Was "water cooler tv" always a myth?

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  • Aurora13Aurora13 Posts: 30,243
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    The early series definitely were. I remember being in a queue to get out of Commonwealth Games in Manchester. A group started talking about BB and then others chipped in. It ended up with the queue taking about who should win and being adamant that it shouldn't be Jade.

    BB downfall really started with CBB5. It picked up a stigma that it has never lost. In fact producers accepted its mainstream days were over and went ever more shock factor niche.
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    It depends what you define as 'water cooler' I guess. Today and 2005, as an example, look very different. The outlets we have for discussing things have changed hugely. People react in real time now with other people they know are reacting too.

    We're in the age of Twitter, the internet's water cooler, if you will.

    The recent celebrity series have reclaimed some of the old skool "you hear people talking about it at the bus stop" and press momentum — but given the sheer vintage of most CBB's on Channel 5, that's not surprising.

    Could the civilian series ever get that dizzy again? Hmm. It's not just the outlets we use to express ourselves that changed but we as a collective audience have too.

    Big Brother was water cooler TV during its vintage years because it was unique. Evictions were event TV. The finale felt like it mattered. Heck, our votes felt like it too ;)

    Today, we're too accustomed to formats, outcomes, voting patterns, too used to producer tricks (which were always there, but are now too visible) and tropes etc, to get as emotionally caught up as before. Even X-Factor isn't quite what it was.

    That's just how things go

    I think "water-cooler tv" has two aspects. One is that whatever happened on tv had enough impact that people were still talking about it the next day in contexts (work, school) that weren't about discussing tv. The other is that so many people were talking about it that it would happen almost everywhere. In the quote from Catherine Shoard in the Guardian that I used in the OP, she said "you can barely go near a watercooler without hearing people discuss their favourites ...".

    When people "react in real time now with other people they know are reacting too", while the show is on, I don't think that's "water-cooler", because it's not the next day, and because it's not a non-tv context. However, it might be "water-cooler" in the sense of lots of people, in lots of places.

    But I wonder whether BB was ever really water-cooler tv, except perhaps about Nasty Nick in bb1.

    Consider the idea that evictions were event tv. Maybe they were in some sense, but the viewing figures show that the great majority of people didn't watch them. Most people didn't vote either.

    (BTW, I don't know what you mean by "the sheer vintage of most CBB's on Channel 5".)
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    muggins14 wrote: »
    I agree with joeysneddon above, that Twitter is the internet's water cooler ... I was thinking that as I read through, glad somebody else thought the same. Mind you, it's hard to gauge how many people are really tweeting about BB because you seek out the hashtag so you find those who are, rather than seeing tweets by accident on your timeline from people who don't normally tweet.

    Do you think that talking about BB on Twitter is a reason why people don't talk about it around water-coolers? Both you and joeysneddon seem to be thinking that, ok, people don't talk about BB around water coolers these days, but they do it on twitter instead. But, unless talking on Twitter causes people not to talk about it around water coolers, why don't they do both?
    I do know that a lot of the people I follow decided to watch the last CBB when they hadn't watched one since it went onto C5, there were a lot who wanted to see Katie Hopkins say something terrible. The previous time there were a lot of Gary Busey fans watching who don't usually watch BB, or even BBUK.

    The 3 shows I've heard people talking about in the supermarket are The Apprentice, Masterchef and The Great British Bake-Off.

    It would be useful to know how much the CBB audience changes from one series to the another. Is it mostly the same people watching each time, or are there lots of new viewers coming in and old ones going out.

    In any case, Gary's fans don't seem to have raised the total, since his CBB has the lowest series average of any on C5.

    Here are the series averages for C5 CBB's:

    2.8 -- CBB 8 (Paddy)
    2.6 -- CBB 9 (Denise)
    2.2 -- CBB 10 (Julian)
    2.8 -- CBB 11 (Rylan)
    2.3 -- CBB 12 (Charlotte)
    3.1 -- CBB 13 (Jim)
    2.1 -- CBB 14 (Gary)
    3.1 -- CBB 15 (Katie P)

    For comparison, the lowest on C4 was 3.3 million, the next lowest was 3.7, and third lowest was 4.3.
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    muggins14 wrote: »
    ...
    The 3 shows I've heard people talking about in the supermarket are The Apprentice, Masterchef and The Great British Bake-Off.
    Nasty Nick's ejection was definitely something I remember being discussed a lot. It is hard now to understand why it was considered high drama. It was a Susan-Boyle-on-BGT moment, in the sense that people would ask colleagues whether they had seen it.

    ..
    Bake-off, yes, definitely. I have never seen it, and it always seems odd to hear groups of adults excitedly discussing yesterday's meringues.

    And Strictly. People really seem to get emotionally involved in that. I've never seen that either. I'm practically a social outcast.

    Hmm. Those comments make me think of another thing. Are shows such as The Apprentice, Masterchef, The Great British Bake-Off, BGT, and Strictly often described as "water-cooler tv"? Some of them, at least, have many more viewers than BB.

    ...

    I should mention that, these days, people seem even more inclined than the used to be to doubt the BARB viewing figures. They argue that people now watch differently, for instance by watching on-line.

