hi all:
wonder if anyone else caught the first episode of the new channel 4 series
for the deaf and HoE at 11.30 saturday morning.
my impressions.
some good but mostly not.
on the plus side, as a blind person watching I obviously couldn't benefit
from the subtitles and signing but the audible track was a big improvement
on that usually found on programs for the deaf which is often stilted and
false sounding. In this case it was very natural.
there was a great deal of the show I couldn't follow because of the lack of
speach but then I guess I can't really complain too bitterly about that.
now for the criticisms:
production, the music, theme tune & general production were unusual, it
could almost of been a project done by the students on Grange Hill or some
other mock school room setting.
content: the content was all serious issue based stuff, eating disorders,
teenagers attitudes to a single parents new partner etc etc, but I wonder
how many of the apparent target audience actually want to sit back and watch
this sort of thing on a saturday morning when the other channels are showing
cartoons, sabreena the teenage witch, the PopStars and West Life?
Sure a deaf audience deserves access to issues as well as popular culture
but to educate your audience first you have to have an audience and I'm not
convinced that being accessible to the deaf community is sufficient to make
deaf people watch, afterall radio 4s In Touch program aired on tuesday
evenings is purely for the visually impaired and is similarly issue based
and I don't listen to that.
As I can't see the screen I don't know for sure that the adverts run in the
commercial break half way through the show weren't subtitled and signed but
I doubt it.
So what is channel 4 saying to its deaf audience ?
"specialist target audience please forgive us for a couple of minutes while
we ignore you as per norm."
overall this was the sort of program I'd expect to see popping up on mid
morning week day bbc2 or c4 schedules or on a video in one of those vague
"social skills" type lessons at school.
Shifting it to a saturday morning slot when it's up against Live & Kicking,
and Ant and Dec doesn't to my mind represent a serious comittment from
channel 4.
very disappointing as a follow on from their last late night mock Euro Trash
disability program (whose name I can't recall right now).
Adrian Higginbotham,
SURFACE
Salford University, Research Focus on AcCessible Environments.
E-mail [log in to unmask]
tel: 0161-2954939
fax: 0161-2955011
web: http://www.scpm.salford.ac.uk/surface/
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