Doctor Who

I think the argument goes that there are all these private companies making entertainment, so why should the government spend money producing entertainment too? Just scale it down to public information, if that.

You'll end up with something even more limited than PBS, and I hate how everything good on PBS is children's edutainment or imported (from the BBC).

People have been talking about slashing, shuttering, or privatizing the BBC for decades. I wish I could find the Fry and Laurie sketch where among other things (it's a very busy sketch actually), one of the chief proponents of expanding private entertainment comes into a restaurant, and at one point asks for a fork, to which the waiter responds by dumping a box of toothpicks on his table and saying, "THEY MAY ALL BE COMPLETE CRAP, BUT AT LEAST YOU'VE GOT A CHOICE!"

I think the Beeb's contingency plan is that if they do lose their funding for the big stuff, they'll spin off their intellectual property into a for-profit company (like BBC Worldwide, only domestic) that they can license programs from.

BBC should be advertising funded. Not by a regressive, egregious, and class-focused tax.

I disagree. Tax-funded television at least has the pretense of being for the people, by the people. Ad-funded television more often than not just does whatever it needs to to make the advertisers happy, which usually means as little controversy as humanly possible.

I feel like there should be some sort of middle ground, but the solution is not to cut the audience out of the equation entirely.

(Perhaps the BBC should be tax-funded, rather than needing to pay taxes to own a TV period?)

No. Just. No.

That would be horrible.

As bad as the license fee is.

edited 5th Feb '16 8:34:08 AM by unnoun

If the government's doing a crappy job providing entertainment (like the CBC), then I can see the argument for ditching it and focusing public TV stations on news reporting and analysis and documentaries.

But when a show like the BBC is producing excellent programming on all fronts, including shows that are immensely popular and have lasted decades, then it's ridiculous to say they shouldn't be funded. A Doctor Who that wasn't produced by the BBC wouldn't be Doctor Who, and throwing out a long-running, popular, well-made show like that is nonsensical.

And having television that doesn't include advertising is fantastic.

In addition, there's the fact that private companies aren't producing anything comparable in quality to the BBC on several fronts - nature documentaries especially. No private company would ever make the investment that the BBC has in things like Planet Earth and Human Planet, because it's a massive, very long-term investment with considerably risk and no guarantee of profits. And yet those documentaries have provided vast enjoyment to countless people.

It makes up a tiny fraction of taxes (considerably less than people willingly pay for, say, Netflix), and is well worth it.

Trying to get into the franchise. David Tennant is the best thing about it.

Ngn.

Gngh.

Play nice everyone.

As for funding, yeah the licence fee is bad, but add based funding is not the answer. Simply funding it out of general taxation seems like a simple answer to me.

edited 6th Feb '16 7:07:07 AM by Silasw

Don't do ads. They're terrible. It's one of the big reasons Americans are moving away from traditional televisions.

Well, it wasn't so bad when they were less than five minutes of an hour, but now they're over fifteen minutes in the hour.

Went to a watch party tonight. I came in on the tail end of Battlefield (rather unfortunate that it was the end of it, since that's the only one I was present for that I hadn't seen yet), then we watched Fires of Pompeii (the only New Who of the event, because the organizer only had an hour to fill in that part of the schedule), then Logopolis and Castrovalva.

I expect I'm not the first person to observe that the Logopolitans' efforts are essentially the source of Dark Energy.

Also, I may as well say I'm reading Lungbarrow too. One thing I'll say for it is I think I like the way it handles the parts that are the First Doctor running away. Aside from not seeming to have any room to acknowledge Susan's existence, it seems decent at framing what we learned in Remembrance of the Daleks in a way that's fairly consistent with the First Doctor's character.

Maybe it's just me, but i feels kinda like the BBC is holding Doctor Who hostage. "You want to cut our funding, do you? Well, then, let's see how you like not getting a new series of Doctor Who! And when people complain, we'll refer them all to you."

Heck, it might even work....I've seen people choose who to vote for over far sillier things than a favorite TV show.

Basically any reason to vote against the Torys is a good one in my book.

edited 8th Feb '16 12:20:43 AM by unnoun

Also, I mean, 'if we lose funding, we won't be able to make as many good tv shows' is not an even slightly unorthodox argument for a tv station to make.

Oh hey, I forgot to mention a few weeks back that it occurred to me to wonder if the Eleventh Doctor Titan Comics have done anything about David Bowie's death, since "Jones" is one of Eleven's comic companions.

I started reading a Star Trek novella in the Department of Temporal Investigations series today. It bore the dedication "For William, Patrick, Jon, Tom, Peter, Colin, Sylvester, Paul, John, Chris, David, Matt, and the other Peter", and I caught a reference to somebody confiscating a vortex manipulator.

New today from Who Back When:

This is the one with Victorian antiques of no consequence, the human factor whatever that is, and dizzy dizzy Daleks. It's called "Evil of the Daleks", here we go...

Taxation funded television is great for making media which benefits it's population (which is certainly a powerful force, hence the existence of this website, and let's not forget that the UK is recognised as a cultural superpower)

But I don't think Doctor Who benefits the entire British population as much as it benefits a select certain group of demographics.

The largest tax paying ethnic minority in britain is South Asian. How many south Asian characters have we seen in Doctor Who?

Hmmmmmm, this mind set is probably why I'm more fond of God Complex than my peers.

We had one in Under the Lake (the actor has actually spoken about the issues facing South Asian actors), though I believe that some of the Americans here felt that he should have been replaced with a black character so that we didn't have the only black guy die at the start.

As for the benefit argument, BBC drama television shouldn't be looked at show by show, but as a whole, hell I'd say look at all BBC fiction/entertainment programming as a whole, if there are segments of society being ignored by it as a whole then yes that's a problem that needs addressing.

I think the issue with that is that people should be restricted to watching certain shows to see people who look like them when it's their taxes being used to fun the entire channel.

Oh and can you point me towards that interview? It sounds exactly like the kind of thing I want to read.

I do feel like Americans push for black representation in Who over more needed demographics. But I think that comes from just not being aware how disproportionate representation in British media is. And I'm always in favour of more black representation regardless. I'm afraid that when it comes to ethnic representation I'm a begger, and as a begger I can't afford to be a chooser.

I am going to be seriously down if/when the next companion isn't south Asian.

So... people paying for TV should just shut up and be happy with what they've got, or else the companies putting that TV out might take it away?

edited 14th Feb '16 7:52:02 AM by kkhohoho

The nice thing about tax-funded television is that because it's supposed to represent the entire population, the BBC is occasionally willing to step in and course-correct if it's not living up to that mandate (see: the new rule about all comedy-panel shows needing at least one woman in each episode.)

I'd argue they don't go far enough, but the option and the incentive are there.

I find that the one-woman requirement is bringing lots of new female talent to QI to get really awkward and embarrassed when the men go off the rails. Which may be part of the reason why it seems like Jo Brand is on a third of the episodes.

I watch Would I Lie To You and it's fun, but I remember one where the only woman had "I've kissed a man in this room" as her truth/lie and it was fairly awkward.