We are Anything TV, and this is People Will Watch Anything.
In a society where it seems anyone and anything can attract an audience, will people really watch anything? We believe that when it comes to entertainment, our standards have significantly lowered. And we believe that the Internet may be partly to blame for this. Owing to the growing popularity and development of websites such as YouTube, anyone can get a platform instantly. But just because something gains an audience, does that mean it is worthwhile viewing? For example, Chris Crocker, a19-year-old Britney Spears fan, posted an emotional plea to the public to leave Britney alone, on YouTube last year. Since then, the video has received over 15 million views, and Crocker was recently offered his own TV show. In a society obsessed with celebrity, we are quick to glorify people who have done nothing to earn their status.
We are particularly interested in the area of “reality TV”. Since Big Brother exploded onto our screens in 2000, the genre has expanded at an alarming rate. It is no longer just the lives of celebrities that we are interested in. We have become obsessed with the voyeuristic nature of watching ordinary people interacting, that we’re beginning to interact less and less ourselves.
Generally speaking, however, reality is fairly mundane and uneventful. The producers of such programmes realise this, and so engineer situations in order to create more interesting viewing. Television programmes such as The Hills and Laguna Beach are dubbed as “reality” shows, when in truth supposedly “real” situations are constantly edited and manipulated for dramatic effect, to such an extent that they are required by law to preface the broadcast with a disclaimer stating that the footage has been manipulated. Yet still, they gain an audience, happy to accept what they are seeing as “reality”. Whether this is simply a solution to boredom, or a highly immersive form of escapism from their own mundane lives, we can’t be entirely sure.
John Cage’s notion of life itself as the highest form of art is something we feel is very relevant to our work, as were the highly uneventful films of Guy Debord. We are very interested in the idea of whether or not people will literally watch nothing. During Big Brother season, E4 broadcasts almost 24 hour live coverage of the house, and has done so during ever series, including the entirety of every night, when the housemates are asleep. As tedious as this may be to observe, not to mention irritating thanks to the constant dips in sound for legal reasons, it obviously gains a large enough audience to warrant its production over other programmes.
Today, we are completely saturated by the media and potential forms of entertainment. Perhaps this is the reason why we will now settle for the mindless and repetitive, simply because it is easily accessible. Through the creating of our fictional TV channel, Anything TV, we will parody popular shows in order highlight the poor quality of much of today’s television content. We will strive to prove that people really will watch anything.
Further details can be found on our blog at www.peoplewillreadanything.blogspot.com
