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| WEEK FIVE Ok... big prediction time... When Christopher Eccleston was promoting his series of Doctor Who, he told Simon Mayo on R5 that the Doctor's character changes after his encounter with the Daleks. I dared then to believe that this was Eccleston code for "I'm not doing a second series", i.e. the Doctor would regenerate after meeting the Daleks. I dared to believe that and I was right! Ha! The only time it ever happened. This week, Matt Smith did the same junket. He let drop to Mayo's successor, Richard Bacon, that the Doctor's character becomes quite different by the end of the series. Consequently, I've popped down to William Hill's and put my house on the notion that Matt Smith will not last a full series as the Doctor. I'm feeling a little more confident about the new series now... As I write, there's only a day to wait! [Oh God... I just saw some clips on the internet. I feel unwell... There's a girl in this fucking fireplace...] Right. That's three months of 2010 down the plug-hole already. You know what that means, kids? That's right! Graphs! Click here to jump to the seasonal analysis. WEEK FOUR Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit's been on B4 recently. There was a time I'd've watched that, but at the moment I'm not in the mood. I'm more in the mood to watch Lipstick On Your Collar, currently doing the rounds again on UKTV Yesterday, but, alas, again, not on Freeview's version of that channel. Instead, I've wallowed in the safety of BBC2, biting my nails in anticipation of the inevitable disappointment that is Easter. It appears that I've not talked about The Bubble yet, this month. It's another vehicle for David Mitchell, really. Only a week after he savagely acknowledged the existence of The Bill in one of his rants (a rant about how The Bill is one of those programmes people neither like or dislike with any sort of passion) this legendary police drama turned soap is getting axed by the ITV. They have taken a programme with consistently respectable though never massively exciting audience figures, fucked it up beyond recognition and dumped it in a later slot, beyond the hammocking powers of the big soaps. There its audience has evaporated and now The Bill can be axed without tears being shed. The Bill was good once, back in the Hollis / Tosh / Burnside / Martella days. That is the way I will choose to remember it. RIP Sun Hill. WEEK THREE First of all, apologies for not being here last week. Margaret was playing up so I had to have her seen to. And in the meantime the webspace was undergoing an upgrade so nobody could put up an apology on my behalf. What did you miss while I was away? A eulogy of ecstatic proportions over Professor-Brian-Cox and his new series: Wonders of the Solar System. Professor-Brian-Cox (or PBC) is the new love of my life, supplanting the now somewhat soiled Lauren Laverne: his cute, friendly, enthusiastic but relaxed and laid-back demeanour is infectiously brilliant and for once he has a decent programme to work with as opposed to some Horizon-tal horse-shit. He's lovely, like an adorable little puppy. I watched In The Loop the other week too. It was ok but not as good as The Thick of It. Too wide. For the unaware among you, this website comes to you from the misplaced heart of darkest South Yorkshire in a place called Dinnington. Dinnington is getting an awful lot of exposure at the moment. Sue Perkins keeps turning up, enthusiastically waving her arms about at some brass-band players in a garage for a programme called A Band for Britain. It's all very ordinary and Dinnington comes out of it looking like a crumbly, wet place full of fat people. But no more. Now, Dinnington is the Monaco of the North! For we have our own Formula One racing team: Virgin Racing. They're just the other side of Tescos from the brass band's hut, in a shiny glass building-site where the pit used to be. They started the season in style, with two DNFs, but it was a very boring race (as Bahrain often is). Races will continue to be a bit boring until double-diffusers are outlawed next year. But hopefully they'll not all be as drearily brown and tedious as this one was. Even the post-race coverage was a bit flat. WEEK ONE The ITV decided to follow the BBC's lead and publicly postulate doing something stupid. In this case, something stupid is making some or all of its digital portfolio subscription-based. It's not going to happen, of course, because it's a crazy idea. CITV is not good enough to sell in a world where two BBC channels come for free. ITV3 would be the most workable option, but even that would need some considerable sharpening up to make it sufficiently enticing. One can see a possible scenario whereby ITV4 becomes ITV Sport, perhaps, but as things currently stand it would be an insane thing to do. Mind you, later this year, the ITV will be getting it's new boss: Adam Crozier. So anything could happen. Just watched the latest promotional film for the new series of Doctor Who. I'm becoming increasingly unconvinced of Mister Smith's abilities, but the new trailer is rubbish anyway and would be so whoever were in it. Nothing much more for me to say, really. Nothing much on at the moment. |
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2010 - JANUARY TO MARCH
The
first quarter of a new regime. That means some new graphs to look at.
