Question of the week:does Sky Arts make Sky less evil?

5 January 2011 Rob Buckley UK TV 3 Comments

So a little while ago, I asked if Sky was evil. Now, there is one obvious possible exception to this question: Sky Arts. If you’re the kind of person who wonders where all the opera, dance and highbrow music programmes have gone to; if you want to know which UK broadcaster would show In Treatment; if you want to know who covers events like The Theatre Festival, has documentaries on the likes of the Birmingham Royal Ballet; and shows concerts by bands such as Queen and Thin Lizzy, it turns out Sky Arts 1 and 2 (also available in HD) are the places to go. Not even the Beeb is doing much of that, and it’ll only cost you a quid a month on top of your basic Sky subscription to get them, if you don’t already have the Style & Culture Pack.

So this week’s question is:

Does Sky Arts redeem Sky? Does it make Sky “not evil”? Or does the fact it’s a separate channel mean that all the other channels are lowbrown and it’s merely a beard that Sky can point to whenever anyone accuses it of being bereft of cultural value?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog

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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