Desperately sad news from the BBC today as it announced the first phase in the sale of Television Centre, White City, London. The BBC’s putting a brave face on this, claiming it’s all about making a smaller, fitter BBC, but the building is where many famous shows were born. More importantly, it’s a central hub for the BBC, which will now be fired in all directions across the UK, into cheaper real estate.

The real reason, of course, for the sale has nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with successive governments trying to kill the BBC by removing chunks of its funding, causing a massive shortfall. It’s depressing to note that regardless of whether you back the Tories or Labour, both of them want the BBC dead. Rupert Murdoch must be laughing his arse off right about now.

Oh, BBC. According to The Guardian, you really do have your head up your arse quite a lot these days. After spending quite a lot of time trying to axe 6Music last year (£9 million in funding in 2008/09, and the one place where loads of new and interesting music is played on British radio), it’s now decided that BBC3 is, for some reason, sacrosanct, despite costing £115 million per year to run.

The digital channel’s new controller, Zai Bennett argues BBC3 is required to enable people to “experiment” with talent and formats, in the manner its rivals cannot. In the old days, that’s what BBC2 was for. BBC1 was for big shows, and more niche stuff would be on BBC2. Still, experimentation is all well and good, so since I just still fall into the target demographic of 16-to-34-year-olds, I thought I’d try and list all the must-have television I can think of on BBC3. Here goes:

• Ideal (Graham Duff’s fantastic comedy about a small-time drugs dealer)
• Being Human (vamps versus werewolves in Bristol)
• Doctor Who repeats

That’s really it. And Being Human became inexplicably dreadful as of series 3, leaving Ideal, which could probably find a home on BBC2. Perhaps the forthcoming quality review will sort things out, but I find it odd the BBC is trying to justify saving a channel that’s increasingly full of exploitative crap like Freaky Eaters, Spendaholics, The House of Tiny Tearaways and Sex..with Mum & Dad, when it’s simultaneously arguing the channel’s survival is required to enable it to experiment in a way other networks cannot. Those shows are precisely the same kind of garbage 5, Sky and others do crap out.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, in September (CNet):

How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode? [This would] jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free.

Warner, also in September (LA times):

“We just don’t think the value proposition is a good one for us,” [Chairman Barry] Meyer told analyst Jessica Reif  in an interview at the conference. He said in his view he’d rather license whole seasons of shows rather than “open up a rental business in television at a low price.”

I’ve now been running an Apple TV since the start of 2011, and here’s what I’ve learned from the experience:

• 99 cents for a 40-minute show isn’t fantastic value, but it is good enough as an impulse purchase, and stops me from bothering to find shows via ‘alternate’ means. It’s also a cheap and usable enough system to ‘convert’ me from using ‘alternate’ means to the semi-legal one (for me) of Apple TV (see below for more on that).
• 99 cents is too much for old shows that aren’t great and also for shows that are 20 minutes in length. For those, I tend to grab DVDs on sale from the likes of Amazon; studio execs say they don’t want to harm DVD sales through digital, but the stuff I buy tends to be significantly cheaper than an Apple rental would be, because I wait for the sales.
• The single-episode rental nature of Apple TV could be a boon for studios, since it enables you to ‘test’ shows you’ve not watched before. Our household’s $1.98 test of two episodes of Lie To Me (sadly now cancelled by idiots at Fox) resulted in all 48 episodes being rented. So the studio got a total of $47.52, minus Apple’s cut. We’d have never bought the DVDs.
• There aren’t enough shows for rental on the Apple TV, meaning interest will soon dwindle.
• I don’t want to buy most shows to rewatch them (most of our DVDs have been watched once only), and there’s no way in hell I’m paying £2.49 ($3.99) for a single TV episode in HD, nor even £1.89 ($3.02) for SD. £36.99 is terrible value for a season of a show that will soon end up on DVD for half of that.

Of course, execs would also argue that, despite me paying for TV content, I’m still breaking the law, because I’m in the UK and using a US iTunes account to rent TV shows. Frankly, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over that—TV being locked to regions is an anachronism that makes no sense whatsoever today (and the same goes for movies), and the studios are getting money they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.

I think it’s a great pity that Apple TV seems to be on a road to nowhere. Although new movies regularly appear, the top TV rentals have barely changed in six months, bar new content from the BBC showing up on a regular basis (which makes no odds to me, being British, but I’m sure Americans are happy about this, so: well done, BBC). And it’s bizarre that studio execs witter on about Apple TV ‘devaluing’ content when that same content is available in the US in unlimited form for under $10 per month from Netflix.

