-Opening line of Gogglebox

A TV show about watching TV, in theory, sounds more banal than most contemporary reality programming. But in the UK, Gogglebox became a hit since it premiered in March 2013. It’s the stuff of reception studies scholars’ dreams, officially called an “observational documentary.”

Gogglebox follows households from across Britain responding to relevant news stories, reality TV shows like Top Chef and Britain’s Got Talent, and popular films from Titanic to The Full Monty.

As a sleeper success that recently won a BAFTA for “Best Reality & Constructed Factual,” it may have just reached its peak. Certainly, watching the cast watch the BAFTAS is a top meta moment, but also a great scene of pure jubilation. Bill from Cambridge claimed it was the first thing he’s won since the 1975 British Chess Championship; best friends Sandra and Sandy embraced in the south London neighborhood of Brixton; and exes-turned-pals Christopher and Stephen in Brighton hurriedly opened a bottle of champagne.

The cast, who welcome viewers in their homes with uncensored and sometimes quite explicit commentary, is what really makes the show so enjoyable. The appointed “Posh Ones,” Dominic and Stephanie, are rumored to be on the next installation of Celebrity Big Brother.

Retired duo June and Leon, the quintessential “old married couple” provide cheeky banter on everything from finding the remote control to Leon’s interview for MI6 when he was in the army. I couldn’t help but tear up when they watched a recent widower speak of his late wife, or during the famous scene in Titanic when Rose lets go of Jack. Following both scenes, Leon says to June, “I couldn’t do without you.”

But the most telling parts of the series for a foreigner in the UK, such as myself, are the households’ responses to recent political events.

June and Leon are quite possibly the most liberal-minded of the Gogglebox bunch. The two cheered when the UK passed same sex marriage legislation. They empathized while watching a documentary on a group of men risking their lives to find a better life in England.

Leon is particularly supportive of immigrants, citing that his grandfather came to the country as one. He expresses his distaste for the head of the UK Independent Party (UKIP) Nigel Farage, whose party swept victories in the recent European election. Leon voted for Labour “with a heavy heart,” and the party is attempting to appease UKIP, as former Prime Minister Tony Blair has addressed.

During a news brief on David Cameron, Leon pointed out that working class citizens do not vote for “posh rich boys who look after the posh rich boys,” while Reverend Kate from Nottinghamshire stated it isn’t easy to vote for him “when you’ve seen the heart of your city ripped out by a Tory government.”

I first came to London in 2011, and most of my graduate cohort also hailed from other nations, from China to Portugal to Canada, and our British colleagues were welcoming and open-minded. Since returning in 2013, immigration issues have exacerbated. Farage spoke of “less civilized” Europeans from Romania and Bulgaria who could cause crime while taking jobs and abusing the benefits and healthcare system. The blatant xenophobia struck a chord with me as I am originally from Romania.

The reactions on Googlebox towards foreigners helped me understand attitudes towards outsiders in the UK, as foreign born residents in continue to be on the rise. Goggleboxer Andrew is a retired hotelier in Brighton, and furiously responded to an ad by the current head of the Labour Party Ed Miliband who said there is nothing wrong with employing from abroad, but that the rules should be regulated so “local people get a fair crack at the whip”:

“No, local people should be offered the jobs first, not just a ‘fair crack at the whip,’ whatever that means. They should be offered the job first because they’re born here, brought up here, their parents were born here, their grandparents were born here, so they should be offered the available jobs first. And then, if all that local labor is absorbed … bring them in and that’s fine.”

Gogglebox has essentially assembled a televised social experiment. It encapsulates pop culture nuggets from film and TV, and the most significant news events of each week, with unfiltered reactions to how it impacts individual citizens based on their beliefs, backgrounds and education. It’s only a shame the Season 3 finale ended before the results of this European election. I know Leon in Liverpool will be disappointed but not surprised. And I know I’ll be waiting patiently for Season 4.

