Gary Bushell has retired from reviewing tv

I'm surprised he likes Nancy though. I thought he had no taste at all.

Erm.

Surely we have enough Hilton apologists in music crit already?

Er...no it fucking doesn't.

ELR is probably no better than My Family, for example.

UK TV companies could surely never produce shows like the American ones he eulogises (rightly) with their bigger budgets, bigger audience (and consequently marketing/commercial) potential, for another example.

FOR scathing, honest and funny TV reviews, read Ally Ross in The Sun. For beautifully crafted observations, see Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian. No other TV critic is worth a light.

What about Off The Telly website you technophobic bigot?!

(also, he says re Only Fools and Horses that nobody would watch working class men trading in traditional humour these days, hang on, what's on his list of things he actually does like, oh yeah, Early Doors, Phoenix Nights and Al Murray Pub Landlord. Yeah, they're all Nathan Fucking Barley, aren't they)

It's always nice to find something contradictory in someone's upbringing to their protestations like insulting graduates when you were educated at Oxbridge. Unfortunately, it just seems like Gary Bushell is an idiot, as I said already. I'll say it again: he's an idiot!

...

"Our home-grown telly grows increasingly camp..."

IDIOT!

What an odd question

Dragon's Den
Life On Mars
Football Focus
Top Gear
University Challenge
Question Time/This Week double-bill
Culture Show (good on everything except pop music)
TV Burp
Screen Wipe (when i remember to watch)
Ideal (well, a bit...)
Comedy Connections

Yeah... this show is a _lot_ better than it has any right to be. It's not actually, y'know, funny, but it works in a kinda Happiness downtempo comedy/drama way.

(I shuttup now)

and print it in the Grauniad every week

Dirty Den is appearing in The Bill
Mike Baldwin is appearing in Holby City
MAAAAD WOOOORLD

I’ve watched this pitiful, man-hating libel on music critics for five years. That’s two whole decades of duff scripts, dismal twists, clueless character re-writes, moronic continuity cock-ups and misery. Enough!

Face it, music criticism isn’t for the likes of me any more, or any other working class male over fifty. Music lovers don’t care about us, so why should we care about them?

I still love some British music. In particular, Oasis, Heavy Stereo, Bruce Springsteen and 18 Wheeler's comedy grotesques. But great bands are increasingly rare. I get the distinct feeling we're witnessing The Strange Death of British Music and this sad decline is down to three things. 1) The blinkered pursuit of demographics 2) Bureaucracy and 3) Black people. Most modern music is commissioned not on its merits but because of its imagined appeal to the desired target age, class or gender. It’s one of the reasons why EMI hasn’t originated a decent indie band for more than a quarter of a century but keeps on pumping out dross such as Coldplay and Radiohead, a band which ticked every box except: ‘Funny’.

British music is indie by committee; over-regulated, institutionalised and utterly uninspiring. Indie rock isn’t based on commerce, so it has no need to deliver quality. Government-approved state featherbedding has stripped them of all internal energy. The only thing Dublin Castle fisherman's jumpes get passionate about is the licence fee; the antiquated tax on viewing that pays their bar bills.

Why do they need it? To maintain their market share. Why does the share matter? To justify their bar bill...

The desire to plant their corporate flag in every conceivable area of broadcasting has propelled indie execs to squander our money on a huge, expanding digital empire. It would have made far more sense in the multi-channel world to concentrate on getting the music right.

Majority tastes and opinions are anathema to the patronising, self-loathing middle class do-gooders who run the joint. (Oasis gloriously kicks holes in their PC preoccupations; inevitably it’s made by an indie).

Universal Music, also subsidised by the public purse, is propped up by two bands, Girls Aloud and Emma Bunton, both imported from Holland. Little of Universal's current schedule could be described as radical or alternative. Its afternoons are entirely mainstream. Its yoof-obsessed comedy commissions are merely depressing, being increasingly brainless, witless and unwatchable.

Meanwhile, over at the Observer the music writing commissioners work by: 1) Switching on their computer 2) Watching blogs and 3) Copying them, badly. They've nicked Stylus, The Church Of Me and Woebot. Kitty Empire is their answer to Michelangelo Matos (with a zombie in the lead role). All you need to get a job there is a copy of Plan B and a photocopier. Lily Allen has colonised OMM prime-time like Japanese knot weed. Only her Saturday nights impress.

