Although many Brits are still stuck in a VHS timewarp, for the increasing number of us who have got ourselves a DVD player, watching movies at home has improved beyond all measure. However all is not well in the world of the Digital Versatile Disc. There are some issues that still need to be resolved before the technology can conquer all before it. I'm not talking about recordable DVD, which is coming down in price in any case, and is really not that great as it's main uses are going to be telly and piracy. No, DVD is really about film, and succeeds or fails on that basis.
pre-release promotional material. There's a good reason for this sparseness - a 4-disc "director's cut" is coming out in November, no doubt to great commercial success and a further big payday for various industry fatcats.
Worse than this, though, is the practice of releasing movies with absolutely no worthwhile special features at all, thus failing to take any advantage of the medium's incredible flexibility. The absolute minimum that we should expect from a disc is the correct aspect ratio. Panning and scanning is to cinema what chemical landmines are to warfare - an ugly and appalling
crime that should be banned everywhere in the world. There are some enthusiasts for this debasement, arguing that it's better to reconstruct a film for TV than to put up with black lines at the top and bottom of the picture. Indeed, so popular is this view that the first Harry Potter was released in two editions, widescreen and fullscreen. However, when push comes to
shove, these people are wrong, mad and probably evil. If you don't like the black lines, buy a widescreen set.
The soundtrack is the next concern, although it is not particularly high on my agenda. It is possible to spend a lot of money on "home cinema" hifi systems, but whilst this is nice, it tends to only be worthwhile for enthusiasts of modern mainstream cinema. If you have more widespread, or discerning, tastes than you're just as well sticking with NICAM and saving yourself some cash. An unfortunate side-effect of our Region 2 status is that there are a lot of different languages that need to be covered on our DVDs, whilst those lucky North Americans can get away with no more than about 3. This can lead to a lot valuable disc-space being taken up with various dubbing and subtitle options, leaving no room for those special features we all find so alluring.
To my mind, the best special feature is a decent documentary. This does not include those half-hour jobs that sometimes appear on ITV just before a cinematic release. They are basically extended adverts and in a lot of cases are unwatchable. Something a bit more objective, and crucially, showing some perspective is really what's called for. This is why made for TV
profiles can work especially well. The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General are excellent British Horror DVDs that use old Channel 4 programming to brilliant effect. Specially commisioned material can work as well, although does tend to be a bit short on production values. The Silence of the Lambs is a good example of a made-for-DVD doc that keeps your interest.
Next on the extras league table has to be missing or deleted scenes. This does not include allegedly humourous out-takes, obviously, but filmed scenes that didn't make it into the final release print. High Fidelity comes particularly to mind here, because the deleted scenes are actually better than the ones that made the finished version of the film, including one alternative version of a sequence that was so palpably better than the one eventually used that you just had to wonder what drugs director Stephen Frears was on when he was putting the film together. After this comes commentaries, whch are very popular in some quarters but can be deathly dull in the wrong hands. Personally, I hardly bother with them, except in cases such as The Wicker Man, which has a wonderful 4-way discussion that's well worth sitting through.
There are many other, lesser special features that can sometimes prove mildly diverting. Accompanying pop videos are a favourite, though rarely played more than once I would suspect. DVD-ROM features can vary in quality enormously, but are maybe worth checking out on a dull day if your PC supports it. By far the most popular special feature is the trailer,
mostly because they are so easy for DVD company's to get hold of I would think, as there's little earthly reason why anyone would be interested in most of them. Direct scene access is not "special" at all as it's integral to the technology and so listing it as such is plain, if widespread, dishonesty.
So, if you're still a video-only household, by all means upgrade at the earliest opportunity. However, DVD owners must not tolerate poor releases nor should we accept being exploited. The best cure for these ills is a simple one. Hurt the cash-mad manufacturers in the only way that wouldreally make their eyes water - don't give them your money.
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Although I reserve most of my antipathy for the tax-funded BBC, it's impossible not to laugh at the disastrous state of the commercial version, ITV. Those useless idiots at Granada and Carlton have wreaked enormous amounts of damage to Britain's TV landscape, basically due to their incompetence, and have effectively delivered the UK viewing public into the greedy hands of Rupert Murdoch.
