Well, not everything is going to be wonderful, not even on the BBC. But oh for a channel without ads!

My theory is that advertising, via ratings, has driven what we get to see on tv during the peek hours for years. Quality don’t enter int’ it! (to steal a little from Monty Python.)

When the tv ad sales rep goes to see the MacDonalds marketing person, they have to promise a certain number of viewers per dollar spent by McDonalds. The only way the tv company can deliver this is to schedule a type of show they have shown before, because they have the ratings evidence from previous shows of that type to back up the promise. This explains why we seemed to get game show after game show in the late 80/90s and why we get reality shows and “survivor” knockoffs ad nauseam now. The potential audience for the next “new” show is easily calculated.

It gets worse, because now tv show producers can’t “sell” their show to the network unless they can prove how many people will watch it. Anyone with an original idea is doomed, and their show idea canned.

If the producers can find some way to convince the network to take a risk, unless there’s evidence the show will pull X-numbers of viewers, it will get relegated to the off-peak hours – witness some of the wonderful arts shows of recent times, buried late on a Sunday night. In these slots, there’s no chance a new idea will get a large audience (maybe TIVO will save us here?) and the network gets to say “I told you so!”

If we want good quality public television – we should sell off TV2, and make TV1 non-commercial and entirely state-funded. We are too small a country to afford more than one tv station, and using the commercial model just isn’t working, as can be seen in your remarks about Neil Roberts Brian, and comments here by chezpayne and others.

I concur. It does feel a little like minitrue is relaying a dubious decrease in the chocolate ration.

I stopped watching TV as an experiment in June last year, and now I never use the dusty thing in the corner. I will watch TV shows, but I watch them on youtube, on demand from channel sites, or on dvd. This way I am more active in what I consume, I press play on the viewing of my choice, whether that be old bbc comedy or the odd piece of mindless rag, rather than just having the passive noise on in the corner all evening.
I am not harried by hoards of hawkers trying to ply me their wares (usually in the most maddeningly inane way possible, as if to say “if we can’t beat them, let’s irritate the buggery out of them”).
I am also much more aware of time, how I fill it and how it fills me.
I still feel quite aware of current affairs, I get my information largely from various internet sources. I try to form an actively gathered grasp of what’s going on. It’s like living on a wee self-sufficient farm.