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November 30, 2008
Public Access cable channels are those stations you surf through many times not finding anything of interest to watch. All of its programs are home grown and cater mostly to niche audiences. It costs me 26 dollars a year to produce The Lorton Show and that's it. Anyone who lives in the county can do it.
I thought if I created a show with the name of the town I live in for a title, people who live here would likely stop by and check it out. After figuring I could find an audience using Lorton for a title, I had to do was figure out a way to entertain you so you would hang around and keep coming back.
I know from my personal experience that anytime something happens that puts somewhere I'm familiar with on TV, it captures my interest. So a show with the name of the town I live in that is about that town seemed like it had a chance of being successful. Since I live here and would also be the star of the show, I would creating myself into a local celebrity. So if a Lorton audience does find itself interested in a show about Lorton, I'll become an integral part of making it successful by becoming famous, small town famous that is.
I didn't really think of it that way at first. But when I show up to shoot my show with my little 70 dollar camcorder that I got on Ebay and tell people what I'm doing, it brings out a side of them that explains the old adage about how everyone wants to be on TV. So in making them stars, I am making myself one also.
It really seemed like too simple of an idea where if that was all it took to produce a popular TV show, someone would already be doing it. It turns out that the concept is easier to think up than it is to put to work. But not so hard that it isn't worth doing. In fact after working out the angles, the end result is so much more worth the effort than I ever thought. And I only expect it to get better as it gets more challenging.
Right now, the show is about whatever I choose it to be because it hasn't aired yet. "The Lorton Show 101" premiers tomorrow morning as a special. I need to have six shows in the hands of Fairfax Public Access in order for it to become a weekly event. I'm almost done preparing them now. By mid February, I expect to be hearing enough from my audience to start making it about the community of Lorton, to make it your show.
If you have an idea for a show, anything at all going on in Lorton that you want to see showcased, I welcome your suggestions. If you want to be on the show, let me know even if it is just to say hi to Lorton or demonstrate something unique, a special talent or even just tell a good joke. If you have a local concern or political complaint, want to praise our leaders or are a leader yourself who wants to communicate something to the people who you have a responsibility towards, let me know. If you have some video footage of your own that you think your neighbors would be interested in, perhaps I can use it.
I'm open to any ideas for how to produce a community TV show that everyone in Lorton will look forward to watching to find out what's going on around here where although we aren't living in Hollywood, one day it could become quite common for locals to ask each other if they saw each other on TV recently. If this concept works, I hope it expand it to be a kind of town hall center of public focus for any issue that needs attention mixed in with entrainment and informative field trips to the many interesting sites we have around this area.
I also hope to produce other shows that spin off of ideas that grow out of this one. So if you live in Lorton, be sure to tell your friends about The Lorton Show. If you live somewhere else in the Fairfax County Cox Cable viewing area and would like to produce a show like The Lorton Show about your community (The Springfield Show, The Annandale Show, The Herndon Show, etc), I would be only too happy to lend you any advise I can to inspire its future.
In theory, shows like this could change how small towns existing within huge suburbs see themselves by being an instrument that allows us to get back to the basics of what made this country great, the American home town community where people knew each other and problems were solved in a more personal and educated way.
A lot of the problems we face are the result of average citizens not having a full understanding of the issues of the day because we mostly get information about what's going on around us from sources that don't know enough about the topics to relate them to us in a comprehensive enough way to allow us to competently decide what to do next. So we wait around for politicians and business leaders to come up with solutions to problems we don't fully understand, and neither do they apparently because it seems things just keep getting worse.
Many of our problems boil down to having a right and wrong ways to fix them. But it seems everything we face goes through a political decision making process that offer so many irrelevant sides of a story that its no wonder the right answers often get missed. In fact many times what would have worked isn't even on the table because not enough money could be made from using it.
Everything is about big profits for people who might not even know what they're invested in. If the correct solution to a problem would only hire a lot of people in the community to fix it while paying them good or even high wages but leaves nothing left over for Wall Street, it won't have a voice in the debate. So the often times the choices for solving problems don't work but do make a lot of people disconnected from the community a lot of money. That kind of thinking just doesn't seem to be working very well anymore.
I believe a lot of the problems we have in suburbia wouldn't happen in a small town where everyone eventually hears the whole story so there isn't much room for making mistakes. If mistakes are made anyway, everyone knows about it even if they don't say so. A lie in a small town is just something no one talks openly about. But in a big town, a suburb that extends the length of most of the East Coast, lies come and go without most of us knowing they existed. In a small town, only one person has to be smart enough to know that a politician is lying or doesn't know what he or she is talking about. In suburbia, we don't even know that person exists or that there was an issue they could have told us the truth about.
We get most of our information largely from sources that have an interest in us believing their point of view, that is unless we further research it ourselves. I often do this and frequently find that just because I read something on the front page of a newspaper or see it on the news, it doesn't mean I got informed. The internet is a great tool for finding out the truth about what's really going on when the news media doesn't represent stories in ways that lead to finding solutions that best solve problems in ways that most of us would think makes the most sense.
In the old days, small towns had a way of spinning a story from mouth to ear enough times so everyone's point of view became part of the process. This allowed for all potential solutions to problems to eventually sift to the top of the decision making process. The Lorton Show is an attempt to combine old and new school ways of communicating in the hopes of finding a better way to represent ourselves in the future.
To comment, offer suggestions, or be on The Lorton Show, email me at BobbyFontaine@TheLortonShow.com