Alan Titchmarsh Vs The Games Industry

Hello. Long time no speak.

Anyway, I was on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and saw this retweeted by somebody, from @GamesMaster:

It's true! Follow us for the first official facts and pics from the new TV show.12:18 PM Mar 11th via TweetDeck
There have been rumours for a while that they were looking at bringing GamesMaster back to TV. I've got mixed feelings. There's a reason for this.
Computer games programmes, by and large, are shit. Really, they are.
Cast your minds back, those who can. Remember Movies, Movies, Movies (which then became Movies, Games and Videos) on ITV? Appalling stuff, pre-scripted press releases read out by a bland man. Live & Kicking on BBC1 had a little scrote called Adam Ay, the Game Guru, reviewing games on a Saturday morning, perhaps his reward for a week of bullying in school. Bad Influence! on CITV made a lot of mistakes which several similar shows made in that era; they got clueless children to review stuff. The gaming demographic has changed a lot since the early to mid 90s, but these programmes instilled in broadcasters a stereotype that would last forevermore: any programme about video games ever made, ever, would be aimed at kids or the simple.


One of the worst things about Bad Influence! was the sizeable portion of the show devoted to cheats. Seriously, why pester your poor parents for £50 for the latest Sega Mega Drive game only to ruin it with a cheat mode to make it easier, you spoilt little shit? If you need cheat modes, you have no business playing games. So then the kids in question would struggle to enter a complicated code without the benefit of opposable thumbs, read from a card sellotaped to the head of a jobbing actor; Bad Influence! employed future 'star' of Heartbeat and The Royal, Andy Wear, to play a comedy arse called Nam Rood ("Back Door Man" - do you see what they did there? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) to tell mindless fuckers how to get infinite lives in Micro Machines 2 or Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Treasure, so they could get an empty feeling of victory when they finally get to the end of the game and get a "Well Done" message before the days of Full Motion Video, forever bereft of the value of money. These kids are now either bankers or benefits fraudsters.
GamesMaster on Channel 4 was a little better, but suffered from similar problems. Instead of Nam Rood, we had Patrick Moore's head being sarcastic to similar-looking children, whose parents' banks had broken long before their children's ungrateful voices. The programme itself was presented by Dominik Diamond, then Dexter Fletcher. I never got the impression that either had much of an interest in games themselves, only the chance to mug to the camera. You might as well have had Dustin Diamond and Jessica Fletcher. Seeing bandana-clad games 'expert' Dave Perry smug his way around games was one thing, seeing smackable children playing games against each other was another. GamesMaster seemed to be trying to go for a teenage audience on the one hand, pre-pubescent bully bait on the other. This, and its themed sets and "celebrity" guests made it largely unwatchable for me.
Remember Cybernet? Amazingly, I've just discovered, it ran for thirteen years. Thirteen. Thir. Teen. It was essentially the games version of Movies Games and Videos, and started with bland Steve Priestly presenting blandly, and went through a multitude of out-of-vision bland presenters being bland with their bland presentery voices in as bland a way as blandly possible. Uninformative, drab, wallpaper television, you'd be hard pressed to learn anything of value that the games' press releases didn't want you to know, with nary a smidgen of a bad word to say about anything. If someone brought out Mein Kampf as a first person shooter, and Cybernet reviewed it, you'd be led to believe that it was a "fun-packed blaster". Cheap TV at its worst, it highlighted another negative aspect of gaming TV: you get ready-made clips, so therefore why bother applying any actual journalism behind it? This tat was so light and airy, it didn't so much sit on the fence as float harmlessly above it.
So, recent years, and little if nothing has changed. Channel 4's Bits was singularly awful. The premise was, as gamers are no-hoper spotty geek teenagers who will never get close to a real lady, get three ladies to host it. Unfortunately, these 'ladies' included drawling pudding face Aleks Krotoski, who recently hosted something about computers on BBC Four claiming to be a professor, and hungry-for-fame-no-matter-how-demeaning-the-porn-film, L!ve TV's Emily Booth. Deathly dull, I couldn't help feeling patronised by it. Its very existence made me feel like a social misfit. Thumb Bandits was okay; it was supposedly aimed at a slightly older audience, yet still had smug Aleks smugging around, and I found the style and tone a little grating, with its yoof-friendly handycam swooping shots and presenters getting in teenagers' faces whilst they review games.
Last week, I watched Bravo's latest games effort, GameFace. They covered a few sports games with footage that looked someone filming YouTube off camera. That's one thing that's never gone away with games coverage; despite the existence of HDMI cables and general broadcasting standards, programme makers tend to show low-grade (not Lew Grade, that'd be a whole different area of misery) fuzzy clips, like if you were watching a Blu Ray through a loose RF cable. Anyway, the programme itself is your standard dire games-show-by-numbers, complete with clueless presenters (the on-screen blonde woman with bizarre pyramidal haircut, and the smug disembodied male voice), attempting to be in some way biting or witty. Or at least, their scripts do. It's really, really bad, and once more casts games as a throwaway bit of cheap telly.
Each and every games programme in the past decade has been of a practically identical format, and none have helped their perception in the eyes of the right-wing, perma-scared General Public. Not even this incredible piece of footage can be used as positive PR for the games industry (thanks to @MozMoz3000 for this link):

