Abolish the BBC Y/N

BBC provides US public broadcasting with hours upon hours of the equivalent of direct-to-dvd, off-the-rack programming. If it should disappear, the PBS schedule would look like the victim of a shotgun blast.

Last week I spent three days with my 86 y/o father, whose evening schedule consists of watching back-to-back documentaries on BBC2 & BBC4. I was shocked by how awful most of them were; had I been on my own I would have been shouting at the screen and turning off in a foul mood. Especially noxious were Andrew Marr on Thatcher and a terrible thing about hump-backed whales, which seemed to be aimed at children. He liked them well enough, although he'll have forgotten them by now.

Portillo seems to be on every day too. in fact, twice today.

Andrew Marr, forgot about that cunt. Abolish the BBC.

oh but that really influential doc he made on the shitty, drunken, sunday painter daubs of Winston Churchill will really stand the test of time.

everyone pays for the BBC so it has to represent value-for-money for everyone and that puts it in the position where it has to do opposing things simultaneously, it has to speak to young and old, left and right, etc. I don't think it's got the balance quite right in recent years and they've lost a generation in Scotland due to their wilful ignorance of what was happening with the SNP at Indyref but I don't know how they could do it perfectly for everyone and I'd rather have it than a race to the lowest common denominator of programming

I mean I think about something like Only Connect, which is unflashy and knowingly kitsch and intellectually demanding of its contestants and viewers, and how you would never see that on prime-time ITV in the same way

> they've lost a generation in Scotland

Maybe this will help

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1hx87NrNp3Y45hF2NyQDhFs/welcome-to-your-brand-new-television-channel-bbc-scotland

BBC Scotland's Nine news will show 'world through Scottish eyes

lolling too hard to want to abolish these nobheads now

everyone pays for the BBC so it has to represent value-for-money for everyone and that puts it in the position where it has to do opposing things simultaneously, it has to speak to young and old, left and right, etc.

I feel like there are ways of doing balanced news in particular that don't just amount to "attempt to cover every bias at once" though.

Really worried about whoever the entire BBC1 daytime schedule except for Bargain Hunt is speaking to

100% agree with that - the Reithian principle of education and informing still stand and I think it's utterly ridiculous that eg the BBC News website gives any credibility to flat earthers

nick robinson vs salmond during indyref was all time classic beef

Jeremy_Vine_cowboy.gif

An academic on twitter refused to take part in R4s Moral Maze and:

In case you haven't been following: @PriyamvadaGopal published an email she had sent to the producer of The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, saying she wasn't happy to appear with a "known racist"; she didn't name names. The producer, in response, made it clear who the racist is. pic.twitter.com/nycAbRS07p

— Robert Hanks (@RobertHanks) February 13, 2019

R4 sounds pretty awful most of the time (although a few ppl were vouching for its drama but Radio drama is really not my thing)

Gogol's Dead Souls adaptation with Micheal Palin not tempt you sir!?

haha nah I'm cool tx

was watching an old 70's BBC series Alistair Cooke's America a couple of years back and was enjoying it + thinking: it sure helps when the writer/presenter puts some trust in the audience, rather than glassy faced mediocrities like Dan Snow condescending to them like they are all thick as pigshit, or just disseminating ultra dullsville conservative takes on history for ageing Mail readers.

Dan Snow condescending to them like they are all thick as pigshit Dan Snow.

the half interesting ones, like Bartlett the medieval specialist for example. Get about 1 series a decade, to piss poor generalists like Dan Snow's half dozen.

I hate the oh it was better in the olden days but there really is some amazing BBC documentaries , particularly the ARENA ones, that I have watched on youtube and I recently discovered some 70s and 80s interviews by Brtan Magee where its just him and his guest chatting on a couch discussing philosophers.
Such a great premise and I cant imagine the BBC running with it now.

I think I remember those shows from when they were broadcast.

OH GOD HERE COMES ANDREW MARR SAVE ME PBS AMERICA

I've got a persistently annoying rash on my arse that I call Andrew Marr. But tbh it goes a lot deeper than that - I would seriously celebrate his death when it comes tbh. I know that probably sounds deeply unpleasant to outsiders and maybe other UK ppl, but this is what the BBC has done to me. That same peado-golem who got caught whispering "that was good" to Penny Mordaunt and also unwittingly showed his bullying game when he lost his shit under mild duress from Shami Chakrabarti is deffo one of the biggest BBC politico cunts next to Nick Robinson.

I think asking Gordon Brown whether he was on anti-depressants was about as low as I've ever seen an interviewer stoop.

that outside no 10 broadcast he did stanning for Blair/Iraq as well.. what a snivelling piece of shit !

Browsing radio 4. Do I want to listen to this or shoot off my toes and bathe the stumps in acid? pic.twitter.com/NNuqCu0bme

— Louie Stowell (@Louiestowell) February 13, 2019

that program is like being the beef that j petersen eats, but being completely sentient and aware while he digests you and shits you out.