Series 2 sees 91 high-definition cameras fixed throughout the Accident and Emergency ward at London’s Kings College Hospital each episode chronicles a single day in one of the UK’s biggest trauma center. Able to turn and zoom in any direction, these cameras are controlled by remote control from a mobile gallery parked outside. 168 production team members filmed for a month, accumulating 7600 hours of footage, to produce 14 episodes. It is a mammoth technological undertaking, illustrating how Channel 4 likes to do things big – it’s a public service broadcaster, but one funded through adverts, so it has to reel its audience in.

Each episode of 24hrs in A&E (which airs in the US on BBCAmerica) assembles a series of central stories and surrounding vignettes. We have victims of road traffic accidents, gang stabbings and massive strokes. But we also have the little old lady who fell out of bed, or the man who left in that splinter way too long. It’s often a masterpiece of storytelling, confronting us first with the injury and the team’s attempts to treat and diagnose before slowly building up the picture of the patient and what happened through retrospective interviews with friends, families and medical staff. It illustrates Channel 4’s public service remit in action, working as a flagship ‘state of the nation‘ documentary, and a chronicle of multicultural Britain through its patients and staff. Yet at the same time it demonstrates technological innovation through its filming processes.

In recent years Channel 4 has built a stable of these fixed-camera documentaries, chronicling daily life in model agencies, hotels, maternity wards and high schools (and even a houseshare of dwarves during panto season). The form debuted with The Family in 2008, where Paul Watson’s groundbreaking 1974 BBC documentary serial was updated for the Big Brother age. The observational camera crew were absented in favor of 40 fixed cameras fitted around the Hughes family home, with a live gallery in the house next door, filming for 100 days to build up a picture of ‘everyday’ family life. Creatives and executives were careful to highlight the program’s ‘normality’ in contrast to the pictures of dysfunction and conflict painted by previous Channel 4 hits Wife Swap and Supernanny. This was serious, 9pm, ‘event’ documentary. Its title suggested universality – ‘The’ family – a chronicle of the institution, featuring white, British-Asian and British-Nigerian families. Building on Channel 4’s remit to ‘appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society’, the programme established the fixed-camera format as a distinctive (another remit buzzword) feature of a new era of Channel 4 observational documentary.

The Family’s success helped signal a way forward in the imminent post-Big Brother era, with Channel 4’s defining reality TV series slowly limping towards its cancellation in 2010 (since revived by channel Five). These fixed-camera documentaries utilized Big Brother’s surveillance technology to present a new spin on the classical ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style. By making its camerapersons invisible, the documentaries attempt to reduce the observational documentary paradox, with their around-the-clock filming and all-seeing cameras bringing connotations of directness, immediacy and transparency.

You can see the value for Channel 4: a standardised format, deployed across a range of subjects, producing a string of new programming, for a limited development spend. The accumulation of vast tranches of footage allowing relatively lengthy runs compared to a single-authored documentary series or one-offs. From One Born Every Minute to The Hotel to Educating Essex – they all unfold the same way. A fast-paced opening montage introduces the concept and location, foregrounding the technology and the breadth, yet intimacy it allows. Highlighting the combination of the spectacular and the mundane that will unfold. Then they settle down to tell 2 or 3 main stories through observational footage and contextualizing interviews from participants. You could set your watch by them. As with any success story, this boom tipped over into a glut of fixed-cam documentaries chronicling the emergency services at the beginning of the year, leading to grumblings from the press.

However, as I noted, these programmes have particular value for Channel 4’s public service remit, though they are distinct from the majority of the channel’s socially-focused factual programming. The channel has a tendency towards livening up complex political issues within a challenge format, which offer more than a hint of neoliberalism – the need to ‘provide access to material that is intended to inspire people to make changes in their lives’ is literally written into the channel’s remit. Series like Benefit Busters or Fairy Jobmother, with their tough love and use of NLP strategies on the long-term unemployed, seem to come straight out of a government press release. Whilst Secret Millionaire and its search for the ‘deserving poor’ and community volunteers to hand a cheque to (whilst going on weeping personal ‘journey’) is a virtual blue print for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ – someone will surely step in to provide these public services we’re cutting.

