On May 14th 2020, numerous news outlets reported on the potential closure of BBC Four at the end of the year, detailing plans for partial budget reallocation to BBC Three, as the Corporation continues to focus its attention on attracting the 16-34 demographic.
Since my last blog/musings there have been some changes (not a lot) in the family viewing fight habits.
Do new perspectives become more shocking the further you get through life? Unsettling? Like having a carpet yanked out from under you? Probably by somebody who is rightly reminding you that you’ve had that carpet since around 1977 and it’s really about time you bought a new one. That happened to me this week. Thanks to a podcast. The podcast in question is called ITC Entertained the World and I think it’s rather brilliant.
The title of this blog might sound a little bit too catastrophist or even like pure fake news. It is not. It is an appeal to all those interested in ensuring that Europe is able to maintain in the coming decade a diversified and rich landscape of audiovisual content production and distribution. Beyond the body count and the rising notoriety of having been infected – have you heard that Madonna also had Covid?
As we find ourselves largely confined to our homes, it is unsurprising that television viewing has sky-rocketed. Watching live broadcasts in the UK has increased by 17% since the coronavirus lockdown, halting years of decline.
During this time of Covid-19’s pandemic spread — when worries for ourselves and others can be all-consuming—we need jokes along with much else.
When I attended my first academic television event back in Reading during 2013, it was called Spaces of Television – a wonderful all-encompassing title which allowed vivid and varied discussion about the space in which television was made and which it occupied in myriad meanings.
Alex Garland’s recent miniseries, Devs (20th Television, 2020), takes on many similar themes which have been explored in his previous directorial outputs, including Ex Machina (A24; Universal Pictures, 2015) and Annihilation (Paramount Pictures;
My wife and I are rather fond of the very charming children’s animation Clangers (1969-1974) [ii]. These kind, loveable, knitted, whistling, stop-motion aliens are just irresistible and one of those slices of childhood that can be revisited again and again. There’s a really nice episode where the Soup Dragon is upset.
Good true crime is like an onion: each layer, each episode, revealing more of the complexity of the case, more about the character and behavior of the suspects, more about possible motives and alibis, and more potentially compromising truths. In Netflix’s Tiger King (2020), each layer reveals more, well … crazy.