Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - Printable Version
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RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - interestednovice - 04-09-2023
Yes, I understand the idea of a panel to provide added context to what has just been said - but arguably the interviewer should just do that themselves, in a proper challenging discussion.
The panel usually seems to take the form of one politician from the government, one from the opposition, and a third person to provide light relief or make up the numbers. This quickly devolves into a shouting match every time so adds little.
You can also imagine that booking three different high-quality guests, week in and week out, quickly becomes difficult. I would drop the panel and return to the Marr format of guests for a newspaper review. The programme really sat better as a general news programme when it had headlines, weather and a long from interview which was often not political. At the moment, it’s probably too overly politics-heavy which will switch off the casual viewer.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - Will - 05-09-2023
(04-09-2023, 03:54 PM)interestednovice Wrote: At the moment, it’s probably too overly politics-heavy which will switch off the casual viewer.
There's a lot of very valid criticisms for this programme since Kuenssberg took over the slot but I don't think criticising a politics programme for being too politics heavy is one of them.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - interestednovice - 05-09-2023
Oddly, it serves neither audience that well - the casual viewer, that might have watched Marr in the past, gets easily put off by the adversarial arguing of the panel and the unfriendly nature of the programme; the person with an interest in politics finds the panel irrelevant and the overall tone too simplistic which means the programme comes up short compared to programmes such as the Sunday Politics in the past.
So yes, it is possible for a political programme to get the balance wrong.
Especially when it is about rehashing debates and not interrogating or analysing issues, as the debates add nothing new.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - London Lite - 05-09-2023
The adversarial arguing on Politics Live is the reason I don't watch that show either.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - Brekkie - 05-09-2023
It's the same on all political shows now - part of the reason Question Time has been completely unwatchable for a couple of years, arguing over the ideology rather than the facts of the matter at hand.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - DTV - 05-09-2023
(05-09-2023, 12:49 PM)Brekkie Wrote: It's the same on all political shows now - part of the reason Question Time has been completely unwatchable for a couple of years, arguing over the ideology rather than the facts of the matter at hand.Politics over policy. I'd say a lot of the issues go back to the 2002 review of political programmes that basically decided that political programmes should favour maximising the audience over analysing policy, with that compounded by the desire for social media clippability and obsession with everything being a debate in the last decade. And, as interestednovice alludes to, it's just chasing a ghost - ordinary viewers aren't really interested in tuning into a politics programme and the people actually interested in politics just find it simplistic and/or off-puttingly argumentative.
What gets me so much in that the politics department within BBC News remains very healthily sized - there are more than enough politics correspondents and policy editors from other departments to be able to deliver this kind of analysis on these programmes. It's a choice not to and has just led the BBC's TV politics output to just be this sort of shouty and unenlightening mess. Luckily, the radio equivalents have largely escaped these pitfalls.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - Spencer - 05-09-2023
(05-09-2023, 11:28 AM)Will Wrote: There's a lot of very valid criticisms for this programme since Kuenssberg took over the slot but I don't think criticising a politics programme for being too politics heavy is one of them.Personally, I’ve always found the arts content on the various Sunday morning programmes something of a turn-off.
I find it a bit of an odd mix to include it in a programme mainly concerned with politics. Watching a pretentious actor talking in depth about their latest stage production seems rather irrelevant and unconnected to everything else in the show.
It’s like including a cookery section on Match Of The Day.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - interestednovice - 05-09-2023
That’s a good point about political coverage on radio often being more insightful than TV, even though it usually makes use of the same correspondents.
Outside Source actually often covered politics more insightfully than purely domestic output, precisely because Ros Atkins would often engage with Rob Watson (a primarily WN political correspondent) on analysis rather than the classic format of: what’s the government saying, what’s the opposition saying, “meanwhile, the people this impacts are left in limbo”, that’s all the time we have.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - Brekkie - 05-09-2023
I think part of the format of Outside Source is to cut through the noise to get to the issues. Sadly too many outlets - and politicians - only care about making noise nowadays.
RE: Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg - interestednovice - 05-09-2023
(05-09-2023, 02:01 PM)Spencer Wrote: Personally, I’ve always found the arts content on the various Sunday morning programmes something of a turn-off.I think it goes back to trying to create a Sunday magazine show (rather like a Sunday paper’s various sections) instead of a show that is politics in it’s entirety.
I find it a bit of an odd mix to include it in a programme mainly concerned with politics. Watching a pretentious actor talking in depth about their latest stage production seems rather irrelevant and unconnected to everything else in the show.
It’s like including a cookery section on Match Of The Day.
I don’t feel that a purely hard-debating politics programme can find a decent audience on a Sunday morning. If the programme is basically Hardtalk but with an added panel, casual viewers won’t be interested. If you water down the content to be “accessible” to people who don’t really follow politics, it becomes too anodyne and simplistic for the politics-keen viewer that the programme ought to naturally attract. So you have to tread a fine line to allow a wide audience but also not alienate the “core audience” of the political nut, to put it bluntly.
This difficult balance is why there have historically been other sections to this sort of programme, which also doubles as a sort-of news programme and even look ahead at the week.
This is essentially what I was alluding to in my earlier comments that the show wasn’t really working because it simultaneously tries to be purely politics but also attract a casual viewer - so it’s something that seems simplistic to a politically-minded viewer but also too argumentative to a casual viewer. A bit of a “reset” with other programme segments helps make the overall programme tone more cordial even if you do sometimes have hard interviews throughout the slot.