11/08/2005

On regional differences

entry posted by Inquisitor at 19:46 (permalink).
categories: Idiots , TV

Currently, BBC2 in England is showing the World Athletics Championships; an event which only takes place once every two years, where all the world's best athletes (plus the Brits) race against each other to find the best there is and which is one of the few sporting events I actually care about wanting to see.

BBC2 in Scotland, on the other hand, is showing an aimless, irrelevant second-round UEFA Cup tie between MyPa 47 of Finland and Dundee United.

YOU DON'T DO THAT. Especially when people with analogue terrestrial therefore can't watch the WACs; this therefore restricts the athletics to Sky or NTL, both of which allow viewers to watch real BBC2 on an alternate channel and both of which cost an awful lot of money. Telewest, my cable provider, don't do this; I'm lucky, however, because they've kept the red-button interactive athletics running, so at least I can watch it on that. Quite a lot of people can't do this, and they shouldn't have to.

On the other hand, BBC Scotland are pretty much a what-not-to-do station: there's chopping off the last twenty minutes of Newsnight for obsequiously awful interviews with MSPs (with, again, no alternative for anyone without real BBC2), there's their truly crappy 'home-grown' comedy, there's the useless Reporting Scotland (which seems more interested in reporting Glasgow), there's moving Have I Got News For You to 10:35 so they can fit in their 'comedy' and River City, possibly the worst soap ever, and so on. Just because we actually choose to live up here doesn't mean you have to punish us...

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