Small Correction
"Little Britain" was originally on Radio 4.
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.