BBC4 controller wants longer hours

25 January 2006 Rob Buckley UK TV 8 Comments

Good news, fans of Nigerian crochet and Swedish Renaissance painting: BBC4 wants to broadcast for longer each day!

I jest. BBC4 has been getting much better of late. But although the ratio between the absolute crackers and the mind-numbers may be at an all-time high, it’s still got some way to go before it achieves the same quality ratio as More4, which is still the holder of the crown for “ best channel for thinking people who don’t have a degree in Pretension, minoring in tribal art”.

More4 does have a slight advantage though. It just imports all its good stuff, while BBC4 rolls its own. More4’s home-produced output, such as The Last Word, would very much rate as “cruel and unusual punishments” if shown to US prison inmates, so it shouldn’t sit on its laurels.

So let’s give a possible BBC4 expansion into longer hours a cautious welcome and hope we don’t have to face too many programmes hosted by Tyler Brûlé or (and I kid you not) documentaries about Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-born, two-fingered Gypsy jazz guitar legend.

Jazz. Ugh.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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