BBC4 to no longer commission new content.
Hopefully SkyArts will fill the void – although like a lot of Sky content it is either repeats or sourced from the big companies.
And now they have to compete with their own SkyDocumentaries channel.
BT are dipping their toes in original music docs with the Madness film Before We Was We on 1st May
(I can’t get BT so will have to wait and see if it’s on BBC4 (unlikely by the sound of it) or SkyArts (possibly?)
Knee-jerk reaction above – it’s not just Music. What of the History, Science, other minority subjects (like Maps or Traffic Cones) – where’s the outlet for that?
I’m almost annoyed …
Shame about BBC4 but given the argument about the
Licence fee, it’s hardly surprising.
While a lot of people hate Sky because of its Murdoch heritage,
its arts and documentary coverage continues to be first rate.
Netflix need to take over this space as well.
I love the F1 documentary series. They can do this.
Seconded – a fine series indeed
I wonder if this is a repeat of what they did with the threat to shut down 6 Music?
They threaten to downgrade it, in order to gauge whether licence-payers are prepared to fight for it and perhaps they can increase it’s profile in the process so that they won’t need to.
But if that ploy fails, there must be loads of good stuff in the BBC archives that’s not seen the light of day in recent years.
The way things are going, hard to see BBC being viable as a commissioning powerhouse.
They are, however, Already starting to show some excellent repeats – Between the Lines and Reggie Perrin to name but two.
Despite their criminal wiping of video taped shows up until as late as the early 70s, the BBC still has an enormous amount of stuff they could be showing.
Off the top of my head, Our Friends in the North would be an excellent example of a show that’s long overdue an outing on national TV. Other suggestions would make a good thread on its own….
Theme nights a la this week’s Fleetwood Mac Friday would also be a good way of using an archive which, let’s not forget, licence payers have already paid for several times over.
OFITN is on Britbox, so is unlikely to be shown on BBC4.
Assuming the BBC commissioned, paid for and still owns shows like OFITN, they can presumably show them where and when they like.
Big potential problem for Britbox is that it’s a subscription service and UK-based licence fee holders who paid for the service’s BBC content are being asked to pay to pay to watch shows all over again.
FWIW, BB is currently only available in the UK and North America. Not sure if its planned launch in Australia ever happened and cannot understand why they didn’t sort out possible rights issues and offer the service across the EU and Asia
I don’t think the “paying again” argument holds. I was a license holder when the BBC made Fawlty Towers – I don’t think that gives me the right to watch it for free at any point in the future.
It is live in Australia, and has been for a few months.
@jaygee
I did catch one episode of Reggie Perrin (possibly the best comedy ever..) last week or so. Have all the series been shown recently?
I am ashamed to say that given how highly everyone speaks of it, I have never actually seen it myself.
When it was first on in the late 70s, I didn’t have a TV and until I saw it was on BBC4 the other day when this thread started, I’ve never been in a place where it’s been on.
Not seen it since the original broadcast but if memory serves, the first series was great, the second rather less so.
Series 2 was the Grot Shops – inspired and absurd in equal measure. All the catchphrases and mannerisms were rolled out, but this time in a different context.
Series 3 lacked a bit – the concept was good, but the delivery felt a bit lazy and “seen it all before”. Stil great, but not as great as before.
And the Martin Clunes re-make? What were the BBC thinking?
I really don’t think it has worn well, particularly as it is currently being shown immediately after a rerun of series 1 of Yes Minister, which is absolutely timeless, magnificent and still totally relevant.
You’re probably right.
I remember thinking the 3rd series was certainly a bridge too far.
That said, I have fond memories of Friday evenings where, if memory serves, the 2nd series was repeated on BBC2 between Pot Black and Crown Green Bowling (or was it One Man and His Dog?).
I thought Reggie Perrin was still funny, but I think the last few episodes dropped off. I’d forgotten that he decided to go back to his wife almost straight away, I thought it came in a later series. It undercut the idea of him throwing everything away and trying a new life.
Like a lot of comedy, it captures the details of the time perhaps more than serious drama- he is only 46, but has two children in their twenties, grandchildren and a wife who doesn’t go out to work. Not typical middle-class life now. The children would be about 14 or 15, if that, and both he and his wife would have full-time jobs to buy a house like that in suburban London, if they could afford it at all.
I’ll keep watching if only to to see the funniest scene, which I still remember, where Jimmy talks about his secret army plan ( which also reflected something about the times) with a brilliant punch line.
I’ve just remembered that they made a further series called the Legacy of Reginald Perrin in the mid-1990s.
