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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
Thanks to Nicholas for suggesting this first entry in my new "ten minutes, no references" project, now titled (as you can see) Unreliable Answers. The subject: "Why Dr Who got cancelled. Long term problems, or short-term silliness?", and my ten minutes starts... now.
By the mid-1980s, Doctor Who had been running for over twenty years, and had become as much part of the televisual furniture as the news. John Nathan-Turner had been producer since about 1981, and while pointing the finger at him is a popular hobby for Who historians I don't think he was single-handedly responsible. The reasons were probably twofold.
Firstly, the format was getting tired. While it was a winner, ideas were running thin, and during the Davison years it became alarmingly clear that the series was in a rut. Certainly there were some great stories, but nothing like the outpourings of writerly creativity that marked the Pertwee and Baker years. This rut was mishandled by the producers. Rather than looking at the whole series in a new light (for instance, being stuck on Earth was good for Pertwee's Doctor, as without the TARDIS available most of the time they had to concentrate on writing good stories rather than handwavey science fiction) they tried to get round it with short-term gimmicks and celebrity guest stars. Bonnie Langford's always the person people think of here, but far more harmful were casting decisions such as Ken Dodd in Paradise Towers. When the Happiness Patrol and the Candyman burst onto the scene, you knew things were getting bad.
The series was, in short, taking its continued existence for granted, rather than continuing to justify its production budget and prime teatime scheduling. This was finally realised in Sylvester McCoy's second season as the Doctor, leading to a totally new direction and some fantastic, innovative, thought-provoking stories such as Ghost Light and the Curse of Fenric, but by now it was too late.
Secondly, of course, BBC management was not sympathetic to Doctor Who. Michael Grade made no secret at all of his disdain and dislike for the series, interfering to the extent of insisting on Colin Baker's replacement. Whether Baker was a success or not in the part I'm not going to dwell on here, but when senior management are so openly hostile to a programme it's unlikely to change many minds. The rot had set in - hostile management needed to be appeased with ratings, and ratings were to be acquired.. how? With good stories? No - ultimately with big-name guest stars, as mentioned above.
Ultimately, the series would probably have continued a few years more had radical corrective action been taken by the production team earlier, producing a quality series which would help swing sceptical management minds towards the idea that continuing the series was a good idea. By the end - well, before that epic last season - it simply wasn't very good any more. It wasn't the series it had been, and I think the end of the series was more or less inevitable once Colin Baker got fired. That showed the management wanted an end to a dead-end series, and the producers failed to use the chance to rescue the series before it got canned.
In summary - a bit of both!
Time up! (10 minutes exactly). No time for any editing.
I'd forgotten exactly how striking Broadcasting House is in person, as it had been a while since I'd seen it by daylight until I happened to walk past today. 1930s architecture at its very finest and most elegant, a giant ship of a building sailing down Portland Place in a manner which reminds me of the Crimson Permanent Assurance. Eric Gill's fantastic sculptures make it one of those rare things - a building that's equally as interesting to look at close up as it is from a distance.
Inside, with the exception of the reception area (currently closed during the building works, but I hope it reopens) the building is, in my opinion, a bit of a mess after 70 years of alteration and remodelling to suit the changing needs of the BBC. But outside, it's a treat. A creation of the days when broadcasting was still a young ambitious medium, when the wireless was all and television was only the subject of Baird's vague and fuzzy demonstrations, and the mystery and magic of the new medium had yet to change into the utilitarian ubiquity that characterises the radio of today. With the possible exception of Television Centre, no broadcasting building has yet defined the characteristics of the medium it was built to serve so well.
I was.. well, surprised to hear that the controller of Radio 4 has deemed Fritz Spiegl's gosh-it's-early-in-the-morning Radio 4 UK Theme to be a historical anachronism and that what people want at 0530 is, in fact, more news. So I emailed the Today programme about it..
(note - there's more here in an earlier post.)
