How can traditional British TV survive the US streaming giants

No, it was longer and wasn't concentrated on red dwarf. It started on the casting for Sherlock.

That’s what you got from the quote? Not the part about being cruel?

My son is a teenager but loves to watch old politically incorrect comedies like "Airplane". There's no way you could make that movie today... but there's certainly a market for it, cruel or not.

Now that I think about it, it's no more cruel than what most kids watch on YouTube today.

Yeah, none of that was what was funny about little Britain... and I think you missed the point.

I suspect the same number of people were upset in 2006 as would be upset in 2017. But there wasn't a social media platform for those upset views to be expressed and easily measured.

This idea of "oh everyone is offended these days" is a bit weird to me; the 'these days' part I mean. There was a lot of comedy from the past that was... awkward to me as a kid, or just... felt unnecessarily cruel. But I was in a minority, or at least felt like it, with some of those. And... I don't think I changed, but I now can hear/read about others who share the same sensibilities on comedic topics.

The notion that it's somehow "more" people getting "offended" today just strikes me as odd. It may be that as more folks have a platform to share their views, that influences some folks, but I'm not sure that works on all topics. Certainly... on comedy, I've heard many of complaints about some comics/topics. Rarely has anyone's view of a comedy bit made me change my position. If I found it cringe/bad, I found it cringe/bad.

A lot of comedy back then was about laughing at the absurdities of a shared life.

The absurdities of yesterday have been changed - and there can be no actual normality today when there are no absurdities. Laughing at absurdities was not considered cruel.

With no common shared understanding of what's funny or not. Today we can laugh at cruel people only. The cruel and those who think others are weird are the strange ones.

Comedy used to be "look at us, hahaha" now it's "look at them, heh". Real comedy has truth and the truth is always about ourselves not some external other. But such vulnerability is very risky.

Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.

You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.

You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.

> Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.

As if the only kind of risk you could take is punching down at trans and black people.

There's an interview with Bob Monkhouse about making TV in the 50s/60s; he wasn't allowed to say "condom" on TV, and would get fined if he said "bloody".

There's as always a "taboo" on some things. Lots of jokes about sex and religion today that would see you completely crucified in the past. Do you think The Thick of It could have been made in the 80s?

I never cared for Little Britain and haven't seen it, so I can't comment on their "jokes about transvestites", but this whining about "PC gone mad!" has been going on for 40+ years. A few decades ago it was about "you can't make fun of the pakis and nig-nogs any more!"

Little Britain was always crap and completely mainstream and non-edgy. It's a series of one joke sketches based on familiar stereotypes. I don't want to 'cancel' it, and the occasional sketch gets a titter out of me. But to hold it up as an example of edgy, groundbreaking comedy is quite absurd. You can find oodles of much edgier and funnier shows on British TV today.

It's not just the time range that's the issue with that comparison. Older shows had less competition and had a longer time to develop a cult following.

> BBC 4 was axed a few years ago

No it was not. BBC Four is still going strong. It's great.

Basically none of this is true.

Are you perhaps thinking of Babylon 5?

But yes, the low budget is part of the formula for success. Without a ton of money, they had to rely on wit and creativity. Most shows now have comparatively gargantuan budgets, and it goes on big sets, big effects and big names, but the things that actually make a show good (compelling story, enjoyable writing) are unbottleable magic that you can’t just buy.

Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.

Would anyone like some toast? Muffin? Teacake? Buns? Baps? Baguette? Bagel? Crumpet? Pancake? Flapjack? Waffle?

They did it with models. They then rereleased some of the earlier shows with CGI, demonstrating how much better it was with models.

I would argue Monty python is in fact not an exception. Their best sketches are just outstanding, but their median sketches are very unfunny indeed.

The actual exception is e.g. the life of Brian where you have 90 minutes where almost every scene is funny or at least engaging. Compare with e.g. the holy grail where the best 90% is quite good but the rest is... Not...

> Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.

