Ahead of the Game
A core ingredient of TV broadcast output, cookery shows have created feted celebrities and food crazes, but could it be as the media landscape changes forever that this last bastion of television commissioning is about to fall.
If Jamie Oliver’s determined iconoclasm carries the day, it almost certainly marks the end of the way cooking programmes are shared with the viewer.
Jamie’s Food Tube doesn’t really do anything markedly different to other cookery formats in the videos themselves; although his cheekiness is given free rein as he glugs down wine from the bottle (something someone at the BBC would have left on the cutting room floor).
You Tube is eroding the reach of the broadcasters. This we know.
But when the protagonists themselves start producing and distributing their own content, cutting out the army of expensive TV producers and the like, the situation is probably terminal for the kind of TV that some of us have known all their lives.
The change is not the how the content is presented, in some ways back to the basics of TV cookery, but how it’s distributed and paid for.