Episode 16 Points of View

Good afternoon and welcome to Points Of View.

Let's have a bit of a laugh, shall we?

It remains to be seen whether any comedies on the BBC can deliver that.

BBC One is the most popular and best-funded BBC channel so its

latest offering Me And Mrs Jones you'd think would do the trick.

-See. There's nothing wrong with a hug.

-Only poo heads hug.

Oh, Jess, please don't say poo heads.

Mrs Jones, can you not use the word poo on school property?

Ah, so perhaps we have to spread the net a little wider then.

BBC Three has quite a reputation for comedy,

spawning Gavin & Stacey and schooling Russell Howard.

So, what of its newly-hatched Cuckoo?

If you truly contain the spirit of our beloved Deborah,

then please drink from the left saucer.

And if you do not, then drink of the right.

And this will prove what?

-It's a scientific test, Ken.

-It's not, Cuckoo.

It's a wholly random experiment. The cat can't read.

Yeah, but Deborah could.

Cuckoo apparently nesting down nicely then

and surely Jo Brand is on to a winner with Getting On on BBC Four.

It won a recommission on a cash-strapped channel,

which is a feat in itself.

Someone felt it was worth the investment.

Let's have a crack, it can't be that difficult.

Well, I haven't been to a training session, Kim.

-I'm quite good on the DS.

-Can we move it up. That's good.

Excellent.

Kim, make sure she doesn't fall forward.

Kim, Kim, stop! Now. Can you not get it back down?

No, Kim, you're going to squash her now. Kim, the knees...

Can you not make the whole thing come down flat?

Plenty of evidence then that comedy can be a very hit and miss business.

So to even out the vagaries of public taste

and quality of comedic talent, does the BBC comedy department

have what a certain character used to call a cunning plan?

I e-mailed Points Of View because me and Ben were having

a discussion about sitcoms, there's not as many sitcoms as there was.

We would like to see more sitcoms being brought to the BBC

and new ones and new material, new faces just to give new viewers

a chance to see what other people can do and what they can write.

The things I miss is shows like Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers.

Uno, dos, tres!

It's not that we're saying we don't like this shows that are on now.

We'd like to see more new material, speaking as people who love comedy.

There's nothing wrong with my casual clothes.

Come on, your trousers were so short,

when you crossed your legs you could see your knees.

There's very little difference,

I think, between sitcom in the 1980s and now.

It's still the values of physical comedy, laugh-out-loud moments and set pieces.

Chris is having an affair.

VICTOR LAUGHS LOUDLY

We haven't got many of those long-running television shows

where people can cut their teeth any more.

That's a challenge.

Would you tell Barbara it's Margo, please, Tom?

Barbara, that's Margo over there.

Before, it was trained actors who went to drama schools

and worked in the theatre before but now you see people like Miranda

and Jack Whitehall, who are stand-up comedians, taking sitcoms to TV.

Most of our comedy is about individual oddballs.

And so I think that started with Fawlty Towers where John Cleese

was writing a version, probably of himself, and that has carried on now.

British comedy is often about single people like Miranda.

Miranda could be the only person who writes Miranda.

If you are watching with other family members, ignore them. It's me and you. Saucy!

I would be interested in finding out how to bring forward our ideas

to the BBC and I'm sure other people would who are interested in comedy.

We have this fantastic thing called The Writers Room which

I urge anyone...

It's like a hidden treasure the BBC has.

Go on the website, and if you have an idea, a funny joke, a line,

contact The Writers Room

because they will read every single syllable you write and a lot

of it comes through to us at the comedy department and we are working

with any number of writers who have come through The Writers Room.

Off on our travels now

and a surprise hit for BBC2 this autumn has been Welcome To India.

No glossy travelogue, this. Mumbai's six-star hotels have been

sidestepped to get down and dirty with the street dwellers.

This series profiles the literal depths the locals are forced to

sink to in order to scrape a living.

Working flat out for 20 minutes he dredges enough sludge to fill

six bags.

Newsman Huw Edwards hasn't had nearly so far to travel to

profile his homeland for BBC2 in the Story Of Wales.

This is a very Welsh experience, isn't it? For me, at any rate.

