UK Gold

I saw a post on the cook'd and bomb'd forums, and it asked what had happened to UK Gold, as it seems to show a load of rubbish now. I didn't know why, so I thought I'd ask here.

It used to show lots of good old stuff like Shoestring and Not the 9 O'Clock News, but now it apparently shows stuff that's only a month old. I havnt watched it in ages, cause even when I'm at a mates house who's got UK Gold, I dont bother watching TV there.

They may as well call it BBC One + 6 months. It's a shadow of it's former self. BBC One is more UK Gold than UK Gold these days with reruns of Only Fools & Horses, Fawlty Towers, Allo Allo, Keeping Up Appearances and the like.

Sooo... let me get this right, you're saying that UK Gold is crap based on something you read on the internet, but you can't receive it yourself and even when you can't, you don't watch it.

It begs the question - why do you care?

However... UK Gold is owned and operated by UKtv, which is owned jointly by BBC Worldwide and Flextech (which is a part of Telewest). It's been under the same ownership for quite a few years.

The contact address on their website is ukgold@bbc.co.uk so I am guessing the BBC own a large chunk of it. I never watch UK Gold now it is a shadow of it's former self.

On the point of it being a shaddow of itself, so much so that I've noticed on one or two occasions the same special trailer for a programme that BBC One used finds its way onto UK Gold second time round.

I was asking on behalf of the person that posted on Cook'd and Bomb'd, I didn't say that I'd formed my opinion around what they said, and I said "APARANTLY" it was showing crap. Anyway, the other replies seem to agree with the bloke on Cook'd and Bomb'd, so, although I won't form my opinion about today's UK Gold until I've seen a bit more of it, I would have to say that it looks like they are right.

I'm interested because, although I can only remember seeing The Fast Show on UK Gold (I'm sure I must've seen something else, but can't remember), I always had a good time when watching it, and now it looks like they could have changed it, I'm kinda wishing they hadnt. It's good to have a station you can rely on to show you something good (if old), instead of having to put up with todays standard of TV programmes, and UK Gold used to be that channel, but now it isnt it seems.

So, if the BBC still own a chunk of UK Gold, why can't they keep showing the old BBC classics at least. Have the rights to show them run out or something?

Cook'd and Bomb'd forum thread

Thought I'd better include that so you can see.

I think UK Gold should start showing 1980s episodes of Neighbours - these eps are much better than the late 1990s episodes they currently show

I think UK Gold are probably going to show them all, as in 1997 UK Gold were showing the 1991 episodes and now I think they're on 1998 if I am not mistaken. Though UK Gold have retstarted some things, they did it sometime ago with Eastenders, they got to about 1994 or so and then went back to 1985, with The Bill they haven't done the same, but when they got to 1999 or so they went back to 1993, but it's a good time to restart The Bill, as it is becoming too recent and probably some of it being unsuitable for a daytime audience.

If this proposed UK Comedy channel launches by the end of the year, then it might free up UK Gold's schedule to show a more diverse, and hopefully, more vintage series. I would much prefer UK Gold to be more like how it was in the pre-UKTV era days, with a mix of entertainment, comedy, quiz shows (Challenge has now neglected classic shows for the likes of Takeshi's Castle overload) and music shows. Comedy shows may transfer to UK Comedy (or bring back UK Play and give it a decent number in the EPG) and recent/current non-prestige drama series that won't be shown on UK Drama shouldn't be shown on UK Gold until at least three years.

But maybe the tide is starting to change at UK Gold.

There are rumours that old episodes of Top of the Pops will be returning to UK Gold in the New Year; hopefully not as a one-off for the 40th anniversary of TOTP. Getting old TOTP back and putting it in a regular weekday slot will be a success for UK Gold, when it repeated old episodes TOTP always got the highest ratings for the channel.

And as long as it's not DOGged.

But classic TOTP clips are already on BBC2 - TOTP2. Would be good to see intact episodes though, pity they can't go all the way to the beginning...

My old friend Digifiend:
"But classic TOTP clips are already on BBC2 - TOTP2".

With pointless superimposed captions and an annoying and egotistal host making inaccurate and banal comments over the intro and outros of most performances. And the same performances repeated year in, year out.

Better than nothing though.

"Would be good to see intact episodes though, pity they can't go all the way to the beginning...

Here's hoping the rumours are true then!