators, he’s much better when he’s being recorded than as a “presenter” and trying to entertain and there wre moments when he looked across at the generally quite wonderful Ms Humble with a look in his eye which said “You really haven’t got a clue, do you missy…?” and he looked as if he’d rather be back at his university instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator.

There was also quite a lot to be learned, too, albeit in that slightly patronising way that mainstream TV science programmes have of assuming everyone is about six years and doesn’t have enough wherewithal to actually possibly know something about the topic already, or have already gained enough interest in a subject to be tuning in to find out more.

Perhaps there is just an assumption that we really only want to see the presenters burnt to crisps after all.

A dangerous career choice is Volcanology…

Still, you have to get them young to get them interested, so maybe it was those six-year olds they were aiming the show at after all.

I think what annoyed me most about Volcano live was what usually annoys me about these kinds of shows. Like, for example, that there is a need to make the show about making the show itself, so there’s the ubiquitous “walking around our production headquarters” nonsense as if we really need to know quite how much effort they’re putting in whn we really could have been looking at more actual Volcanoes, er, “Live” which is what we might really have been tuning in to see rather than a car park full of vans in some spectacular countryside.

Equally there’s the ridiculously scripted intro’s full of “false jeopardy” and breathless faux-excitement along with the ridiculous overuse of the word “footage” which is really starting to drive me mad in these kinds of programmes. It’s almost as if it’s the only “technical term” that they expect us to be able to understand and so they have to bludgeon us over the head with it time after time after time…

That and the idea that they have to include a “celebrity” moment – in this case comedian Ed Byrne – just in case our attention was flagging. He was brought in to do the “I’m a dorky ordinary person” science explanations which was fair enough, but we all know he’s not the idiot he was making himself out to be. Still, as an “everyman” figure, they could have chosen worse, although if I were him, I might just have flown out to Hawaii and made a surprising appearance during that last “Live” show, just to guilt them into buying him a ticket to somewhere exotic next time…

If there is a next time, of course, but I’d like to be there if there is because, despite what I might have suggested, there was a lot to like and I really do like a good bit of geology when it turns up on my telly.