"Dear Television" on BBC Two

If you get a chance try and catch "Dear Television" on BBC Two, a short ten minute vignette of a programme which showcases "strange and wonderful letters cataloguing the pre-occupations and passions of television viewers". Culled from the pages of vintage editions of The Radio Times, it marries a narration of the letter to clips of the original show.

The joy of the programme is not just in the bizarre nature of the letters, but in the way the clips illustrate the changing face of television. Did people really sit and watch a locked-off camera showing a record being played on a jukebox, interspersed with reaction shots of a studio audience vaguely nodding their heads in time to the music? For the duration of a song? And someone then wrote in to the BBC about how they imagined the audience in period costume throughout the ages?

My favourites have included the claim that a late 1970's show on Astrology fronted by Michael Aspel could lead to satanic worship and ultimately suicide, the man (I presume) complaining that we didn't see enough of the curvy profiles of the contestants in Miss World 1967, a clip of Tomorrow's World that only served to illustrate how uncannily accurate Look Around You had been, and an eagle-eyed viewer spotting a lighter stolen right underneath Bergerac's nose.

I guess the passage of time, and the fact that they were already in the public domain having been published in the Radio Times, allows the programme to gently poke fun at the writers of the letters. Within the BBC we have access to a wealth of correspondence from the audience which would be enough to make many, many more episodes of this programme, from the people emailing to complain that the weather given for a particular region is *always* wrong, to the person phoning up to register their disgust that there are "too many Scottish people on TV".

One significant difference the internet has made since the time the letters featured in "Dear Television" were written is that there is now a (reasonably) unfettered public space for the audience to write their letters to the BBC - and since it isn't against the rules of the BBC's messageboards to hold a, shall we say, distinctive point of view, the BBC is helping to electronically facilitate these one person crusades - whether it is someone who won't accept that Cyderdelic never got shown on BBC Two, someone who objects to any English dubover of a foreign language speaker in a news report who personally names, shames and blames the on-screen journalist involved, or someone who believes the BBC is run by a Catholic mafia (which presumably will be news to those protesting about the screening of Jerry Springer - The Opera). Even the person who believes that the reason the repeats of Match of the Day don't include the full production credits is to hide from sports fans the number of women who are involved in making the programme now gets their voice.

I hope we can keep the content of our community spaces for a sufficient length of time that they can fuel content creation as far off in the future as those letters to The Radio Times unwittingly did back in the 1960s.

Posted by Martin Belam, March 8, 2005
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