@cuff

Apparently, there are plans to make a TV improv comedy show where viewers can tweet ideas.

This sort of thing annoys me. Partly it’s because the audience at a studio recording of @cuff (formerly “Fast and Loose”, formerly “Mock the Week”, formerly “Whose Line Is It Anyway”) is already sufficient to generate ideas, and I suspect that the hassle-factor involved in getting tickets and physically to a recording will increase the average quality of suggestions, too. If you have a room full of self-identifying improvised comedy fans, who have to shout ideas in person in front of seven professional comedians, then they’re surely bound to give you funnier ideas than Jeff and Tina McRandom sitting at home tapping out “now do it like a horror movie” and hitting “send” — not least because Jeff and Tina will post their first thought without knowing that (or wondering if) it’s horrendously clichéd.

Also, once you get a million people tweeting ideas, you can pretty much do whatever you were going to do anyway and rationalise it post-hoc by searching the Twitter stream for the ten or twenty people who will inevitably have suggested it. It would be a lot of fun to pre-record an hour’s scripted and predictable comedy, then show it as a “Twitter experiment”, with a live ticker of tweets from real users whose uninspired suggestions best matched the next bit of the script.

But mostly, they annoy me because the use of Twitter is always, always superfluous. The idea “improv show where the audience can send in ideas” is not something that became possible when Twitter launched. It was possible the moment SMS messages became commonplace. It was possible the moment webforms became a thing. Pretty sure you could do it with telephones, or fax, and other technologies that predate television. It’s an idea that has been easily doable for something like fifteen years, and yet somehow producers can’t get excited about it unless it involves Twitter or Facebook — and preferably the former because that has more jargon. And they always talk about “technology” as if sending 140-character messages to a TV studio requires some kind of fucking flux capacitor that only the mad scientists at Twitter have access to. It doesn’t. It requires a webform. It’s obvious that the creative process is less “think of a great concept, then figure out which technology could make it happen” than “think of something popular, then flick through the Radio Times until you find something to bolt it onto”.

Ultimately, though, to the average viewer, @cuff will be indistinguishable from Fast and Loose: many will be using iPlayer or watching repeats, so won’t be able to post ideas; the majority of those who can probably won’t bother; the majority of ideas that are posted won’t be read because there will just be too many to track; and the majority of ideas that are read won’t be used. So what’s the point?