BBC Four

(And is there a BBC Three?)

BBC 3 = relaunch of BBC Choice (which is totally lame, and apparently targetted at my age group)

ahhhh Leslie Judd.

Always a disappointment when an interesting looking documentary starts and then Neil Oliver swans up

Oh by the way calz PBS America are doing a Dan Snow day, I lolled.

This is gonna be my moaning about documentaries but still sitting thru them thread from now on

https://www.essexlifemag.co.uk/polopoly_fs/1.5499669!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/image.jpg

here he is exhuming his grandad's corpse so he can bum it (again)

Lol Google has our chinless nepotee confused with some dude who appeared in a couple of Toxic Avenger movies, check it out

Andrew Graham-Dixon talking about Dutch masters is my ASMR

Love these documentaries that spend hours trying to get you to empathise with the mindset of an executed tyrant and zero minutes imagining what went thru the minds of his victims

This turtle cam no voice-over documentary is exactly the balm my poor useless brain needs right now

Oh wait he just savaged a jellyfish that was a bit harsh

Just watched this and its brilliant! I hate jellyfish so it was good to see one get hacked at

I thought this was really good for being so still and silent. At first it felt like an Ecco The Dolphin walkthrough played on mute but there was something about it that was fascinating, a calmness that seems so at odds with how TV is made in 2020.

jellyfish are bacterial space aliens that are taking over the marine world- it's war! And in the future will probably be our only alternative food source to the old long pig as we go forwards into the abyss.

not watched this yet, but less presenters sounds like a good way for the bbc to go.

BBC4 have done a few of these slow TV things, I mostly love them. There was a fantastic flight over the Great Wall of China from east to west last year, lasted a couple of hours, beautiful. Sleigh ride thru northern Norway (iirc) is aces too

Earlier I listened to John Luther Adams: Become Ocean/Become Desert back to back, a bit off topic but it felt really good and the audio version of slow tv.

Yeah JLA is the business

Slow New Zealand last night was brilliant. sociohistorically or even landscape-wise I wasn't that excited for it but formally it felt like one of the most minimal yet, not too busy with the sur-titles and just gently drifting along until it sailed off into the southern ocean. tbf I was watching with a friend and we didn't give it total attention but it was crazy how it just kept meandering its way with no clear rationale once they left the train. The sheer joy of no voice-over is one of BBC4's finest achievements and I want at least one of these every week, forever.

Was aware of it but didn't settle down to watch it but isn't there something about "we didn't give it total attention"? - I often think of this about music I've heard at friend's houses. It's just on but you hear it and it is great.

these shows are built for drifting in and out of, yeah.

Can't watch Janina Ramirez without thinking "fuck off, melt" any more 😢

I mean her voice is still less unbearable than Tony Cunt Robinson but still

"Edith Bowman talks to Sam Mendes in The Life Cinematic"

you have got to be shitting me

if you put the title of his latest movie into a calculator and turn it upside down it almost spells shit - makes u think!

Sometimes I wonder if BBC4 knows who it's for and then sometimes I worry it really does

i have to admit, when i hear dire warnings about bbc funding and some senior manager says 'for that money we'd have to close bbc four, radio 4extra and two other digital channels' i'm like.... wow don't throw me in the briar patch

No Beeb4 would pretty much finish me for BBC tv

i dunno man, i feel like.... if it's good enough put it on bbc 2. if it's too niche make it iplayer only. you don't need a whole channel.

can you get i-player on freeview? I know it is probably a dumb question and there are other options etc.. but I've just never found it.

I could do without a lot of the stuff on 4 sure, and 95 percent of pop music docs or Edith Bowman gladhanding terrible Brit directors just feels v wrong, but I feel like they've used the existence of 4 to syphon off all the good and rigorous documentaries from BBC2 which has been reduced to god awful "people going about their everyday lives somewhere vaguely scenic" or Michael fucking Portillo docs. I guess if you axed 4 then 2 could go back to being a bit more grown up but I wouldn't hold my breath

Better use of iplayer would be a good strategy, yeah. Some of it feels a bit unkempt and uncared for at the moment. I think there's gonna be a smart tv accessible Sounds soon? That'll be a godsend tbh

Calz you can get iplayer with a smart tv or thru some games consoles

Yeah I think I've got a smart tv, but it always completely flummoxes me when I'm trying to find i-player! It probably would be easier using the PS4.

Yeah if you've got a PS4 it should be straightforward I think, I used my PS3 for years before I got this telly

yeah you can install iPlayer for free from the playstation store.

Sounds is coming to various smart TV platforms and set-top boxes but it'll take a long time to reach all of them. there's a zillion slightly different versions of, say, Freeview Play, or YouView, one for each make/model of TV. i think a PS4 version of Sounds is still probably a long way off.

Rise of the Nazis was quite good and shockingly on BBC2. Although it's currently not available on i-player even though it only went out last autumn. That's a common complaint I have with i-player because I'll either just deprive myself of precious viewing pleasure or maybe even just download a torrent of something I want to see rather than pay a penny for britbox on the chance they have content I've already paid for once that isn't currently on i-player.

Not that I always go looking for Nazi content, but Vol 2 of the Volker Ullrich Hitler biog drops next week!

If you don’t use iplayer they make you register an account

there's a zillion slightly different versions of, say, Freeview Play, or YouView, one for each make/model of TV.

lol not so smart

computers are dumb and they make people dumb

computers and television - never the twain should meet!

OK maybe just shut it down

I miss those days when you could kick a yuppie about in the street!