I want to back up and support this point: just pull up a list of shows on Wikipedia from any TV channel you can remember, ideally one with a long history and just go through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s etc. You're going to find a lot more cream the further forward you go into the future, and maybe, depending on the channel and your own personal tastes, a drop off in the last 10 to 15 years. Most TV was just bad, but old TV especially. For every "All in the Family" or "Cosby Show" or "The Wire" or "Frasier"; or to make this more British: "Sherlock", "Doctor Who", "Monty Python's Flying Circus", there's just dozens upon dozens of terrible shows. They each had their audiences, the ones that weren't cancelled (and even some of the ones that were), but it's like, nobody remembers the dirt underneath the flower, but they remember the flowers that they liked.

90% of the BBC wasn’t crud. Even if you didn’t like it. Until the early 90s it was making programming commercial companies couldn’t justify or take a risk on. This programs were fantastic and impacted the entire world.

This was a corporation (the BBC) who made their own cameras and microphones.

Go and watch “Ways of seeing” on YouTube. It’s 50 years old and still as exciting and relevant as it was then.

It was most when conservatives decided that the truth felt a little too left wing and they became vocal about not wanting to fund things they didn’t find entertaining.

Hence quality was traded for populism.

Eye of the beholder. I personally think Red Dwarf series 1 to 6 was great. It even charts a course of British TV decline. Series 1 and 2, low budget sitcom, class warfare and the loneliness of space. Series 3, more budget, more sci-fi, but similar writing. Series 4 and 5, more budget, more sci-fi, becomes monster of the week, but the character building from the prior series keeps it funny. Series 6, even more budget, they start to explore some more interesting sci-fi themes. This turns out to be popular, so it gets more budget again and moves to BBC 1, more cast etc. Series 7, 8 just urgh, trying to appeal to "mainstream" was stupid because it was already popular enough, it loses the serious side. Everything they've done since then feels like they're trying to force the humour that came naturally before. The actors have aged but the writing didn't mature with them.

I watched some interviews with the cast and they would joke around in the canteen between filming and find their jokes had been overheard and incorporated into the script. It had this realistic dialogue.

no one is going to prison for not paying the license fee. the article brings up prison, but only as a way to sneakily associate it with non-license fee payment in a way that clearly worked on you

Anecdotal, but out of my family I’m the only man who doesn’t pay the licence fee, and the only person who hasn’t had a visit.

They’ve visited my mother, sister and one auntie that don’t pay - they all live alone and are the sole name on the bill.

I’ve heard from friends similar experiences too, single men and households with men on the electoral register don’t get visits, or very rarely if they do.

I had the pleasure of answering the door at my mothers to one of these people and believe there’s an issue with the way they choose who to investigate. It’s predatory.

> if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help

Or they're more comfortable breaking that particular law (under the same conditions). I'm not saying that _is_ the case, but it is one of the possibilities.

Your complaint would have much more merit if there wasn’t hundreds of years of examples of women being systematically discriminated against and having the system unfairly target them.

> I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works

So you think that it should just be privatised like netflix. If you don't think public service broadcasting has a place, just don't try to hide it.

"Modern form of criticism" - pointing out the fact that the license fee is unfair and as a consequence disproportionately affects women.

>> women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help

Wow. That's a bold take.

It's not modern, although I don't disagree that it's more common. But you do have jokes even back to the 80s of "world ending, women and minorities most effected."

No OP, but I'm in a smallish EU country and it's not available here.

In the US and watch Britbox and Acorn at least as much as other providers now. We watch a lot of Aussie and British shows, new and old, color and B/W.

The BBC made really great shows. If they go under, it’s a shame. I would pay tax to help the BBC keep going. I’d pay the Aussies, too, if they’re not getting comp’d.

BritBox is available in a very limited set of countries: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, United States.

You're mixing up different bits of tech, streaming services (like BBC's iPlayer) don't care (or know) what DNS servers you're using. To get around their geo-blocking you need to change your IP address, either by using a VPN service or a proxy server.

