This year's variety market is still wonderful, "Tron 4" Teacher Li makes people head-on, Fan Zhiyi on "Spit Conference" let us see the ceiling of Chinese talk show, the viewpoint of "Strange Story" is as sharp as ever, and the love affair between Wang Ziwen and Wu Yongen in "Suddenly Moving Again" also makes this love variety lover finally bump to the truth.
But if you push the time forward 30 years, there are not so many shows to watch. When I was a child, I always squatted in front of the TV, waiting for the program I wanted to watch to be broadcast, and I didn't even want to let it go.
That feeling, now that I watch variety shows and see the flowers, it is difficult for me to experience it again.
So in this issue, we start from the grassy era of Chinese television and the initial budding of local variety shows.
On April 21, 1990, the first issue of "Chia Tai Variety" was broadcast for the first time on CCTV.
When Jiang Kun, dressed in a suit, and Yang Lan, who was green-faced, read out the slogan of "don't look and don't know, the world is wonderful", the prelude to Chinese TV variety shows was slowly opened.
At that time, I was not yet born, but "Zhengda Variety" became my personal variety enlightenment later.
Younger students may not have seen this show at all, but as an early post-90s generation, I still remember that every Saturday night I always turned on the TV in advance, tuned to central radio two, and excitedly waited for the program to be broadcast.
In today's terms, this should be a program of on-site tourism + quiz.
When I was most addicted to "Zhengda Variety", the hosts at that time were Cheng Qian and Wang Xuechun, who were very fond of my grandmother. At the beginning of each episode, the host whispers a few words and enters a VCR on location.
The location host in VCR who speaks the language of Hong Kong and Taiwan will take you to see all kinds of beautiful and magical foreign scenery, from the camels in Australia to the gondola in Venice, so that the young me has an infinite yearning for the beauty of the world.
What's even more fun is that at the end of each VCR, the location host will leave a message similar to "Guess what this thing is behind me?" Such questions were given to the live audience. Then you can see the on-site guests guessing randomly.
In the end, the location host revealed the mystery, leaving a sentence of "Did you guess right?" ”
But when I was a child, I didn't know that I was addicted to "Zhengda Variety", it was such a simple program, and in the history of Chinese variety shows, it had a groundbreaking status.
It generated phenomenal ratings in the '90s, reaching a peak of over 37 percent, becoming a shared memory for at least three generations.
You know, I don't know how many children dreamed of becoming the location host of "Zhengda Variety" all over the world.
Yang Lan, Wang Xuechun, Cheng Qian, Zhang Zheng, Lin Hai, Zhu Xun and a number of other hosts relied on this program to quickly become the faces of the people who were popular with the whole country.
The popular theme song has also become the classic melody of 90 years: "Love is love, love is amour, love is rak, love is love, love is love, love is the most beautiful language of mankind, love is the selfless dedication of Chia Tai."
Many people later learned that this was actually an advertising song. In the 1980s, The Thai Chia Tai Group opened a Sino-Thai joint venture pig farm in Shenzhen, becoming the first foreign-funded enterprise to invest in China after the reform and opening up.
Xie Guomin, chairman of Chia Tai Group, saw not only the commercial potential of the Chinese market, but also the almost blank media industry in China at that time.
So he founded Chia Tai Variety Company. In 1989, Chia Tai Variety Company and Shanghai, Beijing, Fuzhou and Guangzhou TELEVISION stations jointly produced a two-hour TV program called "Chia Tai Zongheng", which was well received after a year of trial broadcast.
At the same time that CCTV was also promoting the opening up and reform of the domestic television industry, it was a hit, and Chia Tai Variety Company began to launch a new program in cooperation with CCTV from April 1990. This is "Chia Tai Variety".
Why is the historical status of "Chia Tai Variety" groundbreaking, because it has created many firsts, and it is the first in the industry.
It was the first tourism program in the mainland, and the programs in the later tourism satellite TV almost had to call it a grandfather.
It is also the first local variety show to adopt the answering method, and since then the intellectual competition has become an important program form throughout the development of Chinese variety shows, and there have been national variety shows such as "Lucky 52", "Happy Dictionary" and "One Stop to the End".
It was also the first local variety show with a program slogan, "Don't look at it, don't know, the world is wonderful" became the mantra of many young people at that time; it took the lead in setting up the column "Zhengda Theater", and when there was no Central Radio Six, it took the lead in broadcasting a large number of translations and productions;
It is also the first variety show to be brand-titled. Although the identity of Chia Tai Group is not a sponsor, but a co-producer, objectively speaking, it, together with the later "Toshiba Animal Park" and "Samsung Intelligence Express", laid the naming model of the later variety show.