I was living in a bedsit in plumstead/woolwich and doing a nightshift in a factory at the time this risible garbage aired originally, talk about different strokes for different folks! When you see all these pathetic melts creaming themselves over it, it reminds me why I'm such a sad angry old sad bastard!

I've got no ish with what other people enjoy really, but it's a bit much filling up one of the only channels I watch with some nostalgia soap.

yeah it should be on Dave or some shit like that. but it had a quite a popular response from all the usual suspects when it was announced. obv they also love eternal loops of 80's totp.

I didn't realise they're showing the whole fucking thing. Fffs

probably just testing the water for the jess phillips series that is coming soon.

"Bab and Bougie"

tonight's Life Cinematic is Sam Taylor-Johnson. Talentless YBA and director of Fifty Shades of Grey and some sack of shit John Lennon biopic... really lads is this the best you can do?

Joanna Hogg has done some decent work in recent years ... Mike Leigh is still breathing.. maybe there are some better contemporary examples .. but this shite following Sam Mendes is such craven garbage - it's almost like you might as well be owned by Murdoch.

It was a banal silly idea from ep 1, not worrying, there's plenty of space for banal silly ideas in the world

why does it have to be specifically about brit directors? We already know most of them are posh talentless amateurs, don't need to hear their thoughts as well ffs

well they're probly easier to get hold of but also some people treat movies like football teams

The longer I lie here too apathetic to turn off Dominic Sandbrook the more ironic the discerning viewer gag gets

Stop giving Kermode work ffs

recently someone posted the entire list of Alex Cox's Moviedrome and it brought back happy memories and made me so glad I grew up watching that beautifully curated series rather than anything to do with this fucking idiot.

Although he did start turning up on my tv like a stale bank manager's fart in the early days of Film 4 :(

Feel like he wasn't always this bad but can't really remember when he wasn't.

when Film Four first launched as a channel he introduced me to The Exterminating Angel so he probably wasn't as bad as he is now, but I'm sure he always was a bad reader of movies but this is from vague memories.

Oh man remember the red triangle? That was bad.

I was quite young at the time so my memories of it are filtered through some pornographic playground talk and eh?

I think some of them movies were pretty good to very good, but curated in a very questionable manner.. Was that the thing?

Yeah I don't remember what films they showed but as a teenager watching my black and white portable in the bedroom with the sound turned right down there was a disappointing lack of boobage.

I don't mind Kermode. No question he's in decline, though. No sense of crisis in his criticism at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4)

Pretty decent list tbf

This documentary about British Bangladeshis is giving me a shameful craving for a curry

Themroc!

Very well deserved: worth watching each episode if they’re still on iPlayer. https://t.co/sJ4GHKPgVH

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) February 26, 2020

I've only watched a bit of this and this tweet reminded me I need to go back and watch the rest because it was excellent

It was good, some of them old Ra lads were tough cookies

Shepherding on Scafell Pike, so nice to chill out with

Is it this? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hb4r

Damn, I *need* this in my life. Probably not the hottest series to be t0rrented. Will try with a vpn.

It's apparently going to shut at the end of the year. No big loss.

lbi - DM me

i think it’s clear that if any channel should have moved to iPlayer-only it was Four all along.

I could still access BBC4 through cable over here and can't access iplayer through my tv at least. Would need to get a proxy to get it through my computer.
So not very happy to hear this, have enjoyed being able to watch it for the last umpteen years.

xxp Done Tracer!

What I don't get is that BBC4 was supposed to be the highbrow documentary & drama channel, but today's schedule looks like this

7:00pm - Stunning Soloists at the BBC (yeah, fair enough, seems like this sort of thing is on all the time though)
8:00pm - Top of the Pops (I like old TOTP, but is this really the channel's remit?)
8:30pm - Kermode and Mayo's Home Entertainment Service (this is standard BBC2 fare, why is it here?)
9:00pm - Top of the Pops (What, again? Jive Bunny is not what I want BBC4 for)
9:30pm - Eurovision at 60 (I like Eurovision! But this is not the place for it!)
11:00pm - Dana: The Original Derry Girl (Is this fucking Channel 5 now?)
12:00am - The People's History of Pop (Haven't seen this, could be good, middle of the night though!)
1:00am - Country Music by Ken Burns (This is probably the right sort of thing, however 1am?)
1:50am - Eurovision at 60 (And so on)

it's a loss to me and i've always resented the music nostalgia Fridays and other (imo) inappropriate takeovers. off the top of my head the Slow TV stuff they've done has been wonderful and wouldn't have happened elsewhere.

i can just use the iPlayer but fuck it i don't think what the Beeb needs is less of the best stuff that BBC Four has broadcast.

i mean Comrade Alph's

no big loss

It's definitely a loss for me, and NV otm, if anything they'd need more Four.

I mean, I get it, I suppose, but it's another 'flattening of the curve' of what's on offer.

obviously BBC2 is now suddenly gonna become less Lifestyle

yeah right

iPlayer is just a way of shutting off potentially good, interesting stuff the BBC has the potential to do to generations that care for it, and surely making the phasing off the BBC easier in future.

That's more of a question.

i don't know what i think about it in terms of the purpose and future of the BBC tbh, i'm speaking purely from personal likes and disappointment at the moment.

i still believe that on balance it's good that the Beeb exists. the balance gets closer all the time tho.