This is how I watched Match of the Day from Japan for months

the new new one is meant to be available on disney plus

not sure about the others though

Why we love HN.

TV was seen as a great learning tool in the day.

The idea that you could cheaply and affordably replay lectures with video, demonstrate concepts visually, show foreign lands and peoples, all with low cost of production was captivating to many.

Computers were initially seen by educators as a path to interactive TV. Making it easy to find video info, and to index it, even rotate images (repair videos and part assemble for example).

Point is, TV was seen a more than entertainment, it was a tool that could be employed to teach. Computers more so.

Then the Internet came, and it was at first mostly educational, intellectual. Sort of the inverse of what it is now.

Once everything exploded, it became entertainment primarily. Sort of like TV. The educational aspect is there, but muted.

this is a fantastic, well-thought-out analysis of the kind that is all too rare amongst people talking about the BBC. thank you

BBC is great but it is very biased. There’s no such thing as neutral news and the front page is full of pro-western and pro-british articles. You could argue it’s in the middle of the British political spectrum but that’s inherently a bias towards the status quo.

There’s nothing wrong with biased news but it’s important to recognize what their perspective really is. Thinking it’s neutral is dangerous and you’ll never know the truth if you believe that!

> The BBC cannot be funded from general taxation without the licence fee.

The question also is whether Ou want to directly pay it from taxes. Taxes fully depend on the current mood of the government. The fee does a bit of indirection limiting the direct influence.

The "Is it cake" made me cancel Netflix. That and some shows about car restoration with focus on drama.

I don't want to pay and end up supporting such dreg.

It is funny though. For some reason I almost watched 5 episodes of is it cake and a lot of the car restoration shows.

It is like you default to time wasting when you have nothing you want to see. And I don't want that exposure ...

Netflix is far more robust and smarter than what you could ever strike them down for. These aren't people who just started a few weeks ago in the industry, and they are far from the people who are equally long lived dinosaurs who can't or won't keep up and dies in the past.

You're just not the target market anymore, and that's more than fine, because there's a few hundred million that are, and that number is growing, not shrinking, in fact they're growing faster than ever.

Broadchurch

Wolf Hall - originally a great adaptation of a superior book but the last series terribly constrained by budget and cliche background music.

Line of Duty - decent procedural but increasingly bonkers stories and hammy script/delivery.

Adolescence - well produced but liberal scare story. Netflix!

Haven't seen the others.

Hardly in the class of historical Beeb let alone contemporary US brilliance.

Back in 2013, when BBC still was airing Top Gear with Hammond, May & Clarkson, and things like Bake Off.

Recent seasons of Dr Who were made with Disney+. They have killed a 60 year old franchise.

Gary Lineker, the radio presenters, news readers. Fine if you're commercial but in no world is it justified to pay the likes of Huw Edwards £600k to read the news, then whinge about not having enough money as a public broadcaster.

"Oh, but if we don't pay them they'll leave"

Let them go! I'd happily read some words for a few hours each day for a mere £200k.

It's a way to pay the annual fee monthly. You can't cancel whenever you want.

All media is propaganda.

At least it's not the made up right wing shit that runs America.

1 downvote explained.

the comment is being downvoted because its central premise is preposterous: the BBC lied about vetted people for MI5 30 years ago -> therefore it's a lying propaganda institution -> therefore it should be disbanded

first of all, even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?

second, this was 30 years ago.

third, if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.

fourth, the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?

people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance

You don't think that it intruded into private lives, but I would disagree. If only certain information/ideas/programs are aired, you don't know what you don't know. You are not able to make informed decisions with only partial information. An institution such as the BBC operating without any push back for decades would be capable of directing culture and society, in an artificial way.

The BBC that you see in the rest of the world is very much not the BBC you see in England. The English BBC is surprisingly myopic and totally fits the charge of propaganda.