Hacker Cinema
EastEnders
1985 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 42 seasons
Created by Julia Smith, Tony Holland
The everyday lives of working-class residents of Albert Square, a traditional Victorian square of terrace houses surrounding a park in the East End of London's Walford borough.
2 negative20 neutralfrom 22 commenters
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23 comments on Hacker News
I think because while visually and technically better in the right hands (with multi hundred million $ budgets), it will almost always end up looking like a cheap soap opera in lesser hands - every imperfection in makeup, set and lighting becomes immediately obvious to even an uncritical eye. It’s kind of similar to an uncanny valley situation in VR, side note: I think ultimately AI on its current trajectory will finally push forwards and make VR accepted and feasible for entertainment in a multitude of ways...
For 4K or 8k HFR HDR live filming, you have to raise all your general production values by a really crazy amount for it not to look cheap and naff. Forget additional storage and transmission costs of the extra data, the actual day to day increases in production costs (and timelines) rapidly scales far beyond those, making such trivial things like storage a mere rounding error. Case in point - the most watched UK soap opera “Eastenders” saw the BBC go way over budget and spend £90m+ over many years just rebuilding all of their iconic sets so they could finally film it in basic HD. HFR 4K HDR would require an even bigger and more serious upgrade across the entire production, and a long term commitment to those bigger budgets, which the BBC have clearly decided is totally not feasible and also not worthwhile for a 3-4 times a week half hour soap opera. It won’t happen for most things because HD and certainly 4K is more than good enough for most normal people to enjoy video media on a screen up to around 100”’s at a sensible seating distance… So most entertainment can be done at a much lower cost and with way lower risk. The benefits just don’t and probably never will outweigh those factors.
Can confirm to some extent - I started out in data analytics for call centres, and important episodes of Eastenders et al would completely bork the demand predictions by causing exactly the pattern of depressed traffic followed by a massive surge described in the blog post. Some of this was less about tea and more about just having four television channels.
This reminds me of this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/slDAvewWfrA. There's a monitoring room to make sure people are ready to switch backups and reroute in case of some kind of grid failure, but also in very specific scenarios.
Britain being filled with Brits, what would happen is that once the show was over, half the nation got up from the couch to turn on the kettle for a cup of tea. Those electric kettles are quite demanding, especially if millions of them turn on at the same time.
So every time there was a major event, dedicated people are monitoring the grid frequency, power plants on standby and foreign contracts at the ready when needed, just to increase capacity at the right time. You can't just schedule this stuff, because if a football match runs over its allotted time, you may suddenly add power to the grid without any load, causing all kinds of problems like the grid frequency increasing and making digital clocks run ahead. There is a temporary demand of gigawatts of power that rises within five minutes and lasts until the kettles are done.
The YouTube video provides an example of 600MW of power being requested from France... for the end of an episode of Eastenders.
I always knew the British like their tea and that there's some kind of planning going on for events like street lights turning on, but the combination of the two is a great example of complex behaviour that's easy to overlook.
> I was immediately thinking about early morning in Asia, still dark outside, everybody puts the kettle on.
In the UK they actually have to plan for grid demand to skyrocket during ad breaks in certain TV shows because half the country puts the kettle on at the same time! In one episode of EastEnders, demand grew by 2290MW, nearly twice as large as any single UK nuclear reactor.
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/iconic-eastenders-episode-almost-brought-19943556
Actually yeah, I suppose so. I hadn't realized it was a soap opera and assumed it was a non-standard season/episode format. It's moot in this case, because the show doesn't seem to have any structured episode discussions in their subreddit. This one instance is the only thing my process found.
https://www.redditdiscuss.com/eastenders/
Apparently they have 4 episodes/week. And there's been no success in starting regular discussion threads. And if they did, they'd probably prefer one thread per week (covering many episodes). It's quite unintuitive that communities formed around soap operas wouldn't have robust discussion threads. I guess because it'd be a full time job at the rate they release episodes...
https://www.reddit.com/r/eastenders/comments/e3lyjh/episode_discussion_threads/
https://www.reddit.com/r/eastenders/comments/nulg8n/episode_discussion_threads/
> Sitcoms don't include death
UK sitcoms beg to differ - just look at Coronation Street or Eastenders - they cover pretty much every category of death you can think of (except, I suppose, by wildlife.)