> i can just use the iPlayer

they (my department bosses!) keep talking about an ip-only future but that's just adding such a hurdle to access - the tech and the *cost* of the tech. decent, video-capable internet access isn't free.

that said, bbc4 does seem to me like a lost opportunity sometimes, mostly when lucy worsley is on. would hope the scandi-dramas continue on bbc2.

you diss St Lucy again and i swear i will cut you

(i say that even though in other tabs of this very browser i have tickets open for my part in improving the live-streaming capacity)

i did find it funny the scorn piled on Nish for sharing a HH clip pointing out that all the "English" things weren't english at all when, based on the clips i've seen (not many) LW seems to do that all the time (whilst dressed up as a elizabethan prostitute)

is kind of right given how TV works now but it'd be easy to apply that logic to the whole of BBC TV if that's the argument.
― come out you melts and bams (Noodle Vague), Friday, 15 May 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Leaving aside the general anger at the BBC I wasn't automatically applying it to the BBC TV, but this channel is diabolical. The creation of it was probably a lack of nerve on part of the BBC in the first place anyway. Let's shut that 'difficult' stuff away in a box (and it's another corner, a smaller one and further away each time).

And lack of nerve is everywhere in it's approach to any thought. Not sure why this is a loss because it breaks out of that and makes a nice program now and then?

xps

i don't think shutting BBC4 is going to lead to a backwash of thoughtful programming into the remaining broadcast channels

"breaking out and making a nice programme now and then" is precisely the reason it's a pleasure and i expect no more BBC4 to mean a reduction in pleasure

do you really enjoy Lucy Worsley's Royal Photo Album? not judging, just asking because personally it would cause me to engage with the television in a very unpleasant shouting and cussing manner until it got killed!

I don't think anyone here does but the making of it is a problem.

Lucy Worsley is a good historian imo, i don't watch everything she does religiously but she brings content most of the time

xp as i say xyzz i'm talking selfishly. my watch ration between BBC 1, 2 and 4 is probably something like 1:4:40 so i'm gonna miss BBC 4

BBC Three demonstrates that if you keep a very clear audience fixed in your mind and commission relentlessly for it, you can do great things, even if you’re iPlayer only. (Their comedy has been comprehensively terrible though imo)

Lucy Worsley is a good historian imo, i don't watch everything she does religiously but she brings content most of the time

It's either that or Neil Oliver dressed as an Elizabethan prostitute.

I used to like Bartlett a lot but he hasn't been given a slot since his Plantagenets series, a lot of the new BBC history crew are awful, I don't mean Beard but that useless goth and nice but Dimbo Snow are examples of absolute unwatchable mediocrity.

yeah i guess i'm judging Worsley against people like those two (and Neil Bloody Oliver) and it's no contest

The Plantagenets series is a good one, yeah

his series on the (other) Norman Conquests was good stuff as well.

Lucy W on the Romanoffs: "bringing the dynasty to its tragic and bloody end" but she says "bloody" like she loves it really

I demand a gratuitously violent and gleeful description of daft Nicky's brains decorating that dingy cellar wall before I believe that!

I still haven't watched The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, apparently it is good by bbc standards.

She told the Alexander II assassination with a degree of relish

I have a huge crush, there's no reasoning with me

She's pretty much taking a "he asked for it" line on Nicholas II

conscripting people who many of whom lived in medieval serfdom into fighting on a battlefield where many of them didn't have boots or bullets against one of the best equipped armies in the world and were getting harvested like corn was a shit move for sure!

classic Eastenders, hour after hour of boomer pop music, the paucity of good new documentaries... Yeah, shut the fucker down, I've come to peace with it

THANK YOU

1xtra's lost half its under-25 listenership in the last 5 years and yet they carry on serving up this shit. what is its identity? if it were a radio station which station would it be? three quarters of the time it would be Radio 2, the other quarter.. 4extra?

sorry the 1xtra stat was a bit extraneous, i just mean... there are better places to be spending money

"the paucity of good new documentaries"

the lobotomised garbage they put out these days compared to the last few decades up to about.. erm idk but the last decade has seen a steep decline/dumbing down/commitment to a tediously myopic mediocre worldview that makes Margaret MacMillan sound like an angry radical.

Probably need another thread for another day because it's mainly just me but the archival stuff on iPlayer gives you a taste of how the Beeb used to make factual programming and I'd love more access to more if it's available but I'm starting to think that the well of good stuff is just not deep, not only from the BBC but in the English-speaking world. Or more likely there's just not enough of us who want factual programming that rivals the depth of books and I shd just give up on looking for it

In some small way I don't think that closing BBC4 will improve documentary production but I accept it's probably not worth it for the half dozen gems we get a year if we're lucky

I didn't fight in the Ashley Jackson wars and call him a fraudulent grey thatched sunday painter arsehole when i saw him painting on the moors, just to return home and click on i-player and see an apparently serious Bob Ross documentary!

I still have a soft spot for Alistair Cooke's America tv series from '72 and have re-watched a few times, so it isn't like i can't appreciate people with different views from mine doing history, it's not as simple as fucking tory wankers/melts ruining the quality, there are too many mediocrities who even if they are qualified - they are simply not good enough to do the job they are paid to.

I enjoyed the African stuff on the other day - the thing with Ade and the art-focused thing on Ethiopia.

And Samira's three parter about Persia, recently.

xp

that is more of an observational documentary though innit? not seen it yet but it looks decent.

Mary Beard's Julius Caesar documentary this week was so bad that I turned it off twice.

