BBC Four

we are all gently dodgy saints next to twats like Neil Oliver or Dan Snow. But I don't like many of Lucy's programs much at all. She does remind me of my English teacher Miss McNally from when I was 12 who I had a mad crush on, but until she stops being a curator at the goddamned museum of lies and propaganda she's still on my list of enemies of the people I'm afraid!

No I get it but I have a crush and she's sarcastically dry about the royals sometimes

I did enjoy Empire of the Tsars much more than any of her other stuff but Blitz Spirit is the kind of shit where I judge the book by the cover and say no thanks. And it is fair to say she is highly overemployed compared to loads of much more interesting historians who wouldn't have a prayer of getting a series commissioned now. Although it's not like it was any better when Schama was getting all the gigs. The odd decent and genuinely engaging history program has been the exception for years now.

Anybody's better than Neil Oliver ffs

"like i'm ok with a good tory historian"

I feel like Ash Sakar popping up as a contributor on Rise of the Nazis a couple of years back might just be the last time a Novaro media head/some lefty shows up on a bbc history doc for at least a decade or more or if not forever! This a probably a heretic thing to say, but I didn't think her contributions where that interesting tbh. The older Tory/classic Lib historians added much more to the show imo!

pished again granda

pardon?

xp
Oh I remember you now, the arch Morrissey apologist who once posted only thick people consider him racist. Lol I hope encroaching senility has spared you the memory of that period of your fine ILM posting history.

These zings take time

If you are harbouring ambitions to be Benny Blanco from the Bronx you have to show up with a loaded gun!

oh great the BBC is winding down its only decent channel https://t.co/pCqjfSkW2X

— bat020 (@bat020) March 29, 2021

it's happening

it might even improve it!

Couldn't hurt much at this stage

If they took seriously the possibility of making it all 'Archive', it could be marvellous. The BBC archive obviously contains thousands of hours of fascination going back 70-odd years.

But I daresay that Archive will mean: repeating documentaries from the last 10 years.

yes, probably just repeats of the mediocre drivel and if you aren't willing to pay for a Britbox subscription then you have to try your luck with youtube and torrents to access the good stuff. I say this without knowing how much is actually available on Britbox - which is a streaming service I'd refuse to pay a penny towards on principle.

Oh god, Sandbrook! "Look at Doctor Who, it's a bit like the Victorian explorers". "Look at Live Aid, it's a bit like Victorian charity". It's like he picks the most reductive trenchant social commentary from a left-wing pov but as A Good Thing.

I got 6 months britbox with my phone contract, not really investigated much but it seems p crap. Def won’t pay the 72 quid annual fee once trial runs out

(Possibly “the good stuff” is buried in there somewhere but as with all these services there is a tiled front page of shite and I just give up)

I thought Sandbrook was a Tory? He's bad whatever he is

Blairite?

very much a capital t tory iirc

Probably, I've never taken any notice of anything he's ever done tbh.

NV, if it was my post that caused confusion, yeah he's totally a tory. I just meant he takes the kind of analysis you'd expect from the left (this children's show about an alien time traveller is actually imperialist propaganda) and recasts it as "hooray for our empire, doctor who is a great celebration of it".

Sorry I get ya now Daniel, I thought that was a possibility but wasn't clear

Also otm, but I can live with a good tory historian with depth, Sandbrook comes across as witless

Sandbrooks progs are just basically "The Great British History-Off". It's a tendency exhibited by the channel as a whole - I think, I dont watch it much anymore.

the medievalist Robert Bartlett did some really really fine programs on the Normans and the Plantagenets. In the years since he has had nothing new commissioned by the BBC I think Dna Snow has had about 12 different shows. He's like a fucking plague is that posing dim fucker.

Who'd have thought a dim posho called Snow could have a career on British TV?

I've no doubt he worked just as hard to get where he is today as David Olusoga did. It's just that any effort he put in was completely unnecessary, because it never mattered how shit he was from the start!

A licky boom boom down

Dan Snow certainly has impressive range when it comes to nepotism:

"Born in Westminster,[1] Dan Snow is the youngest son of Peter Snow, BBC television journalist, and Canadian Ann MacMillan, managing editor emerita of CBC's London Bureau; thus he holds dual British-Canadian citizenship.[2] Through his mother, he is the nephew of Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan and also a great-great-grandson of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.[3]

One of his father's cousins is the Channel 4 news reporter Jon Snow and his paternal great-grandfather (Peter and Jon's grandfather) was Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, a British infantry general during World War I."

Agree that Robert Bartlett's documentaries were very good (some of them are officially available on youtube), I wish there were more of them.

lol I didn't know about the Margaret MacMillan connection as well! At least she has wrote at least one brilliant book!

watched the goth librarian talking about anglo saxons last night, mainly due to this thread, and it was fascinating.

Dna Owns xxp

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/may/26/bbc-announces-raft-of-closures-cbbc-four-online-only

Christ, this is grim.

Sure, to some people, many people, not being able to get BBC4 on TV or Radio4extra on radio, or whatever else, won't matter.

But to many people it will make a difference, and will make the BBC seem that much less worthwhile. I suppose I am one of them.

I don't kid myself that everything on either of these channels is great but they are something that makes me think it's worth having a BBC. Probably few people listen to 4extra but I often turn it on in the kitchen and hear Tony Hancock or any other random thing that I'd never have heard otherwise.

