Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Five Days

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Have any of you seen this Five Days thing with Suranne Jones? It certainly seems to be one of those dramas to get you on the edge of your seat, the tension is nerve racking as, whilst you trim your toe nails you wonder if anything is going to happen in the next half an hour. Will it? Anything?

In this (I’m not sure we can really call it a drama) the tools from the BBC ‘social issues’ toolbox are being slowly unpacked and unwrapped. We have the strong female lead (divorced and a carer), tick, the nasty white male authority figures, tick, British Moslems, tick, dementia, tick, African immigrant, tick, caring metro sexual male, tick – yawn – and a touch of risque smoking to spice it up. And going by the first episode I wonder if even a ‘transgender’ has also been used, though that’s too early to judge and I may be being too cynical. Since I never bothered to watch episode two I wonder if they’ve yet managed to pull out the token homosexual and the paraplegic, or the wise and friendly Imam to tell us about the religion of peace, or everybody’s favourite: the white bigot to be held up in contrast to our diverse and wonderfully multicultural society.

Is there any chance, do you think, after they’ve made their 600 million in cutbacks, of the BBC being a bit less ‘socially relevant’ and a bit more entertaining? Part of the BBC’s remit was to be educational, but it seems, over the last 13 years, the word ‘educate’ has been confused with ‘indoctrinate’. Another part of their remit is to be unbiased and representative, which program producers seem to have interpreted as ‘do it like Harriet Harman is peering over your shoulder’. Time for pay for view, on everything, and time for the licence fee to be dumped.  

9 comments:

LarryS said...

The BBC makes me laugh. They axe certain programs,accusing them of 'dumbing down' Britain (DIY SOS for one,which was entertaining,and threaten to kill Top Gear) and yet have you seen some of the shite they put on BBC3 at night?

Grim's Reality said...

You spelt Career wrong.

Didn't Andrew Marr make some comment to the effect that the BBC has been infiltrated by the Leftist, greeny homosexual elite or some such tomfoolery... or was that our man Gezza Clarkson... who should be director general of the BEEB for at least one year.

Jebel Krong said...

harriet harman probably is peering over their shoulders...

i just wish that the "cutbacks" included some of the executives' exorbitant wages...

Neal Asher said...

No, that was 'carer' - one of those shite words the liberal-left have introduced to our vocabulary. She's caring for her mother who's the dementia case here.

Grim's Reality said...

Oops, my dab.

Neal Asher said...

And of course the BBC is not in the slightest swayed by politics:

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/3/3/bbc-presenter-cant-question-agw.html#comments

Grim's Reality said...

Fascinating stuff.

Sparks said...

But isn't the licence fee charged for owning receiving equipment that uses the e-m spectrum the state claims as a natural resource? So you could shut down the beeb and still have to pay.

(That's the situation in Ireland, at any rate).

LarryS said...

@Sparks, yea you pay a licence fee to receive the signal. So on that basis you need a licence to own a greenhouse or wave your wet finger in the air!