Opening pointless scene of somebody giving birth, "not many people know that the C in C Section stands for Caesarean" ffs, turned over

Flipped back 30 minutes later "not many people know that July is named after Julius Caesar" ffmfffs, OFF

prof Judith Herrin is my latest fave ageing history/late antiquity academic, can't remember if any of her tv/radio programs were any cop but her Byzantine book is decent.

that delightful late 80's Studs Terkel Omnibus is deffo worth catching while its still on i-player

Oh I'll look for that

Yeah, that was good 😊

David Olusoga’s excellent documentary ‘Africa Turns the Page: The Novels That Shaped A Continent’ is up on BBC iPlayer for a few weeks. So many great writers, I wish it’d been a six-parter. https://t.co/pNUpMLSrcv

— David Hayden (@seventydys) September 10, 2020

I caught some of this last night. The bit on Emechetta was pretty well done.

that African Writers Series looked appealing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Writers_Series

there are 270...

Thursday Film Night. Not sure whether this smacks of desperation or not, especially seeing as the film in question was shown on bbc2 the previous weekend. (Casablanca last week, Zhivago this week).

i regret to report that this daft preening cunt is at it again

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eib2eClXgAEznQ4?format=png&name=900x900

This has to be parody. It just has to.

Nah, he's the real tartan gammon deal

I hope he at least expands on the life forms that fare well with communism.

When you spend weeks showing admittedly great but hugely normie BBC2 Saturday afternoon movies but you haven't broadcast any classic non-anglo movies in forever on your fucking snob channel maybe it's definitely time to put it to sleep

there's a Norwegian film on at 10 tonight.

(But, yes, first in a while)

And the Saturday evening Scandi dramas are still quality (except Montalbano). New one is Icelandic, which I'm looking forward to.

Showing Dad's Fucking Army is a step too far though.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that plenty of BBC2 shows' 2020 seasons are nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

possibly a controp but i hope Dominic Sandbrook dies soon in maximum agony

his books are pure trash. I wouldn't touch one of his tv programs with a bargepole.

i think i was being unfair because i hope the thick tory cunt dies slower and longer than that

like i'm ok with a good tory historian if they're a decent historian but all Dom does is wank off to 80s music vids

thought this was going to be about the usual Saturday night Scandi drama being replaced by sport.

Scandi noir and sport are both bullshit wastes of BBC4 so i don't feel strongly either way

I don't think David Edgerton is ever going to get any work on the BBC now with the current direction it's going in, this is the type of waster we have to pay for.

the foreign drama is probably the only thing i tune in for. that and totp.

oh, storyville about the chillean oap was a good watch this week too. wouldn't normally have watched it but I'd taped a previous storyville and it set a season pass...

yeah this is why Beeb 4 is finished

nah meanness sorry there should be a space for nostalgia but a space for documentaries aimed at adults would be lovely too

the only non-music BBC I have enjoyed today was a repeat of some old 70's Vincent Price horror/mystery serial on R4EX earlier.

speaking as someone who owns a bbc four mug (bought from the bbc shop in bh) i don't disagree that it's often, like 6music, a disappointment.

(it's obsession with Lucy Worsley being the biggest mystery)

and subtitle fans needn't worry, there's a hebrew / German film on later.

Lucy is a gently dodgy saint, how dare you

we are all gently dodgy saints next to twats like Neil Oliver or Dan Snow. But I don't like many of Lucy's programs much at all. She does remind me of my English teacher Miss McNally from when I was 12 who I had a mad crush on, but until she stops being a curator at the goddamned museum of lies and propaganda she's still on my list of enemies of the people I'm afraid!

No I get it but I have a crush and she's sarcastically dry about the royals sometimes

I did enjoy Empire of the Tsars much more than any of her other stuff but Blitz Spirit is the kind of shit where I judge the book by the cover and say no thanks. And it is fair to say she is highly overemployed compared to loads of much more interesting historians who wouldn't have a prayer of getting a series commissioned now. Although it's not like it was any better when Schama was getting all the gigs. The odd decent and genuinely engaging history program has been the exception for years now.

Anybody's better than Neil Oliver ffs

"like i'm ok with a good tory historian"

I feel like Ash Sakar popping up as a contributor on Rise of the Nazis a couple of years back might just be the last time a Novaro media head/some lefty shows up on a bbc history doc for at least a decade or more or if not forever! This a probably a heretic thing to say, but I didn't think her contributions where that interesting tbh. The older Tory/classic Lib historians added much more to the show imo!

pished again granda

pardon?

xp
Oh I remember you now, the arch Morrissey apologist who once posted only thick people consider him racist. Lol I hope encroaching senility has spared you the memory of that period of your fine ILM posting history.

These zings take time

If you are harbouring ambitions to be Benny Blanco from the Bronx you have to show up with a loaded gun!

oh great the BBC is winding down its only decent channel https://t.co/pCqjfSkW2X

— bat020 (@bat020) March 29, 2021

it's happening

it might even improve it!

Couldn't hurt much at this stage

If they took seriously the possibility of making it all 'Archive', it could be marvellous. The BBC archive obviously contains thousands of hours of fascination going back 70-odd years.

But I daresay that Archive will mean: repeating documentaries from the last 10 years.

yes, probably just repeats of the mediocre drivel and if you aren't willing to pay for a Britbox subscription then you have to try your luck with youtube and torrents to access the good stuff. I say this without knowing how much is actually available on Britbox - which is a streaming service I'd refuse to pay a penny towards on principle.

Oh god, Sandbrook! "Look at Doctor Who, it's a bit like the Victorian explorers". "Look at Live Aid, it's a bit like Victorian charity". It's like he picks the most reductive trenchant social commentary from a left-wing pov but as A Good Thing.