I caught a bit of the moral maze when they were complaining that Hans Christian Anderson had written all the fairy tales and yet Disney kept adding non-white princesses. It was odd.

wtf, what's that about?

i agree with a lot of the criticisms here.

what are people's specific beefs with Sounds? you can think of me as the glenn macdonald of Sounds.. i can tell you what i know and find out if i don't know.

My technical beef with Sounds is that when I was trying to play The Ratline series it wouldn't play the episodes in sequential order, and when each 20 min ep finished I had to manually load the next ep. I can't remember if I had that problem before the revamp. i'm sure it didn't used to be in shuffle mode.

I don't get the point of Sounds. They have this huge archive of audio and it makes both recent radio and archive programmes much harder to find somehow. The search function is terrible and the front page is stacked with stuff nobody wants. It looks nicer but does a worse job than the radio iplayer app did.

yes, good point. the search function is completely dysfunctional.

like if you type the EXACT name of the program you are looking it returns all sorts of other unrelated shit that isn't helpful at all.

Beefs with sounds:

No descriptions of shows

No original broadcast dates on shows - I was recently listing to a good doco about northern soul in japan which talked about the Wigan casino opening 40 years ago this year; its a good job I know a bit of northern souls history so know that 1979 is too late but the original TX date is 2013 and is necessary for placing the narrative in context.

I want to know which station shows were comissioned for - a 3 drama sounds different from a 4 one, and a world service doco is different from a 4 one.

Searching/browsing is terrible. I want to be able to filter by network - witness is a good strand but it dominates the documentaries category

Ok, two of those things seem to have been fixed since I last used sounds.

when I was trying to play The Ratline series it wouldn't play the episodes in sequential order

this works on web, but not in the app. they are working on a fix.

The search function is terrible

yes :( this is in the hands of "the search team" in salford. the most important thing it to match the first few words of the title exactly. there are improvements coming to this but i have no idea when.

the front page is stacked with stuff nobody wants

the manual curation is geared towards under-35s. ;) but the front page is also filled with: algorithmic recommendations and "continue listening" which should be pretty specific to the sorts of things you listen to. the algorithm at the moment is fairly blunt - there is a lot of work being done to make this better. another big difference coming up is "segmentation" - where Sounds can serve up different curations to different audiences. currently everyone sees the same manual curations (similar to iPlayer). but fairly soon you will get a different mix of stuff on the front page if you're, say 60, than if you're 25. it can be tricky to get this stuff right because you don't want to immediately get served up The Archers and Gardener's Question Time the day you turn 35.

No descriptions of shows

No original broadcast dates on shows

Ed if i find Shine Like Tokyo (the doc you mention) in the app it has a full description. at the bottom of that description it says "first broadcast in 2013". it is true that the latter depends on the producer being wise enough to include that in the description - it's not a field that automatically gets pulled in in a structured way (though it does on web). others have complained about this too. i'll see what the plans are on that.

Searching/browsing is terrible. I want to be able to filter by network - witness is a good strand but it dominates the documentaries category

weirdly (to me) the categories at the bottom are more popular than the lovingly curated collections above them. even though they're just a bone-simple reverse chronological firehose of stuff that's been tagged with a particular genre. it's weird. so there are plans afoot to make those categories better.

one thing that bugs the shit out of me is that upcoming episodes, that have not been broadcast yet, don't show you their descriptions - it's greyed out.

the people who designed it started from the principle that only playable audio should be accessible. if something wasn't playable it just wouldn't show up. including future episodes. at launch there weren't even schedules. they have backtracked on that a little but you can still see that principle at work.

I think I remember those shows from when they were broadcast.

― Stephen Yakkety-Yaxley-Rosbif (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 13 February 2019 20:58

the 80s one I assume and not the 70s?

Mark S (who also inspired my Oor Neechy d/n) told me that he had the book with the transcriptions of the series. So I got one cheap on ebay.

btw did you know Bryan Magee was still alive?

this statement seems... ill-advised

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/14/bbc-attacked-for-failure-to-provide-abortion-advice

All part of the pathological obsession with being 'fair and balanced'.

NHS comeback was measured and otm but could have done with more spittle-flecked invective about what gormless fuck decided that free access to legal abortions is the "controversial" side of this "argument"

seriously hope somebody loses their job over this

Good evening!

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/feb/15/bbc-this-week-to-end-after-16-years-as-andrew-neil-steps-down

https://www.clashmusic.com/sites/default/files/field/image/bobby-gillespie.jpg

His little setpiece speech about Churchill at the start of last night's show was nauseating - he's such a boilerplate West of Scotland Unionist Orange cunt.

... and Andrew Neil's almost as bad.

I would keep the show but just change everything about it.

whoever thought it would be a good idea to inject some humour into the show, with the comedic talents of portillo/postman twat really deserve a good shoeing.