I'm quite excited! We'll start conventionally:
Figure 1.1 - TV, Radio and Film, week
by week
 Overall TV Radio Film The
Test Match in South
Africa helped radio to a firm start in Week1, Snooker helped bring television
ahead in Week3, and then there was the amazing final episode of Dollhouse. Television really hit its
peak in February when I went on a See-Saw binge and watched rather a
lot of old Doctor Who (though Being Human, Newswipe and QI XL also had their roles to play).
This was internet television, not broadcast television. Broadcast
television has been pretty useless since January while radio has
continued, under the new "anything goes" rules, to churn out the most
points of the three categories (though its total's dropped off slightly
since February and the end of the News
Quiz and the more lucrative Mark
Thomas Manifesto). Film has been dribbled scantily over the
front of this graph, with no good films on at all in Week4.
Now that internet television has been brought into the Ration Book fold, and the film scores have been neutered, perhaps we need to shift our analysis: Figure 1.2 - Broadcast TV versus On-Line TV
 Broadcast TV Broadcast TV (excluding Film) On-Line TV The difference between broadcast and on-line radio is negligible: just a couple of points a week for the most part. The TV graph is more interesting (and looks a bit like Montenegro). That lump of internet fun in the middle is mostly, though by no means exclusively, down to me binging on See-Saw. Aside from that incident, at no point does the web get the upper hand on the mast whilever films are included in the score. Remove cinema and it's had a couple of weeks in March. Of course, all that really means is that I was having a more exciting social life in March, and had to watch everything on the iPlayer. Figure 1.3 - Network by network, week
by week
 BBC TV ITV TV 4TV 5TV BBC Radio The
change to film scoring has had a dramatic but unsurprising effect on
the independent networks. 5TV is now a calm ocean of nothing,
occasionally spoilt by the odd Spaghetti Western classic. Even Film4
has been well and truly muzzled. Meanwhile, the unleashing of radio
programming has created a huge black mass of wireless all over the back
wall of the graph.
Figure 1.4 - Digital vs Analogue, week
by week
 Digital
Digital excl. Film4
Analogue
The neutering of Film 4 can be seen with startling clarity in this graph. What is all the more evident is the lack of anything interesting on digital. It took the combined efforts of Dollhouse and Being Human to get that large spike in January, and even that didn't pierce analogue. However, a large portion of this graph comes from the newly emancipated realm of radio... Figure 1.5 - Digital TV vs Analogue TV
(excluding film), week
by week
 Digital Analogue Removing radio and film from the previous analysis, we get a straighter fight between digital and analogue TV. Now things become less one-way for analogue, though it's had the better of digital throughout the last month. Dollhouse and Being Human provided the first of digital's two huge vampire teeth. In the second, Being Human was augmented by Newswipe and the Winter Olympics. Figure 1.6 - Analogue channels week by
week
 BBC1 BBC2 ITV1 Channel 4 five With less films for channels to choose from under the new scoring system, BBC2's devotion to some sort of entertaining programme content shows all the more. Channel 5 has only scored in two weeks so far this year, I1 and B1 in three weeks, and C4 in four weeks. Hidden behind C5, B2 took the week of 13th March off, though some B2 programming was watched on the iPlayer. Lets take a look now at what limited impact film has been having:
In
the above pair of graphs we get to see how each channel's and each
network's output compares when broken down into television (+ve) and
film (-ve). As ever, the hard work of making decent telly is done
pretty-much exclusively by the BBC. But there in the middle of Fig 1.7
is the pleasing sight of ITV4, outshining all the BBC channels bar B2
and doing it all through one programme: Dollhouse. Other than B2 and I4,
only B3 and B4 came out with more television than film (though ITV3
ended in balance with 1pt each way). With a reduced sample of films to
play with, 4TV still comes out on top in the cinematic stakes, followed
by the BBC.