Most importantly, it has created the most important creative model of China's variety industry in the next 30 years - portability.
Nowadays, in China's variety market, the core concept of most programs is imitated from South Korea, the United States and other countries. From "The Voice of China" to "China Has Hip Hop", from "Extreme Challenge" to "Creation 101", the "Sinicization" of overseas variety shows has achieved brilliant results. And "Zhengda Variety" is the forerunner of the introduction of variety shows.
The production team of this show spans both sides of the strait and has a very international perspective.
On the side of Chia Tai Variety Company, Mr. Weng Bingrong, an old man in the media industry in Taiwan, serves as the chairman, and the main core is Jiang Jixiong, the producer of the well-known Taiwanese program "Variety Show 100".
On the CCTV side, it was the international department in charge, the director Xin Shaoying was only 30 years old at the time, and the host boldly used Yang Lan, a newcomer who was only 22 years old at the time and had no background in the class.
The intellectual competition gameplay of "Zhengda Variety" refers to the most popular answering variety show in Japan at that time. In the location part, the early CCTV International Department did not have its own location shooting team, so it directly used the video material of the Taiwanese tourism program "Running Around the Earth".
So much so that when "Zhengda Variety" was popular, Li Xiuyuan, the location host in Taiwan, did not know that she was already a household name on the other side.
In the middle of this, the matchmaker is Mr. Weng Bingrong. Weng Bingrong has long worked in China Television, one of Taiwan's "old three stations", and "Running Around the Earth" is a program under China Television.
By the way, the theme song "Dedication of Love", the lyricist is also Weng Bingrong, and the singer is his daughter, Japanese Chinese singer Weng Qianyu.
When we now complain that domestic variety shows always carry foreign models, don't forget that in the 90s, "Chia Tai Variety" borrowed the stone of his mountain to open a 15-year era of CCTV hegemony, and opened an entire era of television entertainment.
As Yang Lan said in the cross-talk of the first program: "I hope to add a little bit of life to your life after tea and dinner." The show show showed people a rich world landscape, and in an era when foreign exchanges were still very inconvenient, countless people were able to open their eyes to the world on TV and entertained on TV on weekends.
"Chia Tai Variety" has created many firsts, but only one first does not belong to it. That is Chinese mainland's first variety show, this name belongs to the "Variety Show" that started a month earlier and began on March 14, 1990.
Maybe many young students have not seen "Variety Show" at all. Although the names are similar, the two shows are completely different. The nickname of "Variety Show" is "Little Spring Festival Gala".
From form to production, all aspects of "Variety Show" benchmark the Spring Festival Gala, which adopts the form of a TV evening, covering a variety of art categories such as songs, dances, music arts, and operas. Even the broadcast method uses live broadcasting.
Its birth is also largely related to the Spring Festival Gala.
In 1983, CCTV held the first Spring Festival Gala. Throughout the 80s, except for the Spring Festival Gala in 1985, which was criticized for technical problems, each Spring Festival Gala became a phenomenon-level program, which can be called a spiritual feast for generations of Chinese.
The Spring Festival Gala has become a "new folk custom" of the spring festival in the Chinese, and it has become a national ceremony. As the Spring Festival Gala becomes more and more important, CCTV needs to have a live broadcast program to train troops for the Spring Festival Gala.
In this context, "Variety Show" came into being. On the one hand, it trains the team, on the other hand, it also selects artists and runs into the program.
Not strictly speaking, it is the "I want to go to the Spring Festival Gala" of that era.
According to the report of first finance and economics, the average rating of "Variety Show" can reach 18%, and the average number of viewers per period can reach 200 million. This statistic is a bit of an exaggeration, and I guess it may have included replay viewers. But in any case, it can be broadcast live at eight o'clock in the evening prime time of CCTV, and "Variety Show" is also the top of the times.
And like "Zhengda Variety" out of Yang Lan, "Variety Show" also walked out of two "CCTV first sisters", the first five years were Ni Ping, and the next five years were Zhou Tao, who together hosted the Spring Festival Gala 28 times.
The status of "Variety Show" can be seen.
Two or three years after the launch of "Zhengda Variety Show" and "Variety Show", literary and artistic programs such as "Quyuan Miscellaneous Temple", "TV Bookstore", and "East, West, South, and North" were also born one after another.
