{"id":2043,"date":"2007-08-23T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2007\/08\/state_of_the_tv\/"},"modified":"2007-08-23T11:00:48","modified_gmt":"2007-08-23T11:00:48","slug":"state_of_the_tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/state_of_the_tv\/","title":{"rendered":"State of the TV Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/theeditors\/2007\/08\/a_message_to_the_tv_industry.html\">BBC&#8217;s Editors&#8217; Blog<\/a>, Newsnight Editor Peter Barron invites readers to post their thoughts on the current state of British television. He&#8217;s one of the organisers of the Edinburgh Television Festival and he&#8217;s planning on putting the comments on both the festival <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mgeitf.co.uk\/index.asp\">website<\/a> and the walls of the conference centre (I assume they&#8217;ll be digital in some way).<br \/>\nGo away and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/theeditors\/2007\/08\/a_message_to_the_tv_industry.html\">read what people<\/a> say &#8211; they have some quite interesting thoughts. And for completeness, I&#8217;m reproducing my thoughts here:<br \/>\n<UL><LI>Show some respect for programme makers &#8211; stop telling me what&#8217;s on next before the programme I&#8217;m still watching has finished, and then shrinking the credits to an unreadable size whilst telling me again about what&#8217;s coming up.<br \/>\n<LI>Stop putting ever more invasive graffiti all over the screen &#8211; I&#8217;m trying to watch your programmes and don&#8217;t actually care that much about how colourful and jazzy your DOG is, or the fact that this weekend is a &#8220;Morse Weekend.&#8221;<br \/>\n<LI>Address the training shortfall. With the BBC shrinking, we&#8217;re left with media studies students wandering around with cameras a touch better than a home videocamera recording footage without caring about getting their white balances correct or worrying about whether the sound&#8217;s audible.<br \/>\n<LI>Step away from the overnights &#8211; big numbers are not the only criteria a programme should be judged by. Do not cancel a series or banish it into the wee hours if episode one under-performs. If you carry on doing this, I&#8217;ll never bother even trying to watch your programmes again. If you&#8217;re not going to invest your time in them, I&#8217;m not going to bother either.<br \/>\n<LI>Combat internet downloads by airing shows as close as possible to US release dates.<br \/>\n<LI>Stop paying silly money for US imports that are never going to be *that* successful, then leaving yourself high and dry with two of them when Sky One outbids you for season two.<br \/>\n<LI>Stop stealing shows from one another&#8217;s channels. Remember the outcry about Thames when it &#8220;stole&#8221; Dallas? It&#8217;s a free market, but how about building your own shows.<br \/>\n<LI>Don&#8217;t behave like a petulant four year old when negotiating which channels your competitor&#8217;s cable service can carry.<br \/>\n<LI>Just because BBC Four exists (for now), that doesn&#8217;t mean that BBC Two has to &#8220;dumb down&#8221; &#8211; step forward British Film Forever. This could have been a wonderful series, but is spoilt by a demeaning narration and spurious interviewees. The whole series is pitched at a level somewhere around the average Channel 4 list programme. Wasn&#8217;t it nice to see an episode of Civilisation over Stephen Fry weekend?<br \/>\n<LI>Prevent the seemingly likely severe cut backs in the budgets of such wonderful fare as Storyville, Timewatch, Horizon and other factual programming.<br \/>\n<LI>Let&#8217;s do something to combat the diminution of science on television. Guess what? Science is actually really really important.<br \/>\n<LI>Stop public service channels featuring a single reality show across upwards of a third of a year. Channel 4, you do realise that I avoid your channel during the whole of this period don&#8217;t you?<br \/>\n<LI>Explain exactly why BBC Three costs twice as much as BBC Four. Isn&#8217;t there enough television for 15-34s?<br \/>\n<\/UL><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over on the BBC&#8217;s Editors&#8217; Blog, Newsnight Editor Peter Barron invites readers to post their thoughts on the current state of British television. He&#8217;s one of the organisers of the Edinburgh Television Festival and he&#8217;s planning on putting the comments on both the festival website and the walls of the conference centre (I assume they&#8217;ll [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}