Message for Michael Grade

[John Stewart Miller]

This is to Michael Grade or anyone who may be able to pass on the message.

Michael I hear (Evening Standard 11th Oct 2005) has proposed a rise to 180 pounds for the licence fee to the Government. The Standard argues this is beyond the means of most.

Michael is quoted as saying 'the BBC needs the money so it can stop showing repeats and make new programmes.

Michael was previously qouted as having said 'viewers do not like repeats'.

I put it forward, where has Michael sourced the mistaken idea that viewers dislike repeats? It sounds like a qoute from a 1969 Radio times edition, in which indeed there were vociferous protests from housewives as they were the mainstay of round the clock viewers at that time.

In case anyone has failed to notice, the current media is based largely on the DVD market where A: repeats of cinema films for home viewing and B: Old TV programmes are sold, widely and; this is the popular marketing area.

Without doubt the best BBC product currently on offer usually presents itself in the form of the retrospect featuring old material.

There is a mainstay of families - of which the viewing is for female partners and children either soap imports (not new programmes) or cartoons (usually repeats).

The male audience will largely watch news programmes or live items (i.e. sports), and not necessarily on terrestrial TV (i.e. Sky sports).

There is an absolutely huge audience of 20 somethings, thirty somethings, forty somethings and fifty somethings who enjoy looking back to the shows of their childhoods, from the 50s to the 80s. Hence we have the U.K. Gold, Bravo channels etc. Theres hardly a week goes by without Channel 4 or Channel 5 doing a retrospect, and a huge audience tunes in.

Most of my viewing time is spent watching old shows or shows that feature old material. Yet now I hear, I want new programmes, because repeats are not popular. This sounds a case of another 'no one wants to watch Dr Who it's old hat' scenario. Rather than research with the viewing audience in consultation, we're being told.

All I can say is that I'd gladly pay something more to EXPAND repeats and their possiblities, but am really not bothered about 'new' products and wouldn't want to subsidise them with a ridiculous top up fee.

I can't see this is a productive execise, it'll just push more people towards the scenario of doing away with TV sets altogether and people viewing DVD material on computer monitors without any broadcast TV!

[Clive Shaw]

I think the repeats that everyone complains about are those filler episodes of 'Only Fools and Horses' , Porridge , Open All Hours and The Good Life which seem to have had almost continuous showings in the schedules over the past couple of years.

In a similar vain, I get very annoyed with Newspaper TV Reviewers who slag off the BBC and BBC4 because it attracts low audience figures and features lots of "highbrow arts programming which no one wants to watch" Guaranteed that the same reviewer will there after complain that the BBC is not fulfilling its public service remit.

Living outside the UK, you soon come to realise just how superb, educational, informative and entertaining the BBC's sets of channels are. The one thing I do miss living here in Sweden is having access to the BBC channels.

I would gladly pay (indeed I have offered) to pay a UK license fee, just so I could be able to legally view the BBC channels via the internet, as you lucky people will soon be able to do.

Out here in Scandinavia, BBC Prime is a very popular channel, even if they only show the load of rubbish programmes that they cannot sell to any other broadcaster. If BBC Prime could be extended to provide a more domestic like service (as it did in its early days) then I am sure the BBC would find a surprisingly good stream of revenue and so not need to increase the domestic license fee any further.

[andrew martin]

The actual figure quoted by Michael Grade was £150 *by 2013* - it's not going to go up to that next year! In any case, what always happens is that the BBC asks for a licence fee increase and it gets less than it asks for, as in all negotiations.

[Tom Morris]

I may have got this wrong but I understood that above inflation rise was to pay for the switch to digital and the turning off of analogue. But isn't this so that the government can auction off the old frequiencies for millions, if not billions, of pounds? In which case, shouldn't the government be paying for the conversion?

I agree about repeats - I'd much rather watch one Open All Hours than a two minutes of Little Britain.

[Clive Shaw]

Tom said:

But isn't this so that the government can auction off the old frequiencies for millions, if not billions, of pounds? In which case, shouldn't the government be paying for the conversion?

There is not alot that the Government could do with the frequencies anyway Digital TV still needs those frequencies so they can't sell them off. What will happen is increased power on the Digital muxes and also more muxes, more channels for terrestrial viewers, hopefully some High Definition muxes too.

[pete]

i must point out that in the DSS in Weston super mare

they repeat endless reels Only fools and horses and Fawlty towers

[john7]

thank you michael

for the first time in thirty years i won't be buying a christmas radio times the fare over the last five years has been dire at it's best the finest quality dross you can have. one eastenders is bad enough but two on that night with eric and ern at breakfast time shameful

i agree that archive tv is not for today but give us one channel i mean you have six and you made a complete mess of them all the news too little to late after sky the children with no classic cartoons and three and four eastender repeats and programmes no body watches whose going to pay for a political channel either with all your archive sitting there give us a channel

archive is 60's and 70's not 1995 and onwards uk gold started out with 70's now they dont remember what happened to radio one and top of the pop's when you ditched the archive audience today's audiance don't buy or watch they download

here's to a dvd non terrestial christmas eric and ern two ronnies val and del boy enjoy the square michael

[Tom Morris]

cliveuk said:

Tom said:

But isn't this so that the government can auction off the old frequiencies for millions, if not billions, of pounds? In which case, shouldn't the government be paying for the conversion?