In contrast – perhaps because the technology provides the high concept – the medical (and school-based) fixed-cam documentaries step back and let us view the daily work of the public services. Of course there’s the hand of a master storyteller behind this, shaping those thousands of hours of footage into linear stories and perfect moving moments. But whilst the programme depicts the cost of timewasters and drunks, the long waiting times, and the struggle to provide care, this is soft political advocacy. A heart-rending personal story (nearly always) wrapped up in a warm hug. All this technology allowing television its small-scale intimacies, and the NHS its moments of grace.

I am currently working on a 2 year project on multiplatform television. Multiplatform might be understood as 2-screen TV experiences or asynchronous programme extensions onto digital media platforms through to voting on celebrity/reality TV shows. The project is based on interviews with industry insiders – from senior execs to below-the-line workers – and is interested in the relationship between multiplatform television, independent digital media and television companies and public service broadcasting. One of the things we’ve been asking producers is how they assess the success of their multiplatform productions. In a post-ratings world and one in which overnight figures are less important, this produces some interesting answers.

By far the most interesting example of success has been in response to Channel 4’s Seven Days, a multiplatform docu-soap production. Set in London’s Notting Hill the format promised to be a new kind of interactive documentary, filming ‘ordinary people’ in their everyday lives and then editing together a one-hour episode each week, as well as releasing clips online, establishing a Twitter feed and a ‘chat nav’ site that allowed viewers to interact with each other and the people filmed for Seven Days. Billed as the ‘next Big Brother’ and supported by a massive marketing campaign, the series inevitably failed to live up to the hype with a small viewership – just 1 million on launch night – dwindling away across the course of the series.

Despite this, Seven Days has been cited as a ‘success’ by many of our interviewees and more broadly in the UK trade press. Paradoxically this is because the amount of users it attracted to the associated online offerings were so big as to crash the C4 servers. Trade magazine New Media Age reported approvingly of the “overwhelming response” to the show, whilst its TV counterpart, Broadcast, described it as “unprecedented” demand.

The failure to build digital infrastructure to support the community of users – which was presumably something far smaller than the 1million watching the broadcast text – has consistently been highlighted as a success. As Matt Locke, acting head of cross platform at C4 argued:

The spike in traffic we saw in the middle of Seven Days was something new – it was an audience realising that they could become part of the conversation, part of the story, part of the lives of the people they were seeing on television.

Despite the problems relating to technology, Seven Days was seen to produce new forms of interactivity. Editor of trade publication Broadcast, Lisa Campbell, enthused that “As far as social experimentation goes, it makes Big Brother look more like Watch With Mother.” This is because of the series’ relationship between social media platforms and programme:

The ‘chatnav’ social media element of the project makes for a fascinating, often surreal watch. So, for example, you’re on a laptop reading comments while watching the show, watching a character on the show on their laptop responding to those comments (still with me?).

Similar comments were made by Matt Locke, series producer Stephen Lambert and others who pointed to both the format’s innovation and the quality of interaction produced in the Seven Days user community: a tech-savvy demographic, highly engaged with the show and its characters – one prominent example included a viewer facebooking a character for a date which, of course, appeared in the following episode.

Digital media and the fragmentation of the broadcast audience by multichannel, multiplatform television has placed the role of ratings in established business models into question. The hype surrounding the failure of Seven Days suggests that new ways of measuring the audience might include attempts to assess the quality of interaction – rather than numbers. Most of our interviewees have commented on such metrics being a key barrier to multiplatform taking off. Whilst many have argued there needs to be a successful TV programme to fuel a multiplatform success, Seven Days suggests how metrics might move beyond page impressions and ratings, and be seen literally in the text: as viewers shape the unfolding narrative and are rewarded for their multiplatform investment in the series.

In this landscape, a failed TV programme, with less than a million viewers, might be a success if it produces measurably engaging forms of interactivity. As one report in Broadcast commented:

The show, we were told, attracted ten times as many web comments as C4’s next most discussed programme … an interesting signal that multiplatform activity is becoming an important currency in the broadcaster’s ratings metrics … I guarantee this will be purposefully aped by other producers.

Our current research, however, suggests that TV remains the dominant in multiplatform productions. If Seven Days is re-commissioned it might suggest new ways of thinking about multiplatform production in the UK. Give its failure to succeed on TV, this remains a big ‘if’ …