Some Comments (Part One)

by Chris McGinty (According To Whim .com)

I just thought I’d take today’s post to throw out a few different thoughts about recent posts and perhaps some other stuff.

Remember TV? – It’s almost like Nathan was unaware of public access when they lived in Rhome. I’m not saying he was. I’m actually commenting on the fact that once he was back here in Fort Worth, and had his cable set up, his focus came a little bit off of the World Wide Web and back onto the TV. Realizing the old DVDs were skipping a little after tuning in to public access one day, he made new DVDs for me to take each Monday.

Time Slots – This had a couple of effects. It pushed Nathan into thinking about getting more time slots. Most of the time, the public access station isn’t playing shows. It’s playing a community bulletin board slide show thing. Even when it does play programming, it’s mostly religious. There is nothing wrong with religion, but there is often something wrong with religious programming. It’s just not very compelling.

Religious Programming – I think the problem is simply that the audience is too narrow. I’ve talked about this a little on the blog here. We have an anything goes blog. We choose our topics according to whim. (hmmm) In this way, if we sometimes get a little narrow in our discussion, it’s probably ok because we have other material that is a little more broad in scope. The truth is that when I listen to a show like The Dave Ramsey Show, I’m equally interested in some of the Christian slant of the show. I’ve learned a few things. It’s not all Bible thumping though. The show is about money primarily, but it deals with other areas secondarily, which works. If I were required to do religious programming, I would take my cue from that, rather than “Let’s open our Bibles and worship the son before the father, Hallelujah!”

Reviews – Since I had the new DVDs, and an overnight guard shift, I decided to watch through the old shows with an eye to review them for the purposes of blog posts. I must say that I started to understand Nathan’s renewed interest in the TV and the time slots. Our shows, while a little hit and miss at times, are fun. I know some folks do watch public access, and I kind of hope they enjoy our show. I figure that just in case they do, we should put a whole lot more of it on. Just in case.

Expanding Material – I would like to deal with one thing though. I think Nathan sort of misunderstands what the in between bits were. They weren’t intended to expand the existing show. They were intended to create either an hour long, or an hour and a half long show, to obtain one of those larger time slots. The material we shot, and that I’m looking through my backups to find, was us introducing segments from different shows, new segments we had shot but hadn’t placed into a show, and things that would never be in the show (such as when I tape local bands). The reason for using previously shot material was that we could record the in between bits somewhat off the cuff in a night, and insert the other bits as needed, creating an hour long show with little fuss. I’m not saying not to do the “Special Edition” shows. I’m intrigued by the idea. I always wanted to re-master “Sniffles (sniff)” too.

In Part Two – That’s all I’m going to do for today. I have a number of things I’d still like to comment on, so I can get another post out of it. So join me tomorrow when I discuss my thoughts on the “Special Edition” shows as well as the hour long slots. I’ll discuss gap insurance. I’ll talk about the weather. I’ll discuss the usefulness of this kind of post. And really, anything else that comes to mind.

1 thought on “Some Comments (Part One)

  1. I don't know about doing 'special editions' or anything like that. Maybe you are being too narrow in your perception of our work. I don't see the finished episodes as being sacrosanct or anything. If they change, they change. Consider them a work in progress but mainly my thought was to 'redo' them to be able to fill in more (or longer) slots on public access. These editions woudn't show up on the web (unless they turned out to be REALLY entertaining).

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