News Television: A Sad Approximation Of Being At An Actual Concert?

You’d be a fool to claim that there isn’t a place on television for live music. The fact that Jools Holland is still in employment at the BBC and the sad reality that Fearne Cotton gets money to swan around the fields of Glastonbury, relaying how amazing it all is to hapless viewers, is a testament to that. But it only really works because of the scale of the things that they’re capturing: Jools sycophancy is usually appropriate because of the scale of guests that are invited on, with arena fillers and £100-a-ticket legends regularly turning up to promote their new album. Similarly, Glastonbury has long since been thought of as A Very Big Event, giving a view to the self proclaimed best festival in the world, as parents around the country remember that time that they fell over in mud and discuss the horror of the toilet situation way back when.

But new music on television, in the plainest possible terms, is a formula that does not work. 20 years ago, you could get away with it; a decade ago you might have been able to pass it off if you’d packaged it correctly. But now it seems that there’s no point at all: the very crowd that such shows are aimed at are precisely the ones who are just going to wait for the bits they want to watch to pop up online, watch it once and forget about it forever. It’d take a very special line-up indeed to justify the kind of viewing figures that such an outlay might entail.

Of course, the motives are admirable, and any endeavour that strives to give voice to unheralded yet talented artists is always going to be noble. And whilst television is far from a dead medium, there are aspects of it that are no longer relevant nor necessary, which is precisely why they’re not really produced; the recent announcement that The Old Grey Whistle test was being relaunched as a radio show illustrates exactly that point. Pre-internet, new music fans would happily gather round the television in the hope of catching the next big thing and latching onto them, and even at the advent of the mp3, there was worth in being to catch a band live without having to wait 3 weeks for a video to download.

Now, every music website worth its salt has taken up the mantle, offering sessions to new bands, and almost every recent moment of televisual history is uploaded to the web. If you had any interest in seeing what SBTRKT’s live set up looks like, you can have a look at his set for Turntable Lab session rather than having to deal with the adverts that come with Channel 4’s broadcast of the Abbey Road Debut show. Again, you’re even able to check that out on youtube anyway, the show itself acting as an online session by proxy.

Of course, live performances being captured on video still have a place: the glorious online repository that is Manchester Scenewipe have spent the last 18 months proving that to anyone and everyone who’s visited it’s site, as well as various others. But thanks to the way that most who are interested in new music today work, it feels as if tuning in to a certain channel at a certain time to see a certain band play a few songs is nothing be a sad approximation of being at an actual concert, and it’s not as if there aren’t enough of those around already.