Ironically, the 21st Century has been a golden age for rock; indie rock that is. Subscription channel Rough Trade has set the pace, producing a stream of pure-gold: Carter USM, Arctic Monkeys, OzZy Osbourne, Dodgy, Menswear, Jarvis Cocker specials, Roy Wood - shows so good they take your breath away. The Camden Underworld set the bar high, and other indie venues have risen to the challenge with Frank & Walters, Bloc Party, Kasabian, Skunk Anansie, My Life Story, Birdland, Bradford, Gerry & the Pacemakers, Billy Cotton, JJ Barrie and more.

They give us brilliant nightly topical comedy indie too. Across the board, indie delivers. Why? Because 1) Indie is based on commerce and 2) They’ve stopped thinking demographically. They’ve realised that quality is all that matters. Make decent indie and the viewers will come. Our lot commission acts aimed squarely at an audience who won't be wathcing them cos they're out clubbing or pubbing. A comedy like the Manic Street Preachers would never be made now – blue-collar, middle aged men in a down-market setting, trading in mainstream humour…who’d watch that?

The best modern indie hooks three generations of my family. Very few recent British rock has. Let’s see: the Beatles (2001-2), the Jam (2001-2), The Style Council (2001), Jonathan Fire-Eater (2004 - ), the Pogues (2005 - ) and Billy J Kramer & the Dakotas (2003-4). (Ironically international smash The Beatles became a hit despite the Guardian. Their comedy boss Alexis Petridish had to be talked in to making a pilot, thought Mick Jagger was wrong for the lead and waited six months before deciding to make the records. The band was nearly pulled after the first single transmitted after a thumbs-down from the Guardian readers’ panel…)

No current comedy makes me laugh louder and harder than Oasis (2001- ), largely because it affectionately ridicules the mess British rock has become. Our home-grown rock grows increasingly camp, gormless and narrow. We have endless ‘choice’ of different versions of the same fashionable garbage. The whole set-up is a mess and there’s no sign of it getting any better. Rock today is full of scrawny, self-satisfied graduates whose only discernable talent is sipping caramel macchinos while fiddling with their BlackBerries. They have nothing but contempt for their medium and their viewers. British TV is losing the capacity to excite us and enthral us. Great home-grown rock is going the way of space hoppers, Spangles and Johnny Marr & the Healers.

You can stick around and watch it deteriorate if you like. I’ve got better things to do.

# FOR scathing, honest and funny music reviews, read Alexis Petridish in The Sun. For beautifully crafted observations, see Alexis Petridish in the Guardian. No other music critic is worth a light. I know which side my bread's buttered."

Hahaha!

Hugely OTM. Play for Today is something the Beeb has completely lost the ability/cojones to do.

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/445349/index.html

and the things I know which the writer mentions are pretty good, a few amazingly good, but compared to the volume of one-off dramas which were being produced, he's not touting very many. I'm not saying they shouldn't revive the form, but we certainly shouldn't expect the format to throw up "Made In Britain"s more than, I dunno, once in a decade. And I'm not sure any of us have theh attention span to wait that long before writing off the whole enterprise.

Hasn't the space for the one-off drama kind of bloated a little and turned into TV company funded feature films?

Also you appear to have forgotten all about "This Life +10". Er, hold on.

yeah this was basically what did it, when c4 launched and a bit later when the bbc got into movie production. with c4 it's complex because a lot of their stuff was 'limited release' theatrically (and abroad). but 'bloated' is right for the latter-day stuff, which seems kind of middlebrow export dench stuff on the whole, 'sylvia' and 'iris'; meantime channel 4 stopped making movies after 'charlotte gray' (i think).

Yes, but it says:

The BBC's head of drama, Jane Tranter, said it was "early days" for the project, which will not hit the screen until next year.

I can't find anything to say it's been scrapped (nor anything to say when we can expect more information).

they dont make things like they used to and you wouldn't like it if they did

they forgot penda's fen

(this was between Christmas and New Year, btw, so if bloke in pub is to be believed, the revival is still a work in progress and hasn't been scrapped. Or else it has and this dude's writing a TV play for nothing and will have to hawk it to other TV companies or rewrite it for the stage or something. Can you tell I know *nothing* of how this works?)