Figure 1.9 - Average performance of
each weekday
 Overall TV Radio Film In Our Time and Kermode & Mayo make themselves felt on Thursday and Friday respectively (Thursday aided to its victory by Mark Thomas) and radio has the best of the weekdays with the exception of Monday where television has University Challenge and Dollhouse with which to play. TV's best showing is at the weekend though, with Formula One, Being Human and Wonders of the Solar System conspiring to give Sunday the edge. Film's best day is Wednesday, narrowly, though on no day does film ever do better than radio. Despite the promise of a film or two, the best day to go to the pub would appear to be Wednesday. That's pretty much the lot, graphwise, for this term. Now for the table:
A few things to be said about that lot. Firstly, the fact that all programming is now accepted means that we have a new battle at the top of the scoreboard. The three-way tussle between BBC2, BBC4 and Film4 is replaced by the to-the-death bout betwixt Radios 4 and 5. This quarter it was Five Live that took the honours, with a ten-point margin over its public-school elder-and-better. BBC2 was pushed to an actually rather respectable 3rd place, and its usual 4pt average for the first quarter. The opening up of on-line content accounts for the next four entries in the chart. The iPlayer gets separate entries for TV and radio a) because it is easier for me, and b) because the BBC Radio Player was well established before the iPlayer was but a twinkle in our Auntie's eye. Both versions of the iPlayer inevitably feed off other channels to their potential detriment in this chart, but this serves as a test of the scheduler's art as much as anything else. Film4, which was top channel for the first quarter of the previous two years, has felt the thin end of the new system of film scoring. It scored 4pts per week less than it usually does as a consequence. C4 was also pretty harshly hit, and scores 0pts p.w. for only the second time since records began. C5 and I1 also spoiled lengthy unbroken runs, and the lack of any good-enough films is the natural explanation. Some other minnows have dropped off the scoreboard entirely thanks to my new lack of generosity where films are concerned. The new film-scoring system cannot, however, be blamed for the most depressing entry on this table: BBC4 at =14th, with only 1pt p.w.: its worst result ever, and half the total score of its previous nadir in the summer (almost forgivably) of 2008. This is the first time that BBC4 has been outside the top 3 in the first quarter's Ration Book, and the first time it's ever scored a single digit total. The iPlayer can take a small amount of responsibility, but the iPlayer has cost BBC2 a good deal more points than BBC4. More damaging is a degree of apathy on my part: I could've watched Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, for instance, and I missed the feminism series. But my apathy is, I can't help but feel, a symptom more than a cause. Still, I get the slightest impression, perhaps erroneously, that this score marks the lowest ebb of B4 and that a recovery is due. There's been the odd little shiny pebble in the B4 listings of late that's made me think "oh, things aren't all that bad." But then I look at the RT this week and all I see is The Great American Song Book. And I weep slightly. So that's that... We conclude with a review of the new Doctor Who: First things first: the music: Nice to hear some whoo-whoos. Not very sure about the jazzy rhythms. The titles: Interesting use of hellfire. Horrible logo designed in the 1990s by someone with a new graphics package. The Doctor: Not as bad as feared. He seems to be able to act to a sufficient standard. At times you can see why they picked him, with his weird looking face and gangly limbs. He's a bit bouncy (emphasized by the whole Tigger routine with the food) and not particularly different from David Tennant, though cockier if such a thing were possible. A hint of Hyde from Moffat's Jeckyl can be discerned in the characterization. The Back to the Future outfit is, of course, a bit rubbish, but at least there are no question-marks on the lapels and he isn't wearing a cravat. The Tardis: Where's all this stuff come from? Don't like the idea of all this stuff just being "made" by a regenerating Tardis. No, no. And more steam-punk bullshit... With an apothecary jar as the uppy-downy thing? That's a step too far. The Sonic Screwdriver: Hurrah! It's