The Weird and Wonderful World of British Broadcasting - Part Four

Continuing my series about how TV works in the UK and what makes it different to US TV.

In Part One, Part Two and Part Three, I charted the development of UK broadcast TV up the point where we had five analogue broadcast channels: BBC One; BBC Two; ITV; Channel 4; and Channel 5.

Part Four - multi-channel TV, from the 1990s until now.

Until the early 1990s, four channels of analogue broadcast TV, was pretty much all you got. Because of the density of the population, there was never much demand for cable TV, as people could normally get a good service through their aerial. Because of this, there wasn’t an infrastructure in place for multi-channel TV.

That started to change, however, when Rupert Murdoch (yes, the guy who owns Fox) launched a satellite service called Sky (there was originally a competitor, BSB, but they went bust and Murdoch bought them). Murdoch’s brilliant strategy was to outbid the BBC and ITV for rights to live football (real football that is, not that nonsense you call football - oh, OK, soccer, then, if you insist…) and then to show it on a satellite subscription service that required a dish and set-top box. Surprisingly enough, he was allowed to do this (a few sporting events have to be broadcast on free to air TV, but everything else is up for grabs), a situation that I can’t imagine occurring in the US. The result was that wave upon wave of sport-hungry British citizens bought satellite dishes and decoder boxes, paving the way for multi-channel TV in the UK.

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

Review: DOCTOR WHO “Voyage of the Damned” (S04E00)

(Also doubling as a short piece on Christmas TV in the UK)

Episode zero? Episode zero??

It must be an odd thing, from a US perspective, Christmas TV in the UK. On Christmas Day, virtually everywhere shuts down and people stay at home, digesting their Christmas dinner and watching the TV. In times gone by, the BBC and ITV used to fight to unleash the biggest blockbuster movies on Christmas Day itself - until specialist movie channels, video and DVD rendered this tactic obsolete. There’s a tongue-in-cheek history of this practice here (warning: contains obscure cultural references; swearing; idiomatic English; swearing; British humour; and swearing).

Another tradition on Christmas Day (and on the days around it) is the Christmas Special. Most famous are the Morecombe and Wise Christmas Specials in the 1970s; and the Only Fools and Horses Christmas Specials, especially those shown in the 1990s. I know there are plenty of US Christmas Specials (here is a comparative list) but my understanding is that none of them were first broadcast on Christmas Day itself. Nor, as far as I know, have there been ratings phenomena like the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special (which got 28 million viewers on Christmas Day, approximately half of the UK population at the time) or the series of three 1996 Only Fools and Horses Christmas Specials (which all exceeded 20 million viewers).

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

The Weird and Wonderful World of British Broadcasting - Part Three

Continuing my series about how TV works in the UK and what makes it different to US TV.

Part One dealt with the BBC and Part Two with commercial television, now I’m going to rush through the years as broadcast TV got a little more complicated.

Part Three - adding more channels, from the 1960s to the 1990s

Going back to the 1950s and 1960s and we have two channels, BBC and ITV, using a VHF transmission network. However, the advent of UHF broadcast technology meant the possibility of moving to higher-definition colour TV and adding an extra channel (or more than one). In 1962, a government report was published that was highly critical of ITV (for being trivial and populist) and recommended that a new channel be awarded to the BBC. As a result, in 1964, the existing BBC Television Service was renamed BBC One and a new channel, BBC Two, was launched (exclusively using the new 625-line UHF broadcast technology, which meant you had to buy a new TV set to able to view it). BBC Two started broadcasting in colour (using the PAL system, not the lower resolution NTSC system used in the US) in 1967 and BBC One and ITV followed in 1969.

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

My Sarah Jane

Back when I was five or six years old, I got to meet Sarah Jane Smith. It was the local summer festival and I got in a queue of kids, with my ten pence in my hand and instructions to give it to her when I got to the head of the queue. When I got there, Sarah Jane was lovely and asked me my name and signed a photo for me. When I looked at it, it said, “To Matthew with love from Liz Sladen,” which was a bit confusing - but, still, I got to meet Sarah Jane Smith!

Sarah Jane Smith remains the longest-running companion to travel with the Doctor in Doctor Who - and, up until the debut of the new version of the show in 2005, she was probably the best loved one as well. Her tenure ran from the first episode of The Time Warrior (on December 15, 1973) to the final episode of The Hand of Fear (on October 23, 1976). The first Doctor Who story I can clearly remember is The Time Warrior (I have vague memories of bits of the season before, but nothing coherent) so Sarah Jane was the first companion I was really aware of. So, just as people tend to refer to the Doctor they grew up with as their Doctor (Tom Baker was my Doctor, even though I caught Jon Pertwee’s last season), Sarah Jane Smith was my companion, my Sarah Jane.

Sarah Jane’s final scene was re-written by the actors, Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, because they didn’t feel the original version was emotional enough. It isn’t the words that make it a beautiful scene, though, it is the way it is played, with what isn’t said being just as important as what is:

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

The Weird and Wonderful World of British Broadcasting - Part Two

Continuing my series about how TV works in the UK and what makes it different to US TV.

