Channel 4 – Picture This (after seeing programme 1)

c4picthiusscreenshot

I mentioned Picture This yesterday and have just watched the first programme. It suffered from the same things most modern TV programmes suffer from – assuming their viewers are idiots with no attention span. Reminding me after each break what happened a few minutes before. Having introductions every 10 minutes telling me what’s about to happen in the next 10 minutes and things like that. When you cut out all of that crap, you’re left with surprisingly little content. That’s true of a lot of TV though, so I can’t single this program out just for that!

What was left of the content was fairly interesting if a little frustrating. The first task was to produce a portrait shot that brought out the personality of the person being photographed. However, it didn’t look like that’s what the contestants had been told and it looked more likely that this brief had been fleshed out in editing afterwards – either that or they all ignored it which seems unlikely. The difficulty for us, the viewer, to decide if we thought the photographer had done a good job of this task or not was made near impossible because we’d barely heard any of them speak and knew nothing about them. We were lucky if we’d got 3 or 4 sentences out of them by that stage.

What we did get to see a lot of though were the three judges – especially that Martin Parr character. I think it would have been better if the judges had been a more varied bunch – all three of them are in the business of photography – it would have been nice to have a few that were just interested in the creative side.

The mentor, Joy Gregory did seem to talk more sense than the judges and seemed to be talking about the creative side of things rather than the money making potential of the images, so she was a breath of fresh air. Even so, we didn’t get that much out of her compared to the judges either.

All of the contestants produced some good images but the final decision about which two would have to leave seemed a bit strange to me. The most uncomfortable part of the program was watching the chap trying to stage his dancing children shot next to Brighton beach and earlier wandering around wondering what to do before finally finding a street cleaner to use as part of a photo. You can put a lot of that down to nerves and pressure but I would have imagined this contestant to be in the first batch to be dispatched.

After that it was a tough call.

I had prior knowledge of one of the contestants – Jay from the program, who is on Flickr as J L M. I find his Flickr stream of a very high quality and very stylish, so I was quite disappointed when he was voted off – however, his work raises it’s head above most things I see on Flickr. I think his portrait of the other contestant that the judges said she was too small in was my favourite of all of the portraits regardless of what the judges said.

Unfortunately, the Picture This web site seems to have been unavailable for most of the day, so I couldn’t use it to fact check the contestant and judge names above.

I’ll definitely watch the next two programs though to see how this pans out.