New Year, old repeats — and movies we last saw on VHS!
ON THE final night of the year, the TV schedules were stuffed full of repeats. Apart from formulaic New Year’s Eve party programming, there was barely ten minutes of original television on any channel.
All we got were replays of Christmas specials, second-rate movies and ‘another chance to see’ stuff.
This overdose of old hat started early. By mid-afternoon on ITV, we were back at Downton Abbey for the farewell bout of upstairsdownstairs. That’s proof of how disposable even the best telly is: we waited for months to see if Lady Edith would finally find happiness and, as soon as she did, the show was relegated to the status of filler on a Thursday afternoon.
The Beeb was also repeating Christmas Day favourites, including the Julia Donaldson animation Stick Man, with Martin Freeman as a lump of wood, and Chris Packham introducing the World’s Sneakiest Animals. These were not bad shows. But chances are, if you had wanted to watch them, you would have recorded them at Christmas.
And if, overcome by plum duff and sweet sherry, you forgot to set the timer on the box, there were other ways to catch up. This is the age of on-demand TV, which is a fancy way of saying that if you’ve got broadband internet access, you can wallow in all the repeats any telly addict could ever wish to see. What with iPlayer, and the newly redesigned ITV Player, and All4, and Demand 5, and UKTV Play, not to mention the subscription services such as Sky’s Now TV, the BBC Store, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Lord only knows what else...you really need never miss another TV show.
This is a technological marvel. It’s home entertainment heaven. But it also highlights the laziness of channel chiefs, who suddenly have no excuse for packing the schedules with old shows already available all the time to any viewers who want them.
The main offering on BBC1 was Esio Trot, starring Dustin Hoffman and Judi Dench as a courting couple in an adaptation of a Roald Dahl trifle. It debuted last year amid great fanfare, but there was a distinct lack of sparkle between Dame Judi and Dustin, and the whole business was a disappointment.
BBC2 was showing a couple of movies from 2012, neither of which was anything special, and a rehash of Gareth Malone’s musical exploits in Great Choir Reunion, which brought together some of the singers from previous series.
The backwater channels were no better. ITV2 was screening E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, while on BBC3 it was Toy Story 2. This can’t be the best that the digital telly revolution has to offer — two children’s films that we last watched on VHS videotapes.
In one short respite from all this regurgitated viewing, there was an hour of original programming that was by default the highlight of the evening. Panda Babies (ITV) visited the Chinese hinterland to inspect a breeding programe that is striving to save the Giant Panda from extinction. This was not worthy, educational, natural history TV — it was unabashed soppiness, even cuter than an hour with a basket of puppies and kittens on your lap.
Infant pandas are the most adorable creatures on earth. They look like teddy bears dipped in flour and mascara. Sadly, the panda mother is oblivious to their charm: she has twins and discards one baby at birth, which immediately cuts survival rates in half. Vet Steve Leonard learned how the Chinese were nursing these abandoned babies, holding them like fluffy dolls and feeding them formula milk, before teaching them how to cope in the wild, at panda primary school.
One especially scary statistic came up: we think of pandas as the epitome of endangered species, with just 1,600 left outside captivity — but according to John Bishop earlier this week, on his excursion to the Rwandan highlands, there are only 900 mountain gorillas remaining.
And there doesn’t seem to be any intensive ape breeding programme in Africa. Unlike all the TV repeats, this really could be our last chance to see gorillas. That’s a sombre thought to start the year.