Viewers are supposed to hate recycled shows. But the evidence points to an appetite for the familiar
Those newspapers that pursue a sceptical view of British broadcasting, and especially of the BBC, seem to keep a particular headline typeset and ready to print again at the click of a short-cut key. The phrase is, fittingly, "repeat offender". It's seen at least every Christmas and every summer, and frequently in between, when broadcasting organisations announce schedules containing large numbers of programmes that have been shown before. The repetition of material has become symbolic of failure to provide proper value for the licence fee or advertising revenue. When Jeremy Paxman gave a Newsnight bollocking to BBC director-general Mark Thompson, one of his lines of attack was the number of the corporation's offerings that had the letter R in brackets after their entry in listings magazines.
Such is the sensitivity about re-screening that broadcasters have developed camouflage tactics. Get Sir Archibald Autocue to record a one-minute introduction to seven of his classic documentaries from the past, and you have a project that counts, for monitoring purposes, as a new series rather than a repeat. And the phrase "first time on terrestrial TV" disguises the fact that a product may have been shown a hundred times on cable.
But such subterfuge will become increasingly useless over the next few years. Among proposals for dealing with substantial cuts to BBC funding, the director-general has suggested that high-profile new programmes might be shown "three or four times" a week. Even if this strategy ? called "narrative repeating" ? is not adopted, it will be hard for the BBC to avoid filling in the holes by putting out the same stuff more often. That grumpily punning headline will do much more service.
But the demonisation of second chances to see depends on upholding a questionable model of what TV should be. The brutal noun "repeat", with its suggestions of tedium or acid indigestion, is employed only about broadcasting, and more often by newspapers than by commissioners, who adopted long ago the more enticing formula "another chance to catch".
In contrast, cinema speaks of "re-releases" and theatre of "revivals". And, in London or Broadway on an average night, the majority of the audience at a revival of a popular play (the core Shakespeares, Coward, Chekhov) is likely to be viewing it for at least the second time. Admittedly, the production will be new, but a significant part of the DVD box-set market depends on the nostalgic desire to see movies or TV shows again: the repeat-offender viewer.
More revealingly, repeats ? even of potentially worn-out warhorses such as Dad's Army ? continue to perform notably well in the ratings.
Detractors of current programming may conclude that we prefer quality from the past to present-day dross, but the figures reject this reading: a contemporary show such as New Tricks regularly draws as many viewers for a repeated episode as a new one.
One reason for this, I suspect, is that viewers have less sense of deja-vu than reviewers or commissioners. A major aim of TV and radio in recent years has been to make the material unmissable, technologically if not always artistically, through the spread of self-scheduling technology, such as iPlayer and Sky+. Yet the email boxes of presenters and producers still contain numerous complaints from those regretting that they've missed a certain show.
This suggests that, even though time-delay devices make it increasingly hard to miss a hit, many still do, creating the paradox that, even as newspapers complain about too many, some consumers feel that there are too few repeats.
One explanation for this difference of opinion may be that, to the distress of TV's creative talents, although the pleasure of the medium's accountants, the significance to viewers of desire for fresh content has been overestimated.
Perhaps television, in the minds of its audience, is not an expensive new negligee but a comfy old jumper. Or it's possible that many of the audience simply feel that TV, which shares so much DNA with theatre, is also best watched as it happens. Most of us, if we carefully examine our consciences and hard drives, have recorded or downloaded shows but never actually watched them until they turn up again in the flow of a night's programming.
Despite these compelling counter-arguments and cultural shifts, the charge of lazy replaying remains too easy and resonant for the enemies of broadcasting to abandon. As the schedules begin to show the cuts, those articles about too many repeats will be endlessly repeated. Perhaps they should be headlined: Another Chance to Read.
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