Hi,
I'm sure you're sick of listeners emailing you about the Radio 4 UK Theme, but I was surprised on hearing your piece on the subject to hear no mention of the wider historical use of similar medleys both within broadcasting in general and in the BBC.
The spiritual predecessor of Spiegl's theme was the "Fantasia on National Airs", universally known as "Nat. Airs", arranged by Jack Byfield and used as a startup theme by the BBC Television Service from the mid-1950s alongside Eric Coates' better-known "March for Television". Spiegl's piece has definite echoes of Nat. Airs, in particular with its use of "Early One Morning" as its key theme and in the appearance of "Danny Boy" (aka Londonderry Air), and it's highly probable that Spiegl wrote his piece as a natural successor to the Airs rather than as a wholly original concept. So while Spiegl's piece is only 30 or so years old, its roots go much deeper.
Other regional medleys were extensively used by the various regional ITV companies as their own startup themes. Some of them are masterpieces, most notably "Westward Ho!", a medley of West Country tunes used by Westward Television and Tyne Tees' superb "Three Rivers Fantasy". But over the years the regional medleys dropped away as regulatory requirements loosened, and with the introduction of 24-hour broadcasting the only one left was the Radio 4 UK Theme. It's the last of a long and honourable line, which is why it's so sad to hear that it's an endangered species.
Incidentally, your controller's vague assertion that the R4UK Theme is "five to six minutes long" is slightly odd. He's talking about continuity music here, and the Theme is precisely five minutes long - a nice round number, especially given its past use as an opening piece for the station itself in the days when Radio 4 opened from dead air at 0600 rather than carrying a sustaining feed overnight from the WS.
I understand that broadcasting has to change and not ossify - after all, that's a lesson which the BBC itself learned rather painfully on such occasions as the introduction of Radio 1 and its reaction to Independent Television. But saving five minutes at what my girlfriend's American father refers to as "zero-dark-thirty" to give a nod to a broadcasting tradition which goes back for at least fifty years seems to me a much better thing than injecting yet another news bulletin to replace the one which comes after the UK Theme anyway.
The UK Theme is part of the cycle of the broadcast day on Radio 4. From the UK theme in the morning, through Today and Woman's Hour to PM and the Book at Bedtime and ultimately Sailing By and the national anthem, it's part of what keeps the station ticking over, part of its 24-hour respiratory cycle. To get rid of it would not only be a shame, it would be throwing away one of the few remaining moments when broadcasters can still pause and remember those who came before them and built the industry in which they work totally from scratch in a remarkably short time.
It would, in short, be the worst decision made by a controller keen to make their mark since.. er.. well, who was the last person to try and scrap "Sailing By"?
Yours,
Mike Knell
A famous incident in the pre-war days of BBC Radio was the "Woodrooffe Incident", also known as "The Fleet's Lit Up". On 20 May 1937 the BBC was going to carry a live commentary on the illumination of the naval fleet, and its man on the spot was former Naval officer Lieutenant-Command Thomas Woodrooffe. Woodrooffe had taken full advantage of the generous entertainment provided on board his old ship, and when the time came for the broadcast his state can only be described as "tired and emotional". Because in those days there were no continuity suites - all switching was done in the control room, it was some time before the engineers took the initiative of fading him out themselves.
There's now an MP3 of what I believe is the full incident available on the web, from here at nr23.net, but there wasn't yet a transcript, so I thought I'd make one. It's hard to make out Woodrooffe's words at times due to the crackly off-air recording, so I apologise for the occasional (indistinct).
This incident is notable for two things. Firstly, even the fearsome John Reith must have been at least slightly amused, as Woodroffe was only suspended for a week after this incident. He went on to commentate on other things for the BBC, notably declaring in the closing minutes of the 1938 FA Cup Final that "If there's a goal scored now, I'll eat my hat." There was, and he did.
Secondly, it led to the development of continuity studios as part of the programme chain, where undesirable happenings on air could be taken care of much more quickly as continuity had direct control over station output. More on this here.