Saying things will be online is fine for some people, not for others. I don't want to watch BBC4 on a computer, I want to be able to turn to it like any other TV channel, when I happen to watch TV. And there are people who are online less than I am.

It's bonkers, in this context, that BBC3 has recently returned to TV. That was hard to understand anyway, but now even more inexplicable.

If someone is trying to get us to think the licence fee is not worth it and we should forget the BBC (which they probably are), they are doing a good job.

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

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, January 30, 2020

Tracer's comments a couple of years back were spot on, for me BBC4 has largely been a pointless mess since then and I'm sure the point of that is I won't miss it now

And tho BBC3 is basically not for me I think it fills a public service niche that 4 doesn't. Dropping CBBC is the real crime and I still believe that will be rowed back

they were promoting dab radios and giving free ones to over 70's and saying look at all these great radio stations. I listen to them on a dab radio in my kitchen/bedroom or the portable one when I'm out, quite rarely online. When I listen/watch on the pc it's usually because I've had to download an illegal torrent of something interesting that isn't on i-player at the time and probably won't be on it again.

I have a dab in my kitchen, I still love Radio 1extra and 3 and the sport commentary on 5, and I used to watch something on BBC4 every week, but the whole structure has been gutted over time

BBC4 was meant to provide arts programming that BBC2 stopped churning out at nighttime. And from that perspective I can't think of anything very good for a few years. That the Top of the Pops repeats were a thing I would switch it on for says it all.

Good riddance.

pinefox, keep in mind these channels and stations won't close until 2025 at the very earliest. CBBC gets something like 60K viewers at peaktime. this is very small for a TV station. the transmission expenses for a live digital broadcast channel are considerable. it starts to feel like vanity to keep it on the air, particularly when that age cohort is glued to their phone 24 hours a day already. why should the BBC spend money trying to lure them to a non-skippable live broadcast on their parents' tv? the public expects the bbc to be smart stewards of their money.

4extra is super-serving an already very over-served audience: older radio 4 fans. the idea that the BBC should be funding an entire radio station playing repeats of old radio programmes that appeal to mainly prosperous seniors i find ludicrous. the BBC is bad at attracting young working class people and i can't see how many of them would find the existence of 4extra anything but insulting or irrelevant.

bbc four is a hollowed out husk of its former self and no longer has any commissioning identity. if a channel exists only to churn out repeats, let people find those repeats on a free on-demand video service like iplayer.

it is awkward that bbc three is back on the air, i agree.

pinefox i salute your classic tv practice of tuning in to see what's on but most people's habits are cutting in another direction: repeats, scripted programmes, frankly anything that's not live, are increasingly accessed via the internet. the bbc needs to follow those habits if it's to serve people. that is its mission. but don't worry - the big broadcast networks like one, two, news, etc aren't going anywhere for a long while yet! and even the ones due for the chop are getting at least another three years. that gives you a while to work out how to get iplayer working on your tv :)

I get all of what Tracer’s saying apart from the bit about 4extra which I imagine costs basically nothing to run and I’d be very surprised if the BBC managed to attract more young working class people as a result of closing it down.

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. The people that listen to it already have tons of stuff made for them on R4 and R3, and if they really want endless Dad’s Army repeats there’s hours of that on Sounds. Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

Awhile ago there was an idea that 4extra could relaunch as a "young speech" station which I really liked and I'm sad it hasn't happened.

bbc3 does at least get new programmes, so i can see it makes more sense for bbc3 to be broadcast over bbc4. i hope the Saturday 9:00 stuff remains though, perhaps on bbc2. as for totp repeats, i think we've had the best already.

and i think cbbc is collateral damage because it's timexed with bbc4.

i like the idea of 4extra but the reality is that i don't listen live and that won't change if it goes.

the last year has felt like the death of a thousand cuts though. and meanwhile dorries is on sharing Netflix subscription with 3 other people and doing *things* on tik tok

iirc working class ppl have their own broadcaster its called itv

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. … Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

It has no commissioning budget but the costs of transmitting, scheduling, checking rights etc add up. The people that listen to it already have tons of stuff made for them on R4 and R3, and if they really want endless Dad’s Army repeats there’s hours of that on Sounds. Obviously switching it off alone isn’t going to bring in more young working class listeners but investing that money in some of the stations that do i.e. R1, 1X, 5 Live - possibly could. Or at least that’s the idea.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 27 May 2022 22:50 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Lumping Radio 3 and R4 Extra together as the same homogenous blob of old people stuff is a bit of a silly and reductive argument tbh, as they clearly serve different audiences. I'm not convinced there's a such a big Venn diagram of people who want to hear old Just A Minute repeats and Bartok violin concertos

In any case, I'm pretty sure the corporation has already invested an insane amount of money into trying to reach a younger audience via podcasting, one article I read suggested that spending for radio-related podcasts was around £120 million(!) in 2020. Perhaps they should be investing some of that money into radio aimed at the younger demographic instead?

I'm betting R4 Extra costs a fraction of that to run (and quite honestly it's a bizarre assertion to say young people are "insulted" by it's existence because most of them probably aren't even aware it exists). It served a purpose when it started, at a time when most UK archive radio was largely inaccessible, and it occasionally had some decent original content. Much like BBC Four it's remit has been whittled down to the point of redundancy but I would still be sad to see it go.

modest proposal: all the at-risk channels should devote a daily section to playing shitty dad indie, watch the petitions fly in