almostwitty

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:05:09 GMT

Anyone who loves Britain’s televisual heritage will not have let the closure of BBC Television Centre go by without at least one sad thought of glorious days gone by, lamenting how the creative engine that kept the BBC going will now surely be lost, and how they will no longer find a home or see their friends and colleagues at the bar.

Forgive me for interrupting the nostalgia fest – and none of this is meant to dismiss the great work that went on there – but the two BBC chat’n'compilation programmes that look back at the great days of Television Centre have reminded me of one thing:

As a current BBC employee, there is no way I – or many people I know – would have even had a chance of a job there back in the 1970s. That’s not down to my skills or experience, but simply because my face would not have fit. The two programmes that looked back at Television Centre didn’t feature any non-white people on its various panels, and hardly any women compared to today’s television schedules. What, no room for Floella Benjamin or Lenny Henry on the comfy sofa?

To be fair, this in itself was symptomatic of 1960s/70s Britain, an era where any thought of diversity (by today’s definition) was a sci-fi dream as alien as anything from Doctor Who, but in the mass rose-tinted view of a simpler life where everyone was friends with everyone else, this seems to have been forgotten.

A similar delusion seems to have befallen some people as they realise our television heroes back then were as flawed as their British society counterparts. It’s apparently a shocking revelation in a new Doctor Who behind-the-scenes expose book (ironically written by the man who directed/produced one of the Television Centre tribute shows) that William Hartnell was racist, and senior members of the production team would sometimes use their oblique power of promise to extract sexual favours from fans.

Forgive me if I’m not shocked at the thought that a white British man in his 60s in the 1960s would not have been entirely comfortable with people from other races. Or that the casting couch phenomenon was alive and well in 1980s/90s Britain. As the Seventh Doctor once said in one of the spin-off novels: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

None of this is written to denigrate the creative genius that created moments of joy and laughter for millions of people (or indeed the distress of those on the wrong end of the power equation), but let’s not pretend it didn’t happen. And isn’t happening now.

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Why the BBC iPlayer isn't coming to the US...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:38:31 GMT

Cable networks forced BBC Worldwide to choose between BBC iPlayer International and BBC America. They chose BBC America.

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The James Bond Theme at the BBC Proms

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:26:23 GMT

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Middle class is magical, so sings the BBC…

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:01:29 GMT

BBC Proms: Comedy Prom – Mongrels – YouTube.

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BBC: One step forward, one step back…

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 13:27:06 GMT

Someone at the BBC had the genius idea to broadcast, after the Royal Wedding, a trailer for that other British institution that’s stood the test of time… the BBC. And it’s a fab trailer that brought a whisper of a tear to my eye.

Unfortunately, the BBC wasn’t forward-thinking enough (at the time of writing) to actually put it on its own website or YouTube channel. And it comes to something when even the Royal Family are YouTubing, Flickring and Tweeting their way through it all. Fortunately, someone else has uploaded it:

As a TV nerd, I was flicking through all the other channels all morning, comparing the wedding coverage. Amazingly, CNN basically had a series of trump card captions comparing Kate to Diana, eg: “Diana didn’t go to college and was a nursery school teacher. Kate went to the University of St. Andrews and graduated in Art History”. That poor woman is going to suffer with mother-in-law issues for eternity.

Amusingly, Fox News also had full live coverage of the Royal Wedding. You’d have thought that Republicans/Tea Partiers would be against using tax payers’ money for a ceremony of pomp and circumstance…

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My wife's first UK acting job ;)

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:03:31 GMT

and it's on the BBC! (six to eight seconds in...)

Shame they don't pay anything...

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One rule for the BBC, another for commercial broadcasters?

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:44:06 GMT

You’d have thought that linking from a website to another website would be a basic principle in building websites. Even the BBC seems to agree – its’ latest Strategy Review states that “BBC Online will be transformed into a window on the web with, by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites.”

Except OFCOM, the commerical broadcast regulator, has reprimanded GMTV for essentially linking to another website from its’ main website.

During a broadcast, viewers were invited to apply for free gym passes via GMTV’s website. Once they got there, they were told to click through to moneysavingexpert.com to pick up the gym passes. Ofcom said this is effectively promoting Lewis’s business and breaches rule 10.3 of the broadcasting code which states products and services must not be promoted in programmes.

Hrm…

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The Internet. It’s full of chimpanzees.

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:05:06 GMT

It’s amazing what you can cut together with rushes of interviews…

(The BBC documentary that was actually made partly from these rushes is The Virtual Revolution, presented by the divine Dr. Aleks Krotoski, Saturdays at 8.30pm on BBC Two)

Incidentally, it’s nice to know that I have finally achieved my ambition to have my name listed on a BBC network programme’s credits. Even if it’s only my netname, and it’s only listed on the website…

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Suction man, suction man, does whatever a suction can…

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:42:31 GMT

In a show that is in no way an attempt to recreate elements of Mythbusters, a presenter of the BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory climbed one of the BBC office buildings today using the power of nothing but suction:

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