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SKY (G)ONE: A History of Sky’s Flagship Channel
[NOTE: This article originally appeared on Medium last September. I’ve rewritten some of the following to bring things up to date a little.] It’s now just over twelve months* since Sky One was filed alongside Bravo, Carlton Select and U>Direct on Wikipedia’s list of defunct UK television channels. This is a suitable opportunity to reflect…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (60-56)
Closing in on the half-century. Ready for another look at five formidable formats, regularly interrupted by ill-considered meanders down distraction avenue? Hopefully the answer is yes, else you’re in the wrong place. 60: Tomorrow’s World (Shown 1511 times, 1965-2003) As the trope has it, a series inextricably linked to a nation of pop kids who…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (65-61)
Here’s the next bit. I appreciate it’s been a while. Back when the last update came out, we had a different Prime Minister, a different Monarch. and a different Chelsea manager. So, that’s enough pre-ambling, on with the list. And it only took one Friday night spent looking through 1920s radio listings to see which…
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I Challenged Six AI Image Bots To Generate Images For Newspaper Headlines from The Day Today. Here Are The Results (Part One)
For the uninitiated, The Day Today was a 1994 BBC2 comedy series parodying contemporary news coverage, a programme that has remained resident in the collective consciousness of all British comedy fans ever since. A TV adaptation of Radio 4 series On The Hour, The Day Today would provide terrestrial TV debuts for Chris Morris, Armando…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (70-66)
Welcome back, everybody. Exciting fact! When I started writing this update, three of the five entries were for completely different programmes. It’s only after writing them that, for various reasons, they’ll actually be appearing higher up the list. Still, at least that’ll save me some time later, eh? Before kicking off the next update, reader…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (100-71 again, sort of)
Well, damn. As you may well be aware, I recently embarked on a foolhardy quest to tot up the hundred programmes shown most often on BBCs One, Two and Television Service since it launched in 1936. Taking data from the BBC’s Genome Project (now known as the BBC Programme Index), I scoured through 855,361 individual…
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20×4: Marking Twenty Years of BBC Four
Hi all, still sorting out some refinements of the 100 Most-Shown BBC Programmes Ever. In short, a total of 25,371 programmes have now been added to the mix (previously buried within other listings such as 90s/00s CBBC – where individual shows were listed in one big programme description on Genome – plus listings from the…
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You Know, For Kids: The 20 Most Popular CBeebies Series’ EVER
A slight detour from the 100 Most-Broadcast Things On The BBC Ever to give another airing for something I posted on Medium earlier this year. Some of you may already have read this, but for any new readers (especially those with kids), I do hope you’re sitting comfortably. “Shall we put CBeebies on?” is one…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (75-71)
As Ringo Starr famously said, sorry for the lateness of my reply. This is what happens when you spot a suspiciously quiet spell in a broadcast history of a long-running series, look into it and discover it spent two years billed as “Weather, followed by [PROGRAMME NAME]”, meaning I have to recalculate a load of…
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BBC100: The 100 Most-Broadcast BBC Programmes Of All Time (80-76)
The ill-advised journey through the papery soup of BBC scheduling history continues, your intrepid reporter wading on with increasingly papier-mâchéd legs to bring you the following five dispatches from television history. Quite a long one, given the sheer bloody amount of history for some of them.
BrokenTV
Welcome, welcome, welcome home
BrokenTV 