The Great Unwatched: BBC hails glorious digital future for Three The BBC's director general Tony Hall hailed a great digital future for the little-watched terrestrial channel BBC3 today. The BBC wants to move it to the internet to save money, and has submitted the proposals for rubber-stamping by the BBC Trust. The channel's budget has been cut from £55m to £30m, but TV programme …
The sooner they kill BBC3 the better. If you've ever watched it you know why.
For every Gavin & Stacy there are a million Don't Tell the Bride, Sun Sex & Suspicious Parents and 'documantaries' presented by naive young female journalists who pretend its a shock to them that some people are poor before busrting into tears.
If we could axe ITV (all channels) too the quality of British television would increase by an order of magnitude.
You know there is something wrong with a supposedly "adult" channel like BBC 3 when a kids channel (CBBC) churns out better content than it does.
Hell, even most of Cbeebies content it highbrow compared to Don't tell the Barely Legal Suspicious Parents.
I guess the bottom line is that when Channel 4, Channel 5 and a large amount of ITV content is puerile shite, there is no real benefit in the licence funded BBC doing the same.
For every Gavin & Stacy there are a million Don't Tell the Bride, Sun Sex & Suspicious Parents and 'documantaries' presented by naive young female journalists who pretend its a shock to them that some people are poor before busrting into tears.
Almost as egregious , for every Gavin & Stacy there is a Gavin and Stacey
Presumably a +1 channel is cheap, as there's no additional editorial cost. The programs on BBC3 may look like they cost nothing, but it's still the more expensive option.
I don't watch commercial channels much because I find it annoying when programmes are interrupted for ads. I was horrified to discover that BBC3 interrupts films with non-ad breaks in which some witless totty recites "news" about "celebrities". The sooner they close it the better.
@ DPWDC
+1 for the, errm, +1 comment!
+1 channels served their purpose back in the early days of Satellite, Cable and Digi TV days, when people either didn't have a DVR, or if they did, it was a single channel affair,
But now that time-shifting DVRs with 2 (or more) concurrent channels, are common place, even pretty much standard equipment these days, then there really is no purpose to these +1 channels now, and if you did miss an episode of something, it's likely to turn up on the relevant on-demand service soon enough anyway!
I've no real issue with them existing on Satellite and Cable, as they have the bandwidth to carry them along with 100s of other (mostly worthless) channels, but digital terrestrial has a very limited bandwidth, so personally I think using that space for a +1 is not just waste of available bandwidth, it aught to be outlawed outright.
So use the space for something useful, new content, or an additional HD channel, don't waste it on a +1!
What part of "reaches outside the middle classes" didn't you understand? Lots of people like this dross, it's the TV equivalent to reading The Sun. I think it's puerile and stupid but that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, because I am not everyone.
Yes, but this kind of shite "lowest common denominator" output is done to death by the other terrestial channels. What added value does the BBC offer by doing it too?
Anyone who wants to can still get their fill of as much fly-on-the-wall reality shite as they want once BBC 3 has gone from a hundred other channels.
Compare this with if the BBC had decided to scrap BBC 4 instead.
Monkey dust is indeed superb. I bought a DVD on eBay containing slightly dodgy quality files of series 2 and 3. Even though it represented £4.50 of free money for whoever sold it to me, it felt like £5 well spent.
(I know it must all be downloadable somewhere - I just couldn't be arsed to find out where and how.)
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I sat through the excruciating episode last night between the Linguists ("Oh, how cunning!") and the Gallifreyans (sweet Jesus... one of them flew 6000 miles for a first date which should tell you something) and the ridiculous affectations they have implemented to try and make the show seem more intellectual than it is ("Ooh I'll pick the Eye of Rah please, no wait the Horned Asp" - fuck off, it's numbers 1-6 you bell ends) rather than a glorified guessing game are purely there to make what could be over in 12 minutes last 28. It's no better than Noel Edmunds and his red boxes of bollocks. Scrap it!
BBC 3 is a pretty good test bed for new programming. The life cycle generally goes like this
First airs on BBC 3. Proves to be very popular.
Moves to BBC 2. Ratings continue to improve.
Gets promoted to BBC 1. The Daily Mail gets wind of it and complains that it's puerile.
Show is cancelled.
Seriously though, they're going to replace BBC 3 with a +1 channel for BBC 1? The BBC has always been very keen on promoting the iPlayer for catch up.
That was the original name of what became BBC3. It used to show time-shifted repeats of the best of the other BBC channels, except when Glastonbury was on when it was pretty much full time coverage.
So, having BBC1+1 is almost like going back to it's roots.
And remember, significant numbers of people who were early smart TV and BluRay player adopters have recently been deprived of iPlayer when the BEEB decided to re-work the UI to make it incompatible with older devices.
>take away all the TV programmes made for "regular TV" and there'd be nothing to watch on Netflix.
