My old alma mater, Televisual magazine, has its Intelligent TV Festival running today. Biggest news so far, according to the Media Guardian, is that the BBC is going to scale back on three- to four-part factual series in favour of longer-running pre-watershed documentaries. Which is nice.
More interestingly, from the same article, the Beeb is starting to regret cancelling Timewatch and other ‘strand’ shows:
“There was a period about five years ago when we lost a lot of strand titles,” Ms Benson said. “I do think it is a very good question – should we actually have a rethink about bringing back strand titles for documentaries?”
Doctor Who‘s back. The Price is Right is coming back. All sorts of long-forgotten stars, such as Noel Edmonds, are cropping up again. Commissioners are clearly starting to realise that maybe the old days weren’t so bad after all.
On the subject of which, this month’s Televisual has an interview with Russell T Davies and one of the guys down The Mill about the effects work on Doctor Who. If I were still there, it would have been me doing that and I’d have just got back from NAB in Las Vegas. Sigh. A la recherche du temps perdu and all that…
