All through television history hospital dramas have featured from Doctor Kildare, General Hospital through to ER on
Apparently people like to view others in crisis. Episodes typically are based on unusual diseases or awful disasters with victims/patients being at death's door while 'loved' ones worry, argue, fight or grieve depending on the situation.
Personally I liked Doctor Finlay's Casebook as it was more about the drama of the goings on of the community and less about unusual diseases. I don't remember a single plane or train crash deemed necessary to drum up interest.
The modern-day medical/hospital dramas rely on all sorts of weird and wonderful scenarios to maintain viewer interest. When rare diseases don't cut it they literally cut it by showing close ups of disgusting surgical operations.
Recently we have been served up 'reality' hospital programmes. These have had high drama with worrying, arguing, fighting or grieving relatives and close ups of disgusting surgical operations. The difference in this case is that it smacks of voyeurism.
As I was interested, not in the TV programmes per se as they revolt me, but in the viewership, I did some research.
I found a survey site that exhaustively canvassed viewers of medical dramas over a period of 20 years and sorted their responses demographically and psychographically and then resorted by gender, marital status and sexual orientation. The site is www.medicaldramareview.com and is quite an eyeful as the treatise is about 200 pages long.
To paraphrase I extracted some pertinent information.
- Viewership, on average across Europe, USA, UK, India, Africa and Asia is 55% of the population
- Viewers by gender are 75% female
- Of the 25% male viewers 95% are reported as being homosexual or having no particular sexual orientation.
- 20% of viewers are reported as being in the upper decile of earning.
- 0% of viewers are reported as being of IQ above 120.
1 comment:
Good to see you finding things to fill in your evening.
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