Over the last five years I’ve seen a lot of CBeebies. Probably more than any of our children have actually seen. Some of it was good, some bad, but the content that sticks with me, the stuff that annoys me, is how nauseatingly preachy children’s television has become. I should add by children’s television I …
Something odd has happened to British television in the last couple of years. The gameshow, once a staple of primetime television, has disappeared from our screens. Or has it? Do you remember the days when you couldn’t move for primetime gameshows? Some of television’s biggest hits were built around the gameshow format – Blankety Blank, …
There was a time when “Later…” the live music show presented by Jools Holland was essential viewing. On a BBC that knows so little about music that in every documentary it trots out the usual bollocks about how important punk was1 Jool’s show was a breath of fresh air. Not only did it present bands …
For many years now Royal Mail Postman Pat Clifton was the man you could always rely on in Greendale. He was the glue that held the community together, the face of officialdom that could be relied on to being the post whatever the weather. Not only did he bring the mail he was often there …
Cbeebies is full of very strange programmes. Take Numberjacks for example. This appears to be a remake of spooky 70s show Sapphire & Steele albeit with the eponymous heroes replaced with CGI talking numbers that live inside a sofa. Then of course there’s Waybaloo a show about dwarfish Buddhists with speech and learning difficulties, which …
I’ve written before about some of modern television’s mad new techniques to stretch half an hour into an hour slot. Shows like Location Location do this a lot and I ranted about it here. But there’s an even more annoying technique starting to appear over here. As ever this is a US invention, where if …
I’ve made it pretty clear in the past how I feel about the increasing dumbing down of the once great BBC News presentation – the silly pointless live linkups etc. One other thing that’s getting on my goat is the way the news deals with people who wish to retain their anonymity. Often these people …
Have you noticed something very wrong with many of Channel Four’s output over the last few years? My beef is in the way many of its home-grown reality shows are edited. Channel Four seems to think we all suffer from ADD or that we couldn’t possible join Supernanny or Location Location Location and understand what …