The problem with the government “merely” being the conduit of funding is that it puts them in charge. Like I said, what happens to the BBC if the government decides that in this economy with these fuel prices the enforcement vans are just not worth the trouble? BBC funding will drop through the floor as very quickly only the honest people will pay the tax (which might be a higher percentage in England than the US but still will be a drop), that’s all the government has to do to exercise total control over the BBC. And that is the nature of government, to increase its own power, and to never give any back.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t. Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
But how you play the hand is everything. One of the big name poker players in the 80s when discussing the game would do a “demo” where he’d play somebody and never look at his cards. He always said it was because what you thought of your cards was much more important to his victory than anything in his hand. Again look at the enforcement vans that get the BBC funding. Any low level functionary in the UK government could “decide” to lower the priority of those vans and dramatically change life for the BBC, it doesn’t have to be a high level government decision, anybody in the budget office deciding which department gets how much money for transportation can effect this change. Sure they might get overridden eventually by somebody in charge, but it’ll be months before anybody figures out what the heck is going on. That’s why they say secretaries run the office, one less or more 0 on one form can change everything, it’s the old “for the want of a nail the horse was lost” and knowing who controls the nail allotment.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
That’s how fandom is. They focus on what they don’t like and complain constantly. There’s still people whining about Farscape being canceled, that was 3 or 4 owners of the network ago, but they still hold it against the network today. So from where you’re sitting you get to hear about all the “non-SF”, because that’s all fandom talks about.
And what happens if the US Government decides that a "fairness" doctrine needs to be implemented on Talk Radio? Or that advertising on TV should be taxed? The government has all manner of means to influence and control. Just because it has some connection with the purse strings doesn't make it more or less likely.
In all my fifty years I have never seen a detection van. Are such things possible anyway? How can a van detect the passive reception of radio signals? The truth is its all done by a list of names on a big computer. If you are on that list and havent paid, they will come and find you.
you might have a point IF the BBC produced a higher general level of quality than commercial TV. But it doesn’t.
Yes it does.
Whether it’s purely commercial like most of the US, charity funded like our PBS, or tax funded like the BBC, 99% of what winds up on TV is crap. Because one way or the other they’re still pandering to the taste of the average person (even if it’s a minority subsection of the average person) and the average person is a bleeding idiot that needs to be told not to put their extension ladder in cow poo (actual warning label you can find on ladders in the hardware store). As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people the medium will continue to produce crap, and the path of funding only nuances the goal, it doesn’t change it.
Absolutely so. But there you have the nub of it. "As long as the goal is to get an audience of average people.." But the BBC doesn't have that goal. They never have had. Because it is not dependent on ratings for its income, the pressure to produce cheap tat is nowhere near as strong. That's not to say ratings are of no importance to the Beeb. If the ratings fall very low then people will start asking why we need a public televisual service! But even so, it is much easier for the BBC to experiment and try our new things, and yes...80%+ won't work. But at least they have been given a go. Do you think any Commercial channel would have ever commissioned something like "Monty Python" in the early seventies? Or adapt Rober Graves' book "I Claudius", widely considered to be impossible to film, in the late seventies? Or produce televised versions of the complete works of Shakespeare, four to six plays a year, over a decade? Now, none of those examples might float your boat personally, but our society and out culture is all the better for all of them.
Actually I think it’s the other way around. I think when it comes to characterization they got away with more 30 or 40 years ago. They can show a hell of a lot more skin today, but subject matters have tightened up. One of the deep cable channels had a program about 8 years ago where they brought the heads of entertainment for he big 3 in to discuss how TV works and how it’s changed. For one segment they did “elevator pitches” for popular well regarded 70s TV shows, they didn’t mention the show though everybody always figured out what it was, they just rattled off the 30 second version of the subject, like “sit-com in a front line war hospital”. All three guys said over and over they could never show these shows: MASH, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and a handful of other shows considered classics of TV today. In the modern PC world you can’t have a war sit-com, you can’t have a main character that’s a racist, you can’t have a main character that goes to the porn theater every episode.
Agreed, the world has worstened. Censorship of sex and bad language has slackened considerably, while censorship of political viewpoints has been tightened.
Incidentally, both "All in the Family" and "Sandford and Son" are US adaptions of BBC shows.
I never had a hard time following the BSG storyline. And I wouldn’t say it was all nay-saying, it was human flaws bouncing off of each other, but they were always trying to do the right thing, problem is not everybody really knew what it was. It was a classic example of nobody being a villain in their own story. From their perspective everybody was a hero doing what was necessary, it was up to the audience to decide who was wrong. And it should have been relentlessly dark, when your story STARTS with a massive multi-planetary genocide that reduces the human population to a non-genetically survivable number it’s going to be a dark story. The Cylons weren’t necessarily one step ahead, and certainly weren’t at the end, the big advantage the Cylons had was a defined goal, the humans spent most of the series confused and pathless, the Cylons knew from the start what they wanted to accomplish and how. People with a goal will always beat the aimless wanderers. Nobody was flagellated for thinking for themselves, they just got to face the consequences of not thinking it through to the end. There was a lot of consequences in the show, a lot of the show was built around what happens after the quick fix stops working.
There's nothing wrong with being dark. There's nothing wrong with exploring the failings of Human beings. What's wrong is when you ONLY do that. I don't like shows which basically rubbish Humanity. I accept we are a fallen sinful race, but I gravitate to the "flawed masterpiece" idea myself. This anti-Humanity idea is very blatant these days - its all derived from this neo-pagan Gaia nonsense. It gets its attraction from reversing the traditional good and bad - shows where vampires are the heroes and Humans are the savages. Where Indians are noble and peaceful and the cowboys are ruthless and greedy. There was a shocking amount of moral equivalence BS in BSG too. "Don't call us toasters - its racist and mean and unworthy" - moral lessons from the machines that just attempted to commit genocide on the Human Race. It was all very interesting and enlightening for a while, but there's only so much of that stuff a man can take.