Also, why are we being forced to subsidize EastEnders?
Whats the public benefit from that rubbish?
CBeebies, CBBC - cool. Public benefit makes sense.
BBC Science and Documentaries - Public benefit. Fully justifiable.
EastEnders - Pay money to make other people less intelligent or we’ll fine you.
It's a soap opera played out as though it's real life and on social media, and soap operas have been popular since the 1930s.
IMHO the reality and social media aspects of it get all the attention and people focus on those and think it's something entirely new and unprecedented, but really they're just force multipliers. Soap + reality and social media. That's it. The things that actual make it engaging are exactly the same as those in any soap, but even soaps are powerful enough that they can bend some people's reality.
I once saw an interview with the star of a popular soap here in the UK. He played a despicable character that manipulated and betrayed the people about him, especially women. He said that at a certain point when his character was particularly nefarious he had to avoid going out in public. Quite frequently he would be walking down the street and a woman (it was always a woman) would start screaming and shouting at him, telling him how horrible he was, and he should be ashamed of himself. Some of them even threw things at him. An actor in a TV show, it wasn't even a reality show, this was long before they even started. (Dirty Den in East Enders).
A lot of people consuming this stuff, even the explicitly fictional dramas, have a lot of problems distinguishing between reality and fantasy. They will sometimes even acknowledge they know it's just a show, while also directing abuse at the actors. Deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and real life, as reality shows do, and the brew becomes even more viscerally engaging.
Given this, things like qAnon become a lot more understandable. There are a _lot_ of people who are just out and out fantasists. If there are enough to make actors hide at home, that means there are some on almost every street in every city or town in the world all the time.
Edit: https://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/eastenders/a27088763/soap-villains-who-received-real-life-abuse/
Not really. Sports are a fundamental part of every day life for arguably the majority of the population. I do think there is a hang over from the past though as arguably gaming or social media could be considered as such too.
What does grind my gears, however, is how the British media (including BBC News) think that the results of TV shows or the things that happen on soap operas are news. The fact that a person dressed up as a sausage won a TV talent contest or that a character died on Eastenders is not national news, IMHO.
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
I take it to mean that sometimes you have lots of energy coming in (during daylight for example), then suddenly very little (during nighttime). Weather can affect it also.
So to balance the supply of electricity to customers you need a way to make sure there is an not too much and not too little.
Many years ago in Britain, it was predictable that at the end of the TV show Eastenders, people would all go to turn on their kettle for Tea. The surge was so big that someone had to monitor when the programme ended and initiate the additional supply of electricity to meet demand. That supply even had electricity from France as a backup.
I recall an interview where they had that energy available from a Hydroelectric Power Station where they could release the water and get an instant source of electricity.
All for tea.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/09/06/britain-turned-this-mountain-into-an-incredible-hydroelectric-power-station-to-support-tea-drinkers/#5e555c731bbb
[2] https://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/tea-time-in-britain-causes-predictable-massive-surge-in-electricity-demand-1535023/
And this itself is something that seems to vary by country. In the US, the average TV show character seems to be fairly well off, at least 'middle class' and able to pretty much work maybe two hours in their entire life.
In the UK on the other hand, a lot of our characters seem to be from working class backgrounds with a lot of money troubles and lower key living conditions. Like say, basically anyone from a UK soap opera (like Eastenders or Coronation Street). Or the main characters from Only Fools and Houses or Steptoe and Son.
This hasn't really been a problem. Not as far as I can see from my life time.
The TV shows have never been any worse than private competition, especially considering the 'original 5'. In my opinion, BBC shows tend to be better overall (except Eastenders vs Coronation St).
That plus no adverts every 15 mins makes for a good experience.
Wrt to news, I read BBC News quite a lot. Again, no adverts to slow scrolling down and reporting that, although may face vehement accusations of bias, isn't all that biased.
I would prefer to keep the BBC too.
UK's load balancing has some quirky features that always fascinated me, like the fact they require a unique calibration for the end of each episode of Eastenders, right after which millions of households put the kettle on.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml
Well Eastenders gets away with it by putting a helpline number at the end of the program with the text "If you've been affected by the issues in this program, contact 0845...".
Perhaps they could do that with blue movies :)
"If you've been fucked in the eyesocket"...
