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March 28, 2024, 06:39:44 PM

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BBC BAFTA-TV Auto-fellation

Started by jutl, March 23, 2004, 10:22:56 AM

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alan strang

Just realised I never got round to posting this:

Quote from: "Peking O"You can't blame the BBC for that

Of course you can - they're the country's main broadcasting service! Along with C4, ITV, etc. They set the ultimate template for the rule book on how to get a show onto television.

Quoteif that's something that L&W aren't prepared to stand up against then they get everything they deserve. Take a look at League of Gentlemen series 3 - a popular show, the writers completely changed the format, wrote out the two of the most popular characters and basically followed their own vision. It can be done, I've got no time for people who haven't got the guts to do it.

The League Of Gentlemen have no guts. They started aiming low around Series 2 - attempting to repeat earlier 'successes', queezing the last drop of life out of comic characters, extending scenarios way beyond their initial worth and generally being a bit rubbish. The 'change of format' was interesting but could hardly be considered brave or revolutionary. It merely disguised the fact that they'd suddenly stopped writing as many jokes, painfully highlighted all the jokes they'd nicked from other shows, and managed to further mess up the veracity of their initial concept - 'Royston Vasey - You'll Never Leave'? Well, maybe you'll get as far as Camden Town just so Steve Pemberton can do that new character of his.

QuoteI'm looking down the Comedy Chat page here and it seems like plenty of stuff is being produced that people like. Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 15 Storeys High (Ok, it's cancelled now, but 2 series worth were produced), Catterick, Black Books 3, The Daily Show, Look Around You, Shaun of The Dead, etc. Naturally some shit is being produced, but it's always been that way.

The trouble with this 'opinion' (apart from the fact that it's so inutterably, stupidly, tear-wellingly head-hittingly wrong and only ever spouted by people who live in a cosy self-imposed coccoon filled with blancmange and fag-ends) is that it fails to take into account the following:

The "there's always been lows as well as highs" argument conveniently bypasses the appraisal of individual shows in the context that they're made in favour of a meaningless statistic. The high/low ratio is worthless as an observation because it refuses to directly compare the highs of today with those of the past. To use an extreme analogy, it's like comparing AIDS with gonhorrea and saying "See - nothing's changed - there's always been STDs!".

In terms of the comedy industry, fifteen years ago the highs (and the attitude which created them) were higher. The lows were probably still low but they didn't tend to irk you nearly as much because the highs were so high.

I would argue that the examples you've quoted above (discounting American imports as they have their own hyping rules over the Atlantic) would never have been considered 'A-list' comedy by anyone had they been made fifteen years ago. They'd have been the 'also-rans' - okay-ish programmes you'd watch while waiting for something truly fantastic to come along. And in those better times you could always trust television to provide something truly fantastic at some point. The media was in a healthier state.

Without any current examples of 'truly fantastic' programming being produced (and a very poor attitude towards nurturing the talent or ideology to produce such programming), the also-rans have been shifted to the centre. They automatically become the 'highs', not because they're necessarily fantastic but because they're the best of a bad bunch.

Why do you think there's always such a prevalence of people defending mediocre shows with the words "Oh come on, it's better than anything else on at the moment!"? This attitude didn't exist fifteen years ago - mainly because there usually was something better on at any given moment.

The past is proving a bit of an embarrassment to current media people. To that end, over the past six or so months, there's been a noticeable rise in the duplicitous redefinition of the accepted 'worth' of shows from the past specifically intended to bring them in line with today's output and claim everything's really rosie.

This is why Mark Lawson and his ilk are now attempting to prove that the past was also full of crap, and that we're all just suffering from selective memory syndrome. All that "for every Dad's Army there were three 'Bottle Boys'" shite which Peter Bazalgette tried to spew out in his Reith lecture a few years back (itself just as a selfish means to an end - to popularise the financial payback inherent in producing prole-feed over quality).

It's the reason why the BBC are attempting to create the illusion of 'modern classics' - from describing 'The Office' as "right up there with the likes of Fawlty Towers" (basically selling the notion that a modern-day 'high' carries the same currency as a 'high' from the past) to trying to turn 'Nighty Night' into an overnight hit simply by telling everyone that 'Nighty Night' is a hit even if the figures say otherwise, in the hope that people will just accept it without question.

It's the reason why 'Dead Ringers' and '2DTV' are presented and defended as "the new Spitting Image", despite them being entirely comprised of material which, had it ever been considered at all, would simply have been the 'filler material' during the glory days of that show - mere Polyfilla surrounding the 'proper' sketches which displayed a bit of heart and soul.

Yes, things were different 15 years ago. Yes, those days are gone. You reckon we should "get over it" - just accept it and join in with the 'fun'? Naah.