Have you been watching Doctor Foster? Or Rellik? Or Strike? No? Me neither. Doctor Foster apparently drew over 8 million viewers to one of its episodes, but judging from my facebook feed, they were not impressed. Rellik scrapes around the 4 million mark, whilst Strike managed around 5 million.
At the end of the year BBC4 will be screening the third and final series of Detectorists (BBC/Channel X 2013 -), the sitcom written, directed by and starring Mackenzie Crook about a group of metal detector enthusiasts (‘detectorists’) in East Anglia.
On May 30thTwitter and the BBC announced a live streaming partnership to provide coverage for a number of election related broadcasts including the May 31st BBC election debate and the June 8th Election Night Special. These election events were simulcast on BBC television.
I said it wouldn’t work, didn’t I? Yes, friends, after less than two years in operation, the BBC Store is shutting up shop, having admitted defeat ‘in the face of streaming service rivals’. Way back in November 2015 I blogged about the Store’s launch (I like to keep things current), when Auntie Beeb was proudly trumpeting the fact that over 7,000 hours of content, old and new, would be made available to purchase and view via
It is the end of May, and we are coming to the end, I assume, of the high-budget, ‘quality’, event-TV dramas that follow the blockbuster repeat series of the winter months. In Britain, this meant that we got to see a lot of dramas that were usually based on real crime cases.
The big question of this year’s BAFTAs was how many awards Netflix would romp home with.
The Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, or BARB, tells us the who what, when, where, and how of watching British TV and computer screens. Jointly owned by ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and the BBC, it has been going in its current form for many years, shifting as required to keep track of changes caused by deregulation and the proliferation of consumer technologies.
In a recent Sight and Sound article (March 3 2017) Nick James made an interesting observation about BBC1’s latest historical/period drama, Taboo (BBC1, 2017, Scott, Hardy et al). Likening its look and characters to an Alan Moore graphic novel (“ From Hell ”), Taboo , according to James, has a “peculiar iconography” that “yearns to be linked…with the shadows…only graphic novelists care
What do the following programmes have in common?
As this goes to press (can we say that about online materials?), series four of Line of Duty is about to commence transmission in its new Sunday evening slot. I must admit I was slow coming to this particular party; when I saw the first series being advertised in a Radio Times feature back in 2012 my response was along the lines of ‘Crivens!
