Originally Posted by Alrightmate:
“That little conversation should have made the HL show.
I don't see any good reason why it didn't.
They want funny and entertaining, ideally in conversations. So why didn't Faye and Harry's time travel and wizard chat make the cut?”
I think they'd have shown it if it had been Alex. Not long ago, they showed her just being told some things about the royal family. (Iirc, it was in the same highlights as when Faye and Jem practising wrestling moves was reduced to a few punches and 'Faye taking out her frustrations'.)
I think it's the old problem that the producers seem to decide on a 'character' for each housemate, and on story lines, and edit the highlights accordingly. They don't follow that so closely when making the clips for the web (just as they didn't when it was on C4), but they do in the highlights.
Last year, PEJ
told us a lot about how the highlights were edited, and it fits that suspicion about what they do pretty well. I mean especially this part:
Quote:
“To help your understanding of how we get to the choices we make, this is how it works here on a practical level: There are 11 Day Producers; they work on a shift system which broadly speaking means they do a Gallery Shift (where they are the voice of Big Brother, talk to housemates in the diary room and manage the days activities in the house). The other shift they do is a 24 hour "Story Producing" shift. Basically they sit there, watch the whole day and commission stories as the day continues. The reason we do it this way is that that 24 hour shift allows the producer to get a proper overview of the day (say, for example, an argument takes place at 7pm. If you weren't watching for the entire 24 hour period you might have missed that the roots of that argument were in a comment someone made earlier that day. As you're there all day you can go back to that, make sure it's in ther show and give the thing context.) Each Story Producer tries their very best to present a fair view of the day. We have strict rules about following timelines and not editing things out of context. But you can't show everything. Once the Producer has created the first cut of the show with the overnight editors it's then viewed by a Senior Producer who helps polish it, interrogates it to make sure everything that's in the show is there for a reason and gets it ready for a 9.30 morning viewing with the Executive Producer, the Channel 4 Commissioning editor, The Lawyer and me. We watch it and make notes (and there are often wildly differing viewpoints flying round the edit suite) and then the rest of the day is spent with the senior producer making the agreed changes and polishing it up so it's fit for broadcast.”
Note the parts about stories and also where he says they "make sure everything that's in the show is there for a reason".
(It's too bad that the "strict rules about following timelines and not editing things out of context" no longer seem to be so strict.)
The part where he explains his "soap opera" remark is also significant:
Quote:
“...In fact before the very first series the Execs at the time met with Soap Opera producers to talk about how Soaps were put together to get a sense of how that kind of narrative structure works... Calling it a Soap doesn't mean it's scripted like Coronation Street. So, to be clear, we think of this as a real-life Soap Opera (much in the way many of us describe our daily lives).”
It seems to me that a soap opera focuses on a small number of stories at a time, with other characters relegated to the background. The focus shifts as stories reach conclusions or a point where time should pass, and I think that's why PEJ thought BB's approach gave them "the best possible chance of creating a show that's balanced across the series and is also an entertainingly told story (or Soap Opera)."
Of course, some HMs are evicted before their time in the house can be "balanced". Balance across the whole series isn't really good enough, even assuming it would have happened.
(FWIW, my reply to him is
here.)
Anyway, I think they might even have shown the conversation if it had been Faye and Aaron, but Faye and Harry having an intelligent and funny conversation doesn't fit any of the ongoing characterisations or stories.
”
