What follows is a babe channel blog, originally posted by @Babe_TV on their Tumblr account. Their’s was an incredibly detailed account and charted many of the events of Babestation going back a long time. Unfortunately, it can no longer be accessed as the account has been deleted. Luckily we have a number of posts and we will be posting them here and on babestation.tv in tribute to the work that was done.
In the naughties, the terrestrial babeshows organised their broadcasts into what were described by the girls as “sections”. A “section” was simply the period of time for which an individual model – or perhaps two models together – would be on screen before taking a break. Typically, each section would last for half an hour. So you might get Kelly Carter on screen from 10pm to 10:30, then Dani O’Neal from 10:30 to 11pm, then Charlie C from 11pm to 11:30, and so on.
Whilst some sections on the Freeview shows of 2008 and the first half of 2009 could run up to 45 minutes in length, that was fairly exceptional, and an hour could be described as rare. The first time I can remember the concept of “sections” being in any way challenged on Freeview came in the dying days of Party People, when staffing decisions would be left until the last minute, and on 16th July 2009, only one girl – Camilla Jayne – was allocated to the show. Camilla worked the whole night portion of Party People, from 3am to 05:30, on her own.
Above: Camilla Jayne. In July 2009 Camilla worked a whole Freeview babe channel on her own. The above image comes from a later Babestation appearance
Very interestingly though, whilst this was a straightforward ‘one girl – two and a half hours’ arrangement in terms of personnel, the actual feel of individual “sections” was maintained. During the programme, Camilla changed outfits during short pic download slideshows, and this suggested that variety, and keeping things fresh for the viewers, was of considerable importance.
But it wasn’t long after Camilla’s Party People marathon that individual sections on other live babe channels began to lengthen. Upping the standard section length from half an hour to an hour coincided with quite a few other changes…
- A big increase in the number of Babestation’s full-strength night shows on Freeview, from one to four. This meant viewers could find variety by channel-flicking rather than relying on a single show to provide it.
- Growing audiences. More viewers meant more interactive customers, and more interactive customers would mean more people trying to get through to the onscreen girl. The bigger queues would, crucially, also mean they’d be trying to get through for longer.
- A restructuring of the output to pay particular attention to eavesdroppers. Dividing up a girl’s airtime into eavesdropping and more interactively focused periods meant it would literally take her longer to fulfill her commercial requirements, and realistically, half an hour was now nowhere near long enough.
September 2009 saw the transformation of the main Babestation night shows from relaxed, predominantly interactive products with lots of on-air chat and ‘downtime’, to streamlined, driven and considerably less interactive programmes, with all models more efficiently utilised. Even when the girls were off screen there quickly became more work for them to do.
The idea of “sections” did still exist, but the sections were much longer, and more flexible, running for up to an hour and a half in length when commercial circumstance permitted. The idea of rigid, half-hour ‘tag teaming’ had become a thing of the past on Babestation.
Above: With support from Geri, Tiffany Chambers virtually made Babestation Xtra into her own show on 11th April 2010. This is the opening sequence. Clearly the plan was to get and keep viewers very excited, and that evidently converted into sales.
The next real step away from the concept of individual “sections” on Babestation was epitomised by what was virtually an ‘all-nighter’ for Tiffany Chambers on the Babestation Xtra Freeview show in April 2010. Assisted by Geri (onscreen as well as off), Tiffany remained live for literally hours with her naked special. The broadcast included plenty of steamy walk-on interactions from Geri, and even some Basic Instinct style leg crossing/uncrossing from Tiffany. Whilst there were no personnel changes, Tiffany’s naked special was obviously a huge success, and there was definitely no sense of tedium, even for those watching the whole set. In fact I think I actually cried when it finished…
In slightly more seriousness, the event did demonstrate very well that babeshows with numerous channels and big audiences are, in the immediate term at least, commercially better off putting the most lucrative girls into the most visible places for as long as the stats hold out. Subsequently, the notion of one, highly-lucrative girl dominating one babe channel for most of the night has become quite a common one.
But in the longer term, the implications of the above are unclear. Making overly predictable shows can lose people’s attention, and that was one of the things I think impacted negatively on Playboy TV Chat when it went to Freeview in late 2011. From the start, Playboy/RLC had a propensity to schedule just one main model per show, and that had obvious dangers. If a potential customer isn’t interested in the scheduled model, and he knows she’ll be there all night, then the channel has completely wiped that customer out of the picture. Babestation were operating highly predictable schedules at the time too, but the difference was that they had multiple Freeview channels. There was still always a choice for every viewer, so the predictability probably wasn’t so damaging as it would be for Playboy with their single Freeview option.
Above: Lori Buckby has become one of Babestation’s most familiar faces. Babestation’s intensive and predictable use of obviously lucrative models has divided viewer opinion, with some feeling that these exciting acts justify their high levels of airtime, and others feeling the lack of variety is a serious problem.
It would be nice to think that babe channels could base their output on variety, but the reality is that they’re too desperate to turn a profit in the moment. If they’ve got a model they absolutely know will bring in the strongest flow of revenue, she’s going to get the most airtime, and she’s going to get it in the most visible places. That means peak times, on the channels with the biggest audiences. Over time, that will inevitably equate to predictable output. There’s no reliable way to calculate the long-term damage over-predictability does to the babe channels, because there are so many other factors to which they can attribute commercial decline.
But in the end, you come back to the fact that babeshows are not editorial matter – they’re adverts. And if you look at advertising in general, it is repetitive, it is predictable, and it is simple. That’s how traditional advertising works. Would you be less likely to actually USE a particular supermarket because their ads are still fronted by the same celeb they’ve had for the past five years? Probably not.
However, regular televisual advertising is sandwiched, in small doses, between longer periods of engaging content, and that means when the adverts come on, the audience is in ‘listen’ mode. Babeshows don’t have the luxury of appearing before highly engaged audiences who are by default listening and paying attention. They have to create their own engagement, and that’s where over-predictability suddenly jumps out as a big problem. Audiences who aren’t paying attention are really not worth having, so the babeshows have to be incredibly careful with repetition, eventlessness, and anything else likely to disengage viewers. Balancing immediate-term need with long-term viability is probably the hardest battle the babe channels face.
