BBC Four

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?

"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!