What happened to Heat? (Heat)

Member Name: spiffo

Product:	Heat
Date:	23/08/01 (358 review reads)
Rating:

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Heat used to be a good magazine. What on Earth went wrong? When did Heat change from being a quality magazine to being a trash-filled overblown gossip column?

I was a very keen reader of Heat in the early days. From the very first month (yes, I know it's a weekly magazine, but I started getting it at around issue 3, so I'm saying the first month) I loved it and decided never to miss an issue.

I was trying out a whole load of different magazines, trying to find a weekly that had a good TV guide. The Radio Times was all right, but focused on soaps and period dramas too much, and the other TV listing weeklies were too downmarket to grab my attention.

Heat really had me hooked, though. Honest, barbed movie reviews, inspired CD Reviews and charts of which TV shows had managed the best viewing figures, with an analysis of the major battles of the week.

The TV listings were great, giving enough of the plot of episodes of each show to help you work out whether you'd seen them before or whether they were going to be interesting without spoiling the show for you (unlike Radio Times which often gives away the big surprises of an episode).

The weeks choices were good as well. Many newspapers and TV magazines have a column called "today's choices" and fill it with TV shows that they want to talk about rather than the day's best TV shows. They'll include a piece of Reality TV just so that they can talk about how terrible it is and ignore the quality shows. Heat tried to actually choose the best shows so that they could advise you to watch them.

They had some brilliant features, such as a whole page of quotes from Norm out of Cheers or a whole page of silly answers given in Family Fortunes ("Name something a blind man might use." "A sword.") and they even had some book reviews full of quality books rather than easy-reading drossy romance novels.

Within the first yea
r, though, the magazine started to change. Out went the quality book reviews and in came one book a month, usually either written about the music industry or by someone like David Beckham. The number of pages given to TV listings changed from four per day to two per day, meaning that terrestrial and satellite had to be squeezed onto the same page and that the information about each show had to be written in one line.

Out went the interesting news about TV shows that were being made and in came pictures of Geri Halliwell.

Who on Earth wants to look at pictures of Geri Halliwell?

There are magazines designed for that sort of thing; people can read Hello and see pictures of famous people and their homes or they can read the Sun or the Star to see pictures of famous people walking around in the streets or on the beach. Why put them in Heat?

Out went the quality shows being picked as the day's choice viewing and in came features about Dawson's Creek! Dawson's Creek, for those of you who don't know, is a teen show full of people who refuse to speak a single sentence which has less than 20 words in, and at least 5 of those with more than 5 syllables. A bunch of 25 year olds who look like they're in their early 30s play 16 year olds who almost kiss each other and then spend weeks overanalysing their actions.

I don't know what kind of people watch the show, but I suspect that they're the kind of people who read Smash Hits, Sugar or Just 17. Why can't the show remain limited to those magazines? They've got pictures of Geri Halliwell in as well.

As if to highlight the changes, they introduced a column called "They're just like you and me". Each week there was a picture of a celebrity doing something normal. Like Meg Mathews buying a pint of milk, Jordan going into a newsagent or George Michael going into a public toilet.

Actually, I made that last one up. You can te
ll by the fact that it might actually have led to something interesting! That wouldn't have been the point of the feature, they purposely designed it to be full of people not doing anything interesting whatsoever!

I finally stopped buying Heat when Big Brother started on TV and they started getting obsessed with it. I don't have the slightest interest in watching a load of normal people doing normal things unless they're normal people who I know, in which case I'll just walk into a room with them. If I want to see someone who isn't famous clean some dishes, I'll go to my kitchen. There's a certain amount of interactivity there as well, since whoever's cleaning the dishes will force me to join in and help.

Now I know what a lot of you are going to say. You're going to tell me that there's a big market for this type of thing. You're going to tell me that lots of people want to read about Big Brother, see pictures of Geri Halliwell and read in-depth interviews with actors out of Dawson's Creek (containing questions such as "What's the best thing about being famous", "Are you anything like your character" and "Why is Dawson's Creek so great?").

Maybe that's true, but so what? Why did they have to ruin a perfectly good magazine to cater for that market? Why couldn't they create a new magazine and leave Heat be? Why couldn't they find a magazine such as Sugar or Hello that were similar to that already and read by the kind of people who want to see pictures of celebrities not really doing very much and change them slightly?

And why on Earth aren't there any magazines written for blokes who can read and who aren't interested in finding out which car could theoretically go the fastest if you weren't sitting in a traffic jam, which you always are if you live in London?

Sorry... Rant over...

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