Many of the original cast were onboard but not Rossiter who had of course died by then. Remember that?
Huge publicity at the time, completely forgotten by the following Thursday.
It had the air of remaking The Italian Job or Thunderbirds or The Prisoner about it… you can, but why would you?
I didn’t get where I am today by watching the Martin Clunes remake.
FWIIW I would love to see the 2001 series
In a land of plenty given a showing. I don’t think it has been repeated since the original broadcast. One of my all time favourite TV series.
Also, a repeat showing of Tutti Frutti would go down well in my house.
Neither of these are anywhere to be seen on Britbox.
I think they did a repeat showing of Tutti Frutti, but luckily it came out on DVD.
Your Cheating Heart (also John Byrne) was good too. Extra points for Eddie Reader as a grumpy waitress.
Eddi did the soundtrack, too.
I was supposed to be going to see her in October.
Playing live in a professional capacity, I hasten to add. She hadn’t invited me for tea. Again.
Which reminds me, I must watch Tutti Frutti again. It is absolutely superb.
The DVD release was stalled for many years, I assume because it needed clearance for the title track. Ours came with a set of cards of the characters, which we already had as they were in Byrne’s book of the series. Very, very talented chap.
Never heard of ALOP before but rates very high on IMdB and is on YT so I shall give it a go at some point. Thanks for the heads up
Another vote for Land of Plenty, perhaps the great Robert Pugh’s finest hour.
Anybody remember Tony Marchant’s Holding On? 1998ish, outstanding cast and seemed to speak to what a confused place the UK was in the nineties. Repeat it!
The lack of repeats or availability on other platforms is often a rights issue. Someone refusing to agree – and it seems a lot of people have to say yes.
True.
Tony Hancock’s brother Roger (an agent and at some point probably getting 15% of TH’s estate) blocked the BBC from re-broadcasting the lad’s TV shows for many, many years
Same with Whatever Happened To The Likely lads. It was kept off air for many years because James Bolam refused permission for it to be shown.
Was that ever resolved? I don’t recall seeing repeats on BBC (other than the film) but it has been aired on UK Gold. Maybe the situation is different with satellite TV.
Martin Shaw refused his permission for repeats of The Professionals on ITV. He did eventually agree to ITV4 showings when he was made aware of financial difficulties faced by Gordon Jackson’s family
Yes WHTTLL has been shown on BBC and released on DVD which was also a sticking point for a while.
In a bizarre twist, I seem to remember sitting back waiting for a repeat of “Not Only But Also” on some special anniversary for the BBC only for it, at the last minute, being replaced with the “Likely Lads” episode about the French girl.
I think that might have had something to do with Peter Cook or Dudley Moore objecting to its reshowing.
It was like being told “there’s no chocolate ice cream but we’ve got raspberry ripple.” Triffic, bring it on!
Read somewhere that James Bolam took umbrage with Rodney Bewes when the latter let slip that JB and his wife, Susan Jameson, were expecting a child. Given that Bewes didn’t have anywhere near the post-Likely Lads success that Bolam had and obviously needed the residuals a lot more, JB’s vetoing of reruns and reissues seems spiteful in the extreme.
Hello there, Bob. I’d offer you a beer but I’ve only got six cans left.
How life sometimes imitates art.
It’s the first time this evening I’ve known what he’s got in his hand.
Yes, RB mentioned it in an interview just after his wife had given birth to triplets. JB is notoriously extremely protective of his family’s privacy, and regarded it as an unacceptable intrusion.
Almost everyone in the credits, apart from BBC staffers, has to be paid a repeat fee. Often the contact details for them is not stored with the film/tape but on a bit of paper stored elsewhere in the Beeb’s archives. Often their details can’t be found or are out of date.
Unless everyone who needs to be paid can be paid, the show can’t go on.
When I was at the Beeb, someone was employed solely to hunt for the missing paperwork relating to Spike Milligan’s Q.
You’d think they would have a fund, named perhaps after the Producer that gets credited when someone wants nothing to do with their creation, into which the requisite share of the proceeds could be paid when a person’s details aren’t available. Anyone believing they ought to have had the cash can just make a claim and provide their credentials, otherwise the dosh just stays in the kitty. Sorted.
You would think so, but the BBC is so top heavy with middle managers now that it takes four committees three years to work out which brand of coffee to stock in the canteen
Where do I apply for the job as DG? I’ll sort the bastards out.
“Middle-heavy”, surely. I’m a bit that way meself.
I saw the Tina Turner documentary on Sky this week and thought it was excellent..The BBC can still make good documentaries- the Jackie Charlton one this week was very poignant and a great portrayal of his life.
