Watching The Defectives

An article by Will Hutton in The Grauniad on the woeful state of British TV.

My Comment:

Back in the 60s/70s you could quite seriously claim that British TV, especially the BBC, was the best in the world. US TV was - quite rightly - widely derided as probably the worst.

Recently American TV has not got any better, despite the current trendy fashion for a mere handful of its better efforts - just more slickly produced and marketed. It is still bland over-written and over-produced eye-candy made to fill the gaps between the adverts.

So for British TV to be regarded as poor compared to the US, it must have fallen a very long way indeed. As other comments above say the BBC in particular is crippled by political correctness and a stagnating 'liberal-left' world view, and the commercial channels no longer have the will, let alone the money to make good programmes.

It is not just Drama though, factual TV goes from bad to woeful with programmes dumbed-down and jazzed-up to the point where they too are unwatchable like the now moronic Horizon. The same applies to current affairs TV too, just look at what a travesty Panorama has become.

A solution?

The only answer I've found is to give up on TV for anything worthwhile, luckily, though, Radio 4 and - to a lesser extent - Radio 3 still manage to come up with the goods, and the picture quality is always much better on the radio.