Like the Beeb, ITV has suffered from a lack of competition. The regional franchises that make up the different parts of the network have basically been licenses to print money. Businesses wanting to advertise on the small screen had nowhere else to go, and consequently got fleeced. This situation was all well and good while it lasted, but the inevitable result of poor management and wasteful expenditure within ITV left it badly positioned to cope when things got a bit more tricky.
By the late 90s, Granada and Carlton had divided up the regional Franchises between themselves and were looking at ways of protecting this dominance against the inevitable march of digital television. The result of their scheming, though, was the now notorious money pit ON Digital, later to become ITV Digital and finally rechristened OFF Digital earlier this month. Okay, so the whole comedy of errors wasn't entirely ITV's fault. The European Commission cocked things up by kicking Sky out of the original deal, and thus alienating the only organisation that had ever made pay-TV work on these shores. Next, our beloved Culture Department, possibly the worst branch of the Government that has ever existed, messed up the spectrum allocation, crippling both Channel 5 and Digital Terrestrial TV with weak signals that ruled out vast areas of the country from receiving it.
Okay, so the worst and finally fatal howler was yet to come. A £300m over 3 years deal to show Nationwide League games on a combination ITV Sport, a subscription channel, and also straight pay-per-view. Well, as we now know, nobody paid, nobody viewed, and with the traditional markets that had propped ITV up for so long falling victim to the economic downturn, the plug was pulled. ITV Digital subscribers, usually like me, only with that company because satellite and cable could not be supplied, now face a future without the Pay TV channels we've come to love. Dozens of football league clubs face bankruptcy. The ITV Sport channel has become free, but ceases broadcast on May 11th.
In my view, the following action should be taken:
* The Digital terrestrial signal should be strengthened and handed over to Murdoch to manage.
* Celtic and Rangers should be allowed into the Nationwide League so that at least some viewers might be interested in it.
* Granada and Carlton should be stripped of all regional franchises and basically destroyed. This country does not deserve cowboy broadcasters like them, and now we have the excuse we need to drum them out of business. Channel 5 should transfer over to ITV and the old Channel 5 signal turned off to ensure the bandwidth for Digital Terrestrial is available.
* Everybody in the Culture Department should get the sack. This already happened after last year's general election, but another bunch of second-rate political no-hopers have done just as badly as Chris Smith et al from Labour's first term.
Chris Denton
Useful links:
www.itv-digital.co.uk - Laugh at the solitary holding page where once a broadcasting empire stood.
www.ntl.com - Sign up for a new Digital broadcaster before this one too goes down the swanny.
http://www.itc.org.uk/latest_news/itv_digital/index.asp - See the ITC desperately readvertising the broadcasting license.
In the US, the various series of Star Trek, Buffy, Angel, Smallville and The X-files have all proved to be big hits during the last decade and programme's such as Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate SG1, and Hercules and Xena have gained a cult
Well, the BBC always trots out the same excuses when fans clamour for another series of Doctor Who, in that they can't compete with US fare like Star Trek and Buffy as these series regularly have a budget of between one and three million dollars per episode, which is well outside their budget. Which ignores the point that surely if the series was good enough, it could be sold all over the world and the money recouped. And even if the a programme did flop, it's not as if they can't risk failing to make all of their money back. According to C.A.L. (Campaign to Abolish the Tv License) in "the year 1998-99 the BBC businesses made a gross profit of, wait for it... £172 million," so it's not as if they don't have a bit of spare cash to throw around, and that they don't waste enough money making garbage like (insert your own particularly hated BBC programme here) and on pointless new station idents which often cost millions to produce.
Merchandise could also make up for any money lost, as whilst fans of Eastender's rarely rush out to buy Dr Legg dolls and the like, sci-fi fans do tend to be willing to spend pretty much all of their money on even vaguely related products - just look at the amount produced whilst Dr Who was at it's peak - comics, jigsaws, models, bubblebath, pinball machines, fictional and factual books, wallpaper and underpants are among literally thousands of product tie-ins. And it's not even as as if all 'cult' tv need be expensive - look at Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, The Prisoner and Twin Peaks. They've all proved that to create a bizarre world it doesn't necessarily have to cost that much, and special effects don't even have to feature that prominently, if at all. A sense of unease and the unusual can be far more effective than $1million dollar's worth of spaceships blowing up (though they're always fun to watch too).