I really want to see the Linda Ronstadt one butcouldnt find it anywhere the last time I looked
while excellent and shown on BBC2, FJC was not made by the Beeb
During the pandemic the BBC have been showing/repeating bought-in dramas and plonking that HBO-style BBC Drama logo on the beginning as if actually making the programme was anything to do with them. Perhaps they’ll do the same with doccos and hope nobody notices.
Always plenty of money for 30,000 years of the f***ing One Show though, I notice.
Alex Jones puts TOS’s baffling longevity down to a vast conspiracy whose insubstantial wholesome froth penetrates every corner of the British establishment.
Yes, she is intensely annoying.
Bloody hell, Alex Jones winds me up something rotten. I’m sure she’s a lovely person and I can’t blame her for making the most of her break, but jeez did she luck out getting that gig.
All very disappointing – BBC4 has been responsible for some great commissions over the years and in an era when people can access archive stuff via iplayer it’s hard to see the point of an ‘archive’ channel. They seem to be keeping the commitment to present live performance (Proms, Glastonbury etc) and supposedly BBC2’s commissioning budget for arts and music is being doubled, so it’s not all bad. But this still feels like death by a thousand cuts and another politically motivated step towards the demise of the license fee and the BBC.
They have also flip-flopped BBC THREE, live channel to iPlayer only and now back to a live channel, hence the gradual destruction of FOUR.
Ultimately, younger people constitute the audience the BBC hopes (and probably prays) will be the future license payers who fund its continued existence. As a result, one can understand its obsession with “content that engages the youth demographic” as the John Birt clones who now run its channels would doubtless say.
Sadly, as far back as the broadcaster’s molasses-like creation of Radio One to counter the likes of Radio Caroline, it’s been clear that the Beeb has never really understood the wants and needs of younger viewers/listeners. And this response remember came in the days when the institution was creativity- rather than middle-management-driven.
The Beeb was even slower to start giving what the bean counters probably referred to as “popular music” its fair share of time in the TV schedules.
While I doubt they’ll ever be published, would love to see the audience figures since BBC3 was moved online. I would bet my shirt that they show a decline and reflect a frantic attempt to claw back audience members who’ve abandoned the BBC because they feel – rightly or wrongly – it has nothing to offer them.
The BBC has never understood the needs of younger viewers and listeners? Eh?
Apart from Jackanory, Blue Peter, Newsround, Swap Shop, Byker Grove / Grange Hill, Vision On, Tracey Beaker, Playshcool, The Demon Headmaster etc etc.
They do face a struggle with younger viewer once they reach their teens, but that’s true of all platforms. They certainly find it harder now to be creative because of the political agenda of the “free” press and successive Tory govt’s who hand them a kicking at every available opporunity. They can’t take the risks they used to.
Wasn’t talking about children, I was talking about older kids as the repeated mentions of music in the post made pretty clear.
Clearly, your reference to “younger” and “viewers” confused me.
Sky Arse has broadcast several docs recently that I’d normally expect to be on BBC4 – the Style Council Doc, the excellent King Rocker, Teenage Superstars the Scottish Indie doc and several others so not surprised the days of the great BBC4 music doc are over. And you can be sure that Music docs won’t be high on the list for repeats because of the never-ending idiocy of the music publishing industry.
Case in point – Sky Arse recently broadcast “Blitzed” their New Romantic doc . I gave up after a few mins as the music was some rinky dink shit that some 12 year old had done on a laptop to emulate “the 80s” because they couldn’t clear any actual music for the documentary. (If you’ve ever seen one of those cheapo Beatles DVDs with John Shuttleworth Merseybeat soundtrack you’ll know what I mean).
So the real enemies of music documentary whether it’s on Sky, BBC, Netflix or YouTube are the deluded, greedy cultural vandals who own the rights to the copyrights of music. It beggars belief – “what that? you’re going to broadcast a film on a mainstream TV channel and endlessly repeat it and that might encourage people to listen to Visage or early Ultravox and maintain their cache and add value to our catalogue? Nah…fuck off we want stupid amounts of cash now and again if you want to repeat it” – this is also the reason that in spite of David Hepworth’s refrain that “everything is on YouTube forever” everything musical is vanishing from YouTube at great speed.
You’re bang on the money about the short-term greed and long-term stupidity of rights owners, but that’s sadly always been true of pretty much everyone involved in the business side of the music biz.
A long time ago, I saw the wisdom of using an app/program such as Clip Grab to archive songs/videos i thought i might replay often enough to justify the disc space they ate up.
