A Plea For Quality

This week on Dancing with The Stars, Hitler and Petain!

Jet lag is a bitch.

It was 3am and we turned to one another.

“Wide awake”?

“You bet”.

So it was that we came to explore TV offerings at that ungodly hour.

Most of it was paid programming. New and improved abdominzers.

We watched an hour of Kell on Earth on Bravo, perhaps one of the singularly stupidest programs I have ever seen.  Essentially an entire hour in which almost nothing happens.  An intern gets fired.  There is a crisis over the coffee.

Then, on The Military Channel, we found The World at War.

This series, produced by Thames TV in Britain from 1969-1973 is simply riveting.

It’s a history of World War II, done entirely in archival footage.  26 parts in all. Incredibly intelligent.

From 4am to 5am we watched France Falls, the history of the German invasion of France in 1940 and how France collapsed in a matter of weeks, and why.

As it is 100% archival material, we are not talking about the quality of shooting or lighting, but rather the quality of writing and the intellectual content.  Just stunning. Just fascinating.  What completely great television – particularly compared to Kell on Earth, but honesty compared to just about anything on TV these days.  It was a fantastic demonstration in real time of what television is as a medium vs. what it could be.

Well, you might say, it is not really fair to compare that bastion of stupidity Kell on Earth with The World at War. Perhaps if Bravo had the budgets that The BBC, for example, has, they too might produce something of a calibre of The World at War.

Maybe…

But then this morning I read in the Daily Telegraph (and this is one of the advantages of being married to a Brit, that you spend your mornings reading things like The Guardian or The Daily Mail) that The BBC, just on the heels of closing down several of its networks and paring back on its staffing, is about to spend significantly more money on Strictly Come Dancing so that it might compete with ITV’s X Factor on Saturday nights.

Wait a minute!

I thought the whole idea behind publicly funded networks like The BBC was so that they did not have to worry about ratings – so that they could concentrate on quality instead.

Kind of like funding The British Museum.

Apparently not.

The Telegraph reports that The BBC will spend significantly more than last year’s £400,000 ($600,000) per show, apparently to be able to attract bigger name talent.  ITV has just spent £5 million ($7.5 million) on building a new set for X Factor.

Now, compared to US budgets for US commercial TV, these numbers are a spit in the ocean, so let’s not be too quick to condemn The BBC, except that when they put their minds to it, they make such incredibly good television. But that does not seem to be on the agenda.

The World at War cost £900,000 to make in 1969, all in, for all 26 hours.  That would be £11 million in today’s money, not an inconsiderable sum, but it comes out to about £475,000 per hour in 2019 money. Or about what The BBC will spend on Strictly Come Dancing next year.

So, you have a choice.

You can either produce The World at War or you can produce Strictly Come Dancing (or Kell on Earth)

How do you spend your money?

What kind of product do you want to make?

What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?

What do you want do do with a medium as remarkable and powerful as television?

Well, perhaps if you made The World at War no one would watch it.

I suppose that if that were the case, the BBC executives would have a hard time defending their charter and their license fees.

So this is not so much a commentary on The BBC, but rather on the kind of society we have created in the past 40 years.

Neil Postman predicted this a long time ago when he wrote  Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I am sure of one thing, however.

If I wake up in 20 years and turn on cable at 3 am, if there is still cable, I somehow feel I will not be captured by reruns of Strictly Come Dancing from 20 years earlier.