The world of the soft-centred broadcast celebrity profile has
finally arrived in the UK with OK!TV. The concept is not completely new
in this country - children’s music shows have been showing fluffy
interviews with pop groups for years. But it’s in America that the art
of generating TV shows out of publicists’ wet dreams has had its
apotheosis.
Access Hollywood, which has been going strong for four years, has
managed to dispense not only with any real reportage or dirt-dishing,
it’s even managed to lose the pretense that it conducts celebrity
interviews. The bite-sized chunks have been cut down to the point where
they’re often shorter than the ads they are interspersed with, while the
information transmitted is rapidly approaching zero. It seems that the
best way to present the latest Hollywood starlet is simply to show her
smiling on screen - anything she says is almost certain to detract from
the impression she gives.
The pandering is shameless: a large proportion of the ads in the show
are for films that are being plugged within it. It’s lowest-common
denominator stuff: a desperate attempt to be ironic by getting Tom
Hanks’s co-stars to slag him off in jest was completely deflated by the
necessary words from the anchor at the end of the piece saying that, of
course, they were all only kidding, and Hanks is known as one of the
nicest and most generous guys.
And it’s impossible to imagine even OK!TV running a segment breathlessly
revealing the new month’s Playboy Playmate.
But Access Hollywood is certainly the direction in which Hollywood would
like television to move, and television, being a Hollywood product
itself, is only too happy to follow. (Large chunks of Access Hollywood
are already taken up with gameshow hosts or sitcom stars - a case of
television plundering its own if Gwyneth Paltrow isn’t available to be
filmed drinking tea that day.)
Watching ads during Access Hollywood is like taking a step back in time
- old favourites like Glad waste-bin bags, KFC, Lite FM and Glade
Plug-ins, between ads for the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
Access Hollywood is not alone in what it does: there’s a rival programme
called Entertainment Tonight, and a whole cable channel devoted to such
stuff called E! TV. But Access Hollywood is, for the moment, the
trashiest of them all, and something to which OK!TV will always be able
to point to as a show that is much worse than itself.
ACCESS HOLLYWOOD FACT FILE
Ratings 3-4m viewers
Frequency Nightly
Produced by NBC
Domestic distribution Warner Bros
Intl distribution NBC, syndicated only
Edited by Anna Griffiths Tel: 0181-267 4892
E-mail: anna.griffiths@haynet.com.
