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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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!]

The "Doctor Who" Guide by 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 [...]

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