10-08-2025
Regular TV has become slow and tiresome. Watch YouTube instead
We are living at the end of the Information Age. With just a few taps on a keyboard we can instantly access data on anything that takes our interest. With AI voice assistants improving hourly, we don't even have to strain our weary fingers. We can ask out loud and get the answer in seconds. Bosh!
So why are television documentaries – particularly science factual ones – so coy, and so agonisingly slow? They feel like hangovers from the analogue era, with their endless scene setting, their promises of things 'still to come' and 'coming up', the agonising device of 'we'll find out later exactly how they did it'.
In the 21st-century, this is infuriating. Do they expect us to hang around for them when we can just Google?
Of course, the arc of a story is part of the fun of TV in general. But this structure of flitting back and forth, promising and withholding, is deeply irritating. Recent Netflix documentaries such as Secrets of the Neanderthals and A Trip to Infinity or the BBC's Human take it much, much further. They are visually stunning, gilded with splendour – and so ponderous that they make experts of yore such as Terry Nutkins and Patrick Moore seem positively funky. Everything is in slow motion. You can have a movie-length production that contains about 10 minutes' worth of material. (Not to mention a lot of anthropomorphisation, but that's probably for another column.)
What makes this glacial pace even odder is that there is an alternative. With YouTube, you can see documentaries that unfurl at a much slicker pace, but also dive much deeper. Two of my favourites are linguistics expert Geoff Lindsey and theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder – they give straightforward to-camera addresses, but use modern editing and graphics to get the information across in a simple, direct, compelling way. There are no longueurs or wallowing in production value, and no cutaways to them looking suitably gobstruck on cue à la Professor Brian Cox.
If the aim of science-factual TV is to educate and entertain, I think I've learnt so much more from YouTube than I ever did from TV (or indeed from school). There is the magpie mind of Tom Scott, now semi-retired, or the inventively animated works of the channel Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell. This content – if we must use that ghastly word – is much cheaper and breezier than TV documentaries, but it gets to the heart of what you want to know (and frequently to the heart of what you didn't know you wanted to know). Meanwhile, back on regular TV, documentaries are in a state of grandeur, prettiness, superficiality and, above all, lethargy.
The slowing down of mainstream documentaries seems to have infected TV more generally. Up until the release of the smartphone – which seems like the fracture moment of culture – TV seemed to be getting faster and faster. I remember watching the opening episode of Shameless back in 2004, Paul Abbott's provocative drama about the dysfunctional Gallagher family. I felt exhilarated, like I was on a rollercoaster. I recently went back to check how it stands up, and it's still fast. A hell of a lot of story was going on. It was assumed that the audience could now take in more information, more quickly, without stinting on quality. But this process stopped, and now, clearly, it is slipping backwards.
But 'fast TV' does not necessarily mean that everything needs to be a jaw-dropping visual spectacle full of special effects (despite the blurring of TV and cinema as technology changed).
Some of the most captivating TV drama is just people talking. The riveting third episode of Steven Moffat's recent ITV drama Douglas is Cancelled is literally just that, and it's riveting. All the best bits of Jed Mercurio's BBC police corruption drama Line of Duty were dialogue scenes. What stuck in the public's mind about the recent Netflix series Adolescence? It was the talking heads, and in particular the dialogue between teenage schoolboy Jamie (Owen Cooper) and his social worker (played by Erin Doherty).
But still television-makers strive for the epic. My skin instinctively prickles when I hear about beautiful shots on TV, particularly considering its 21st-century colour palette of dull browns; beige, umber and dun. Almost everything is shot as if it contains the meaning of life – irritatingly atmospheric, and always bookmarked by endless sweeping establishing drone shots. In fact, this is as true with drama as with documentaries.
We keep hearing how our terrestrial broadcasters struggle to compete with the gloss and grandeur of the streamers. And no, we can't ever match the bells and whistles of, say, Disney Plus, but mainstream TV could do worse than learn from its history – and from YouTube. Focus on simplicity and directness. And put its skates on.
