Never Mind the Interactivity

For the first month or so I've been coming up with format ideas aimed at different demographics, various levels of interactivity for home audiences and dealing with things like TV's aversion to liveness. The more I have thought about the task I've set myself, the more I realise how far out most of these ideas seem. TV is hardly doing interactivity and I'm constantly tempted to make the formats less interactive and more 'televisual'. So for our testing regime were concentrating on individual games rather than the bigger picture. We're going to reverse engineer this one.

Meanwhile, Greg has been thinking through the testing plans and getting quotes from potential venues, kit and so on and Ruth Farrar, who works with Greg, has been doing research into how TV game, quiz and panel shows are constructed time-wise. It has been very useful to see the different rhythms game shows employ. The example below shows how the rounds in Never Mind the Buzzcocks get successively shorter.