OFCOM BBC made UK TV Mary Poppins TV?!

Part of the point of this article is that Phil Redmond is a name the under 30s are unlikely to recognise, but shows he produced and created from the 80s to 00s were iconic, what would now be called watercooler (as everyone would speak about them at school or work the next day) TV: Grange Hill, Brookside...

a sample episode of Brookie:

a sample episode of Grange Hill

 

 

He's outraged at the disappearance of working class heroes (to borrow a John Lennon song title) on UK TV. While 7% of the UK population went to public school, half of the lead actors in UK TV series did, Cumberbatch being an archetypal example, his posh boy persona making him an internationally marketable figure.

He strikingly suggests that C4 should be folded into the BBC:

• it has failed to carry out its legal duty to offer a clear alternative to other broadcasters (with the exception of C4 News, I think that's a fair assessment)
• its advertising revenue could help keep the license fee down
• it could replace BBC4 (currently the BBC's highbrow channel, part of their excessive focus on the ABC1 audience who also get Radio 3 + 4 and more high culture content on BBC1/2 whilst the youth audience has just seen BBC3 dumped online and only a big social media campaign saved Radio6)
• C4 fails to represent working class Britain because it is so Londoncentric, something that is true of the majority of UK media; it is too metropolitan.
• he compares the safe, sanitised, politically correct UK TV series Survivor to the US series The Walking Dead (which has 'uneducated hillbilly heroes')

Here's a sample quote:

Redmond’s hope is that the novel gives a sense of what broken Britain is like in 2016. In the book’s introduction, he writes: “This is about life as it is and not how television regulators would like it to be!” That sounds like score settling. What’s his beef with TV regulators? “I call it ‘Mary Poppins TV’. Life’s not very difficult and if you behave and follow the rules, everything’s nice and jolly. It’s made TV crap. It wasn’t and it doesn’t have to be.”

Full article: Brookside creator Phil Redmond: ‘Northern powerhouse? Northern slaughterhouse, more like’.