You clearly don't live in Britain :)
"EastEnders" is the most-followed national soap-opera (rivalled only by "Coronation Street"(aka "Corrie"), but that's not on BBC and has a more Northern focus, so I guess Corrie's kettles are less powerful? Who knows). It's aired twice every day except Sunday (when they air all episodes for the whole week in one go). Like every soap, it will end every episode with a carefully-timed emotional cliffhanger. Episodes are filmed well in advance, but edited fairly close to the actual airing date, to avoid too many plot-leaks. Hence, episodes can be slightly longer or slightly shorter, and they usually make up for it by cutting the credits reel (which starts with the famous "tum-tum-tututum" sound you hear in the video); nobody cares about that, of course, so I guess programmers are just guaranteed "at this time there will be credits", which is not enough for the "electricity watcher" because people will fire up their kettles as soon as credits roll.
Cutting short actual EastEnders footage to accomodate some abstract timing issue would result in a lot of angry calls to the BBC!
Thing with Britain is that pretty much everywhere is close to an urban area. The National Grid is truly that: national. Hydro comes online instantly, faster even than gas. It's perfect for these unique-to-Britain spikes.
The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict, but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're talking about.
I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer. The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a major city on Thanksgiving.
“If they aired a day later,” she says, “illegal pirating would be going on.”
Probably, for different reasons, but likely not anywhere as near as it is today. If you knew stuff would be on in the UK on Th night, and you could see it uncut and unreformatted 26 hours later, you'd be far less likely to have initially bothered to go search it out.
I submit that the awareness and convenience of online 'piracy' of TV shows has been driven, in large part, by the frustration people felt by knowing they'd have to wait months in the first place. Now that there's a whole generation of people who already know how to 'pirate', they're not going to turn back (certainly not without a fight - SOPA, etc) but the content industry has themselves to blame for this again.
We gave up on BBC America back around 2004/2005 because they insisted on showing repeats instead of decent shows, and not explaining themselves. There was one week where they showed a combined 96 hours of "ground force", "changing rooms" and one other insipid home reality show. 96 hours of repeats of just 3 shows. Meanwhile EastEnders was scaled back and they showed less of that, and kept falling further behind. Eventually, after about a year or so of EastEnders in 2004, in to 2005, they started showing repeats of EastEnders from 2004 in place of the then-current episodes. It was as if they thought people wouldn't notice (or care) about getting repeats of a year-old ongoing soap episode. We quit even trying to support BBC America at that point, and turned to full scale torrents of any UK shows we wanted.
In the absence of being able to simply pay a UK TV license fee directly to the appropriate office, we'll just pirate. I realize that $300 still wouldn't cover all the potential ads and such ITV gets, but it'd be a strong start.
Make the BBC channels, ITV, and a couple other UK channels available as a UK package on DirecTV or Dish, charge $49/month, and I'd happily pay, assuming they were uncut feeds.
It is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/tv
I think this app is the first one that makes it possible to buy content when abroad, though.
From that link, I also get the impression that iPlayer still has a fairly nerdy image. The most viewed shows are a documentary about mathematics "the code" and a repeat of an episode of Sherlock; both beat an episode of Eastenders.
It's done manually, when the iPlayer was new there was talk of this being done, that you can rent servers in every exchange. BBC are really relaxed about piracy (in comparison to others) so this might not be common.
Too hard to work out what should be cached. Should BBC send the latest episode of Eastenders, Hustle, Tudors etc to every ISP before it's up for download? (Yes) Should Youtube try to guess which of its popular videos will be in demand next week? (No) Should Steam send out its new games? (Yes) You have to pick services where there aren't too many options, the iPlayer and Steam together have less than 2k items, and have a fairly predictable future demand.
"We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived for all time to understand culture."
Speak for yourself!
"We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived"
I'm sympathetic to preserving the shows themselves.
Their promotional pages on the BBC site when they're no longer in first-run? Feh.
We don't have the ability to preserve all information for all time. Storage media decays, formats obsolete, storage imposes cost, space and time considerations that are non-zero and non-trivial.
If these sites were a special instance of our culture, then fine. But they're not. We don't need every single episode of Eastenders archived for all time to understand culture. A good sample is way better.
These are different times to the classical era. We have a glut of information, most of which, once archived, will never be looked at again, and will only cost money until finally abandoned.