You first have to decide what it is that you are trying to do with the show.
Are you trying to show 'karting' as a sport, or are you trying to show the expensive end of karting as various championship races?
In other words are you trying to get people interested or are you trying just to interest them? This is the difference between showing say 'club' motorcycle races (getting people interested as something they might do) or MotoGP (no-one watching is thinking 'I can do that', but it gets their interest.)
If you are looking at advertising championships, then it is merely boring. Karting is so fast that for the most part it is merely a jumble, it requires a lot of editing and slowed motion to make it remotely watchable and it requires a manned camera at every corner, because the entire race is done in 5 minutes flat. Then one has to make 'characters' out of the karters and that needs rather more PR than just standing in front of the camera mouthing platitudes about 'thanks to my team, my sponsors, the officials and the people I beat'. (Just as most of us haven't got a clue who Lewis Hamilton really is, and wouldn't recognise him if you met him in the street. Nor actually most celebrities; but we all think we know something about them).
Alternatively a 'magazine' programme about karting has to be a lot more diverse. It has to cover more aspects of karting, get some appearance of detail (think how essentially boring 'magazine' programmes on antiques / collectables / junk are made palatable by dressing them up as "Antiques Road Show" ) and introduce people without appearing to make the people the star of the show. This can require less manpower to film, just as a person can identify one driver in a race and watch them without noticing all the other action that goes on around them. The difficulty is then to keep up the interest programme after programme. After all, it really isn't difficult getting through the Arks test and only so often that one wants to hear about the difficulties of scrutineering.
The other problem is the ease with which Joe Public can go out and hire a kart. We know that there isn't any performance similarity between a ProKart for the day and your average Cadet kart, let alone a 100cc or a gearbox. But Joe Public sees that just to get into one of our karts costs around £3k, not to mention the palaver of an Arks test and without some way of comparing the two, why should he bother?
So it really isn't any use asking Karters what sort of karting show they want to see, because they aren't the audience. With maybe 15,000 people active in karting in the entire UK, they just aren't enough. You can buy space on Motors TV, but that is little more than vanity publishing in books.
So what you have to do is to find out what a production company thinks will sell, develop a theme and get people involved and sponsoring. Be creative, don't try Volvo but maybe Van der Berg Foods (what does a Peperami do when it gets out of the lunchbox; it goes karting.). Not marmalade but Marmite.
A good example might be the Aussie Ute racing of a few years ago. essentially it was club racing running a championship with a lot of reasonably competent but clubbie level racers. So the programme followed the trials of the various teams, gave the drivers nicknames and so on. However, beware because as their fame grew so did the pressures on Ute racing. Now it's full of imported drivers, highly professional and driven race teams who don't have time for fun and folksy. Gone are "Fred's Garage" replaced are "Manufacturer's Team Australia" and the like. And just as Formula 1 has gone from the car on the trailer to a £20 million deposit just to enter the series, so too has their budget.
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Karting on TV by 'BenConsty' (04 Nov 2008 @ 11:39)