ANNOUNCER:
This is the Regional Programme. The Illumination of the Fleet. Once again we're taking you on board HMS Nelson for a description of the scene at Spithead tonight by Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Woodrooffe.
WOODROOFFE:
At the present moment, the whole fleet is lit up. When I say 'lit up', I mean lit up by fairy lamps.
We've forgotten the whole Royal Review ... we've forgotten the Royal Review ... the whole thing is lit up by fairy lamps. It's fantastic, it isn't the fleet at all. It's just ... it's fairyland, the whole fleet is in fairyland.
Now, if you'll follow me through ... if you don't mind ... the next few moments... you'll find the fleet doing odd things (indistinct, but that's my best guess). At the present moment, the New York, obviously, is lit out ... and when I say the fleet is lit up ... in lamps... I mean, she's outlined. The whole ship's outlined. In little lamps.
I'm sorry, I was telling some people to shut up talking.
Umm.. what I mean is this. The whole fleet is lit up. In fairy lamps, and ... each ship is outlined.
Now, as far as I can see is about ... I suppose I can see down about five or six miles ... ships are all lit up.
They're outlined, the whole lot. Even destroyers are outlined. In the old days, y'know, destroyers used to be outlined by a little kind of pyramid of lights. And nowadays ... destroyers are lit up by ... they outline themselves.
In a second or two, we're going to fire rockets, um, we're going to fire all sorts of things (indistinct). And.. you can't possibly see them, but you'll hear them going off, and you may hear my reaction when I see them go off. Because ... erm ... I'm going to try and tell you what they look like as they go off. But at the moment there's a whole huge fleet here. The thing we saw this afternoon, this colossal fleet, lit up ... by lights ... and the whole fleet is in fairyland! It isn't true, it isn't here!
And as I say it ...
It's gone! It's gone! There's no fleet! It's, eh, it's disappeared! No magician who ever could have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet's gone. It's disappeared.
I'm trying to give you, ladies and gentlemen, (indistinct) the fleet's gone. It's disappeared. I was talking to you ... in the middle of this damn (cough), in the middle of this fleet ... and what's happened is the fleet's gone, disappeared and gone. We had a hundred, two hundred warships around us a second ago, and now they've gone, at a signal by the Morse code, at a signal by the fleet flagship which I'm in now, they've gone, they've disappeared.
There's nothing between us and heaven. There's nothing at all.
(recording ends)
I noticed a couple of days ago that it was the sixty-ninth anniversary of the inauguration of the BBC's high-definition television service from Alexandra Palace, which through various name changes means that today's BBC1 is the oldest operating television service in the world. Sixty-nine is not exactly a famous or significant anniversary for anything, but it made me think about how remarkably little is actually known about programming and presentation in the early days of television.
Television was, until the advent of a policy of universal archival, a remarkably ephemeral medium. Unlike a newspaper or a book, once a television programme was broadcast it was effectively gone. Programmes which were shot on film (or, later, videotape) would often linger on for a while, but most of the everyday hubbub of live broadcasting which constituted the early days of television was gone as soon as it had been broadcast. Very few records were kept of what was actually broadcast, with the exception of a few stills, a few sound recordings and the daily paper programme logs. Even many dramas were performed live in the studio.
What this means is that tantalisingly little is known about how early television actually looked and worked. Confusing the situation further is that virtually all of the footage that's out there claiming to be from the earliest days of television is actually more recent reconstruction for documentary purposes, which often pays less attention to historical accuracy than it should. The famous clip of Adele Dixon performing Television at the opening of the service in 1936 is itself a later reconstruction, which has given rise to the myth that her song was the first thing to be broadcast on the BBC Television Service. (Although it was part of the opening programme, there were various speeches broadcast before the variety acts.)
There are other long-standing myths which have long been assumed to be historical facts. For many years, the official version of events surrounding the closedown of television at the outbreak of World War II was that the service was just cut off abruptly in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. This excellent piece of research by the guys at Transdiffusion shows that it wasn't - morning programmes continued as normal, and the service just didn't come back in the afternoon. Another myth - that at the return of the service in 1946 the announcer's first words were "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...". Not true either - they were actually "Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?".
