Britain's got crap TV
Cyprus is a beautiful temperate country, its occupants are warm and friendly, it is steeped in history both modern and ancient. I have spent memorable holidays there on a number of occasions, I love Cyprus. Unfortunately now when I think of Cyprus I think of only one thing - the outline of the island as tattooed on the bulbous wobbling belly of some bald fat dancing fool on a TV talent show.
It was hard to avoid Britain's Got Talent last week, I know because I tried. As it transpired I saw about 30 mins of one semi-final, and 45 mins of the final. There are some acts I managed to avoid altogether and I my life was enriched by their absence.
We're now into the silly summer season on television, a time when all your favourite shows come to an end and are replaced by nothing you'd really want to watch. Or maybe that's just me. In the past few weeks I've lost Heroes, Desperate Housewives and The Shield, more of which later, and it'll soon be the end of The Apprentice. It troubles me though that the shows generally recognised as being great are usually treated very badly by UK TV channels.
We have TV programmes that celebrate great TV, but then the networks bury the great shows being celebrated. I can think of many relevant examples, but here are two: at one point Seinfeld was the biggest show in America. This means that one of the biggest audiences in the entire western world was tuned to a sitcom, a format we've become notoriously bad at in recent times.
On that basis you'd imagine that UK networks would be clamouring to show it in prime-time. Sadly not, when it did finally appear on UK television it followed Newsnight on BBC 2 - usually screened every night of the week. I don't have the time or stamina to follow something like that, nor do I have that quantity of spare VHS tapes. So instead I have resorted to buying up the back-seasons on DVD, where they now sit unwatched on my shelves as I never find time to watch them.
The same treatment is currently being meted out to 'The Wire'. If you read intelligent newspapers and magazines (and if so, why are you reading this?) you'll know that 'The Wire' is very highly regarded, and often described as the best television series ever made. This will of course be why it was shown in the UK on a minority satellite channel (FX) and now - that it's all finished - is being shown every weekday night (or so) in the post-Newsnight slot again. All five seasons of the 'best television series ever' treated as filler for insomniacs.
It seems that the major networks think we're all so dumb that we can't have great TV shows, we can only have reality TV - so BGT finishes and Big Brother returns. On the rare occasions when we do get a decent quality drama or comedy on terrestrial TV it doesn't seem to last long. I have found myself following things that subsequently get shelved or sold to satellite instead. So, I think I saw the initial seasons of Lost, Nip/Tuck, Six Feet Under, Prison Break, et al, only to find the later series on satellite only seemingly never to be seen on terrestrial again - or, at least, not until the post-Newsnight slot becomes free again.
I don't have multi-channel cable or satellite TV, because I have a life. Or rather I would prefer to spend what life I do have on activities other than staring at a small screen. I do have freeview, which is just as well because I'd started watching 'The Shield' many years ago and found it compelling. It was on Five, which has very few decent programmes, so it's odd that the very-final season of this excellent and brutal drama was shown on one of Five's freeview channels, Five US.
To add further insult to injury they changed the scheduled time of the show from 10pm to 11pm half-way thru its run, just so they could show some programme that was already on the terrestrial channel in the better time-slot. To compound all of this, despite freeview channels being full of repeats or time-shifted channels (in the form of +1), this season of The Shield was being shown once only so that when I managed to chop the last five mins of one episode I couldn't catch it anywhere else - not even (legally) online. I did get excited when I spotted The Shield at 11.30 on Five, some days after the Five US showing, how stupid I was to imagine that it was the same season - Five were re-showing a previous season at the same time as Five US screened the last one.
So, TV scheduling lacks logic - no great surprise. The fact that they screw around with all the programmes that I enjoy is beginning to feel like a vendetta though. What did I do to upset them? Of course by the time I eventually succumb to Sky or some other form of 'on-demand' television, there'll be too much choice and I'll still probably watch less than I do now. They've missed their chance; they don't seem too bothered though.
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Paul Flower - Paul Flower works in the music industry, a promoter, critic, (self)-publicist and all-round consultant to clients.
Its all down to dosh isn't it, 'reality tv' is so much cheaper to produce, so we're being forced to dumb-down for our viewing 'entertainment' - or, in my case, giving up watching TV altogether and, like you, resorting to watching back-seasons of the decent stuff.
Another brilliant series is House, which isn't being shown on terrestrial channels but on Sky One, for reasons unknown.
Its quite sad (and also rather time consuming) to scour all the digital channels seeking out programmes that don't make your brain cave in.
As for Big Brother, I'd rather have a labotomy without anaesthetic.