Rewind
July 3rd, 2009 | brainjuice
So. BBC TV’s ROBIN HOOD gets cancelled. ITV’s PRIMEVAL and DEMONS get cancelled. ITV also declares that it will not run drama series, aside of course from soaps, before 9pm.
BBC’s response? A teenage-themed prequel to the thirty-year-old ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES comedy workhorse, and, for the fourth time, the loathesome and archaic children’s book JUST WILLIAM will be adapted for television.
Why not put up a sign outside Broadcasting House saying YES TAKE THE LICENSE FEE AWAY FROM US WE’RE NOT GOING TO PUT UP A FIGHT IT’S A FAIR COP GUV and then have the cast of TORCHWOOD sit around it crying? (They’ve had enough fucking practise.)
(John Barrowman on TORCHWOOD’s reduction from 13 episodes to 5 as it moves from BBC2 to BBC1: "I felt like we were being punished. Other shows move from BBC3 and 2 to 1, and they don’t get cut. So why are we? It felt like every time we moved we had to prove ourselves.")
I don’t even like TORCHWOOD and ROBIN HOOD and PRIMEVAL and I’ve never sat through DEMONS. But this is so clearly a full-on retreat from the 21st Century and any storyform that doesn’t look like it was originated in The Days When Beige Rocked that I can only assume the hatches are being battened down and everyone in British television is preparing to not actually be here in five years. ITV’s already made it clear it intends to become a delivery system for game shows and reality shows. James Nesbitt, possibly the most popular actor on British tv today, is saying he’s probably going to have to move to the States because there’s not enough work left for him in Britain.
YES I’M A BIT RANTY TODAY WHY DO YOU ASK LITTLE FUCKFACE BOY
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
James Nesbitt thinks he would get more work in the States? We’re the country that’s going to be showing Jay Leno five nights a week in prime-time come fall.
I was incredibly disappointed when I heard second-hand that the writers of Robin Hood decided to gratuitously murder the lead protagonists and antagonists at the end. I had hoped for some amusingly contrived resurrections next year, but instead they’ve just decided to break the heart of every little RH fan who hadn’t moved on to inventing the wheel.
It’s also a huge blow for anyone who was acting in it.
I completely agree. The BBC will probably use the excuse of the credit crunch as to why they are not putting out any drama. What they fail to realise is that good drama is not just special effects, it’s fantastic writing. NEW DOCTOR WHO’s best episodes are the ones that usually cost the least to make (BLINK, MIDNIGHT) because they had to make up for tight budgets with brilliant scripts. The problem with ROBIN HOOD, DEMONS and PRIMEVAL is that all of them had scripts so half baked that they were practically runny. That’s why they were all deadly dull. Comedies ditto.
I got really frustrated with TORCHWOOD because the characters were so obnoxious I only watched it to catch glimpsing references to the Doctor (and shots of guy on guy soft core porn). By the looks of things, Children of Earth looks slightly better but only because the most obnoxious character has been killed off and the others have become *gasp* likable.
On the subject of James Nesbitt, he was brilliant in OCCUPATION. A great drama.
Bit ranty? More like BRIT RANTY!
*Cue laugh track*
But Nesbitt is awful.
Really awful.
He’s like the British Nic Cage.
What’s Nesbitt going to do over here, guest star on Chuck? Play the British quisling on <I<24?
Dennis Potter is spinning in his grave like a top. Everything he said in that Edinburgh lecture is coming to pass. See for yourselves:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFL-SsjwK_w
Here in the States, we rely on BBC America and the Sci-Fi channel (or whatever-the-f-they’re-going-to-call-it) for an opportunity to watch the TV you throw away 2 seasons after it airs.
Myself: Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval… I enjoy them since we are unable to come up with any decent SciFi programing on on Network TV and it takes the SyPhylis channel forever to do a season of anything decent: Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, etc…
This means 2 years from now I will be searching local cable in desperate need of something watchable and cursing this news…
>James Nesbitt, possibly the most popular actor on British tv today, is saying he’s probably going to have to move to the States because there’s not enough work left for him in Britain.
Glad to have him! Someone talk to him about a continuation of MURPHY’S LAW set in the states.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Rev, but just because it has an accent you can’t hear in Bumfuck, MN doesn’t mean that its any better than the horse shit we produce in this country. Its just horse shit with an accent and, in one case, obnoxious but passably cute guys making out. Which, you know, if I really needed to see I could drive down to Boystown and not have to sit through the constant whining of some gap-toothed, cow eyed, Welsh dinner-theater actress.
Besides, 2 years from now SciFi will be showing nothing but reruns of Farscape and the newest movie Bruce Campbell managed to write/produce/star/cater/edit/sweep up after shooting for less money than I spent on my first car.
This has rather less to do with, say, a retreat into the 20th century and more to do with the total absence of money. ITV, C4 and FIVE have no money whatsoever (aside from not making shiny new programmes they’ve reduced the budget of existing programmes by around 10%). The BBC meanwhile, the only one that has no budget worries (hence the ludicrous number of staff, at least 1/3 of whom could be fired and have no effect on the quality of the BBC) continues to pump out popular TV that destroys the ratings on other channels.
ITV can’t make money because people would rather watch BBC gameshows, soaps and light entertainment (rendering the whole point of ITV pointless). FIVE can barely import enough US drama to counteract the US drama that the BBC brings in. And C4 struggles with trying to be the alternative BBC when the BBC has become the alternative BBC. Its impossible to compete with a publicly funded broadcaster that’s perched on your territory and acting like a commercial organisation.