It's only at the start of the 1950s that it becomes possible to say with any certainty how television looked. The growth of television abroad led to an increasing amount of telerecording (recording programmes on film for archival or sale), and with the introduction of video tape at the end of the decade programmes were being routinely originated on VT, although due to the complexity of editing early quad tape they were still usually performed "as live". However, by no means all of these programmes have been kept (as fans of series like Doctor Who are well aware) due to the expense of buying videotape and the storage space needed for a comprehensive archive. Right up until the introduction of colour at the end of the 1960s, television was still treated as an ephemeral medium.
It's an interesting historical lesson. A medium designed for disseminating information is itself so poorly documented in its early days that less than seventy years later it's difficult to say with any certainty what went on. The technical details are all well known, of course - transmitter specifications and camera designs are all well-documented - but the actual nuts and bolts of providing the service, the continuity, the manner in which people behaved on camera, the look of a typical programme - are hazy at best. Given modern television's habit of self-examination and introspection (television producers love making documentaries about television), the fact that the television of the 1930s and 40s was treated as such a throwaway, ephemeral thing is kind of fascinating.
The Bilsdale TV transmitter in North Yorkshire got knocked off air yesterday when it was flooded out. Currently all its UHF services are off air, and as it's a main transmitter this means that large parts of the North-East are currently without analogue TV service.
BBC North Yorkshire are reporting this on their web page here. They say - and I quote - that "Engineers are on site at Bilsdale now but they are having to dry it all out before firing it up".
Now, if this was national or London news they'd probably write something like "Engineers are in attendance and every effort is being made to restore service as quickly as possible, but essential operational safety checks have to be made before service can be fully restored. We apologise for any inconvenience this loss of transmission has caused, and would like to assure our customers that service will be restored as soon as it is safe to do so."
This being Yorkshire, however, we get (to paraphrase) "Aye, t'team's up there with hairdryers. Don't want t'bloody thing to go up in smoke when we fire it up."
The first time that I heard the original radio series of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy (which is, of course, The One True Version) it was 1981 and I was listening to the repeats at the age of 7. As it was originally broadcast in 1978, I'd have been about 5 at the time of first transmission and not even the most precocious 5-year-old would have really grokked it.
But I digress. The first time I heard the series, I was sitting in a flat in Hannover with my family listening to the series on Radio 4's fading, crackling long-wave service which just about reached Hannover in daylight with a following wind. If they'd repeated it after dark reception would probably have been somewhat better (insert tedious explanation of sky-wave propagation, ionisation and skip zones here), but as it was it was crackly and mushy.
Almost 25 years later, I'm listening to episode 2 of the new series in studio-quality audio on Radio 4 via DAB. My digital terrestrial TV box is automatically recording the programme for me so I can listen to it again. "But Ah!", I hear you say. "You're in the UK now rather than in Germany, and there would have been FM stereo in the UK in 1981 too, so it's not a fair comparison!".
You could say that, sure, but there's more. If I was in Germany now, I'd most likely have an Internet connection available, so getting the programme in hi-fi stereo (or even, experimentally, as 5.1 surround) would just be a case of streaming it from the BBC's web page. Only if I was somewhere without an Internet connection would it be necessary to mess about with AM radio receivers and propagation theory, and there are now very few places in the developed world where you can't get an Internet connection of some form.
What I'm getting at here in a rather ham-fisted way is that the speed with which digital media have come to pervade every aspect of broadcasting has been absolutely astonishing. Ten years ago I would have been playing with long wire antennas and Sony short wave receivers with synchronous detectors, as well as simply crossing my fingers in the hope that the ionosphere would be co-operative, in order to pull in radio stations from foreign countries with mushy, fading audio. Nowadays, if I want to listen to Radio Japan I don't have to look up schedules and band plans and wait up until god knows when so the conditions are favourable. I can just call up a stream and there it is. Want to hear Radio Australia's Tok Pisin service, usually only broadcast to the southwest Pacific? There's a stream for that too.