Give me the last season of House on Apple TV for rent. I’ll watch the lot and you’ll get money. Chuck, too. And probably a whole bunch of other shows. Alternatively, sit there stamping your little feet, covering your ears, shutting your eyes and pretending it’s still 1999. That’s all fine. Bitch and moan about how Apple somehow ‘destroyed’ the music industry (by convincing a bunch of people to pay for digital) and how you don’t want the same to happen to the world of TV. I’ll keep pretending it’s 1999, too, by waiting until the shows I want to watch are in the bargain bin (which happens increasingly quickly these days), and you’ll get less money—and it’s your own damn fault, you idiots.

The Guardian reports that US cinema chains are run by fucking idiots. OK, so The Guardian’s language isn’t quite that fruity (the article is ‘US cinemas threaten not to show films in video-on-demand dispute’), but I think my intro sums things up nicely.

Cinema is under increasing pressure from television, largely because people now have TVs the size of a wall, and they can watch stuff in private, without having idiots around them yammering on phones and stuffing overpriced popcorn into their faces, and, occasionally, their mouths. But with Hollywood studios planning to make new releases available for online rental two months after they debut on the big screen, US cinema chains are threatening to not show films by the likes of Universal, Sony, Warner Bros and Fox.

THAT WILL WORK!

No, wait. It won’t.

Two things here:

1. Cinema chains rarely leave anything other than blockbusters on for more than a few weeks. Therefore, if the window really is going to be reduced to two months, it isn’t really going to make any odds anyway.
2. Cinema chains rattle on about how cinema remains relevant because it’s all about the experience. If that’s really the case, cinemas shouldn’t feel threatened by video-on-demand—they should instead be doing their level best to improve the cinema-going experience. Clue: this doesn’t involve sticky floors, suddenly turning the best seats into super-expensive VIP chairs that no-one ever sits in, charging more for popcorn and a drink than a meal out at a local pub, and sound systems that distort the audio so much that you think the latest Oscar winner is about a bunch of bees disguised as humans.

In The state of British TV (Guardian), Mark  Lawson examines the health of UK drama, comparing it to US TV. British viewers often consider British television inferior to US programming, but Lawson offers a balanced argument, despite not even noting that Brits tend to forget that we get the better US TV over here, rather than the crap. (Conversely, we get to see all the worst of British TV along with the best.)

However, I think he’s dead wrong about one of the listed ‘weaknesses’ of British TV:

American TV companies have the courage and funding to back the big vision: committing to 20-episode runs with quick-fire options on further runs. In the UK, partly because of the tradition of single authorship rather than team-writing, commissioning is too often short and cautious, so that when a hit emerges – Sherlock, Downton Abbey – enthusiastic viewers/advertisers have a very lengthy wait for more. Yet, paradoxically, once a franchise is established, we’re too loath to let it go, even when (Taggart, Silent Witness, Midsomer) the central actors leave.

There are three key elements in that paragraph.

American TV companies have the courage and funding to back the big vision: committing to 20-episode runs with quick-fire options on further runs.

This is sometimes but not always true, and it tends to be more common for the run-of-the-mill (or tried-and-tested) formats that Lawson gets angry about elsewhere in the same piece. It’s quite rare for US networks to go out on a limb for something truly innovative.

In the UK, partly because of the tradition of single authorship rather than team-writing, commissioning is too often short and cautious, so that when a hit emerges – Sherlock, Downton Abbey – enthusiastic viewers/advertisers have a very lengthy wait for more.

I don’t like the wait, but I do like single authorship. One of the biggest problems in many US shows is how weak the characters are, and this is most often the case on shows written by large teams. Conversely, the best short-run British shows are often written by single writers or very small teams. There’s also the problem of filler. The best UK shows tend to be extremely densely packed with plot. Waking the Dead has been consistently tight in this regard, with each two-hour story driving arcs on while also providing a great story in itself. Long-run US dramas tend to be more prone to driving arcs every few episodes, but packing the rest of a season with things that don’t really matter. When you could feasibly remove half a season’s episodes without detriment, something’s wrong.

It’s interesting that Sherlock is one of Lawson’s examples of how these issues negatively impact British TV, too, because that in many ways showcases how things can go terribly wrong when the creators aren’t more directly involved. That miniseries had a great opener, a truly terrible second episode, and a decent finale. The bad middle episode wasn’t written by either co-creator. And, personally, I’d sooner have three great Sherlocks every two years than 22 episodes of watered-down crap every year.

Yet, paradoxically, once a franchise is established, we’re too loath to let it go, even when (Taggart, Silent Witness, Midsomer) the central actors leave.

However, this bit I entirely agree with. Hit UK shows do tend to drag on way past their sell-by dates. Spooks is a series that clearly needs shutting down, with its increasingly absurd plotting, diminishing budget and rapid cast-turnover all contributing to the downfall of a once reasonably good show. And while I’m sad Waking the Dead’s done next weekend, at least that’s a UK show that’s getting a rare chance to go out on a high.