Saturday 19 April 2008

BBC repeats? - Yes please!

I smile with some amusement if I hear 'Joe Bloggs' complaining on a BBC radio phone in about too many repeats on TV and that the licence is a waste of money. That person will conveniently overlook the fact that his licence fee is allowing him to broadcast his moan for all and sundry to hear! Whilst accepting that not everything is right in BBC land I do believe that the licence does provide value if one uses a fair number of the services they provide and not just TV channels. Younger readers of this blog may not realise that in the old days you had to purchase a licence to listen to the radio and I have to put my hand up to say I remember when that was so. Then of course there are the thousands of pages the Beeb has on the 'net'. Certainly their news pages are excellent for linking into other sites. The facility to listen again to radio programmes is also another bonus.

What really initiated this entry though is the fact that yes there certainly is at least one repeat scheduled for tonight. The one I'm thinking of is 'Dads Army'. I know it has been repeated more than a few times(!) but for me it was and still is the pinnacle of small screen comedy. The writing, casting and acting was of the very highest order and even knowing the 'plot' so well I still get a great deal of pleasure from watching it and can't fail to burst out laughing again at some of the antics on the show. However I musn't get too excited about all this for one simple reason: Dad's Army is following the snooker! I know that the Beeb have done this trick before - if the snooker is at a particularly exciting stage then they will stay with it and Dad's Army fans will have to wait for their fix as the BBC know that DA is certainly one programme they can cancel at short notice.

On the subject of repeats one series I would very much like to see again on terrestrial TV is the run, I think it was six in number, of great railway journeys of the World. These were on the box so many years ago that they would appear to be new to many viewers. There must be vast numbers of tapes in the BBC vaults of such interesting programmes that would be worth showing again.

So will Dads Army be on tonight? I won't have to wait long to find out!

UPDATE: Yes it was on! I think to continue with the snooker the viewer was invited to press the red button on their remote or some such thing. I don't have that technology on my TV!

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