BBC Television News slideshow Quiz

Regular readers will know that I’m getting increasingly worried about the way BBC Television News shows us more and more PowerPoint style presentations.

Whether or not anyone at the BBC has ever bothered to ask viewers what they really think about it, I do not know, but I can’t think of any reason why television audiences would differ much from other audiences – which raises the question of why would they be any more favourably inclined towards slidomania than the hundreds of audience members who’ve told me how much they detest it when listening to PowerPoint dependent presentations.

However, after a lifetime in research, one thing I know for sure is that I might be wrong. Maybe information overload isn’t as big a problem for people as I think it is. Maybe viewers really do like to see pictures and printed words popping up on the screen behind reporters in the studio. Maybe it really does make it easier for people to understand and take in things in.

Here's another exhibit from the BBC’s 10 o’clock news (a couple of nights ago) and an invitation to see how it works for you. Watch it once – which is, of course, all that viewers get to do – and don’t read any further until you’ve seen the whole thing.

Then have a go at answering the questions below the video – and let us know how many you got right.

If the result is 'all' or 'most of them', the BBC's nightly slideshows must be doing a good job.

If it's 'none' or 'hardly any of them', I rest my case.

1. What are the 4 essentials of modern life?

2. What did the Prime Minister say today?

3. What would be hugely expensive?

4. How many of us are already in reach of superfast broadband?

5. What will be hugely expensive?

6. How much a year would the annual levy be?

7. What prices have been falling in recent years?

8. What is the government's clever wheeze?

9. How much a year is raised from television license fee payers?

10. How much is it going to cost to help old people to cope with the digital switch over?

11. How much of that might be left over by 2012?

12. How much do local news programmes cost ITV?

BBC Television News informs, educates and entertains without slides!

In case you missed the last edition of Have I Got News for You, here’s the sequence showing how much more interesting the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson can be when he forsakes the awful slides he usually inflicts on us:

You might also like to compare this with some of the following:

BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?

PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)

Another BBC television slideshow

Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel

PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)

In a number of previous posts (here and here), I’ve complained about the obsession of BBC Television news (and other) programmes with increasingly elaborate and confusing graphics.

I can see that using computerised graphics is cheaper than sending reporters and camera crews out to film newsworthy events, but they leave the average viewer (e.g. me) ever more baffled and confused about what tonight's gripping messages are supposed to be.

As if the distracting information overload inflicted on us by the daily diet of PowerPoint presentations isn’t depressing enough, our premier public service broadcaster is still giving us yet another dose of much the same thing on its prime-time evening news bulletins.

Tonight’s offering from Robert Preston plumbed new depths (see below). The ‘news story’ was actually a lecture, disguised as television news footage by flashing moving numbers on the screen, followed by a still picture with a bullet point on it purporting to explain what the biggest of the numbers is supposed to mean.

Just in case anyone was getting bored or baffled by Peston’s monologue at this stage, he suddenly materialises, still talking, on a small TV screen in the corner of a room, from which furniture and fittings keep disappearing – possibly because they can’t stand any more of it either.

Our esteemed business correspondent then returns to his natural habitat, standing next to a screen with slides on it, before we finally get to see a few seconds of film of buildings in the City of London that are presumably intended to make us feel that his PowerPoint presentation was a news story after all.

(I'd be interested to hear from visitors from outside the UK whether this bizarre development in television news coverage is a peculiarly British phenomenon or is a world-wide trend).

Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel

It’s not just BBC televison news programmes that are being infected by PowerPoint-style presentations from newsreaders and reporters (see blog entries on 23 October & 26 October, 2008).

Tonight’s BBC Parliament Channel featured an interview with Gerald Scarfe, arguably the finest cartoonist of his generation, about his new book – a chance, you might think, to show us a few nice pictorial examples of his talent – but why do that when it also gives you a chance to film him in front of some completely pointless and extremely distracting graphics?

Fascinating though it would have been to see the sketches of Sarah Palin he mentions, the slidomaniacs in charge of the programme seem to think that a conversation with Scarfe is so boring (which it isn’t) that we must be supplied with some brightly coloured swirling graphics to keep us awake.