BBC Three

ignoring things is for the best

Broadcasting is back:

BBC Three will return to TV screens after six-year break

"CBBC will close early"

there would have been riots if they treated CBEEBIES with such contempt!

but cbeebies closes at 7, the same frequency is used for bbc4 after that.

yeah but I presume they are still cutting some of the broadcasting schedule off CBBC if they are closing it earlier?

not that I watch CBBC but my son does sometimes.

CBBC goes on till 9pm just now! A child would kick a ball in the street etc.

they need to move with the times and run the closing "now it's time to say goodnight at the end of a lovely day" song at 2am!

cbbc is on too late, it's true, I support all kids' TV being turned off at 8pm, also the internet if possible.

They don't even have enough stuff to fill up the time, they just endlessly recycle the same programmes. Meanwhile CITV have given up completely and just show cartoons.

I don't really remember watching Children's ITV for anything else (I was Swap Shop square, not Tiswas)

as bad things can get I don't think I've seen anything as awful as Press Gang on CBBC

I think ITV had better children's shows than the BBC? The Beeb was all middle class and Blue Peter.

yeah blue peter was always the fucking pits, always felt very alienating if you weren't in the scouts and into tortoise shagging with john noakes and had lived in a nice spacious house with a pond in the back garden.

hadn't

I did see a few weeks back Richard Bacon firmly denying that he did a line of gear off the back of a Blue Peter tortoise

Press Gang was ITV

when there was only 4 channel buttons on the b/w tv it was easy to get confused!

I fully admit that I made some bad choices in my childhood TV-watching.

my childminder's three kids had control over the TV, so I saw a lot to T-Bag, Pink Windmill and Wizbit as a kid, not a lot of fond memories of that shit.

When I was on a ferry on a school trip once there were some production staff from The Pink Windmill recruiting kids to be in the audience or something. They never approached me :(

Oh god, the T-Bags thing epitomises my memories of non-cartoon Children's ITV.

Sorry, T-Bag, not T-Bags. Getting mixed up with Grotbags, silly me.

Good god:

https://www.angelfire.com/crazy/grotbags/

the last bit of bit of children's tv that really blew my mind was Boohbah

what was Grotbags a spin-off from? Was it Orville?

wasn't she originally in Rentaghost?

no it seems I'm getting her mixed up with Hazel the McWitch

Her I could handle. I guess it was Grotbags' green facepaint that turned my stomach.

Grotbags' 70s northern soul banger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEYaxZoQ188

a mate once turned up at our house with a woman who looked like grotbags, he'd pulled her at the petrol station, he couldn't take her back to his house because he lived with his parents, pretty grim stuff all round, I left them to it in the living room and went out to the pub

Grotbags was originally in The Pink Windmill.

Thanks Tom

there is a fascinating couple of children's entertainer/panto types of some kind who live down the road from me. Sometimes they are doing gardening still in their working costumes. The bloke always says hello to my kid with a big hearty wave and a HHHEEELLLO! His partner has a polka dot car and even paints silver polka dots on the lower overhanging leaves in the garden! Although sadly I have not seen that much of them during the lockdowns - it must have been tough on them.

I think that post of Cam's is going to haunt my thoughts for a while now!

sorry about that calz

we called this guy "Mad Mart" because we were a houseshare full of heavy drug users, half of us as-yet-undiagnosed schizophrenics, and he was the only regular bloke we knew who actually had a job and who could not get beaten up in all bar one, he would come to our house to "get blazed up" and announce his arrival with a "wazzzzzup" from the budwiser ad, we used to stare at him in wonder, he was like some kind of exotic animal we didn't usually get to see up close. none of this excuses the grotbags incident of course.

when I lived at my mum's I often had wanker mates turning up wanting to use it as a fuck-pad because my mum hardly ever was there and mostly at her boyfriend's pad. I wasn't judging your post, my response was more like a lol of recognition!

CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS arrived at last on BBC3 and iPlayer.

I felt like there was a word for this kind of material - something about something you know is bad yet still watch despite yourself. The ill-starred phrase 'guilty pleasure' will have to do.

The simple thought occurred to me that from a culture historically famed for eloquence, Rooney has made characters most notable for ineloquence.

You can pull that apart one way or another - arguing that other cultures have their own traditions of eloquence; that Ireland also has some famous traditions of taciturnity; that some of its great literature has been deliberately costive or minimal; that this is an adaptation not the book, which may be quite different; and certainly add that it's the characters, not necessarily Rooney herself, who are so feeble at talking. And half the main characters aren't Irish. With all that said I think it's true enough.

I really loved Normal People, one ep down on this and it feels dead and dull

The actor boyf seems an APPALLING actor

Does he? I don't see that. He seems no worse to me than anyone else in this, or indeed in NORMAL PEOPLE. But not much to go on yet.

when is BBC3 bringing back Snog Marry Avoid, Freaky Eaters, and Sun Sex & Suspicious Parents?

I'll admit I am mystified by what a TV adaptation of Normal People could possibly bring to the table; literary fiction based around the inner lives of its characters seems a very bad fit for adaptation unless you go experimental with it.

I thought Normal People worked really well, but I hadn't read the novel.