TV on Trial: Guilty

BBC4's TV on Trial series was supposed to discover which decade gave the nation the best television.

So why did they fill it with the worst crap they could find/clear?

For example, when it came to extolling the wonders of the 1970s, instead of presenting a classic episode of Porridge or Fawlty Towers we got the "hilarious racism" of Love Thy Neighbour! In the drama stakes we got a tit-lite episode of The Sweeney instead of Pennies from Heaven. And for the documentary strand they dusted off a mind-numbing instalment of World In Action for us to nod off to.

In other words, we got to see the 1970s at its very worst. And it still won!

The other decades fared just as badly. Take the 1980s, for example. This decade should have won on its dramas alone (The Singing Detective, Threads, Day of the Triffids, Edge of Darkness etc etc etc). What we got was Blott on the Effing Landscape! Still, it could have been worse - 2005 was represented by Footballer's Wives! On BBC4! Oh, the irony.

I couldn't even make it through the 1950s. Why didn't they show something truly groundbreaking which demonstrated 50s television at its best? Even by limiting themselves to specific years (55, 65, 75 etc) they still could have shown an episode of Quatermass II - which would have tied in nicely to the live 2005 experiment which was apparently part of the Trial strand. Yeah, right. (More about this "experiment" in a later post).

The final show - while lively and entertaining - was spent criticising the voting parameters. The general consensus was that it was impossible to judge any of the decades based solely on the tripe that had been served up to us. Well, at least they were honest about it.

What a wasted opportunity. BBC4 should have put aside a couple of hours a night for some TV on Trial programming, and they should have stripped the decades across a few weeks. That way we'd have got a wider variety of shows to judge. It's not as if they didn't have the airtime; they've been repeating these snooze-a-thons all week!

Just imagine what we could have had. The good and the bad. A rounded view of television instead of just an easy pop at a particularly tiresome instalment of That's Life.

Probably the most exciting thing about the whole mess was BBC4's attempt at a low-budget version of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Each programme was watched by a couple of cultural commentators (they forgot to invite me. Again.) who would argue the pros and cons of each decade. So we got the the likes of Paul Morley (who contends that Men Behaving Badly caused the downfall of civilisation as we know it) and Alan Coren (twat) giving us an intermittent running commentary of heartfelt inanities and the occasional sideswipe at some very easy targets. The Bachelor is crap? You don't say!

You could switch them off by pressing your red button - apparently this was a showcase of cutting-edge interactivity - but they should have gone the whole hog and offered up the opportunity for live texting, like a middle-class version of E4.

I'd have loved to have seen the chattering classes furiously texting away. Instead of the usual "I FANCY JAYSON FRM BIG BRUVVER" we might have got "MARMIDUKE HUSSEY IS EXTREMELY UNDER-RATED" instead.

Like I said, a missed opportunity.

Comments

[David Ashley]

Strange that you should mention the the decades should have been stripped across more than one evening, I actually suggested this when the idea was first mooted, and I have to admit I was surprised that they didn't do this.

Then I remembered on key fact: Despite being BBC Four, it's still basicly run by the same bunch of dickheads as the other three BBC channels, so what do you expect.