    But is it plausible that more people watch now than used to? Or even as many as used to? BB used to reliably get 4.5 to 4.7 million as a series average. (There's more detail in an earlier post, above.) Are we supposed to believe it still has that many?

    It seems to me that, at least in broad outline, the viewing figures show a decline that makes sense and that fits with other things such as a decline in workplace talk about BB and a decline in media interest. But even when BB was doing well, most of the population didn't watch it. And "most" here is like 80-90-something %.
  • Penny CrayonPenny Crayon Posts: 36,158
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    Bake-off, yes, definitely. I have never seen it, and it always seems odd to hear groups of adults excitedly discussing yesterday's meringues.

    And Strictly. People really seem to get emotionally involved in that. I've never seen that either. I'm practically a social outcast.

    You don't know what you're missing - strictly is great winter Saturday night viewing.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 68,508
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    You don't know what you're missing - strictly is great winter Saturday night viewing.

    I can't stand the music. :(

    It must have something though - I have friends who have actually started dance classes, inspired by watching it. I mean, BB never made me take 'lying around doing absolutely nothing' classes.
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    I can't stand the music. :(

    It must have something though - I have friends who have actually started dance classes, inspired by watching it. I mean, BB never made me take 'lying around doing absolutely nothing' classes.

    I normally can't even stand most of the forms of dance that Strictly features, and I generally dislike the dances that are done by the Strictly professionals or (even worse!) outside champions brought in to show some extreme version of a foxtrot or whatever. The "dance faces" are nauseating, for a start.

    But ... but I still enjoy Strictly and the dances that the better celebs (most of them anyway) do with their pro partners. (Not the awful dance-with-puppets or the nightmare "Cola" Charleston, but most of them.)
  • Cats_EyesCats_Eyes Posts: 20,291
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    Mrs Checks wrote: »
    I think the idea of "water cooler TV" is exaggerated - in my experience, it's usually one or two people who saw a particular show and are telling everyone else about it, whether they're interested or not ;). Nothing like the press portrays it to be.

    It certainly did used to be like that - up to, I guess, around series 6 and 7. Every one at work discussed BB all the time at breaks ( and in between ! ).

    But not now.
  • BunionsBunions Posts: 14,995
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    You don't know what you're missing - strictly is great winter Saturday night viewing.
    I used to LOVE the show - it was unmissable for me a few years back but just like soap-watching, I'm totally out-of-the-loop now.

    Do you go in the SCD forum Penny? :o:D
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    Mrs Checks wrote: »
    I think the idea of "water cooler TV" is exaggerated - in my experience, it's usually one or two people who saw a particular show and are telling everyone else about it, whether they're interested or not ;). Nothing like the press portrays it to be.
    Cats_Eyes wrote: »
    It certainly did used to be like that - up to, I guess, around series 6 and 7. Every one at work discussed BB all the time at breaks ( and in between ! ).

    But not now.

    But how can that be when most of the population (80-something to 90-somethign %, depending on when) didn't watch BB?

    While there may have been some workplaces where everyone talked about BB, I don't see how it could be a general phenomenon when the great majority of people didn't watch the show.

    Mrs Checks's suggestion makes more sense to me.
  • bean_of_sbbean_of_sb Posts: 7,826
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    It certainly was 'water cooler' TV back in the day and everyone in my work used to chat about it constantly - heat magazines out on the tables and there would be an annual BB final party that the whole office would go to.

    I think it totally depends on where you work - everyone was quite young and into the latest fad. BB was dropped for X Factor after BB7
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    I have a question for those who remember everyone talking about BB at work:

    Was it every day, even during bb4?
  • bean_of_sbbean_of_sb Posts: 7,826
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    I didn't start in my job until 2004, but BB4 was still a massive series - over 4 million viewers, everyone I knew who watched BB3 was still watching, and it was still in all the major tabloids with the Sunday papers doing their pull-out BB specials.

    Other shows were still commenting on it, magazines all had BB columnists and they were all claiming to be 'the official BB mag'

    Whilst the show was in a 'lull' it was still a massive show. 'BB Bore' is an overhyped era of the show (in my opinion) yes it wasn't quite BB3 or BB5, but it was still a big show!
  • Cats_EyesCats_Eyes Posts: 20,291
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    Veri wrote: »
    But how can that be when most of the population (80-something to 90-somethign %, depending on when) didn't watch BB?

    While there may have been some workplaces where everyone talked about BB, I don't see how it could be a general phenomenon when the great majority of people didn't watch the show.

    Mrs Checks's suggestion makes more sense to me.

    I never said it was - I said it was where I worked up to the time I posted. I also recalling it often being on in pubs and cafes.

    Perhaps were I worked we were not very culturely inclined
  • VeriVeri Posts: 96,996
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    Cats_Eyes wrote: »
    I never said it was - I said it was where I worked up to the time I posted. I also recalling it often being on in pubs and cafes.

    Perhaps were I worked we were not very culturely inclined

    My post may have been unclear, because I highlighted the part about where you worked, but you also said "It certainly did used to be like that - up to, I guess, around series 6 and 7." And what I'm wondering in this thread is whether it did used to be like that -- something that happened around many or most water coolers (and similar), rather than something scattered that happened only here and there.
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