8 March 2010
Panel beater
It sounds like such a great idea for a TV show: five opinionated and articulate guests drawn from a wide range of orthodoxies and professional fields, facing-off against an engaged studio and television audience that asks tough questions which challenge each individual and spark heated debate amongst the group. Such a program idea promises insight, provoked thoughts, and a little bit of verbal biffo, which is the dream television combination for political tragics on a Monday evening. But if it's such a great idea why does its execution in the form of ABC TV's Q&A suck?
It's not just me that seems to think such unflattering thoughts about Q&A - a good chunk of the sizeable Twitter audience that discusses the show live via the #qanda hashtag regularly voices its dissatisfaction.
While each of those unhappy Twitter viewers has their own reasons for disliking the program, in my opinion the main problem is that Q&A tries to do and be so much that it completely loses focus and ends up doing and being much less. A lot has been said by many people about the composition of the studio audience, and whether it is stacked, biased, or whatever, but barring the facepalm first-year student politics questions read out by oh-so-earnest truth-seekers, and the incessant murder-inducing applause, the studio audience doesn't matter to me. My problem is with panels of guests that are too broad; and woeful interaction with the non-studio audience.
Being at the very centre of the concept of the program, the panel of guests is pretty crucial, but its composition seems terribly random and lacking any rhyme or reason - a government minister from one portfolio here, an opposition minister from another portfolio there; a journo or a think-tank boffin in the middle, and a random comedian or musician to pad out the sides. While the diversity, on the face of it, seems to promise an exciting variety of views, it often results in disjointed and confused discussion; too often panellists are obliged to comment on issues on which they have no informed or developed opinion. Not only must this be frustrating for panellists, but these forced contributions completely derail any flowing and constructive conversation that might be developing.
Or things go the other way completely and two or three panellists with strong and set opinions about a particular issue take over and talk at each other, drowning out all other participants before Tony Jones interrupts the exchange to invite a contribution from somebody else who doesn't really have one to make. Or the debate on a particular topic is developing nicely, with guests' contributions building on those that came before them, and then just as it's getting interesting the topic is changed completely by an audience question.
Sitting at home trying to engage in stop-start debate on a hyperactive rainbow of topics can be very difficult and even more frustrating. The show would work so much better if a theme was selected for each week's discussion - industrial relations, the arts, education etc. - and panellists were specifically selected for their interest or expertise in the theme. Cutting the number of guests down to three or four would also make the facilitation of discussion flow much smoother.
On the opposite side of the TV screen exists the other problem. At the start of each program Tony Jones eagerly spruiks the methods by which non-studio audience members can get involved, including SMS and Twitter. However, you've got to wonder why anyone would bother, with so few of these contributions ever making it to air and no real sense that those that don't make it to air have any impact on the debate whatsoever. Yet again, the show tries to involve everyone but dilutes its focus and ends up involving very few and disappointing the rest.
Especially frustrating is the producers' disinterest in the significant Twitter community that flocks to each broadcast. Q&A's social media following is huge, and it's exactly this kind of engaged and vocal online audience that other programs can only dream about. So why doesn't Q&A take greater advantage of it? For instance, it wouldn't take much effort for the production team to monitor the Twitter stream, select the choicest tweets, and note them somehow in the broadcast, perhaps running them as a continuous ticker at the bottom. Somebody could even count the pro-ALP and pro-coalition tweets to ensure an exact 50-50 split so trollumnists can't screech about a lack of balance.
It's a genuine shame that small but fundamental problems with Q&A's format prevent a program with such potential from being truly excellent, and judging from the rusted-on audience a lot of people want it to be just that. Let's hope that Q&A can answer the questions that its audience is asking.