This short clip does more than video games ever could to promote violence. But what happens when the world of video games dares enter the closed-mindset of mid-afternoon ITV1 in all its Daily Mail-fueled hatred? Thanks to Gareth Donnell for this link, which highlights the ignorance the video games industry is up against. The part of Joseph McCarthy is played by Alan Titchmarsh:

Honestly, you'd think the games industry was an outlet for BNP propaganda or something. The public perception is that games are 'just for kids', and unfortunately, you're going to always get uninformed hypocrites like Julie Peasgood, cast member of 2000's survival horror game Martian Gothic: Unification, shouting down reason and fact to appease their baying crowd. Tim Ingham told GameSetWatch: "Hearing the floor manager tell the octagenarian crowd to 'really let your feelings be known if he says something you don't agree with' seconds before filming was pretty disconcerting. I hope you noted the targeted 'he' in that sentence. I certainly did." At retail level, I dealt with this ignorance for ten years, where parents would complain about a game they'd bought being violent, not understanding the BBFC-certificated number 18 in a big, big circle on the box. Oh, and that, apparently, was 'my' fault (or whoever they were speaking to at the time), not theirs, that they didn't see it. Also, it was also 'my' fault for not explaining to every single customer the fact that games are subject to the same certification as films. With people so narrow-minded, society's ills are always someone else's fault. Unfortunately, the games industry is the current scapegoat. Not even insipid ITV fodder such as Ant and Dec, or Whatshername and Whatshername, advertising Nintendo products is enough to stick a carjack into the narrowest of minds. All credit to Tim, he didn't rant in the clip, like I probably would have done in the same circumstance. His face said it all, which will be lost on the audience. The devil is in the detail, but to people who prefer broader strokes and sweeping generalisation, it's a blind spot.

BBC Four have had Gameswipe with Charlie Brooker, which is the closest TV has come to a decent video games show. For a change, you had someone who knew his subject, and the history thereof. The first few minutes of this clip will show you how poorly video games have been portrayed on TV over the decades:

Rather than being a reviews show, it's more a potted history of gaming and its portrayal in the media. Due to the lack of sensationalist tabloidesque fright in the title, non-gamers wouldn't have watched it, and so the ignorant remain uneducated. For those that love Brooker's output, like myself, it was an entertaining, balanced show. If this were a regular fixture, and in a Screenwipe style overview of the week in games, this would be a perfect show.

That's the weird thing. The games industry is huge. Huge. Games are released en masse on a weekly basis in an extremely fast-moving industry, yet there is no show on British TV that is aimed at games players. GameFace is aimed at 'casual' gamers, and therefore a waste of airspace; it's like having a show aimed at 'casual' football fans, with ill-informed commentary and smug posturing over fuzzy footage of matches. I'm not a football fan, so I can't imagine anything worse. Games have been demonised by the media, much the way that television was in decades past. Games shows have always been aimed at the very young, as there is still this perception that they are a child's plaything (just watch that Titchmarsh clip for proof), yet the demographic has changed imperceptibly to broadcasters. The average age of gamers is much higher than it used to be, and the style, content and classification thereof are vastly different too. However, for the type of programme that games players have to endure, you might as well show clips of Inglourious Basterds on Movies, Movies, Movies.

I asked Facebook and Twitter for their views.

@MozMoz3000: GameSwipe is alright but runs too quickly through things. Internet has helped more informed presenters do their own shows but there are still a lot of video game show productions out there which employ utterly clueless hosts to present them.

@steve_parkes: The best was GameSwipe nothing else has been any good ever (exceptions made for Violet Berlin shows because of two key points)

Gareth Donnell (about the Titchmarsh clip): Where do you start with it?! I'd have launched at Kelvin MacKenzie for the Bulger comment, I mean what fucking game could you possibly try to link to '92?

Phil South (former Your Sinclair journalist): Worst? Oh so many things, take your pick. Either the rabid Daily Mail readers ascribing to them the power to change a normal person into a murderous maniac or pedo, or the BIG MEDIA attempts to cash in on the online and gaming culture by producing shows that talk about "games" and "shootemups" like a 50 year old dad trying to sound hip. Best? uh, yeah still trying to think of something...

Mark Garforth:

I've watched the Alan Titchmarsh link, and, well...shit! Can't put my feelings into words; so I won't try. If we had these figures of moral superiority in charge of anything other than The Sun or Bird's Eye frozen peas adverts, we'd have Britain turn into something from 'V for Vendetta'.

That's it for now. I've managed to unconvince myself that games on TV are a good thing, as they'd just be shat over like they usually are. What format would your ideal games programme take? Is it worth bothering?