That's less true by the day. The recent House of Cards remake was commissioned by and aired exclusively on Netflix, and I gather that did reasonably good business (especially on Capitol Hill, indeed). They and LoveFilmAmazon are commissioning lots of original content now.
BTW I did watch Torchwood and Gavin & Stacey but that purple blob just turned the channel off for me.
Distracting on utv1 to 4 as well
C4 HD might as well not be there logoing a HD channel - moronic!
TBH this would be something for the government to ban - on screen channel logos.
TBH this would be something for the government to ban - on screen channel logos.
There was a "Campaign for Logo Free TV" that I was involved with some years ago which actually persuaded Channel 5 at the time to remove their original DOG. It's back now, but the channel was logo-free for quite a few years.
I think the guy who ran it didn't help himself though, I recall that he could be difficult and he alienated many of the TV execs who were otherwise sympathetic to the cause.
He also had health problems and I believe he subsequently passed away and as far as I can tell, no-one carried on the campaign.
You've just reminded me of that other favourite, squeezing the end credits of a film/programme into half the screen and blabbing over them about the next show or some inane phone-in compo. Always feel that's the height of rudeness to the creditees (and whoever did the music score!).
NURSE! MY PILLS, QUICKLY!
Right on brother! Power to the people.
Or maybe you are missing the fact that the primary audience for BBC3, tends to consume music, video and TV online, so actually it is the right channel, if any, to move off over-the-air.
You also failed to mention the facts that shit like Don't tell the bride is being dumped in favour of as they term it, long term programming.
With the release in budget, it allows CBBC, which actually has some good stuff for kids, to be extended, getting over the absurd situation where Cbeebies is on till later at night,
But still, Wolfie, sock it to the suits. Just remember to pick up socialist worker on the way home.
I find it slightly ironic that you don't like BBC3, as it doesn't fit your demographic and therefore happy for it to be culled, yet expecting a child centric channel to be funded by the licence fee payer regardless of whether they have kids.
My preferred option would be to drop EastEnders completely, followed by the One show and that bloody never ending Tory on a train with a guide book.
"Great British Railway Journies is one of the best programmes on TV!"
It is, and it would be better still without the BBC supporting the career of the washed-up ex-politician and immigrant's son.
Nick Crane or Julia Bradbury or various others would be perfectly OK.
Michael Portillo works well as he likes history and likes railways, he was also responsible for signing the paperwork keeping the Settle & Carlisle Railway open. Yes they had a railway enthusiast as a public transport minister.
"But still, Wolfie, sock it to the suits. Just remember to pick up socialist worker on the way home."
You should have heard the hard time that Radio 4's "Meeja Show" gave to the BBC spokesman this evening over the supposedly vile and unjustified casting out of BBC3. If ever anybody wanted proof of the "right on" 1980s institutional bias of the Beeb, all they need to do is hunt down the podcast or iPlayer coverage of the show.
End the telly tax, and make the Tristrams pay their way with adverts.
Series 1 Episode 7 (Vince in a coma) was so pant wettingly funny, I wet my pants. Apart from that, the BBC has blighted my existence since I was born. Every bloody year, the programmes I wanted to watch were booted off screen to be replaced by whatever South East England middle class crap happened to be passing that week.....e.g. Wimbledon. Then there was the great F1 sell out to Sky. I'll never forgive them for that. I felt really sorry for the people of Somerset last year. Just when the Beeb noticed that they had been standing in water for months, the Thames burst its banks and suddenly flooding was proper news because it affected commuters into London.
They should just rename the whole thing as the Surrey Broadcasting Corp.
The current series of The Newsroom has a thoughtful, head-on take on how making everything digital is akin to wanking into your tea. The BBC's news website, which used to be top of its game, has been dumbed down an astonishing degree. Okay, might be an idea for the Beeb to get out of online journalism (in which case there is an off-switch) but the news programming has gone much the same way: "reporters" and (this one makes me physically ill) "explainers".
Is "digital" going to be the polite euphemism for "shite"? It's got nothing to do with being middle class and everything to with mediocrity.
"explainers" ? Are they finally admitting that the so-called "experts" weren't, so now they're just random-people-that-explain-stuff-that-only-retards-wouldn't-already-know?
Thankfully, I've not heard that phrase yet, I don't tend to pay much attention to BBC News now that each story seems to be accompanied with a picture or diagram designed to cause the most irritation possible. Like, let's see, something happened in Syria. So there's a map showing where Syria is, in case we utterly failed to pay attention over the past four or so years.
Frankly, I'd rather they put news programming on CBeebies. At least young children wouldn't put up with this shit...
Talking of which, when did "digital" become a synonym for "online" (a la "glorious digital future") anyway?
BBC Three was *always* a digital (terrestrial) channel; it was never on analogue. Compact Discs' *whole bloody selling point* was that they were "Digital Audio" (it's in the ******* logo for f***'s sake!). It's not as if Joe Public had never heard the term "digital" back then... yet online services are distinguished from them by being "digital" (as if, by implication, they aren't).
