Re: One flaw
I watch BBC for precisely five programmes. Not Going Out. Anything by David Attenborough (3D-junk aside). Russel Howard's Good News. Mock The Week. QI. My girlfriend watches those and Inspector Montalbano (but she's Italian, so that's understandable purely because it's the only Italian programme on British TV).
And, you know what? Waiting for new content on those outweighs actually being able to watch ANY of them. Averaged over the year, none of those programmes show a new edition more than once every six months. I don't watch the repeats of those programmes at all. So turning on the TV in the hope of catching something new from those programmes means that I'll almost certainly be disappointed.
I do what I think everyone else does now - I bought the boxset on DVD and watch them at my own convenience if I want to watch repeats and use the TV only for "new-new" stuff. Why would I wait for them to appear, come up on iPlayer or anything else? I had two years without a TV. Can't say I missed it at all. We bought a license for an old-fashioned CRT TV we rescued from the scrapheap. It gets watched a couple of hours in the evening if it's lucky and usually for junk. I'm not entirely sure it's worth it at all.
The BBC used to be great. iPlayer was a world-leader. But if they have nothing to show, there's nothing worth watching. Repeats are there to fill time on 24-7 channels that have nothing else to show. They should *NOT* make up the majority of live or online content. There's something to be said for "catch-up TV" and historical archives of shows, sure, but if it's historical content I'm after, I'll pop over to 4oD for some Whose Line Is It Anyway (though I see the BBC have poached Dan Patterson and almost the exact format of that show now, 20 years later) or stick a DVD of something good in.
The BBC's greatest strength was it's ability to broadcast well. But the content is now sadly lacking and the best shows are "vintage". It's not the only provider to fall into the trap of accessibility taking place over actual new content. Hell, I just bought The Two Of Us on DVD because I wanted to watch something actually FUNNY and ITV don't show that any more, and Rough Science, because I remember it being quite interesting when I watched it first time around (and it features Italy in the first series), and there's nothing "new" to watch. There are a few gems on TV now, but an enormous amount of dross (anything that involves a phone-in or viewer-voting) and repeat. Dross I avoid. Repeats I have sitting on DVD if they are any good. In the absence of new programmes, I'd rather find something on DVD that I haven't seen and nobody currently broadcasts.
The point of Have I Got News For You, Mock The Week, Russell Howard's Good News, etc. was that they were funny, current, and different. Hell, even Drop The Dead Donkey was tied into current affairs. If you want people to watch it, either admit it's archive and charge accordingly (i.e. no more than it would take to buy a DVD with that episode on it divided by the number of episodes on that DVD) for permanent access, or make it new and current and have enough of it to keep me wanting to watch.
I was invited to a filming of The King Is Dead a year or so ago. New BBC "comedy" show that was offered to me because I missed a place in the QI audience. I can safely say that I was embarrassed to sit through it. The funniest bit was the comments in between filming (which never made it into the episode) and the unheard-of warm-up comedian. The BBC aren't content producers any more, they're archive managers. And they do that badly. I'll just stick to my DVD's of stuff they could be bothered to license out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
