A ray of hope for television

The end of the ‘noddy shot’ is a ray of hope for television

Rod Liddle

8 September 2007

Channel Five is leading the way to greater transparency

But there is a little hope for the idiot box — and it comes from an unlikely source. One of the execs who has experienced a sort of 40-second, boil-in-the-bag catharsis is David Kermode, the news editor of Channel Five. I never knew Channel Five had, or needed, a news editor — however, David is it, apparently. He announced that henceforth he was banning a whole bunch of hackneyed TV news ‘tricks’ which had previously been foisted upon the viewing public. These included the famous ‘noddy’ shots, wherein a reporter interviewing someone is later filmed nodding sagely in agreement with whatever is being said — even if it’s John Prescott — to let the viewer know that the reporter was rapt and interested, rather than sitting there picking his nose or making obscene gestures, or not there at all. This requires, at the end of the interview, the reporter to sit in a chair and nod like someone suffering from Bell’s palsy, while the interviewee looks on in patent bemusement. It is a device utilised when only one camera has been sent to a particular interview. If they didn’t do the ‘noddy’ shot then it’s possible the viewers might think that the interviewee just spouted his points spontaneously, sitting in his chair at home, and luckily there was a camera to hand, perhaps operated by his wife, who then sent the resultant film in to the news programmes. That’s what the TV people think, anyway.

Kermode has also banned the ‘contrived cutaway’, whereby something wholly arbitrary, or utterly contrived, is shoved into a news report as if its presence there was of relevance. The ‘staged question’ is also to bite the dust — that’s when a reporter is filmed sitting in a chair asking questions of a man who has just delivered a press conference on the other side of the world — i.e., it’s a downright lie.

Kermode has been attacked in some quarters for disingenuous self-flagellation. The ‘noddy shots’ and ‘contrived cutaways’ are not really the point, Kermode’s critics assert; these are mere incidentals, trivialities. They’re not a deliberate attempt to boost the ratings by using chicanery.