Where are all these analogue CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays they've been watching then?
I suspect that, for all today's tech "literacy", the majority of people don't have a clue what "digital" actually means, only that it's a term applied to shiny new computer-based electronics. CDs became analogue because they were no longer cutting edge, and old-school Teletext? Ha ha, look at the funny, blocky graphics, that was *never* digital. (*)
(*) I'd argue that the original Teletext was never given the credit it deserves as probably the first truly mass-market service directly aimed at the consumer when it launched in the mid-to-late 70s. Despite being digital itself, its piggybacking onto the analogue TV signal led- in a hugely ironic way given what I've just said- to it being referred to as "analogue Teletext" and contrasted with the newer "digital" (cough) "Teletext" on Freeview. Sure, it was hugely dated by the time it ceased transmission here, but it was still cutting edge in its day, and more importantly, a major landmark.
BBC Media Action: Subversion From Broadcasting House To Kazakhstan
”Our mission is to inform, connect and empower people around the world.” These are mighty words from BBC Media Action, a charitable offshoot of the BBC funded to £29.5m in 2012 - most of it from the British Government, EU, US State Department, UN and Dutch government. Most of the British public and indeed most of the BBC’s licence payers will have never heard of BBC Media Action let alone understand what this BBC charity really is.
http://www.ukcolumn.org/article/bbc-media-action-subversion-broadcasting-house-kazakhstan
What I want to know is if Aunty will move Family Guy to BBC 2 in the evening?
If you condensed all the programme material and removed the trails and continuity, would it really need more than four hours a day?
Wouldn't the solution be to move BBC Parliament onto the internet and use that bandwidth instead?
When BBC3 was only on digital it was useful as a hook to sell digital STBs, but now? Since half of what's on BBC1 is repeats, you could fit all BBC3 and BBC1 programming onto BBC1 without even straining. Maybe the reverse-snobbery of the C/D/E social groups will stop them from watching "middle-class" BBC1, but that's their choice, it isn't like people will be pointing at them in the pub saying "I know which channel you were watching yesterday", is it?
> Imagine the Revolution¹ guys being able to react to the 4p porridge story and getting something out on the day
Here's a better idea: Imagine the BBC guys being able to research the 4p porridge story [ whatever that is/was ] and getting an authoritative, credible, accurate and structured story out, assuming the story had relevance to the TV audience
Then the channel might actually be worth watching and could support a viewership that made its funding cost effective.
[1] what or whoever TF they are.
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BBC3 has never made or contributed to any world class show like The Fades, or Being Human, or In the Flesh or Orphan Black. It's a shame they missed such an opportunity.
Ah, no, wait!
So in fact BBC3 has been the prime source of quality genre entertainment in the UK for the past few years. Not everything worked - Torchwood S1 was a famous early disaster for BBC3 original content, but it got its act together post-2010 and it's original non-reality drama and comedy content has been getting better and better. It's very interesting that a lot of the abuse BBC3 gets are from white, middle class folk targeting just the pre-watershed cheap reality crap. So should ITV1 move online because it's all X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent?
Sure, I wouldn't watch idiocy like "Don't Tell the Bride" and "Snog Marry Avoid" now I'm in my 40s just like you wouldn't. But I expect a lot of people pissing on BBC3 now did watch Def 2 (BBC2) and Network 7 and Tube (C4) back when we were in our teens; so we'd absolutely be watching BBC3 reality shows now, if we were that age today, as well as "high-brow" comedy and drama on other channels. Mixed content programming is a wonderful thing, educating thing to a teenager.
So BBC3 is vastly superior to ITVs 2, 3 and 4 and any of the extra smug Channel 4 brands, arguably even C4 itself. People defend BBC4 - justifiably so, but always at the expense of BBC3. Actually it is possible to have watched Only Connect on BBC4 then headed to BBC3 for an episode of Bluestone 42 or Russell Howard. As the *only* advertising-free entertainment channel on air aimed at a younger or genre audience, it will be sorely missed. Axing BBC3 as a TV channel is a silly, reactionary move caused by the sort of anti-licence fee abuse by the Daily Mail/Orlowski brigade, who only the see the bad in everything and never the good.
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> and lately I've found bugger all on any of their other channels either.
I hear that BBC3 have commissioned yet another cookery programme, but this time aimed at its demographic rather than the SE England, middle classes that is the rest of the Beeb's output: it's going to be called "Burger All".
"This week the BBC launched a "gamification" app for children" This is the problem I have with the BBC, as there doesn't seem to be anyone working there asking whether or not some of the things that they do fit within it's remit. It seems to not be a case of "should we be doing this?", but more like "hey we've got a shitload of licence fee payers cash to spend let's do something "cool" with it!".
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