Coming to the seaside without the sunshine.

The annual Sunday school trip comes to mind.

I think it's fair to say that people in Wales in the 1950s

and early '60s had a rather limited notion of leisure.

Happy customers there.

Widening out from Huw and Wales to the entire British Isles

and Ian Hislop.

He's been on a three-week historical hunt for the heritage

of the stiff upper lip and it transpires our national stoicism has not

been around for nearly as long as we thought.

Forster had been to public school an experience he hated.

He wrote in later life in an essay on the English character that the

educational system was adept at producing Englishman with

well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds

and undeveloped hearts.

Forster didn't believe the English were innately unfeeling it was

just that they had been taught to, as he put it, bottle up their emotions.

Praise indeed but make sure you don't crack a smile, Ian.

I am thrilled by the reaction to the programme.

What I hoped to do was to try and do a bit of British social history

but from a slightly different angle.

It's incredibly rich in stories and anecdotes and footage

and all of that context

of the last couple of hundred years but to try

and do it as a tale of the way we felt.

What I hoped it would be, both a national story

and a personal story, a history of British emotion

but also a history of my own - and what do I think about that?

I didn't want to do a harrumphing essay.

I just wanted to ask the question,

where did we get the stiff upper lip, how did it change and do we need it?

Whilst we are in a nostalgic mood, a much loved BBC service

is about to be consigned to history but rather than gliding into a

graceful retirement, the Ceefax text service has limped into a corner

and been eclipsed by its shiny digital replacement, the red button.

Ceefax always was, and probably still is,

a great way to get up-to-date news.

And it was the way to get your football team's

scores on a Saturday if you couldn't get to the game.

And it was really quick way to find out what's

going on in the world for people who didn't have a lot of time

to read the newspapers or wait for the TV bulletins.

In its heyday, Ceefax was attracting a audience of 20 million

people a week and that was 24 hours a day,

365 days a year service.

There's the question of miniature Ceefax operations

by feeding in groups of pages of a purely local interest.

For people who valued the brevity and clarity of those Ceefax

stories with their four simple paragraphs, the up-to-dateness and

the fact you could get it any time of the night or day, that is still

there on the digital text service which lives behind the red button.

If you press the red button on your remote you will get digital

text with news, sports and weather headlines.

We've had, throughout the past year, a whole stream of e-mails and

feedback about the service and a lot of people will be sad to see it go.

We've even had a few poems.

Oh, Ceefax, for 29 years you've been part of my life telling me

The news and views of the world

The blocky weather guide and advent calendars of my childhood

And the breakfast time ritual

Of shouting at the letters pages shall be no more

So, goodbye, Ceefax, my old friend

I will not be watching you again.

So, Ceefax has fallen victim to the digital revolution

just as Fahrenheit fell victim to decimalisation.

But only in isolated and randomly chosen parts of the BBC,

according to Martin Berger.

50 years ago, we changed from using Fahrenheit to Celsius.

Fahrenheit is rarely heard on national TV or regional BBC stations.

There are two notable exceptions.

At Look North and Wales all the weather presenters continue

to give us the Fahrenheit equivalent.

When will they enter the 21st century?

Well, Martin, we asked if there was a method to the Fahrenheit

madness and it appears there is. Sort of.

We're told BBC weather presenters always use Celsius both

on-screen and for voice-overs

but when temperatures are particularly high, they will

sometimes make verbal reference to Fahrenheit

because viewers have said they prefer it.

So, from that we can infer two things.

It's our fault because we've asked for it

and we needn't worry about it for 10 months

if ever as we are unlikely to get any high temperatures.

Now, can you see me clearly? Not fuzzy around the edges at all?

No, well,

I am obviously not suffering from Nigel Slateritis then.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, there is a glut in the shops or some

special offers that are too good to miss.

When that happens, I tend to buy now and think later.

Nigel Slater got five million viewers, even if they were squinting.

Pin-sharp and crystal-clear next week, we have the Head

of Entertainment Commissioning Mark Linsey in the hotseat.

What is he busy stuffing our Christmas stockings with?

Why not ask him? You can write to:

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Or jump on the very lively messageboard:

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the number is charged as a local rate call from a landline:

Goodbye.