broken! But wait... what will we sell the kids now? Shit. Better design a new one, different to the old one, so they have to buy some more of our cheap plastic tat! And so that we don't have to think about anything we write. That's the corners all rounded off. Now let's fondle the meat: Doctor meets little girl with time/space hole in her bedroom, forms bond with girl, disappears and returns several years later. Sounds familiar. Doctor tells young woman not to do something specific with her eyes in order to avoid getting attacked by alien creature. Sounds familiar. Hospital ward full of comatose patients all saying same thing. Sounds familiar. Lot of Christmas decoration spaceships surrounding Earth and ready to destroy it. Not even a Moffat one this time, but then that's more than enough tropes for one episode. And where are the Judoon when you need a Shadow Proclamation upholding, eh? This whole story just felt a little too recycled. We've even got ourselves a runaway bride! We could have had so much more. Let's consider things in isolation: The start with the little girl was fine... bit Pooh Corner but alright. The door business was a bit messy and could've been done better but not really anything to be upset about. Then he comes back, there's a convoluted and frankly needless bit with a hospital full of coma patients. The monster's a bit boring and useless. Never actually poses any obvious threat other than being in possession of some rather flimsy looking teeth. That in itself is insufficient grounds for complaint, so long as enough is made of the monster to make it seem like a threat. There was more threat in the Doctor's statement about "one hell of a crack" or whatever it was than in anything surrounding the monster: the whole corner-of-the-eye thing never amounted to anything at all. The monster just seemed to spend all of its time standing around and talking through the wrong mouth. Next we're in a park. There's an obligatory "trust me, I'm the Doctor" moment, which feels forced and pathetic. There's ANOTHER FUCKING APOCALYPSE and there's a very bizarre 'Doctor's POV' thing which makes him look like a bloody robot. But all of this is forgivable given that the sonic screwdriver gets broken (except that this is only a passing respite). The middle is very baggy and nothing very much happens. The Doctor talks online to Patrick Moore and saves the day with some poxy computer-virus fix. Disappointingly Davies-ian. I did like the utter lack of drama we got from the fire-engine ladder business: I thought that was charmingly pathetic. Then we had some more standing about with the monster. Everything wrapped up, the Doctor telephones the aliens (which he could probably have done earlier had it suited the script) and shouts at them a bit in a show of cocky bravado and fan-frapping clips that Mad Larry would justifiably describe as an absurd act of fetishisation (which it is). In summary: At least it's not Colin Baker. Matt Smith is not as dreadful as the trailers painted him (and the trailers really were, and continue to be, very disappointing and dispiriting). But it's not the revolution some of us (i.e. me) were hoping for. The Doctor, the Tardis, the story, were all very much a continuation of the Davies Who concept, not the exciting clean break to something altogether more elaborate and interesting that some of the previous Moffat stories (and Coupling) seemed to promise. Moffat is happy to play temporal games in a relationships sit-com but when it comes to a drama series about a timetraveller, it's all fairly straight and conventional. If the Tardis is working even remotely accurately, let's use the bugger. Let's get ourselves willfully in knots! Or else, break the Tardis properly and concentrate on characters and situations, not on crap toothy snakes and sparky explosions. Still, it's early. These things might be waiting for us in future episodes. Makes sense to offer some sense of continuity in the first episode: don't want to alienate the Davies fans, after all. And this certainly didn't do that. It was a fair script with some amusement and nothing particularly unpleasant about it. It was a lot better than some Davies-era stuff we've had. But it was nothing more than that. It was no Blink; it was no Midnight... it was certainly not up to Eccleston standards. But, in Doctor Who terms, it was ok, and that, really is all that matters: It was ok. I'll give it 2pts. |
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