The sci-fi / fantasy programme's that they have made in the last couple of years have unfortunately been rather lacklustre. Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) was simply an excuse for Vic and Bob to make fart gags infront of a more mainstream audience than a proper fantasy serial, and just too silly. More recently, the beeb produced an hour long one fantasy based drama, Strange, and whilst I missed the show, fellow gc(uk) contributor Chris Denton describes it as "Okay, but hardly brilliant. The script by Andrew Marshall had a decent idea but did not execute it all that well, with some of the dialogue laughable. But once again there's the feeling that the BBC didn't want to put the effort into to making this programme actually good, which it could easily have been." That they only commissioned a pilot rather than a whole series seems to back this up, and it appears to be a theme when concerning the BBC's outlook on sci-fi.
According to an info-packed Tripod's fansite (the link is below) "Christopher Penfold (script-writer for the second series of The Tripods) felt that BBC executives were simply bewildered by science fiction: 'The BBC had Doctor Who for years without really understanding that there was an audience for it, and what the audience actually liked about it. Certainly the television executives were always rather bemused by it, even if they were delighted by its success'." The site also notes that "Red Dwarf (was) originally sold to the BBC on the strict understanding that it was a sitcom with little sci-fi content." And despite decent ratings for that sitcom, there's only been one new series in the last nine years. The Beeb also refuse to admit that there is an audience for a new series of Dr Who, even though when the latest audio adventure went online the site received 1.6million page impressions during the first three days.
Of course it's not just the BBC who should be making genre tv, but as we have no choice in paying for the license fee, and that they're supposed to cater for all minorities(!), it seems ridiculous that they haven't properly invested in the genre in years. But the other main tv stations have mostly ignored the idea of making sci-fi / fantasy tv too, and so the Corporation shouldn't be singularly blamed. ITV of late has only made The Last Train and though it was set in a post-apocalyptic future, it was more a character based drama about a bunch of very annoying people not getting on that well together than a sci-fi piece. But as pretty much everything on ITV is utterly tedious shite, and almost always lowest common denominator tv, we're not especially bothered by this.
Channel Four and Sky really should have done more than they have, though. Whilst C4 are prepared to buy in US product like Babylon 5, Angel and Smallville they've failed to produce any original programming bar Dennis Potter's Cold Lazarus, which was unfortunately one of the great dramatist's weaker works, and Ultraviolet, which saw Coupling's Jack Davenport fighting vampires in a mostly neon lit and very dull near future. And whilst US sci-fi tv proliferates Sky's tv schedules, unfortunately they've cut back on their investment in British product after the failure of various comedies like Baddiel's Syndrome and Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show. But they did at least try with the sci-fi based The Strangerer's, even though that did turn out to be substandard stuff. Problematically, the majority of the few recent efforts on any of the channels have suffered from being far too serious and depressingly earnest, and have distinctly lacked the sense of fun and/or dark humour that characterises Buffy, the Tom Baker era Dr Who, The Prisoner, Star Trek, The Kingdom and Twin Peaks, and made them such distinctly original programmes.
But it seems that the only real reasons why the UK has failed to make new sci-fi or fantasy programmes is a profound disrespect for the fans of such shows, and a lack of willingness to try and do anything new. The sad fact is that all channels, including the BBC, are intent on getting the highest viewing figures possible, so more soaps, reality tv shows, light romantic comedies, big money quiz's, cop dramas, and tragic star vehicles for long past it celebs are set to be the order of the day for a long time yet. Instead of anything even vaguely innovative. Which is a bit of televisual tragedy if you think about it.
Related Links:
C.A.L. - http://www.spiderbomb.com/tv/index.html
Outpost Gallifrey - http://www.gallifreyone.com/index.shtml
The Tripods - http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/Tripods.html
Alex Finch.
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