Saturday 2 January 2010

BBC gets it all wrong again - no surprise there then!

****

On the same page as the Daily Telegraph reports a hissy fit from Lynda La Plante over the BBC they also report the sadder news of that same august institution dropping Jam & Jerusalem the rather jolly WI comedy show featuring French & Saunders – this is despite it getting 4.1 million viewers. The BBC’s justification?

“This decision was taken to allow new talent to come through.”

What? The BBC has two mainstream channels plus all the opportunities that digital TV presents plus the radio. Thousands of hours allowing new talent to come through. So pull the other one – some self-important jumped up executive decided that the series was too “middle class”, “old fashioned”, “insufficiently diverse” or “not well enough endowed with curse words”. That’s why it was pulled.

There’s little enough decent comedy on the telly as it is (and don’t cite the truly unpleasant “In the thick of it” please – just note that only 1.1 million people opted to watch it at its peak) and this reminds me what a bunch of bigoted, narrow-minded, smug folk are running the BBC.

We’ll have Jam & Jerusalem back please…

....

1 comment:

Pam Nash said...

Who does it appeal to? Normal people. The BBC, increasingly, doesn't do normal; violent, abusive, surreal, in questionable taste, puerile, depressing - all of these are now the BBC's interpretation of normal. Sad to think that, these days, The Vicar of Dibley and Keeping up Appearances would never have been made.