Shame About the Script

By contrast, I sat down with my nine-year-old while he was watching Star Wars - The Phantom Menace, the multi-gazillion dollar special effects showpiece. What a visual treat! Special effects which were breathtaking in their realism. Sweeping galactic vistas which looked as if George Lucas had popped into orbit to shoot them. But... the acting! The script! Where were they? How can fine, fine actors like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor be made to act as if they were suffering a prozac overdose? What on earth was going on with all those characters? Great pictures... but shame about the script.

I suppose that's a lesson we're learning now. In the early days, TV and radio programmes weren't pretty - they were cheap, but for that very reason they had the chance to explore ideas and not get bogged down with making it look sumptuous. Radio programmes didn't need computers - they just needed a good script. TV programmes weren't expected to look like Hollywood movies - but they still managed to entertain us.

Does technology kill creativity?

Then the technology got better. The labour intensive way that radio drama and documentaries used to be made - often requiring a single person to spend days with a tape recorder and a razor blade, laboriously physically cutting the tape - are no more. Today we load all our raw material into Cool Edit, or Wizard, or Pro-Tools or whatever software is available, and shove the whole thing together in an afternoon. But maybe having to pore over the tape was a good thing - we heard the recordings again and again, and soon got to know which bits worked and which didn't.

And technology had an even more devastating effect on TV. The special effects which cost Desilu thousands of dollars (and still looked fake) can now be reproduced - often more successfully - by any high school kid with a computer and a video camera. The professionals can make the programmes look very pretty. But what about the scripts? They seem to have dropped in importance as the technology took over.

There is probably a lesson for broadcasters everywhere. However good the technicalities - and today they are VERY good - there's more to it than that. Programmes need to have real heart, and give the audience some credit for some intelligence. There must be a reason why some shows - CSI, Special Victims Unit,

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