Ronnie Barker on the BBC Homepage
The internet is awash with tributes to comic Ronnie Barker who died on Tuesday, and the BBC site has its' fair share both on Points of View and Have Your Say. I wanted to pay a slightly different tribute though, to the picture editor on the BBC homepage yesterday.
Like newspapers with pre-prepared obituries we've always got a stand-by situation for important world figures, and a stack of pictures we would use in case of their death. Sometimes, like with John Paul II, the death is preceded by a very public lengthy illness, which gives our editorial teams plenty of notice to prepare a treatment.
With figures like Ronnie Barker though, although he has been ill for some time, there was no build-up to the announcement of his death in the press. With our regular picture editor away this week I was really impressed with the work if his super-sub replacement. Within an hour of the news breaking they had produced what I thought was a beautiful tribute promo to Ronnie, which was suitably sombre, but also captured Barker at the height of his powers.
I know how hard it can be to get decent pictures to illustrate sudden events - our sources may be limited, or the photographs may not be the correct size, shape or resolution for our homepage, or look very poor when they have been suitably compressed, and bizarrely within the BBC getting pictures out of TV productions can be the hardest. The thing that most impressed me about the promo was that I hadn't heard the news, but saw it over someone's shoulder, and my instant reaction was "Ronnie Barker has died". It was a great piece of work.
Not everybody has been saying that about the BBC's transmission of an unscheduled tribute programme last night. On the Points of View board there is a thread bemoaning the BBC's reaction.
What are the BBC doing putting a tribute programme on at 10:35. People are going to bed. Can't they get rid of holby city for one tuesday so that we can have this comic geneious on.
Come on BBC think about programme times
and
It's a shame that they could not be bothered to move or postpone Love Soup.
The BBC will be using Ronnie's material for decades to come, and this is the thanks he gets .
If it were up to me the whole of tomorrow would be Ronnie Barker Day on the BBC , I think we can survive a day without the bile which we have become accustomed too recently
Mind you in the very next post the same poster complains that they have missed most of a repeat of Porridge precisely because the BBC has altered the schedule.
I think it is one of those situations where the BBC simply cannot win - if they hadn't shown anything last night the TV schedulers would have been accused of snubbing a comic genius, but what they did show is open to accusations of being hastily put together, weirdly morbid in having been pre-prepared and under-promoted.
On a personal note it makes me feel even sadder that last year I was offered tickets at the last minute to watch The Two Ronnies filming the links for The Two Ronnies Sketchbook, but was unable to go. A missed opportunity.
It was a great, respectful picture. I found out too the same way and I also work there. I think BBC ONE and TWO did very well to schedule at the last minute an hour long profile and a repeat episode of Porridge. (One of the best ones too..) and this was a fine homepage tribute. (enough BBC brown nosing -ed)
That's a really good choice of picture. Works so well.
[This comment was left on a nearby post, but I think was intended for here]
"Ronnie Barker, like Spike Milligoon, was a product of their time. Post war repression and harsh school discipline plus a lack of television or computer games as entertainment, ensured that people like them played with their imaginations and language itself instead as well as fought the restrictions of the day. Nowadays children have no authority to rebel against as their supposed elders and betters are just as childish as they are or battered to the ground by the unrelenting pressure of an increasingly violent social and educational environment. Without borders children turn into shallow and illiterate egotists, who can't spell let alone play with words like these former comedy giants could but this is social evolution alas - inner potential captured or realised and drained, leading to a vacuous state where the real, concrete world is ignored in favour of short lived fame and heads being buried in the clouds of illusion (compare Prince Saud al Faisal's comments recently, about the invasion of Iraq and it's destabilisation of the whole Middle East and George Bush's comments about being on a mission for God).
Ronnie Barker will be Sorely Mist, in the BBC's documentary of the Gaelic poet's life, in the up and coming autumn schedule.
I thank u"