One of the very first things I ever did when I got an account on a machine with Internet mail access was to construct a message which would come straight back to me in Nottingham via mcsun in the Netherlands, kddlabs in Japan, munnari in Australia, and back to Nottingham. It took a couple of minutes to circumnavigate the globe (this was back in the days when every mail machine was an open relay - the net was a kinder, gentler place then) but when it got back it seemed like magic. That was just over a decade ago, but today people everywhere, not just researchers on academic networks, hardly blink at the knowledge that they're sending a mail message halfway round the world. People have got so used to the digital revolution so fast that they only notice if their mail message takes longer than a few seconds to arrive, whereupon they complain to their system administrator.
But with this wide-ranging and ubiquitous stream of bits covering just about every corner of the developed world, it's easy to forget that there are large parts of the world which don't have easy, cheap or fast Internet access. The digital divide is something that's real, something that's widely ignored, and one of the hot topics which need to be addressed in the 21st Century. While people in Britain are starting to casually talk about switching off the existing analogue television and radio broadcast networks, there are large chunks of the world which aren't likely to have DAB, or ADSL, or any affordable Internet access at all for a long time yet. There are still plenty of places which rely entirely on HF radio for their communications with the outside world.
The old-fashioned analogue technology may be cheerfully derided as "steam radio" by those fortunate enough to live in a digital world, but for billions of people it's still a lifeline as there's a vast installed base, receivers are ubiquitous and cheap to run (there's a reason the Freeplay radio won so many awards when it came out - plenty of people don't have mains electricity and can't afford to buy batteries), and most third world broadcasters find it hard enough to pay the bills, let alone fund expensive digital broadcasting experiments. Analogue radio will retain its position as the most democratic and accessible medium out there for some time yet, and it's important that planners and bureaucrats as well as the population in general remember this when they're next thinking of cutting the BBC World Service's budget or reducing their shortwave broadcasting hours to pay for expensive digital broadcasts for the wealthy few.
Incidentally, if you feel like spreading a little democracy then for a few quid (or dollars, or euros) you can donate a wind-up radio to places where they really need them, courtesy of the Freeplay Foundation.
Tune into BBC Radio 4 at 0530 most mornings and you'll hear the last remnant of what was once a universal practice in British broadcasting - the startup sequence. Startups marked the beginning of the broadcast day for decades, giving viewers a few minutes for their TV sets to warm up and engineers time to check that everything was in order for the start of programming. When ITV came along each regional broadcaster was required to register a piece of instrumental music with their regulatory authority, the ITA (later the IBA), to be played out at startup time along with an ITA/IBA tuning signal slide and a stern, official pronouncement that the company was indeed broadcasting on the, say, Midlands transmitters of the Independent Television Authority (the so-called authority announcement). Many broadcasters commissioned their own music for this, and especially in the early days many of these pieces were medleys of music related to the area the company served. It's interesting that music for use only at obscure times when hardly anyone watching was specially commissioned and recorded despite being doomed to obscurity - this demonstrates just what a Serious Business television was back in the days before Rupert Murdoch.
Anyway, medleys ruled the roost. You know the kind of thing - a bit of Bobby Shaftoe for Tyne Tees, variations around the Floral Dance for Westward, and so on. Those pieces which weren't medleys were almost always light marches - fans of the Dambusters who find the original ATV startup march Sound And Vision strangely familiar will be unsurprised to learn that it was written by Eric Coates. In the early years, however, the medley was king. Some of them are fantastic works which deserve wider exposure, including Arthur Wilkinson's Three Rivers Fantasy (used by Tyne Tees for decades) and Westward Ho! by Hastings Mann, used by Westward during the 1960s. I've only heard the last 30 seconds of the latter, but I'd like to hear the rest as word of mouth is that it's a good'un. Anyone got a recording sitting around?
