The worst BBC Christmas ever
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There has been a lot said about trends which have been accelerated by coronavirus. All kinds of failing institutions have blamed Covid-19 for what’s happened to them over the past year: British universities, airlines, newspapers and many more. All had systemic problems and coronavirus just sped up the process.
The latest example is British terrestrial television. Recently I bought the Christmas issue of the Radio Times or as they call it “the legendary double issue”. In a depressing year this was one of the most depressing things I have seen. Let’s start with Christmas Eve. BBC1 offers a mix of repeats and game shows. Among the repeats there’s Gavin and Stacey “in last year’s special”, a “celebration” of Have I Got 30 Years for You and a repeat of the previous Saturday’s The Two Ronnies Christmas Sketchbook. Who knows how many times those sketches have been warmed up?
BBC2 has The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, The Two Ronnies Sketchbook (sound familiar?), Michel Roux Jr offers “a festive tasting tour of his favourite restaurants in Bristol”. The one real highlight is an evening of MR James dramatisations and a documentary about MR James, all on BBC2, but when you read the very small print you realise that all three programmes are repeats. BBC4 starts with “Fanny Cradock Cooks for Christmas” and continues with an evening of programmes about Elvis Presley.
Channel 4, which used to be the thinking person’s channel, has The Great Christmas Bake Off, One Night in Hamleys (three comedians “are locked inside the famous toy shop … where they get to run wild, play games, raid the shelves and do all the things they dreamed of doing as kids”). It gets worse on Christmas Day unless you like two hours of Victoria Wood repeats (BBC2), five hours of opera (BBC4), Jeremy Clarkson and Alan Carr’s Epic Game Show.
Much has been said about why young people don’t watch terrestrial TV any more. Is it any wonder? These are two of the biggest nights of the TV year and the five main UK terrestrial channels have basically served up a bucket of cold sick. In the 1970s, BBC1 would offer the original Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show and, more recently, Doctor Who with David Tennant or Matt Smith, Gavin and Stacey, a three-part Sherlock story or (last year) Dracula. All original material, all high-quality comedy and drama. I single out the BBC because year in, year out, they won the ratings battle over Christmas. That’s what most people watched. This year, there is nothing on terrestrial TV over Christmas that I would watch.
Someone at New Broadcasting House should keep this copy of the Christmas Radio Times. One day it will be framed in a museum, marking the end of the BBC as a national institution, the year the BBC became like PBS, CBC in Canada or The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), worthy, publicly funded and largely unwatched.
One word that isn’t in “the legendary double issue” is cheap. All those repeats and game shows, compilations, cheap old Elvis Presley movies cost less than a three-part drama with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman.
Executives will say it’s the fault of coronavirus. How could they film dramas during shutdown? Normal service will be resumed next year. But it won’t. Is coronavirus to blame for the BBC’s decision to endlessly run a mini-documentary with Tom Brook to mark the 40th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder? Or for someone in drama commissioning David Hare to write another terrible four-part drama series or for whoever commissioned the wokish Novels That Shaped Our World?
The mix of cost-cutting and woke politics this year have done for the BBC. They have alienated countless viewers who have fled to Netflix, Amazon and Disney. Next year, how many hardcore news addicts will abandon the BBC for the television news channel GB News? The question is: Will the new Director-General, Tim Davie, have any solutions to this crisis? Will he clear out the voguish leftism of the BBC or find a new revenue stream that will help the BBC take on the cable giants?
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