There is not alot that the Government could do with the frequencies anyway Digital TV still needs those frequencies so they can't sell them off. What will happen is increased power on the Digital muxes and also more muxes, more channels for terrestrial viewers, hopefully some High Definition muxes too.

Sorry I don't understand about muxes but I would refer you to www.digitalspy.co.uk/article/ds24531.html - especially these two paragraphs

"Dyke's comments come days after a definitive timetable for the shutdown process was outlined by culture secretary Tessa Jowell in a keynote address at the Cambridge Convention.

"I scoured Tessa's speech for an explanation," he continued. "I discovered that there was an economic reason - the old analogue spectrum could be sold she reckoned, for between £1 and £2 billion."

It wouldn't be the first time that Tessa was wrong - or me!

[Clive Shaw]

I think it is just wishful thinking by Tessa and the Government who are still seeing Dollar signs over the smallest mention of available frequencies and spectrums, following the sell-off of the spectrum for 3G to the telecom companies in Y2K, which crippled the telecom companies which are still suffering today.

"Freeview" Digital Television operates in the same bandwidth and spectrum as current analogue broadcasts, so the Government could not sell off the 'analogue' spectrum whilst Digital Terrestrial Television, in its current form, still operates.

What Digital TV really means is more choice for the viewer and (more importantly) cheaper distribution costs, as it takes a fraction of the energy and power to transmit a digital signal, as it does an analogue one.

As the public service broadcaster, the BBC have got the responsibility to convert us all to Digital, a responsibility placed on them by the Government, but I suspect it is the transmission end (Crown Castle / NTL) to who most savings will be made by switching to digital. I should hope this saving is, in time, passed back to the BBC and therefore onto the license payer.

As to the article, Greg Dyke has alot of nerve to winge about the switchover as he, himself instigated and pushed for it. Regardless of how his mother 'was in tears,' my own elderly parents love the choice offered by Freeview, my father soaks up all the WWII documentaries on 'UK History'

I get the feeling there are a few sour grapes on Gregs desk.

[ethantyler]

Personally, I wouldn't mind the repeats if they were something that hadn't been seen for some time. There are lots of forgotten treasures in the archives as well as much-loved series that don't get repeated. Unfortunately, what does get repeated has very much a BBC2/The Simpsons and Channel 4/Friends and Channel 4/The Simpsons feel.

[Laurence Piper]

Yes. There are two "kinds" of repeats - a) the genuinely interesting ones of shows that are dusted down after a long time for an overdue repeat and b) the UK Gold type repeats where Only Fools And Horses, Lovejoy and Porridge are shown / recycled until the end of time!

The latter kind of saturation repeat devalues something that may well be quality programming and makes the word "repeat" sound like a dirty word. It's criminal that the archives are full of a wealth of diverse programming and yet only a narrow range sees the light of day. These are the only kind of repeats as far as the tabloid media are concerned though when they like to fill up their pages with "do we pay our licence fee to see repeats?" style sensationalism. A distinction needs to be drawn however between the two types of repeat.

Yes I AM in favour of repeats - but they need to be intelligently chosen / scheduled and not presented as random "filler" (even BBC-2 are guilty of this with their treatment of repeats of certain well-known series in recent years).

[Gary]

I remember when it was Minder and The Sweeney that got all the repeats on ukgold.How times change.Now I would love to see those again.How many times can you watch Vicar Of Dibley,Bergerac or Are You Being Served?Some of the cable channels went for interesting repeats like Hadleigh or Callan but not often.

[Pete Seaton]

surely the best way to cover it all and repeat it fairly is to sort out one channel.

"BBC Archive"

then give one whole DAY to a dedicated to a decade

ie Mondays the 50's, Tuesday 60's, Wednesday 70's, Thursday 80's & Friday the 90's

and at the weekend a mixture of classic obscure "hardly shown classic TV" ie never been on UK Gold

or non stop Top of the pops and whistle test including BBC Kids shows like Saturday superstore, multicoloured swap shop, Going LIve, as an alternative to the dirge called Dick and Dom in da bungalow

[Andrew Doherty]

This is , exactly, the type of channel needed as others, including Laurence Piper and myself, have stated in various threads on this forum . Needless to say, most contributors on this forum would be delighted to have the opportunity to view, not just the classics and cult programmes, but much less visited programme material.

In time, I believe this will happen.

Yours,

[Clive Shaw]

But will it ? Not wanting to pour water on the flames, but why did early 'UK Gold' and 'Granada Plus' never fulfill their potential ??

I don't think a dedicate archive TV Channel is ever going to be commercially viable, however the BBC has alot of opportunity to slot in more archive programming within one if its existing channels, BBC 4 for example.

I think we over estimate how many people would switch over from Corrie to watch an episode of Z-Cars, however the niche is there and the BBC have the resources to fill it.

Screening 'real' archive telly is not as cheap to do as we hope, its not just a case of digging out an old TR and broadcasting it. A lot of the issues which caused the original programmes to be scrapped in the first place need to be resolved before a programme can be re-aired.