BBC Documentaries

I really love the BBC.

Oh, not the horrid gardening shows, nor the two-old-ladies-clean-your-house shows, nor the insipid trash like Hotel Babylon and Footballer’s Wives, nor the rigged phone-in competitions – not even for the great entertainment programs like Doctor Who.

No, I love the BBC for documentaries.

There is no place else that produces such a fantastic collection of documentaries. I’m not talking about the big budget blockbusters like Walking With Dinosaurs (although, those certainly warrant special mention.) I’m talking about the fact that they can make a documentary on the history of fabric dye or on the construction of ancient Viking villages and they can make it factual, informative and interesting.

I can think of no higher accolade and no higher calling for the filmmakers art.

For the vast majority of you who read this blog but aren’t either (a) in the UK or (b) British ex-pats (that would be four people) let me point out why I think the BBC has got a significant advantage over our own meager attempts at documentaries, and in particular, science and history documentaries.

Now, I may be grossly oversimplifying this explanation, so, Brits, feel free to correct my interpretation.

In the UK if you own a TV, you pay for the BBC. Not through an allocation from your normal tax dollar, but from a direct annual television license fee levied against every television-owning household. (If you don’t pay, the Cat Detector van… sorry… TV Detector vans find you and you’re deported to the Falkland Islands for 6 months and forced to watch Argentinean TV.)

That money is given to the BBC to pay for the majority of operations. The BBC is overseen by the the BBC Trust (which replaced the previous Board of Governors) who act as the guardians of the public interest and try to ensure that the public are getting proper value for their license fees.

Of course, the BBC also makes money from other things, such as syndication of programs to other countries (like Doctor Who) or the licensing of merchandise (like Doctor Who). It’s also part of the Trust’s job to make sure that the BBC doesn’t over-commercialize and concentrate solely on money-generating programs (like Doctor Who.) The Trust is also supposed to protect the BBC from political interference.

That’s a gross over-simplification because no process that involves taxes and public funds is that cut-and-dry. The non-subsidized networks claim the BBC has an unfair advantage. Some people in authority think the BBC should be more commercial to keep the license fee down. It’s a whole complicated business, but, in spirit, I hope that’s a fairly concise explanation.

What that ultimately means is that, somewhere along the line, the BBC produces programs that simply wouldn’t be commercially viable. Documentaries about viking village construction comes to mind. While these sorts of subjects could be incredibly dry, they’ve undertaken to make them as interesting and informative as possible, and to a large degree, have succeeded.

So what brings this bit of praise up?

Earth Story.

I’ve just (about) completed this 8-hour, 1998 BBC documentary and it is one of the finest television shows I’ve ever seen.

The bulk of the program is almost exclusively about Geology. The program does the best job I’ve ever seen of explaining the science and the history of geology in terms that a layman can understand. (My five-year old understands enough of it that it brings joy to my heart.)

At the same time, it provides enough explanation and historical perspective to show how the mistakes and failed theories of the last centuries are science’s greatest strength – the ability to be self-correcting and self-refining – not the weakness that the forces of darkness and superstition try to portray them as.

Thinking back to my own early education, programs like this do a far more comprehensive job of informing people about the topics and science than did any classroom lecture or studies. That is the power and potential of television. When used in this way, it is the most powerful and compelling means we have of education and yet it is mostly wasted on reality TV, sensationalist news, celebrity watching, Three’s Company and most heinous of all, abused and perverted by shows like the 700 Club.

Documentaries like Earth Story are the kinds of things we should be exposing our children to, and yet we have no meaningful mechanism in the US to accomplish this. PBS is a sadly underfunded and half-hearted attempt and networks like the Discovery Channel are still too tied to the commercial constraints of television broadcasting.

Perhaps I’m just a disillusioned, cynical old man because I live in a world that doesn’t put Creationists in jail for abusing the minds of children – or at the very least a world that doesn’t laugh them into a closet like the Flat-Earthers or the Earth-At-The-Center-of-Universers, but we simply don’t make the effort to put the facts out there for fear of offending someone.

It pleases me in some small way that many BBC documentaries now make it to the US on the Discovery Channel (or their sub-channels) (even though they’re frequently re-edited or re-narrated in an American accent) and that some small portion of my cable fees might be going back to Discovery and then in turn being financed into the BBC to co-produce some of these documentaries. I’m doing my small part to educate the world.

Earth Story is not available on Region 1 (US) DVD, but is available through amazon.co.uk on Region 2 DVD if you have a multi-region DVD player. Even though it is 10 years out of date, it’s still a great introduction to Earth’s geology and I highly recommend it.

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