No Lights. No Make-Up....!

We were watching Good Morning Britain today and were struck, once again, by the 'new' way of interviewing guests.

After one year of Covid, we're all quite used to seeing people's living rooms and basements...looking at their furniture, curtains and bookshelves, as they struggle with sometimes bad wifi and awful computer mics!

Question: Has this cheapened visual media? 

Pre-Pandemic, TV shows were produced in a TV studio. Go figure!! Hosts and guests sat, professionally lit, mic'd and shot.

Watching one section of GMB this morning, we had an instance where the the 'Zoom grid' appeared, housing four different people. Piers Morgan, the host, in studio. He sat, looking and sounding great.

* Top right - man in his living room. Using the internal computer mic. He was well lit but difficult to hear.

* Bottom Left - man in, what looked like a study with a door to his left leading off to somewhere else. No lighting, camera position below his line of sight and internal computer mic.

* Bottom Right - Another man. This time, no lighting with the internal mic and buffering wifi. 

Besides the host, no one wore make-up. As one person's wifi begins to buffer, it literally stops stop/starts the conversation as the other participants try to figure out when to speak or not...

Has seeing these people in their homes, casually dressed as if they've just come from the kitchen, badly lit, mic'd and shot changed the way we perceive them? Has the mystique been taken away?

If you hold a Zoom meeting with colleagues, you are encouraged to use a backdrop, proper lighting and to use a mic. Yet, on national TV...none of this comes onto play.

For radio people, we can broadcast from our kitchen and (so long as we have a decent audio link) can sound the same as ever. If you are producing video content though, take a note from national TV and don't do what they do. Don't skimp on lighting/mic's and get the angles right. 

What do you think? Has TV lost some of its mystique during Covid?