I got 6 months britbox with my phone contract, not really investigated much but it seems p crap. Def won’t pay the 72 quid annual fee once trial runs out

(Possibly “the good stuff” is buried in there somewhere but as with all these services there is a tiled front page of shite and I just give up)

I thought Sandbrook was a Tory? He's bad whatever he is

Blairite?

very much a capital t tory iirc

Probably, I've never taken any notice of anything he's ever done tbh.

NV, if it was my post that caused confusion, yeah he's totally a tory. I just meant he takes the kind of analysis you'd expect from the left (this children's show about an alien time traveller is actually imperialist propaganda) and recasts it as "hooray for our empire, doctor who is a great celebration of it".

Sorry I get ya now Daniel, I thought that was a possibility but wasn't clear

Also otm, but I can live with a good tory historian with depth, Sandbrook comes across as witless

Sandbrooks progs are just basically "The Great British History-Off". It's a tendency exhibited by the channel as a whole - I think, I dont watch it much anymore.

the medievalist Robert Bartlett did some really really fine programs on the Normans and the Plantagenets. In the years since he has had nothing new commissioned by the BBC I think Dna Snow has had about 12 different shows. He's like a fucking plague is that posing dim fucker.

Who'd have thought a dim posho called Snow could have a career on British TV?

I've no doubt he worked just as hard to get where he is today as David Olusoga did. It's just that any effort he put in was completely unnecessary, because it never mattered how shit he was from the start!

A licky boom boom down

Dan Snow certainly has impressive range when it comes to nepotism:

"Born in Westminster,[1] Dan Snow is the youngest son of Peter Snow, BBC television journalist, and Canadian Ann MacMillan, managing editor emerita of CBC's London Bureau; thus he holds dual British-Canadian citizenship.[2] Through his mother, he is the nephew of Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan and also a great-great-grandson of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.[3]

One of his father's cousins is the Channel 4 news reporter Jon Snow and his paternal great-grandfather (Peter and Jon's grandfather) was Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, a British infantry general during World War I."

Agree that Robert Bartlett's documentaries were very good (some of them are officially available on youtube), I wish there were more of them.

lol I didn't know about the Margaret MacMillan connection as well! At least she has wrote at least one brilliant book!

watched the goth librarian talking about anglo saxons last night, mainly due to this thread, and it was fascinating.

Dna Owns xxp

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/may/26/bbc-announces-raft-of-closures-cbbc-four-online-only

Christ, this is grim.

Sure, to some people, many people, not being able to get BBC4 on TV or Radio4extra on radio, or whatever else, won't matter.

But to many people it will make a difference, and will make the BBC seem that much less worthwhile. I suppose I am one of them.

I don't kid myself that everything on either of these channels is great but they are something that makes me think it's worth having a BBC. Probably few people listen to 4extra but I often turn it on in the kitchen and hear Tony Hancock or any other random thing that I'd never have heard otherwise.

Saying things will be online is fine for some people, not for others. I don't want to watch BBC4 on a computer, I want to be able to turn to it like any other TV channel, when I happen to watch TV. And there are people who are online less than I am.

It's bonkers, in this context, that BBC3 has recently returned to TV. That was hard to understand anyway, but now even more inexplicable.

If someone is trying to get us to think the licence fee is not worth it and we should forget the BBC (which they probably are), they are doing a good job.

i have to admit, when i hear dire warnings about bbc funding and some senior manager says 'for that money we'd have to close bbc four, radio 4extra and two other digital channels' i'm like.... wow don't throw me in the briar patch

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, January 30, 2020

Tracer's comments a couple of years back were spot on, for me BBC4 has largely been a pointless mess since then and I'm sure the point of that is I won't miss it now

And tho BBC3 is basically not for me I think it fills a public service niche that 4 doesn't. Dropping CBBC is the real crime and I still believe that will be rowed back

they were promoting dab radios and giving free ones to over 70's and saying look at all these great radio stations. I listen to them on a dab radio in my kitchen/bedroom or the portable one when I'm out, quite rarely online. When I listen/watch on the pc it's usually because I've had to download an illegal torrent of something interesting that isn't on i-player at the time and probably won't be on it again.

I have a dab in my kitchen, I still love Radio 1extra and 3 and the sport commentary on 5, and I used to watch something on BBC4 every week, but the whole structure has been gutted over time

BBC4 was meant to provide arts programming that BBC2 stopped churning out at nighttime. And from that perspective I can't think of anything very good for a few years. That the Top of the Pops repeats were a thing I would switch it on for says it all.

Good riddance.

pinefox, keep in mind these channels and stations won't close until 2025 at the very earliest. CBBC gets something like 60K viewers at peaktime. this is very small for a TV station. the transmission expenses for a live digital broadcast channel are considerable. it starts to feel like vanity to keep it on the air, particularly when that age cohort is glued to their phone 24 hours a day already. why should the BBC spend money trying to lure them to a non-skippable live broadcast on their parents' tv? the public expects the bbc to be smart stewards of their money.

4extra is super-serving an already very over-served audience: older radio 4 fans. the idea that the BBC should be funding an entire radio station playing repeats of old radio programmes that appeal to mainly prosperous seniors i find ludicrous. the BBC is bad at attracting young working class people and i can't see how many of them would find the existence of 4extra anything but insulting or irrelevant.

bbc four is a hollowed out husk of its former self and no longer has any commissioning identity. if a channel exists only to churn out repeats, let people find those repeats on a free on-demand video service like iplayer.

it is awkward that bbc three is back on the air, i agree.

pinefox i salute your classic tv practice of tuning in to see what's on but most people's habits are cutting in another direction: repeats, scripted programmes, frankly anything that's not live, are increasingly accessed via the internet. the bbc needs to follow those habits if it's to serve people. that is its mission. but don't worry - the big broadcast networks like one, two, news, etc aren't going anywhere for a long while yet! and even the ones due for the chop are getting at least another three years. that gives you a while to work out how to get iplayer working on your tv :)

I get all of what Tracer’s saying apart from the bit about 4extra which I imagine costs basically nothing to run and I’d be very surprised if the BBC managed to attract more young working class people as a result of closing it down.