That’s so right, I too have never understood why it should be the case.
If you are playing say, Visage, you’re not playing ALL of it anyway, so the viewer will have to go off to buy the record to hear it in its entirety.
Even more pertinent, I’d have thought, if you’re talking about 12” versions.
This idea that everything is available is, as David Hepworth rightly asserts, tosh, and that number will recede year on year.
If an Eddie Cochran b-side is attracting 0.1% of the streaming numbers of Red Red Wine by UB40 it doesn’t take a genius to work out which will still be available to stream in ten years time.
And, as as I’ve said before, good luck to the historian of the year 2121 because there will be significantly less, and weaker, material than I have to hand when writing about 1921.
When Tarantino made Jackie Brown, he had to play down how heavily featured the song Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time would be because if the publishers found out it would become unaffordable. That’s for a Tarantino sized budget. The alternative could have been not using it and getting nothing.
I saw an interview with Poly Styrene’s daughter about the I Am A Cliché doc. They did not have the money to pay for original footage. Much as I loved X-Ray Spex, the idea that holding out for a huge sum for when Hollywood gets around to making a documentary about X-Ray Spex is just bad business.
As my Mum and others of her generation (gawd love ’em) used to say 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing
Just finding out who owns such artifacts can be an expensive business, never mind obtaining permission to use them.
Lots of iffy contracts signed in the music biz back then. Lots of rights signed away for pittances.
Lots of sharks now, buying up packages of rights in the creative sector with no knowledge of or interest in what a lot of it is and only motivated by greed.
On the subject of things I’d like to see repeated, I remember loving The Monocled Mutineer when it was on. Possible the best thing I have ever seen Paul McGann in. I’d love that to get repeated.
Assuming it’s not been emergoed from the Terrestrial channels as a result of being shown on Britbox, you can pick up MM for less than a fiver on AUK
The MM was hugely controversh at the time, perhaps explaining why Bleasdale’s next big project (GBH) was done at C4.
What, incidentally, happened to him?
The list of shows that seem to have just disappeared and could do with a rerun, many of which have already been mentioned.
I would add A Very Peculiar Practice, The Crow Road, and Taking Over The Asylum.
Re: A Very Peculiar Practice
The inimitable Graham Crowden as Jock McCannon (“The Sick University!”)
Marvellous.
Another vote for AVPP.
Graham Crowden was always excellent in those slightly mad/unhinged roles – never forget his blink and you’ll miss it cameo as a skydiver in Lindsey Anderson’s O Lucky Man
As suggested repeats seems to be worth a thread on its own, I’ll go and start a replacement
The original remit for the Beeb was to inform, educate and entertain.
Given the shit (This is My House!, I Hear your Voice, Bank Balance to name just three) they’re putting on BBC1 in a pointless chase for ratings, it’s no wonder there’s no money to channel into making worthwhile shows on Beeb4.
Poor old dinner jacketed and bow tied-Lord Reith must be spinning in his grave.
Meet the Khans…. I mean really? They’re spending our money on a shitey copy of the Jenners/Kardashian franchises. Great.
I agree that there’s very little worth watching at the moment but production was shut down for nearly a year so there’s bound to be even less content than usual.
@davebigpicture
Agree 100% about the problems with the shutdown.
My point was more about the Beeb’s mad determination to go head-to-head ratings war with the ITV channels in a race to the bottom.
While the broadcaster is involved in a constant struggle to keep the license fee, it’s sad to see it turning out the same sort of kak that fills the ITV schedules night after night.
If the cost of producing more jaw-droppingly good docs and dramas such as Once Upon a Time in Iraq or A very English Scandal was a few less shows like Mrs Brown’s Boys, I know which I’d be voting for.
They need the ratings as part of the funding war. Otherwise low audience figures becomes the immediate justification for yet more cuts. That’s why the anti Auntie strategy shifted to forcing salary disclosure knowing it would drive talent out, in the expectation that this would – along with funding cuts – push the ratings down.
The Beeb is still pretty much hitting it’s remit to inform, educate and entertain. It has the most watched news, it’s stepped up and done a great job during the pandemic so support home schooling (so I’m told), and the whilst some of their output makes me want to hurl, the wider viewing figures show people tune in.
On the flip side of the coin, there are plenty of people who use the BBC’s chase for ratings as an argument to say well why don’t they just go commercial and have done with it.
Same applies to the salary argument.
People like me were watching MOTD long before the grossly overpaid Gary Lineker was host and assuming the BBC survives in its present form (and I hope it does), we’ll still be watching the show long after he’s gone.