BBC Four

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?

Yeah I don't remember what films they showed but as a teenager watching my black and white portable in the bedroom with the sound turned right down there was a disappointing lack of boobage.

I don't mind Kermode. No question he's in decline, though. No sense of crisis in his criticism at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_triangle_(Channel_4)

Pretty decent list tbf

This documentary about British Bangladeshis is giving me a shameful craving for a curry

Themroc!

Very well deserved: worth watching each episode if they’re still on iPlayer. https://t.co/sJ4GHKPgVH

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) February 26, 2020

I've only watched a bit of this and this tweet reminded me I need to go back and watch the rest because it was excellent

It was good, some of them old Ra lads were tough cookies

Shepherding on Scafell Pike, so nice to chill out with

Is it this? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hb4r

Damn, I *need* this in my life. Probably not the hottest series to be t0rrented. Will try with a vpn.

It's apparently going to shut at the end of the year. No big loss.

lbi - DM me

i think it’s clear that if any channel should have moved to iPlayer-only it was Four all along.

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