Now, I try to stay abreast of world TV. True, my first love is US TV and when I’m not watching that, I’m usually watching British TV. But I do try to sample the wares of other countries when I can, including Canada, France and very, very briefly Australia. I’ve even been known to watch German TV.
But it’s not exactly my speciality. So let me introduce to you Thierry Attard, who seems to me to be a lot better at looking at continental European TV than I am, with French TV being one of his specialities. Want to know how the French and Greek remakes of ITV’s Doc Martin are going? He’s your man. Want to know TF1’s format-acquisition strategy for drama? Look no further.
And he writes in English, which is helpful. So add him to your bookmarks, RSS feed, smoke-signal generator or whatever it is you use to read t’Internet forthwith.
Remember TV when you were kid, eh? Just four channels or maybe just three, full of programmes that don’t exist any more. Maybe they were even black and white rather than colour. Great, wasn’t it?
Of course, I’m not just talking about nostalgia for a TV show or TV shows that have long been cancelled and forgotten about, shows that haven’t been imitated or copied since – or maybe copied ad infinitum to lesser and lesser effect. There were wholly different ways of doing TV back in the old days.
Remember the variety show? The shows that allowed people to criticise what they’d seen on TV, like Points of View, Right To Reply and Open Air? How about the "long running viewer competition" like Puzzle Trail, in which viewers would get more and more clues each week until someone got the right answer? Did you know ITV once even broadcast a play performed in ancient Greek?
Not these days. Doesn’t happen.
So this week’s question is broad:
What aspect of old television would you bring back?
My choice would be the old Open University programmes. For the uninitiated, the Open University is a UK university that lets people work towards degree remotely from their own homes at their own pace. Nowadays, with the advent of the Internet, DVDs, etc, tuition is largely done through other media, but for a few decades, the BBC used to broadcast Open University TV programmes late at night and early in the morning on weekdays, and for a big chunk of the mornings on BBC2 at the weekends.
Imagine that: being able to watch university-grade lectures on dozens of subjects for free in the comfort of your own home. Watch a half hour social studies programme on the tension between deterrence and justice in criminal sentencing, then a geography programme about malnutrition in India, then a mathematics programme about non-Euclidean geometry, one after another.
Look, here’s one about velocity diagrams!
I was young, I should have been watching Going Live: I watched the Open University instead, and I’d like it back, please. How about you?
Well, it was Toby who won at Top Trumps last week when he played his Captain Marvel… oh hang on, wrong game. Anyway, he got the winning 10 points, five points to everyone else… ooh, would you look at that! SK has overtaken Marie to take second place!
Rullsenberg: 245
SK: 200
Marie: 195
Toby: 180
Electric Dragon: 115
Lisa G, Jane Henry: 55
theriverlady: 35
Virpi: 30
Janice: 25
Hebbie: 20
Joe B: 15
whoficwriter, Jeri: 10
kallan: 5
Got a picture of David Tennant sitting, lying down or in some indeterminate state in between? Then leave a link to it below or email me and if it’s judged suitable and doesn’t obviously infringe copyright, it will appear in the Sitting Tennant gallery. Don’t forget to include your name in the filename so I don’t get mixed up about who sent it to me.
The best pic in the stash each week will appear on Tuesday and get ten points; the runners up will appear on Friday (one per person who sends one in) and get five points.
You can also enter the witty and amusing captions league table by commenting on Tuesday’s Sitting Tennant photo, the best caption getting 10 points, everyone who contributes getting five points.
