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Why I Love...BBC4

BBC4 logo
  • Posted at 10:20am
  • 30 January 2008
  • by SimonHumphreys-RT
  • 3 comments

According to the research oracle BARB just over 1.4 million viewers tuned in to BBC4 for an average of nine minutes last week. This amounts to a massive 0.5% audience share. Not a statistic to be proud of, to be sure; but the sad truth of the matter is that the rest of you really don't know what you're missing.

BBC4 is television for grown-ups. By opening its doors at 7pm it has the good grace not to indulge in the mindless pap that habitually pads out the daytime schedules. Rather than the relentless pursuit of ratings it seeks out the discerning viewer who requires stimulation, variety and originality. Amid the jungle of rubbish that fills the digital spectrum it dares to be unashamedly higher brow, if never elitist, providing an array of televisual intelligence and diversity unrivalled elsewhere.

Where else can you watch The Sky at Night? Or catch a Slade film and Led Zeppelin concert on the same night alongside a celebration of the perm hairstyle? Or find whole evenings devoted to Kenneth Williams, the Falklands war, Emmylou Harris? Whole weeks devoted to Iraq or pop music? What other channel can boast a range of programming that includes tsunamis and earthquakes, The Blair Years, Nicholas Nickleby, the art of Spain? Who else would give Charlie Brooker a TV show? And in case you think this all sounds too serious there are always the classic Batman and Stingray series to leaven the mix.

More than anything BBC4 gives its programmes room to breathe. With an avowedly global and non-parochial remit it shows films that you might actually want to watch: coming soon a whole season of world cinema – Herzog and Almodóvar at one end of the scale, the utterly charming Belleville Rendez-vous at the other. Subtitles may not normally be your bag but these are seriously good films in any language.

Its theme nights encourage analysis rather than indulge superficiality. Unlike the wall-to-wall video clips of most mainstream music channels, music is allowed proper space in which to flourish. With a thoughtful use of their impressive archives, BBC4 repeats things that are genuinely worth repeating. In an age when serious, thoughtful documentaries have largely disappeared from the small screen, Storyville and Time Shift continue to bang the drum for a discipline at which British television used to excel. Here, too, be science and opera and dance. A veritable cultural cornucopia.

This is joined-up television that demands and rewards an engagement with your brain. OK, so there are no game shows, no reality shows, no phone lines. There's not a cookery show in sight. And, yes, there are occasional evenings when there seems nothing worth watching and the controllers appear have all gone down the pub.

But for the most part BBC4 is a trace memory of television before it irrevocably dumbed down, public broadcasting as it was originally intended: thought-provoking, eclectic, entertaining, informative, non-sensational, considered. It's a national treasure deserving of wider celebration. It's worth nine minutes of anyone's life. And more, so much more. Go on, do yourself a favour. Give it a try.

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Comments

  • Posted on 10 August 2009
  • at 3:49pm
  • by Alan

At last BBC4 has decided to omit the BBC4 (icon) from all Prom concerts. Well done. Why not do the same for other, non classical concerts, e.g. Madeleine Peroux, who suffered a BBC4 icon printed across her forehead. Moral, omit the BBC4 icons from all programmes. They are not needed now. Pressing i on a hand set is enough.

  • Posted on 26 February 2008
  • at 8:52pm
  • by MazY

I agree with SpursFan's comment. When BBC4 is good, it's exceptional. But when it's bad, oh boy, it plummets to the depths of banality that even a Big Brother viewer would struggle to stomach.

The trouble with 'themes', of course, is that if you're not interested in the subject matter, it does seem to just go on, and on, and on...

  • Posted on 07 February 2008
  • at 2:16pm
  • by SpursFan

YES!

When it's good, it's very very good - eg Summits, currently the best thing on any channel, terrestrial or digital. Or The Art of Spain (not telling us much new, but intelligent and diverting).

But when it stinks, it truly stinks. The whole History of Pop thing was a huge mistake.

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