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. The people that listen to it already have tons of stuff made for them on R4 and R3, and if they really want endless Dad’s Army repeats there’s hours of that on Sounds. Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

Awhile ago there was an idea that 4extra could relaunch as a "young speech" station which I really liked and I'm sad it hasn't happened.

bbc3 does at least get new programmes, so i can see it makes more sense for bbc3 to be broadcast over bbc4. i hope the Saturday 9:00 stuff remains though, perhaps on bbc2. as for totp repeats, i think we've had the best already.

and i think cbbc is collateral damage because it's timexed with bbc4.

i like the idea of 4extra but the reality is that i don't listen live and that won't change if it goes.

the last year has felt like the death of a thousand cuts though. and meanwhile dorries is on sharing Netflix subscription with 3 other people and doing *things* on tik tok

iirc working class ppl have their own broadcaster its called itv

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. … Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. The people that listen to it already have tons of stuff made for them on R4 and R3, and if they really want endless Dad’s Army repeats there’s hours of that on Sounds. Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 27 May 2022 22:50 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lumping Radio 3 and R4 Extra together as the same homogenous blob of old people stuff is a bit of a silly and reductive argument tbh, as they clearly serve different audiences. I'm not convinced there's a such a big Venn diagram of people who want to hear old Just A Minute repeats and Bartok violin concertos

In any case, I'm pretty sure the corporation has already invested an insane amount of money into trying to reach a younger audience via podcasting, one article I read suggested that spending for radio-related podcasts was around £120 million(!) in 2020. Perhaps they should be investing some of that money into radio aimed at the younger demographic instead?

I'm betting R4 Extra costs a fraction of that to run (and quite honestly it's a bizarre assertion to say young people are "insulted" by it's existence because most of them probably aren't even aware it exists). It served a purpose when it started, at a time when most UK archive radio was largely inaccessible, and it occasionally had some decent original content. Much like BBC Four it's remit has been whittled down to the point of redundancy but I would still be sad to see it go.

modest proposal: all the at-risk channels should devote a daily section to playing shitty dad indie, watch the petitions fly in

I put 4 Extra on the earphones in the park yesterday and there was a briefly interesting program on about Edward VIII's antisemitism and enthusiasm for Hitler.

Trying to think of anything that got a premiere on BBC4 that I'd think back on fondly and it was a multi-part History of Photography series.

I'm sure there's more but for a channel that has been going on for nearly a couple of decades (?)

I don't tend to agree with most of the views expressed in this thread revival.

Tracer Hand knows more about the BBC than most people, and most people I know, and I must, to a large extent, defer to his factual knowledge and experience. For instance, a central question in all this is "how much does it cost to run a digital TV or radio channel?". Many of us might intuitively think: not much, once you have set up your basic infrastructure (the BBC); hardly more than it costs to put the same content on iPlayer or Sounds. Tracer seems to be saying that that's wrong and in fact broadcasting costs much more. This would be a significant fact in the context of needing to cut.

Nonetheless, it's in a way surprising, and to me disappointing, to see Tracer Hand, someone who has an interest in a popular BBC, unconcerned about the slashing or diminution of elements of the BBC which help to keep it, to some people, a bit more popular than it would otherwise be.

From the point of view of simple self-interest, I find these moves, esp the BBC4 one, odd, as the people who watch BBC are relatively likely to be the people who will complain publicly and say that it shows the decline of the BBC. It is hard not to think that some kind of sabotage is going on, ie: that the Con twat running the BBC wants to destroy it, or something -- though I realise this is taking conspiracy thinking too far.

But the claim "BBC4 is no longer any good, I don't watch it, I'm happy for it to go" seems to be relatively of a piece with the logic, often described, by Chomsky I think: "Cut funds for the health service, watch it run down, people won't like it anymore, then you can privatise it". If the BBC is being run down and parts of it are being cut, and this makes it less popular with you / me / whoever, then this would appear to be a negative and self-perpetuating spiral which is good for someone (Murdoch, Zuckerberg, or whoever), bad for many others.

The claim "I don't consume this particular product, so I don't care if it's axed" is, I think, a flawed one in principle. I probably haven't gone to the National Gallery in 5 years but I would be appalled if I heard it was being closed down and turned into an Amazon supermarket. It's relevant that things are there, in a culture, whether you as an individual are consuming them or not at every moment.

To be sure, you can say that the actual (low?) quality of, say, BBC4 makes this a bad comparison: that we would lose out by losing the National Gallery, not by losing BBC4. But I think a) to a degree the same principle applies, b) the fact that BBC4 is, perhaps, now low quality is also part of the same problem, not another fact that makes everything OK. Again: if a health service is run down so that it's bad, then can be sold off, then the running down is bad, and needs political explanation, not just indifference when it's sold off.