Auntie Beeb had no need for authority announcements, of course. She was authoritative enough by herself, and didn't need permission from some upstart Authority to be on the air. With no regulatory requirement to use them, the BBC was one of the first broadcasters to drop television startup sequences once television sets became good enough to reliably need less than an hour to settle down into providing a stable picture, instead bringing the network up with testcard and (if they were feeling adventurous) maybe a bit of in-vision CEEFAX. Now that broadcasting's a 24-hour business and the regulatory requirements for ITV have been dropped, startup sequences are a thing of the past on British television. I suspect it's only because of the number of complaints they'd get if they dropped it that Radio 4 still play their own medley of British folk tunes every morning between the end of the overnight sustaining service (a feed of the World Service) and the start of Radio 4 for the day. The Radio 4 UK Theme (for that is its name) was arranged by Fritz Spiegl, and apart from that little is known about it. It's well worth a listen at least for the curiosity value if you happen to be up early, as it's the last of the great startup medleys and a little piece of broadcasting history.
While brutally filleting my CD collection yesterday looking for things to file under "awful stuff, sell" (see yesterday's entry or just go straight to eBay and get bidding before telling all your friends and getting me lots of hits - hey, it's funnier than a guy in a dress, I promise) there were a few things that I could quite simply not part with despite being their pretty abysmal.
There was the Chipmunks album, for instance. There was also Sixty Shades of Green - The Non-Stop Irish Ceilidh Party Mix. Both of these were presents, and despite their marketable dreadfulness it would be a terrible insult to those who gave them to me to simply discard them in a job lot of tat. And anyway, I need to keep those in reserve in case of alien invasion - even if Slim Whitman doesn't do the trick like in Mars Attacks, this stuff will definitely cause their huge alien heads to explode.
The final disc I should have really thrown in the box but didn't was This Is Eurovision, a compilation of "classic" tracks from the Song Contest That Dare Not Speak Its Name. I just couldn't bring myself to ditch it. Sure, just about all the songs on there are pap. Most of them are cheesy. But they're all tributes to the utterly inexplicable longevity of the thing and the shamelessness of some of the artists involved, whether it's Cliff Richard or Bucks Fizz or, god help us, Celine Bloody Dion. Even in this world of cynicism, bloodshed and pain it's still good to hear that all these woes can be swept away by simply singing "Ding-a-dong".
It's the Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday. I can't wait. Having heard a few clips from the entries earlier (you can take a listen on the contest website as long as you're not using a Mac, a Linux box or anything else that doesn't have the latest version of Happy Proprietary Windows Media Player) I find myself agreeing with Terry Wogan that the UK's entry is pretty damn strong, but there's also the small matter of political voting and that whole Iraq thing. We shall see.
Well, it's happened again. I turned away for a couple of years and a technology matured while I wasn't looking. Digital audio broadcasting (DAB) has been around for getting on for a decade (we had a test receiver in the TOC for monitoring the DAB service when I was at the BBC) but in the early years the problem was that receiver chipsets were expensive. This made receivers expensive as well, and the first commercial DAB receivers (if I remember it may have been a Blaupunkt car radio that got there first) had a very limited takeup. Then it became an audiophile's toy as domestic component tuners became available, before a couple of years ago the Pure EVOKE-1 appeared and became the first mass-market portable DAB radio. I bought one of these delightful toys for my parents last Christmas and it was the best-received present I've given anyone in years - the familiar user interface (hey, it's a radio), easy channel selection, increased channel line-up, lack of interference and fantastic audio makes it an instant hit.
Now, Pure have gone one further with the impending introduction of the Legato mini system. The usual mini system features, only in a seriously elegant box and with the addition of DAB and - I swear I am not making this up - the ability to pause and rewind radio with a 20-40 minute buffer depending on the bitrate of the programme concerned. I think it'll be a winner. I'm lusting after one myself, but unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) it's not yet available - it'll be summer before it reaches the shops. You see, I'm about to move into a new flat, and my existing stereo is frankly knackered (most of the time when asked to play a CD it just makes a nasty grinding noise), so I could actually justify buying one...
