“What is a video podcast?” is a question for which you might accuse its asker of ignorance, but I only ask it because the term has risen as something that we all apparently understand. We all know what a podcast is, so a video podcast is surely just one where you can see who is talking?
But just as podcasts, as a form, are similar to existing half-hour and hour-long speech-led programmes found on UK radio, particularly magazine programmes on BBC Radio 4, video podcasts seem to me to be too close to television, or just a video of the type you find on YouTube. At worst, it reminds me of what Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut, in their famous interview, that he believed cinema should avoid: “photographs of people talking”.
At the time of writing, a video podcast is currently being watched by an average of four million people in the UK because it is also being broadcast in primetime on standard over-the-air television. Admittedly, this is because it ties in to “The Celebrity Traitors”, BBC One’s wildly popular reality game show immediately preceding it, but “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” features presenter Ed Gamble interviewing his guests, massive condenser microphones on stands before them all instead of lavalier mics clipped to their clothes, our view cutting between unmoving cameras. The visuals are entirely superfluous to the programme, which the BBC also makes available as audio-only podcasts, but those pictures are there if you want them.
Having previously talked about Marshall McLuhan, the father of media studies, describing television as a “cool” medium, owing to the amount of attention the audience needs to give to make it “warm”, I am wary of the “warmth” of the sound of a podcast being attached to the “coolness” of an optional picture. If it is optional, it can be dispensed with entirely. If it cannot be, then you have crossed into a different media, whether that be television, competing for an attention in a room or, if you move to prioritising visuals over the picture, cinema.
My guess, and it is only my guess, is that podcasts are a more intimate media than radio: both can be listened to individually through headphones, but you will still find radio more frequently in social settings, if only as a background to them, than you will with a podcast. This bifurcation of audio broadcasting is what I think has led to the BBC announcing that its replacement for the long-running BBC Radio 4 consumer affairs show “You and Yours” will be “a refreshed consumer programme, designed to work both on air and on demand”, although the mechanics of how it will work were not elaborated.
Admittedly, other chat shows look similar to “The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked” – episodes of “Parkinson” from the 1970s also have microphones on stands, trailing wires out of shot – but these can be more obviously made as television shows, recorded in a TV studio in front of an audience, with operators moving the cameras. The kind of convergence being attempted by treating a video podcast as a television programme is a point when neither medium is being used as effectively as it could be, just like the act of putting a film in a TV schedule and not expecting the audience at home to turn the lights out and be quiet.
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