The claim that "you can get everything online now anyway" (not that anyone here has necessarily specifically made this claim, but it's generally implied in the whole debate) is partly true; partly underestimates a diversity of audiences and ways of listening to and watching things. Calzino is spot-on above in saying that we were all encouraged to get these radios, now we're going to have to listen to on them. I could, in theory, turn on a laptop computer and navigate to an online BBC4 extra and listen to that. But I don't want to do that, and I can't carry a computer everywhere to do that, and even if I can work out ways of doing this, there are people even less at home with the tech than me who will want to do it even less.

It's true that many many things are going online, non-live, mobile, etc etc. But it's also a fact that we have an ageing population with more over-80s (etc) than ever. Many of them probably feel even more dismayed by this kind of change than I do.

The other logic of "get with the times, daddio, everything's online now" is: well, why not put BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, whatever, all online and switch off TV and radio entirely? Seems that would save a few bob. But not everyone yet wants to switch off all those things.

Some of the arguments for making these changes may be relatively sound. But it seems to me that they arise, at best, as defensive responses to a very negative situation. Seeing the changes as part of the dire situation we're in - governed by a corrupt government, with a corrupt Opposition, and a corrupt media, on an overheating planet of trash - is accurate. But that doesn't make me feel sanguine or indifferent about them. I see them rather as part of the same spiral of destruction and decline that those other things create.

"I don't tend to agree with most of the views expressed in this thread revival"

This was a poor and ill-judged first sentence to what turned out to be a long post, because actually lots of the views, I do agree with!

I agree with things that Calzino, Tim, Pheeel, et al said. Mostly, I think, I was just responding to Tracer Hand, who happens to have more knowledge of these matters than most.

BBC4 is not the NHS, and it's definitely not The National Gallery. It turned out to be a very poor excuse for properly funded, BBC made, arts programming.

pinefox I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathise. I think it's important is to ask what kind of broadcaster should the BBC be. Well it has a royal charter. It has a mission and public purposes. So there is an answer to that question. Most famously it is to 'inform, educate and entertain' and it is to be a universal service. It should reach everybody, and it should be relevant to everybody. A tall order!

But for many years the public has said in surveys that it recognises that the BBC is good, high quality, etc, but that mostly it's just not "for them". It's for other people. What do you do with that information, if you're running the BBC?

If you see the BBC as being akin to the National Gallery, a steward of cultural heritage - an organisation that makes the shows commercial broadcasters won't make - then you run it a bit like Tony Hall did, the previous DG. You pour money into "prestige" programming. Some of which is very good! But then I think you're probably getting closer to what Chomsky was talking about, where your institution becomes increasingly irrelevant to more and more people. You become a "market failure" broadcaster that only does the worthy stuff of interest to an affluent, well-educated niche. That's what the Public Broadcasting Service has become in the US. Highbrow dramas on Sunday nights, high quality news, a few kids' programmes, and that's it. And then it's easy to just consign it to irrelevance. This is not the BBC's model. The BBC has an obligation to reach everyone.

The last 10 years have totally upended the BBC's centrality. 10 years ago, the Official Charts were on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons and were the barometer of pop success. Today, my 13-year-old and my 10-year-old haven't even heard of the Official Chart, and they're obsessed with pop music. Radio 1 used to break new bands. This is just not the way it works anymore. It's a similar story with talent. 10 years ago, you had YouTube stars like Dan & Phil begging the BBC for a show. These days it's the other way around - it's talent that has the audience already, and the BBC goes begging to them. 10 years ago Disney+ didn't exist, AppleTV+ didn't exist, Netflix had no original programming. The BBC isn't the biggest on the block, even within the UK, and it probably will never be. So what can it be? It can be the most relevant. But to be the most relevant it's going to need to feel like it's for everyone - not just listeners who can recite the cast of the Goon Show.

For way too long the BBC coasted on its market dominance and now it's realising that to reach fickle audiences who have more options than ever before it needs to work very hard at it. So this new DG is I think doing the right thing - cutting niche channels (though not for another 3 years at least!), and putting more money into programmes for audiences who don't feel the BBC is for people like them, as well as into the digital products that will be the way most people access media in 5-10 years time. (pinefox there's an app you can get for your phone called BBC Sounds - it's got all those stations on it and more :) I think it's responsible and I think it's egalitarian.

Tracer: I partly recognise realities that you describe, partly respect the conclusions you draw from them, in some cases am sceptical; but also think we are somewhat talking past each other.

To throw in 3 points:

* I maintain the thought that even if, hypothetically, the changes to the BBC were good, they might not be as much in the BBC's self-interest as you hope. Basically because when parts of the BBC are cut, it loses support, and in this case, I would say, the support is lost from the very people (let's say, Guardian readers for instance) who were most likely to be happy to pay the licence fee and even to defend the BBC in public and make arguments for it. You can say it's OK to lose these people, they're a minority, but I don't see many people in the rest of the population bothered to take up the defence of the institution.

* re "the BBC is 'not for me'" - I think your implication is that this is working-class people saying the BBC is too high-falutin and middle-class. As a middle-class person who happens to read quite a lot of books, I also sometimes feel it's "not for me" because too much of it is too crass and vulgar. But another reason I think this can be summed up in two words: Laura Kuenssberg. That is: many many people (again, including people who would have defended the BBC) have been put off it - permanently? totally? - by its disgusting and poisonous coverage of socialists and their political opponents, in the last c.7 years.

Again, people like me are a minority. But it seems to me that in this world where, as you rightly say, the space for the BBC is getting narrower and narrower, it also repeatedly alienates many people and destroys what's left of its own base of support.