While television has had its own loud and brash digital revolution, radio has quietly gone digital as well, and at a fraction of the cost of the enormous amounts spent on digital television. As a result, people are once again remembering that radio's there. Seems to me that the future of radio's just getting brighter by the day.
There are plenty of sites out there with lots of pictures of television test cards. Most of them are "Hey, here are some pictures of testcards!"-type places with very little technical information on how they work and what makes a good test card. This is, of course, something in which most people quite rightly have no interest, but the geek in me finds such things fascinating.
This is why I was delighted (in a geeky kind of way) to find this page a while ago. While some people have long thought that George Hersee's classic Test Card F was about as perfect a test signal as it was possible to produce using a bunch of lines, some colours and a girl playing noughts and crosses, the digital revolution has changed this. The author worked with the BBC R&D department to update F for the digital age, and his detailed account of the pitfalls and problems encountered in creating both a standard 4:3 version (Test Card J) and, more complicatedly, a widescreen version (Test Card W) makes very interesting reading.
Probably not interesting for everyone, but certainly interesting reading for anyone who wants to know how it's possible to improve on perfection. While the subject matter is obviously pretty technical the broad outlines are easily grasped even if you don't know what a frequency grating's for and don't care whether you have a little chrom/lum delay. It's just a shame that as broadcasting is now a 24 hour business it'll be very, very rare to see these spanky new testcards in the wild.
Having observed a family earlier today in which one of the children appeared to be called "Bailey" (okay, that's possibly a surname, but I didn't think it was a first name) I came to the conclusion that the name had to have come from the Shipping Forecast area of the same name. This made me wonder what other shipping areas could provide parents with appropriate names for their children.
While packing my bags before checking out of a hotel in Eureka, Nevada I turned on the television for some background noise only to be harangued by a booming, echoing voice talking at length about faith and obedience. The owner of this voice was onscreen in a rarely-changing close-up against a black background, wearing a severe suit and male-pattern baldness. It looked like something from Nineteen Eighty-Four and took me a moment to realise that this was the NBC affiliate station in Salt Lake City, Utah. The riveting Saturday morning programming was the General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
As it turned out this was one of the most exciting things I saw on television in the USA, where channel surfing is a way of life. It's possible that I've been spoiled by growing up with the BBC and Channel 4, but it was starkly obvious that turning on the television out there is something to do only when there really is nothing else to do.
Programming comes in five-minute bites before breaking for even more commercials, and the commercials aren't worth watching either. This means that the viewing experience is dictated by the ability to split programmes into bite-size chunks. The average news programme takes the form of one item, followed by a brief plug for what's coming up after the break, commercials, welcome back, next item, rinse and repeat.. it's all incredibly frustrating from the viewer's point of view. I could feel my attention span shrinking as I watched, as before a programme ever got going it was time to break, yet again, for commercials. Under these conditions, getting to the end of a half-hour programme became an exercise in endurance akin to watching Gone With The Wind from start to finish without a toilet break after drinking 3 pints of beer.
While I'm sure there are centres of excellence and quality in broadcasting in the US, the absolute, overriding concern in the commercial sector is delivering the largest number of audience eyes to advertisers. What this means is that programming rarely challenges either the viewer or the industry (you don't want anything that might annoy advertisers enough for them to withdraw their business), with the result that 99.99% of network output is repetitive, bland pap. Public broadcasting scrabbles around for funding through voluntary donations and government grants but still manages to produce some of the highest-quality programming as well as large amounts of children's programming and British imports.
There are good bits buried in the murk, of course. I was delighted to discover TechTV, a channel aimed at, well, techies which cheerfully tells it like it is. I spent a happy half hour watching a programme about how people who were considered to be nerds at high school survived their teenage years (I've seen enough John Hughes movies to be very glad I never had to go through that stuff) and came away wishing it was available in Europe.
As far as everything else was concerned, it's probably most telling that after the first few days I only turned the television on once or twice, despite having lots of hotel rooms to hang around in feeling bored.
