sjames

Comic Relief 2021

Although judging by last night it looked like Alesha Dixon had no presenting experience as she stuck rigidly to reading the autocue. There were moments where it was clear Lenny, David and Alesha were supposed to be a 'conversation' between presenters, but Alesha just faced forward and read the autocue without even looking at Lenny or David and just made it look awkward.

In fact the best presenters for me last night was David Tennant and the pair of Amanda Holden and Jason Manford, they seem to be trying to lift the whole thing with enthusiasm and fun whilst the rest were much more subdued and serious.

Like others have said, it was very comedy-lite last night. I don't see why there couldn't have been some stand up routines from comedians to give some more live stuff going on in the studio. People like Rowan Atkinson used to have some involvement every time but he seems to have disappeared. Even people like Michael McIntyre who is a regular BBC face don't seem to get involved which feels slightly odd.

BBC Four to become archive channel (p15)

I think it would be a real shame if BBC Four ended up closing. I'm in my 30's, so not in target age range as suggested by a lot of media articles, but I love all the pop culture and music documentaries, TOTP repeats and other archiving programming. In fact it's probably one of my most watched channels.

It's a wonder really that BBC haven't pushed their 'BBC Archive' brand a lot more, move all the history docs and music coverage onto BBC2, and then focus on repeating old shows on BBC Four. Not the stuff that gets non-stop repeats like Dad's Army and Only Fools, but stuff like TOTP, maybe Blue Peter, Tomorrow's World, Play for Today etc that don't get seen so much!