* you raised, earlier, the issue of social class and how to broadcast on that basis. I reflect on this and I would really just say it's a can of worms. Class is a complex subject and a moving target over time. It is difficult to talk about the relations between class and culture without being entangled. There are all kinds of dubious arguments that one can quickly find oneself in, in this area - eg "X is good because working-class people like it" (this statement is often clearly false), "X is working-class because he has a regional accent" (Gary Lineker was once working-class, I believe), "we shouldn't show complex and difficult things because working-class people don't like them" (but there is a centuries-long history of working-class emancipation through culture of various kinds).

I don't at all think that you, Tracer, would make bad and reactionary arguments about this (it happens that I agree 100% with almost every political statement I ever see you make), but I do think that many people (at the BBC and beyond?) would find "appealing to the working classes" a convenient excuse for transmitting even more garbage than before.

This last point in particular is not meant as an "argument" that you or anyone should seek to controvert, but just an indication that I think that one of the areas that has been raised has massive historical and political complexity and the best approaches to it are not obvious.

PS: I don't present Gary Lineker as the ultimate exemplar of someone with a regional accent (he was a red herring in that context), but as a fair exemplar of someone who probably once counted as working-class (his father a market trader), who is now famously the best paid BBC presenter (and not, I would submit, working-class), who also happens to present a slice of BBC content that probably does have relatively high working-class appeal (as it also does to me).

Alan Shearer was once working-class. Whether he is now may be a matter of opinion. But that's probably a whole other thread, preferably with Grace Blakeley invited.

I think your implication is that this is working-class people saying the BBC is too high-falutin and middle-class

'Twas ever thus.

well now that most w/c people (by Grace Blakely's definition or just anyone who is skint) are locked out of Higher Education, then anything approaching almost to slightly middlebrow will confuse their simple ignorant branes!

Look don't get me started, I'd axe the orchestras too

i'd like bbc4/radio4+ to get more adventurous with the archives, but then i guess the archives already have their hands full.

and yeah, generally against having things only accessible to people with internet connections (and defaulting to HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY like it does) - bandwidth costs money. (even though this is literally my job)

Yeah I'm not sure that the consequences of providing a 'universal service' entirely over the internet someday has quite sunk in with everyone yet. It starts to get party political! You're going to need to subsidize or otherwise pay for literally everyone to have a reliable broadband connection!

Sounds like communism, to me

first 4 episodes of The Roads to Freedom are up on i-player with the rest to follow. It makes a change being able to watch the good stuff on i-player rather than downloading it from torrent sites. Mind you I could never even find this on the torrents and it is brilliant.

Daniel Massey's internal monologues in this are fucking hilarious. Must have been quite shocking in 1970!

Britcom graveyard

Shut it down, people

(Looks at the schedule) Jesus. It used to be the highbrow channel, what happened?

it's this week only, probably a birthday thing

i'm sure it was happening last week too?

no, it looks normal (he says, digging the listings mag out of the recycling). there were two episodes of ever decreasing circles on the Tuesday but that was it.

there have been a lot of story ville documentaries recently, or maybe I've just been catching up with them. the Herzog one about volcanologists was last week and i watched one about midwives.

Friday Night Music nights are just terrible now, an hour of 70s variety performances (they have done Cilla Black, twice!) then two TOTP (ok this bit is good) then one of the 20 or so music documentaries they seem to cycle through, then a dull/predictable clip show, then a live film (which never seems to be any good, they had a 2-hour Status Quo concert from 2010 a few months ago for example - two hours! from 2010!) - I know they are operating under tight restrictions and barebones staff, but with their resources & library it's ridiculous that they can't put something better together.

the wretched schedule on bbc 4 wouldn't be so bad if the rare good stuff they occasionally play was up on i-player for more than just a month. For example The Roads to Freedom that was broadcast a couple of months ago is back to not existing anymore.

I was looking forward to getting around to watching that… one day.

I guess tricky licensing issues with older stuff.

BBC Four reshowing the Amis/Finney/folk horror Green Man from tomorrow:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p031d01y?fbclid=IwAR372ZVTKpQMhfcblAPrPuvV3x1PRttfKW5SR_1bO35ptcC1cdeHSR7lYJg

caught a bit of Schama's History of Britain in passing last night and i'm sure i've noticed and been annoyed by it before but the big melty dope repeats the "rule of thumb" myth as if it was a true fact and were i in a shouting mood i would have shouted at him that he's supposed to be a fucking academic ffs

his basic shtick is tarting up trite cliched cack and passing it off as insightful. The Two Winstons episode from History of Britain was really bad. I hate to think there might be young people who are having their knowledge of history shaped by this pillock! But on the other hand it's probably still better a lot of the other shite they've put out in the last decade.

The last thing I saw him in was that ego trip of a series where he basically put himself in the middle of various 20th century events.

where he compared brexit to the nazi invasion of czechoslovakia, obv just making this up but you never know.

replacing the Saturday night foreign drama with Glastonbury is one thing, it being the manic Street Preachers is twisting the knife.

anyway, Beck back next week (and I'm watching the French thing from More 4 which is her from Crimson Rivers sneaking around so I'm ok for the moment)

Yes Minister is lazily written Tory bullshit and its status as an alleged classic is rubbish

A BBC four programme I want to watch.

1/2. The rushes for Josef von Sternberg's unfinished film of I, CLAUDIUS (1937) get an airing on BBC Four on Thursday in the documentary THE EPIC THAT NEVER WAS (Bill Duncalf, 1965). https://t.co/Qi5EeTj9Pe pic.twitter.com/HCd2fSz29z

— Robin Baker (@robinalexbaker) December 2, 2024

ooh thanks

Sweet!