One of my biggest rants, for as long as I can remember, has been about the way TV companies treat end credits. For years, they've been squashed and made unreadable as the companies insist on advertising other programmes through them, including voice overs meaning that we can't hear the music either.
Ones like this aren't quite as annoying, because at least by placing the advert on top of the credits, you can still read the text:
But, it's ones that are squashed side-by-side that really do get on my goat, because I only have a small television, so squash things to the side and I lose part of the writing. Plus, even without half the writing missing, the text becomes so tiny that they're barely readable.
Why does this annoy me?
There are actually a number of reasons, but here are just a few:- With TV shows, you often get guest appearances that leave me thinking "ooh, I wonder who that was, I recognise them", but it's not always as simple as just looking them up on imdb.com, because often TV series cast lists are miles long. So, squishing the cast list into a tiny box means that I can't read it, and I then have to trawl through the list for the entire series!!
- I often love the music that is used during the end credits, and funnily enough, I'd really like to be able to hear it, rather than listen to some idiot who thinks he's being helpful, telling me what's on next week!
- There are a lot of people that work on programmes - and films - who aren't the cast or the Director or any of the other well-mentioned individuals, but people who work the cameras, or even make the tea, and generally put a lot of work into what they do, but by squashing the credits, they get forgotten and I think that's both sad and a bit disrespectful.
Last week, Sky announced that they would stop doing it, and yesterday the BBC said that they would stop doing it for at least one episode in a series. But, personally I don't think that one episode is good enough, because some guest stars and crew members might only work on a couple of episodes, so when are their names going to be seen? The BBC claim that people find this kind of advertising, through the end credits, "useful", but personally, I would much prefer what some channels do which is have text at the bottom of the screen. These typically appear at intervals during a programme, that says what is on next. I know some US TV stations have big icons that flash up after the advert breaks advertising a forthcoming show, that pops up long enough to see it, eats about a quarter of the screen, but disappears again quite quickly. Or E4 sometimes have an "on-going" icon in the top corner to announce when a new series is going to start. The problem is that these channels still squash the end credits, so I'm not really sure why they bother.