Until now, I can immediately think of the melody of the opening song of "Quyuan Miscellaneous": cross-talk, sketches, magic acrobatics. Storytelling, jokes, rap art. East, west, south, north and south, jun please see, Quyuan Miscellaneous Altar.
It can be said that CCTV led the first five years of Chinese variety shows. At the same time that CCTV Variety shows continue to create ratings miracles, another force in the variety show market is also brewing.
In 1993, Shanghai Oriental Television launched a program called "Happy Wheel", and one of the hosts was Cao Kefan, who was unknown at the time and is now a famous host.
The show, which combines indoor games, fun quizzes and field competitions, became the first case of local television stations testing the waters of variety entertainment.
In the same year, Wei Wenbin, who had just become the director of the Hunan Radio and Television Department, took a fancy to a piece of land on the outskirts of Changsha and built the Hunan Radio and Television Building there. This land is now the Jerusalem of the mainland television entertainment industry - MalanShan.
At that time, Hunan Television Station was not the current "TV Xiangjun", but a "feed TV station" full of livestock feed advertisements. Locals would rather see Changshatai than provincial stations.
After Wei Wenbin took office, he launched drastic reforms in Hunan Radio and Television, one of which was the establishment of Hunan Economic Television. Regarded as Hunan Radio and Television, it is a test field, and the test is of course something that the public likes to hear.
At that time, the director of the tv station was Ouyang Changlin, the godfather of television, who is now famous all over the world, and the producer who led the entertainment program planning was Wang Bingwen, who later became the deputy director of Hunan Television.
At that time, almost all variety shows were more or less affected by CCTV, and they could not open the shelf when entertaining. According to Wang Bingwen's recollection, Wei Wenbin said to the program team at that time: "Entertainment is entertainment, you have to do it." Don't pretend. As long as it is healthy and harmless, you can do anything. ”
On December 23, 1995, a program called "Lucky 3721" was broadcast on Economic Television.
The show is extremely focused on gameplay and interactivity, introducing an audience hotline and a lucky draw that has received a huge response in the province. Now that it's successful, step up your efforts.
In January 1997, Hunan Television became a satellite TV. After 6 months, after being repeatedly killed and repeatedly polished, a program was born out of "Lucky 3721", and joined the program form of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and the program that referred to the gameplay of "Chia Tai Variety" appeared on Hunan Satellite TV.
July 11, 1997 at 8:05 p.m. "Happy Base Camp" met with the national audience on Hunan Satellite TV.
When the hosts Li Xiang and Li Bing walked onto the stage, the audience thought it was an ordinary party.
But soon, interactive games, location columns and preemptive answers followed. "Happy Base Camp" with the power of satellite TELEVISION, let the people of the whole country feel what is a thorough entertainment program, it tells the national audience, CCTV's kind of sitting entertainment program should retire from the altar, variety show is to scatter the play.
The following year, Wang Bingwen recruited He Jiong, who was doing children's programs on the one hand and teaching in Beiwai, and his partner Li Xiang. Some time ago, I also reviewed the clip of the two of them hosting Kuaiben for the first time, when Teacher He was really young, completely without the ease of play now, Li Xiang was still imitating the stage of Taiwanese variety show hosting, and there was no personal style at all.
But it is the host team formed by such two people as the team, and constantly iterating, which has become the unique core competitiveness of "Happy Base Camp".
Three years before the start of the broadcast, the ratings of "Fast Book" remained high at about 40%, and the program team could receive letters piled up into hills every week, and the price of interstitial advertisements was even higher than that of CCTV advertisements in the same period.
Even the small hotels that attracted customers at the Beijing Railway Station at that time have signs: we can watch Hunan Tai's "Happy Base Camp".
In the second year of the broadcast of "Fast Book", Hunan Satellite TV imitated the Hong Kong and Taiwan variety shows and launched the marriage and love variety show "The Covenant of Roses", which once again won an ace program.
The wind of entertainment blew up from Malan Mountain, and it was more than twenty years.
"Fast Book" has brought the first wave of variety shows in the history of Chinese television, and it has broken the "news + TV series" duo mode of the past TV industry into the "news + TV series + variety show" three giant model.
Under the leadership of Hunan TV, tv stations around the world have also followed suit. Shanghai TV launched "Meet Saturday", and Zhejiang TV did "Holiday Story".
One of the most famous is "Happy Story", relying on the super imitation show, let ordinary people imitate stars, and the popularity of the moment can even be compared to "Fast Book".
In the face of sudden changes in the market, CCTV had to respond to the launch of some pure game variety shows, such as "Lucky 52", "Between Cities" and "Happy Dictionary".