Of course all the drama’s mentioned were pure molten shit but most were dropped because they couldn’t compete. Both PRIMEVAL and DEMONS failed to capture ratings because the BBC had ‘em licked with DOCTOR WHO, TORCHWOOD etc.
So simply the non-BBC channels can’t compete, hence can’t make money off advertising, which is dropping due to recession, with the result that they have less money which means less expensive drama and a retrenchment of TV because they need proven money-makers.
The BBC of course is doing this retreat because they are a entrenched and labyrinthine bureaucracy of fuckwits with all the imagination and vim of an accountant.
Also, OCCUPATION, that was a load of shite. Constant emoting, paper-thin characters, the tedious ‘everyone is a damaged soldier’ routine, the somewhat racist way in which Iraqi characters only mattered because of their relationship to British characters, that very BBC obsession with the events of 2003 and failure to understand the war post-Invasion etc. Occasional good moments, the naked stand off with a tank for instance, but mostly crap. Camerawork was decidedly poor/average too. THE WAR GAME it was not.
(Apologies for ranting, length, right-winginess etc.)
Well, this is the same retreat that UK TV took in the 90s, only far, far worse. The decline in TV and movie scriptwriting has been steady since the 90s and this will just hasten it because aspiring writers will only have crap UK TV and crap US movies to influence them.
Here’s a fun idea – Nesbitt guest-starring on LEVERAGE.
It’s a shame, really. I rely on BBC to provide me with quality programming that just isn’t appearing in the States. Instead, now even Britian will fully succumb to the mindfuck that is reality television. *sighs*
> James Nesbitt, possibly the most popular actor on British tv today, is saying he’s probably going to have to move to the States because there’s not enough work left for him in Britain.
Oh, that’s just an excuse. It’s obviously because of his performance in Jekyll.
I work in the BBC environment (just not for the BBC) and what most people outside don’t realise is that the BBC doesn’t exist any more as a broadcaster, it’s a brand that puts out content that in the most part is generated by third party production houses via the commissioning system or within John Birt’s internal market ass fuck, the BBC was gutted and skinned when it’s technology arms where split up and sold off, since then it’s been the same bunch of brainless management that have been floating round the major broadcasters for their entire careers.
Read a copy of Broadcast and see how many new appointments are so-and-so from ITV moving in as Head of new media at Five or what’s-his-clogs from channel 4 taking up the position of chief market analyst for BBC Wales. There’s no new blood in the system and it’s stagnating. Linear TV is atrophying through lack of vision, lack of intelligence and lack of fucking guts. Because all the standard advertising models are based on linear distribution your commercial broadcasters and getting it hardest and first.
For the Beeb though an interesting fact is most of the big programs they make like Doctor Who and Top Gear are not designed to even make money on linear TV in the UK, they make their money abroad though rights and here as DVD sales.
As the BBC is pushed further and further in to an internal and external market economy it becomes more and more unlikely that they can fulfil a public service remit and more and more likely that’ll we’ll see the final vestigial threads sold off and TVC turned into flats (not that anyone would want to live in White City it’s a fucking shit hole).
And all the Daily Mail readers will be so happy to save that license fee money they’ll be fucking in the streets.
As long as Bargain Hunt is still on I’m happy!
[...] Rewind So. BBC TV’s ROBIN HOOD gets cancelled. ITV’s PRIMEVAL and DEMONS get cancelled. ITV also declares that it will not run drama series, aside of course from soaps, before 9pm. [...]
Meh…
TV has been going downhill for a long time. I blame the success of the first Survivor and all the idiots that watched it, myself included (being 12 years old and retarded is no excuse). Thank to wild success of that, and the relatively low budget compared to actual TV shows, we now have to watch nothing but reality shows and shows that critique the reality shows in the States.
There were only three shows I watched religiously throughout my short life; Babylon 5, Farscape, and Battlestar Galactica. The break between the first two were relatively short, and those were the days when TV was populated heavily with actual programming. Now after Battlestar, there are no shows that catch my attention, considering most channels show ‘reality’ based programming, and the TV shows that aren’t are utter naff.
Battlestar Galactica seemed to be the last actual Science Fiction program of its kind. A show with actual plot, characters, and themes. And yes I loved the ending, and no I don’t give two shits what anyone has to say about the ending ’sucking’. Anyway, I have been expecting moves like this from broadcasting companies for a while. U.S. television has shifted overwhelmingly to ‘reality’ television because the writers can just shit out scripts that would not pass under the old standards. Since it has done so well in the States and the budget is relatively low compare to actual programming, I knew one day that other broadcasters from abroad would follow suit.
I knew, but dreaded this direction, hence why I shifted to comics. I can get a great story at any moment far easier then having to wait for the television to air the programming I want. Luckily I have found some creators that satisfy my craving for entertainment (our very own Warren Ellis is one of them). I hate this new ‘direction,’ but I already have alternatives.
Thank god for Avatar Press and Warren Ellis. ;)
Television needs new blood to write new material. Television should be there to tell-a-vision of the present and future world of ideas, from the result of the past it builds upon. Come on BBC and ITV, run some more competitions for writers to submit material and get some more of those play for today going… there are so many talented people out here crying to get a break… let’s look out side of the box and bring a little freedom to a world so hemmed into an ever decreasing circle of ‘who you know, not what you know’. ;P