We want to pay for ALL of the BBC. Also... the last taboo...
There’s an ABW reader who will often send me a text message to see if I am okay if the newsletter isn’t in his inbox by midday. But this is certainly the latest in the day that I have ever sent an email.
(And yes, it probably means the Always Be Streaming newsletter will be a Saturday morning send too).
BBC introduces a paywall
Has the BBC under-valued its content for international audiences for too long? Absolutely. Are the new plans to introduce a paywall for US users weighted too heavily in terms of expense. Absolutely.
The UK BBC World News channel will charge users $49.99 per year or $8.99 per month. Users will get unlimited access to the BBC’s news articles, feature stories and the 24/7 livestream of the BBC News channel.
The official BBC news article tried contextualising the pricing with this terrible comparison:
The corporation hopes the offer will raise money to help fund the BBC's services alongside revenue from UK households through the licence fee, which costs £174.50 a year and accounted for about two-thirds of its total income last year.
The BBC has said it expected to have a £492m budget deficit for the latest financial year.
That £174.50 covers all of the entertainment content from the BBC as well as the news. Plus radio services. If the BBC is going to charge people for the BBC, international subscribers want to pay for ALL OF THE BBC. Just news seems light on. I get that there are folks that LOVE the UK, but shouldn’t this just be a Britbox add-on and not a service in its own right?
Nothing is taboo anymore
Back when I was a teenager, I did work experience on Saturday Disney for a few days at Channel Seven in Brisbane (circa 1995, if I recall correctly). There was a moment where one of the female presenters walked into the room carrying an over-sized publicity photo in hand. Out loud she announced to the room:
“My tits used to be so much bigger.”
She was deliberately being provocative and getting a cheap laugh from her colleagues. But 15 year-old me in the room was at that exact age where I was old enough for adult conversation, but still young enough to have been watching this same presenter on Saturday Disney a few years prior.
I went bright red. So, quite rightly, everyone made fun of me.
It was the first time where I remember being exposed to the idea of public vs private conversation and presentation. It feels like those boundaries just don’t exist anymore.
We’re 25 years into the Internet really taking hold of the mainstream (16 years if you are using the launch of the iPhone and the shift to mobile Internet changing everything as your line in the sand). Conversations became more open online, image-based social media turned our outward facing cameras inward, and… look, I’m not typing anything here that you don’t already get.
But there were a few moments this week that made me realise that there just isn’t a line between that public and private boundary anymore. Yesterday, I made mention of former Girls star Allison Williams talking about a still verging-on-taboo sexual act. I made mention of it in the newsletter mostly because she spoke of it so matter-of-factly - people talk like that now?
And then there was the former host of The Apprentice (no, not Arnold Schwarzenegger - the guy before him) who dropped the F-bomb in a media chat earlier in the week.
It led to this THR story:
Now, it is one thing to recognise that these boundaries are dropping away, but…
I think there’s genuine benefit to people having open conversations. Mental health, body image (which has a connection to mental health, I appreciate), and various other stigmas have long prevented people from being open about real issues in their lives. I actually think it is great that Trump dropped the dirty word. I’m not sure we needed him to be more human, but it was the further removal of that silly artifice of the reserved statesman.
But there are the children to consider. All of this got me thinking about appropriate children’s programming and the way it frames conversations for kids. If all of these boundaries are breaking down, making the impermissible now permissible, how do we set community standard guardrails for public-facing kids content?
Everything’s changing = good.
Knowing where that line is for our most vulnerable = Uhhhh.
TV content / entertainment media is at the frontline of all of that. Right now US media is having a lot of chatter about “How do we tell the kids that the President said a swear,” but the conversation needs to be more sophisticated than that.
News Desk
Call The Midwife isn’t getting the boot, says the BBC. Read: Radio Times
Lola Petticrew and Scoot McNairy have joined Hulu‘s untitled Liz Meriwether series loosely based on terrible 1987 film Black Widow. Read: Deadline
Adam Arkin, an actor you probably remember for being in Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, The West Wing, etc, has carved a pretty solid career as a director. He just came off a gig as the house director on season 2 of Poker Face and has just been hired to direct and EP American Hostage, the MGM+ TV adaptation of the podcast of the same name. Podcast lead actor Jon Hamm is back starring in the TV version. Read: Deadline
Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club will get a cinema release in the UK. Read: Radio Times
RIP the great Lalo Schifrin. The composer of the Mission: Impossible theme has died aged 93. Read: Variety
Trailer Park
To Kill a Monkey debuts on Netflix at a date TBA..
An old friend coaxes Efemini into the alluring world of cybercrime, where every decision he makes draws him deeper into a moral minefield.
That’s the newsletter for today.
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