Telly
Last night we saw the start of the new season of Doctor Who. It was kind of a big event. The Doctor has a new assistant. We like it because it's something we can all watch.
There's not a lot of original programming compared to the States, but the quality is overall high. There are five BBC channels plus a few ITV channels, but lots more available over cable and satellite. The channels that everyone can get - that are available with just an aerial - are BBC One and Two and ITV 1, so that's where the most mainstream programming goes.
Reruns are rare. In general, if you miss a show, you miss it. Some of the most popular shows - like Doctor Who - are rerun between seasons.
We do get American TV, sometimes even on the mainstream channels. Margo's hooked on Ugly Betty. We also used to get lots of Fox shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, Lost and 24, but that went away in a business row. It goes like this: Virgin bought NTL, the cable company we subscribe to for Internet broadband and cable TV. NTL used to show a few channels from Sky, a rival TV/media provider that delivers via satellite instead of cable. After Virgin bought NTL, Sky decided to nearly double its price for Virgin's access to its Sky channels. Virgin decided not to pay up. There were lots of arguments both ways in the popular press, but I'm secretly glad Virgin held out, and I guess I'd rather our money went to Richard Branson than to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Sky.
Being a somewhat small island, and having many of the world's finest thespians as citizens, England does have almost literally a stable of talent, members of whom keep turning up again and again in dramas, comedies, talk shows, even documentaries. Tony Robinson, who played Rowan Atkinson's companion Baldrick in the Blackadder series, hosts The Time Team in which he gets to indulge a love of archaeology. It's almost hard to avoid Stephen Fry, Bill Nighy, Dawn French, and other stable mates as their faces and voices keep reappearing.
And while the English has given the world many great things in the world of theatre and literature, they have also planted some nasty weeds: reality shows and vote-off shows. These are usually combined. Oh, you thought America had it first? No, it was all copied from the UK. Big Brother was a pioneer of continuously surveilled boneheads. Britons were eating bugs on islands long before Yanks. Margo and Sarah used to enjoy How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, in which the toad-like Andrew Lloyd Webber and other judges presided over a troupe of actresses competing for the part of Maria in his new production of The Sound of Music. I thought it was too cruel to watch: at the end of every show, the voted-out loser would have to sing So Long, Farewell (or maybe the others sang it to the loser, I forget). And now, if I walk into the living room and the telly's on, chances are high that someone is due to be voted out of something.
But even when there's nothing exciting on, the shows that are available, dull as they may seem, are very well written and filmed, and we usually end up enjoying them.
There's not a lot of original programming compared to the States, but the quality is overall high. There are five BBC channels plus a few ITV channels, but lots more available over cable and satellite. The channels that everyone can get - that are available with just an aerial - are BBC One and Two and ITV 1, so that's where the most mainstream programming goes.
Reruns are rare. In general, if you miss a show, you miss it. Some of the most popular shows - like Doctor Who - are rerun between seasons.
We do get American TV, sometimes even on the mainstream channels. Margo's hooked on Ugly Betty. We also used to get lots of Fox shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, Lost and 24, but that went away in a business row. It goes like this: Virgin bought NTL, the cable company we subscribe to for Internet broadband and cable TV. NTL used to show a few channels from Sky, a rival TV/media provider that delivers via satellite instead of cable. After Virgin bought NTL, Sky decided to nearly double its price for Virgin's access to its Sky channels. Virgin decided not to pay up. There were lots of arguments both ways in the popular press, but I'm secretly glad Virgin held out, and I guess I'd rather our money went to Richard Branson than to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corporation owns Sky.
Being a somewhat small island, and having many of the world's finest thespians as citizens, England does have almost literally a stable of talent, members of whom keep turning up again and again in dramas, comedies, talk shows, even documentaries. Tony Robinson, who played Rowan Atkinson's companion Baldrick in the Blackadder series, hosts The Time Team in which he gets to indulge a love of archaeology. It's almost hard to avoid Stephen Fry, Bill Nighy, Dawn French, and other stable mates as their faces and voices keep reappearing.
And while the English has given the world many great things in the world of theatre and literature, they have also planted some nasty weeds: reality shows and vote-off shows. These are usually combined. Oh, you thought America had it first? No, it was all copied from the UK. Big Brother was a pioneer of continuously surveilled boneheads. Britons were eating bugs on islands long before Yanks. Margo and Sarah used to enjoy How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, in which the toad-like Andrew Lloyd Webber and other judges presided over a troupe of actresses competing for the part of Maria in his new production of The Sound of Music. I thought it was too cruel to watch: at the end of every show, the voted-out loser would have to sing So Long, Farewell (or maybe the others sang it to the loser, I forget). And now, if I walk into the living room and the telly's on, chances are high that someone is due to be voted out of something.
But even when there's nothing exciting on, the shows that are available, dull as they may seem, are very well written and filmed, and we usually end up enjoying them.
posted by Michael Nelson at 10:10 am
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