At the same time, the ratings of some old programs have gradually declined and been eliminated, "TV Bookstore", "East, West, South, North and South", "Variety Show" have been suspended in 2003 and 2004, and "Quyuan Zatan" has lasted until 2011, and finally has not escaped the fate of suspension.
It is said that when "East, West, South, South and Central" was discontinued, the ratings were only 0.2%, which was quite miserable.
The programs were suspended, but the audience of these programs still had to be received. That is, the "Same Song" that later spread all over the country and finally stopped broadcasting infamously.
Why did China's TV variety shows sprout in the 90s? What prompted mainland variety shows to transform from birth to ratings in just ten years, becoming the thickest thigh in the three giants of "news + TV series + variety shows"?
On the surface, progress depends on the creativity of television practitioners, but from the perspective of industrial structure, we will get a completely different answer.
We look at the consumption side, the production side and the capital side separately. Let's look at the consumer side first. At the consumer level, Chinese have an unimaginable love for television.
In the 1980s, television sets were the primary consumer of residents' savings deposits, and workers did not hesitate to buy a tv set with a year's wage income.
One data is that in 1988, China's per capita GDP was about 300 US dollars, but the number of television sets reached 140 million, and less than 10 people had one.
Compared with the countries in the world at that time, where the TV penetration rate reached the level of China, the per capita GDP was generally above 1,000 US dollars. After a long period of "eight plays for 800 million people", Chinese's desire for spiritual consumption can be seen.
There are plenty of TVs, which naturally need a lot of programming to fill in.
In addition to TV dramas and news, variety shows, as a new form of literary and artistic programs, have largely met people's viewing needs.
Looking at the production side, there is a policy with far-reaching influence, called the "radio and television four-level station system." The policy was launched at the Eleventh National Radio and Television Work Conference in 1983.
The specific content is to open the right to operate television stations to the governments at the city and county levels, forming a mixed coverage pattern of four-level television stations at the central, provincial, municipal and county levels.
The most immediate result is that from 1982 to 1989, the number of television stations in the country soared from 47 to 469. Although the blind expansion of the army has caused a waste of resources, the production level cannot keep up.
But objectively speaking, people who spend a lot of money on tv sets can watch more programs. And these redundant broadcast channels, in turn, have given birth to more content needs, and variety shows are produced under such demand.
Finally, there is the funding side. In the 1990s, there was a wave of rapid development in the national TV advertising turnover, and the market size increased from 2.94 billion yuan in 1993 to 11.4 billion yuan in 1997.
Television advertising has become the most expensive of all media forms.
In the face of more and more advertisers in the market, TV stations need to increase the advertising premium by strengthening content attributes, increase more advertising space, and make more money from advertisers.
Variety shows, on the other hand, are the golden indicators that can really distinguish a TV station from its peers. A good variety show can make a TV station stand out in the eyes of advertisers.
Objectively there is a market need, subjective conditions allow, and profitable. So in the 1990s, the entire television industry entered an era of fully embracing consumer civilization. Not only variety shows, TV series and news are also beginning to enter its best era.
For a long time before that, the mass media throughout China had assumed the functions of propaganda and indoctrination, and in this regard, television had no more advantages than radio and newspapers.
But after the 1990s, television reached the pinnacle of mass entertainment, and in the 20 years before the advent of the Internet era, it sat firmly in the position of the king of the media.
Entertainment is the foundation of the television industry. Speaking of variety shows, Wei Wenbin once had such a remark about "Happy Base Camp": We have received enough education from childhood to adulthood, we were educated by our parents when we were young, we were educated by our parents and the leaders in the unit, and when we returned home, if our wives did not find a good one, our wives still managed you, sitting in front of the TV, and the TV was also educating you.
I said, let's have fun and education! The purpose of "Happy Base Camp" is to be relaxed, enjoyable, and let people sit in front of the TV set to get a kind of enjoyment and relief.
In my opinion, this passage is the best annotation to variety shows: variety shows exist to bring happiness to people. People, myself included, always like to pretend to be deeply critical of "entertainment to death." But is entertainment really so lethal? I don't think so.
From Jin Yong Qiongyao, to TELEVISION entertainment, to video games, to the current Internet, there are too many things that are put on the hat of "entertainment to death".
But from the post-70s to the post-80s, to the current post-90s, everyone has been entertained all the way, and it is not necessarily the generation that has collapsed.
You know, from ancient times to the present, we ordinary people are allowed to be unbridled happiness, and such a time is really too rare. Cherish such times.