I On The Future

When I was a lad (cue Hovis advert music and clichéd images of small boy pushing large bike loaded with bread up a steep cobbled Lancashire mill town hill), it was fairly easy to tell the difference between state-funded and commercial television.

The biggest difference was, of course, that ITV was stacked full of commercials for all sorts of products that would get witheringly stern looks from Gillian McKeith these days, whilst the BBC channels were free from such intrusions.

These days, however, you’d be struggling to notice the difference, with trailers for new programmes, services and ways of watching your favourite programme littering the airwaves of our primary public service broadcaster.

And you would have had to try really hard over the last month or so to avoid hearing all about the Corporation’s latest triumph.

The BBC iPlayer (www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer), proudly wrapped in ecclesiastical purple, trumpets that it ‘makes the unmissable unmissable,’ and the chaps from Top Gear, amongst others, have been collared to tell us, in a fairly roundabout way, how you can now watch BBC programmes from the last seven days on your computer.

All jolly clever, and very handy too, especially after I forgot to tape the first episode of the new series of Torchwood, and early figures show that the number of users has increased 14-fold since the big iPlayer marketing push began.

But aside from helping forgetful types like me, what should this development mean for future BBC programming, especially bearing in mind that our licence fees paid for its evolution?

Theoretically, the fact that you can watch programmes from the preceding week should mean that there’s less need for omnibus editions of soap operas or ‘second chance to see’ programme options at various points of the week.

Taking this train of thought a further stop down the line, this should surely create some holes in the TV schedule, which could be filled in either one of two ways – new, exciting, fresh programming (well, new, anyway), or some repeats of stuff that’s more than a week old.

Bearing in mind the tightness of BBC budgets in recent years, the cost of commissioning new programmes and the need to keep Jonathan Ross rolling in money, and it sadly looks like the ‘more repeats’ avenue could be the one down which the Corporation has to go – an ironic outcome of investment in new and exciting technology that’s supposed to make us look forward, rather than back.

That said, the iPlayer is, in itself, a very welcome addition to the fast-expanding number of multimedia platforms on which you can view BBC content – strange to think that, not so long ago, all we used to do was ‘watch the telly.’

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