Now, I’m an uncloseted fan of the Gogglebox franchise; including new edition to the family, Gogglesprogs – but as a reviewer, I have to be honest and say Vlogglebox is a step too far. A desperate attempt to expand the Gogglebox empire, Vlogglebox is pretty much empty of the humour and overall entertainment one would come to expect from E4.
One major problem, is that due to the shortness of the clips, it is harder for the Vloggleboxers to win us over and therefore harder to get attached to the people on it. Secondly, the video quality, due to watching it through the stream of a smartphone, makes for difficult and even uncomfortable viewing, though I do understand that this show centres on the very premise of watching videos on smartphones – but the jumpy, up-close camera angles due to this made me feel queasy as a viewer at times.
Aside from the inherent problems with the premise, and how I think this does not adapt as easy to the television as Gogglebox and Gogglesprogs, I feel the selection of Vloggleboxers are, on the whole, unmemorable and do not have strong enough personalities to reel-in a loyal audience each week. This may seem a harsh evaluation, but again I think it comes back to the smaller, shorter premise of each show, and the lack of a platform on which the Vloggleboxers can show-off their personalities; with the clips being too short for both the viewer at home and on the show, to really sink their teeth into.
One of the only memorable set-ups were Joseph and his grandma Gilda, which made for interesting viewing due to the cross-generation dynamic. In terms of the Vlogglebox cast as a whole, though there is a good range of people from different cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds as well as people from the gay community and from many different regions, I felt there was a noticeable lack of older Vloggleboxers, perhaps due to the fact many avid vlog-watchers are the younger generation.
It would nevertheless be interesting to see older perspectives, especially since the show does well at documenting the weird and wonderful every day of the internet that older people may not be as exposed to, or may not have access to at all.
Finally, the length of the show is much too long for something of this nature. In fitting with the smaller clips used, and only snippets of opinion from each viewer on the show, I think the show is in danger of becoming boring viewing if left in its current state, and should be scaled down to around 35 mins of viewing time.
But it seems there are still a small team of Vlogglebox lovers out there who disagree…
