"ignorant content for ignorant people", more like

How about a TV show entirely in Cockney rhyming slang.

OFCOM: Hmm, how can we fuck with you BBC. You don't serve ITV's audience, make their shittest programming.

‘Do Shut Up’

"Hey, people from poorer backgrounds seem to prefer comedies and light drama. We should make some more of those."

Enlightened redditor: "Those ignorant fucks. Those addlepated simpletons!"

?????????????????????????

The people on this website were bullied for a reason.

I don't know what that has to do with poorer backgrounds. But I know TV in general the last few years has become fucking obsessed with "dark" shows. Like Stranger things and American Horror Story, okay, they did really well financially and a lot of people like them because they're really out there. Squid Game more recently, there's a niche for that, but its like everything now. They turned the Sabrina remake into a dark show. They made Riverdale a dark show, which is just bizarre. I don't watch tv so that I can experience a pervasive, never ceasing sense of existential dread. I get enough of that from my life.

ITV1 is famous for not having a decent sitcom in years, they have given up on comedy unless it is inadvertently black comedy in having a chance for someone's heating to be paid for over the winter, but do continue to project your own insecurities onto everyone else.

Did you...read the article you posted?

It's Rome and its Circuses all over again.

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Yep, it says comedy drama, but you wrote comedy in a rush to have a go at anyone who might chip in.

Maybe you should have read it more closely.

Y'all peaked at mighty boosh

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So this is the bright idea that someone got out of a focus group?

To be fair a bunch of the “prestige” British dramas gives me the impression y’all a bunch of miserable dudes over there. Broadchurch, The Bodyguard, Luther, Marcella … stuffs so bleak.

There's no good reason for bullying.

But yeah, I get it.

I think the implication is that poorer people generally have unhappier and less fulfilling lives. So, they're less likely to want to indulge in dark and depressing shows, since their real lives are already depressing enough. Instead, they might prefer lighter escapist stuff to take their minds off their problems.

It’s awesome. Well written and well acted. Better than the mindless reality dreck that permeates American tv.

Crikey! You gave me a smash on the noggin last year!

I prefer to think The UK is just a bunch of charming little towns with a fresh murder every week.

I strongly feel that Riverdale does not belong on this list lol. mainly because Riverdale is perfect and has never done anything wrong ever

Ted Lasso, Pachinko, Heartstopper, Schmigadoon, The Good Life, Schitt's Creek, My Brilliant Friend

I mean most sitcoms too

And a lot of Korean TV is slushy as hell

Is this a clandestine attempt to privatise even faster?

For the greater good

...why are you assuming the 'poorer backgrounds' are cockney or Irish?

They are referring to the huge influx of 'refugees' that they currently have.

“You said ‘comedy and light drama’ and the article said ‘comedy-drama’! Such a faux-pas! What an imbecile! A complete buffoon! Now, do excuse me while I huff my farts from a snifter.”

(It was a joke.)

I don’t know why but when I first read this headline I thought it meant lighter in terms of cinematography 💀

a.k.a. let's dumb down everything to celeb shite, so that our core purpose of existing (to educate the populous, and not dumb down) and the reason for our funding is completely destroyed once and for all.

I mean, one day the BBC will be gone. I just hoped never to have seen it. But to be honest, broadcast TV is dead.

BBC itself just makes me think of comedies already. The Young Ones, Faulty Towers, Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Mighty Boosh and probably way more I'm forgetting.

Even Jonathan Creek was a light hearted murder mystery show about a magician that solved crimes.

They have a good track record with this stuff so it's good to go back to their roots but it's such a weird way to describe their plan

The BBC and licence fee were operated mostly on the basis that they wouldn't fall foul to just "crass entertainment", but carry educational programmes (e.g. the entire Open University lectures for decades), fund insightful and non-commercial programmes (e.g David Attenborough for decades), do the things that paid-for commercial channels wouldn't do (e.g. Children In Need, intellectual quizzes like Only Connect, etc.) because everyone else just wanted to appeal to your eyes, not your brain.

It's drifted away from that just in my time of watching it, let alone of late where it seems to be accelerating.

And - a bit like the NHS - the current government want it to look bad so they can justify scrapping it because it's an expense. Paying to educate the riffraff for free?! So they want to scrap the licence fee, force it to produce inane content and turn even an intellectual format into nothing but yelling, the same dozen comedians and nob gags (e.g. QI), wait for it to die, remove funding, force it to compete, then kill it off when it's not profitable.

(He's...) a dumb idiot

Well I don't care about your brit bong tv dynamics. But considering the BBC's most famous and successful show is some bullshit about a wonky space wizard, or whatever, and that's like 80 years old, it seems like it's never been what you describe.

There is a ton of excellent TV made in the us lol. What a dopey take

So they should be! If you re-word the argument, the BBC is publically-funded and as such it should provide content that the public want to see. They doesn’t mean it’s not going to continue making lots of other types of programmes too, but they’ve found a groups they’re not serving and thinking of ways to serve them.

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Sherlock, Faulty Towers, Blackadder, Line of Duty. All produced by BBC and all a extremely popular and quotable worldwide.

No need for the hostile attitude.

TIL that I am poor by these standards, as are post people I know.

A dark show here and there is great, but for fuck sake can we just have something fun once in awhile?

Dr Who is shite. Sorry, but it really is. It's literally the kind of thing we're talking about. It was a trash sci-fi from the 60's that didn't go "cult" until what... the 00's? It's like people going ape over a Thunderbirds remake.

The BBC produced some of the best programmes in existence over the years - not churning them out constantly 24/7 for decades, that's impossible, but it produced a LOT of great stuff that other channels wouldn't touch.

Literally, the BBC Micro was invented to go along with BBC programmes to teach kids in the 80's how to use this new fangled thing called a home computer. They commissioned many series of programmes, the actual hardware (the BBC Micro, giving rise to Acorn/ARM's fame! The chip that's INSIDE YOUR PHONE NOW) , etc.

Schools showed BBC programmes directly during the day for lessons. Entire generations grew up with BBC programmes in their classrooms, then went and learned BBC BASIC on a BBC Micro.

The OU literally has millions of degree-level graduates who owe their degree to late night lectures on BBC2 that NOBODY else would dedicate air-time to, and the BBC basically funded them, gave them the facilities to make them, and put millions through university who couldn't afford it, have time off work to go to university or get the materials any other way.

BBC iPlayer was also ground-breaking. They invented their own codecs to make it work.

Not to even mention the World Service, etc.

Sorry, but if you think that Dr Who shit was what the BBC was about, you've already fallen for the con they want you to.

Crusty jugglers.