Is There Anybody There?

As an editor, nothing quite encapsulates metaphorically what’s it like in the cutting room with a deadline looming, as Matt Hooper frantically tying up a barrel in Jaws. Quint is lining up the great white in his sights, his eventual shot being the deadline. But the barrel is still unattached. After checking his transmitter is working, Hooper scrambles around the boat and gets to work tying the desperately needed knot. Quint is impatient. “Hurry up, tie it on. He’s coming straight for us. Don’t screw it up now!” Hooper shouts “Don’t wait for me!” On hearing those words, I understood his frame of mind exactly as he’s desperately tying up the barrel. The shark passes close by… The knot tightens with a whip tilt to Hooper’s face. “Shoot!”

There have been occasions when I’ve been forced to send out a cut without having had the pleasure of viewing it in real time beforehand. So once something you have been intimately crafting for months leaves home, so to speak, do you ever wonder who’s actually watching or even caring about it now? Or is it just another yellow barrel bobbing in a vast ocean of ‘content’? I don’t know about you but I bristle whenever anyone uses that word. I write, cut and occasionally direct crafted stories. The term ‘content’ makes me feel like a put upon supermarket shopper with no option to cook. So who’s watching our stories?

From the 1950s we had the Nielsen Ratings in the US. In the UK, from 1981, we had BARB (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) now sporting the catchier but odd sounding title of Barb Audiences. Jaded perhaps, but barbed too? Both are still in the game and both employ a relatively small number of viewers with a reporting device to extrapolate the bigger picture. In the UK, a mere 12,000 viewers represent the population which means a single person’s viewing habits has to signify the viewing habits of 5,000. Of course with the proliferation of screens to view on, both Nielsen and BARB have valiantly tried to keep up. So let’s say ratings are a hit and miss affair in both senses of the words. Some streaming services seem to be coy about revealing viewing figures they most certainly have to hand although having said that, six days ago at time of writing, Netflix let us have a small peek behind its curtain… See here.

In the summer of ’22, I was lucky enough to cut a feature doc, directed by BAFTA winner Nicolas Brown, which focussed on Pope Francis’s efforts to make us all aware of the destructive nature of climate change, a project that started with a small book he published in 2015 entitled Laudato Si. The subsequent feature, The Letter: A Message for our Earth was a very ambitious film featuring a small, diverse group of people who each represented an aspect of humanity affected by the havoc our industrial actions have been causing the climate for decades. The four aspects were the youth, the poor, the indigenous and the natural world. It was a YouTube Original Production produced by Off The Fence and the end result was a very emotional and affecting film. It certainly didn’t hurt that it guest-starred Pope Francis. The Vatican and its associates were pleased with it and with Leonardo DiCaprio giving us a Twitter mention (cheers, Leo), the viewing figures on line were an accurate gauge of the numbers who watched it. It has been broadcast on conventional TV stations but the most surprising event was still to come.

World Youth Day, held in Lisbon in 2023, took place from 1st to 5th August – yes, you’d think they could add an ‘s’ on ‘Day’. On Saturday 5th, with the Pope in attendance (again, can’t hurt), the film was played at the Field of Grace, while celebrating a vigil. It’s been reported that 1.5 million people watched a screening of The Letter, the largest ever single audience for a single film showing. There’s a report of this extraordinary event here. As that report comes from the Laudato Si movement itself, perhaps the tiniest pinch of salt is necessary. I mean, what are the chances of 1.5 million youths watching a big screen for eighty minutes without periodically scanning their smart phones? I’ve sat next to young people at the theatre paying through several noses to occupy their seat and where’s their own nose? Attached to their phone. Generations change, strange is normalised. Given the vast audience’s full attention or not, to have one’s work have that level of reach is enormously gratifying. I wish you all the luck that we had with our project on your next one.