In Part One, we learned about the establishment of the BBC, which is funded by a compulsory licence fee and, until 1955, had a complete monopoly on television in the UK. However, in 1955, ITV was established and now I’m going to talk about how this was done - and how, again, this was very different to the US model.

Part Two: Commercial Television

In the US, pretty much from the beginning, you had three commercial networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) who were in competition with each other and who built their networks through a system of affiliated local stations. In the UK, in 1954 (when the legislation that introduced commercial television was passed), you had a single public corporation that produced all the programming and owned and ran all the transmission equipment.

Now the UK is much smaller than the US (it has one fifth of the population and one fortieth of the area, being a little bit smaller than Michigan) and everybody is much closer together (there are 637 people per square mile in the UK, as against 80 in the US*) so it is much easier for a single company or organisation to build a network that covers the whole nation.

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

Exploring British TV: The TORCHWOOD Connection - Part One

Before I start, I should say that Daemon’s TV contributor David has already written about his favourite British shows. I probably won’t be overlapping with shows he’s covered, so check out his posts on Only Fools and Horses, The Royle Family, Man vs Wild, The Mighty Boosh, Sharpe, Life on Mars and Coronation Street. Also, I won’t be talking about Extras as I’m sure you’re all familiar with it already. Likewise, although I will be posting about Doctor Who and Torchwood those posts won’t be part of this “Exploring British TV” strand.

And a couple of final recommendations, before I move on: TV Blog Coalition member Jace regularly blogs about UK TV that’s made it to the US, under the heading From Across the Pond; and fellow coalition blog Pop Vultures is run by an American living in the UK and regularly has features on British TV.

As you digest Saturday’s episode of Torchwood, “Adrift” (and if you didn’t see it, you missed a cracker), I’m also asking you to cast your mind back to the previous week’s episode, “From Out of the Rain” (which was given a repeat showing immediately before “Adrift”).

On first watch, I considered to be probably the weakest episode of the series (and it’s certainly the least typical) but I still can’t shake it from my mind - as it has a strangely haunting quality. This is hardly surprising, as the episode was written by Peter J. Hammond, who also contributed the series one episode “Small Worlds” - but who is most famous, in the UK, as the creator and principle writer of the show I want to talk to you about: Sapphire & Steel.

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

The Weird and Wonderful World of British Broadcasting - Part One

Hello, I’m Matthew and I’m mainly going to be writing about Doctor Who (which starts its fourth series here in the UK tonight) and also about some of the many British TV programmes which are relatively unknown in the US, but which are worth investigating.

To complement these posts, however, I’ve also written a six-part guide to British TV, explaining how it came to be the way it is and what makes it different to US TV. And, without further ado, this is…

Part One: The BBC

In the beginning was the BBC, which was originally a private company set up in 1922 to exploit the technological marvel that was radio. It didn’t run advertising and was instead funded by a license that all owners of mains-powered radios had to get from the General Post Office (roughly equivalent to the US Postal Service, except that they also ran the telephone network, until the early 1980s). In 1922, the license fee was ten shillings a year (a shilling was a coin in Britain’s pre-decimal currency, there were twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound; in today’s decimal currency, introduced in 1970, ten shillings is fifty pence, or half of one pound - at current exchange rates, that’s roughly one dollar). In 1927 the BBC was incorporated by Royal Charter and changed its name from the British Broadcasting Company to the British Broadcasting Corporation. This meant that it became publicly owned, and effectively an arm of government (although it is largely autonomous).

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email

The “DOCTOR WHO” Guide by Matthew

[Editor's note: One of Daemon's TV readers, Matthew, wrote this Guide to all three series of DOCTOR WHO after I mentioned yesterday that I just started watching series one. (He is also one of the people that convinced me to give Doctor Who a chance)

It is so complete without spoiling anything that I couldn't just leave it as a comment and had to share it with everybody. Thank you Matthew!]

As you may have noticed, one of the characteristics of Doctor Who is that it can tell a lot of different types of stories - and this is something the revived version of the series has exploited. As I grew up with Doctor Who (one of my earliest TV memories is the unmasking of a Sontaran, late in 1973) I took this all in my stride, but I suspect that for people who are new to it, it can be slightly disorientating. In many ways, the more you watch, the more you’re likely to get into - and the more you’ll get used to the different types of stories that are told. However, as I’ve said before, Doctor Who has to be suitable for children; so there are places that it will never go (part of the reason that Torchwood exists is to be able to tell different types of stories). Nevertheless, some episodes get about as dark as a show for children can - Doctor Who has never shown much by the way of gore, but it’s never been afraid of death either.

Because of the variety of story types, pretty much every story has its fans and it’s hard to definitively recommend some episodes over others. Personally I admire the ambition of the series in creating a new adventure pretty much from scratch with each new story, and I’m pretty easygoing if it doesn’t quite work. I think of most of the series as being flawed brilliance - with the brilliant bits more than outweighing the flaws. Looking back at the episodes, I always find something to enjoy.

Despite all this I’ll attempt a few recommendations. What follows is a guide to the first three series for someone who doesn’t want to watch all of them. I’ve based it on a combination of my own preferences and what seems to be the consensus amongst fans.

[Read more]

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed or by email