Television has been something of a problem since arriving in North America, partly because of the quality of the television, linked to Bell in some way or another, we have been using for most of the time, but more because of the quality of programming. The density of ITV3 style programmes - for example Lewis or Poirot - seems to be low and the density of advertisements seems to be high. Minor irritations are the facts that the channels offered by the Bell flavoured television do not seem to correspond in any obvious way to the TV guides offered by the newspapers and that many of them are only offered on a pay-to-view basis.
BH has been working hard to master the vagaries of the system and has now reached the point where she can reliably access weather forecasts. But yesterday evening she surpassed herself and found a recent episode of 'Lewis', screened in its 90 minute (or so) entirety without advertisements. So recent that the Foxy sergeant had been promoted to inspector, a promotion which was entirely new to us. Will this promotion destabilise the series, as police whodunnit series of this sort, by long standing convention, involve a hero and a sidekick, not two heroes?
Closer inspection this morning reveals that the programme was brought to us by the Masterpiece Trust which seems to be part of the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) family. Both operations being some kind of not-for-profit, charitable operations of long standing. They both invite donations, rather in the way of the wikipedia foundation.
Sadly I was completely defeated by wikipedia's exposition of PBS. Maybe I will try again tomorrow. And maybe Cameron & Co. should try a diet of North American television before they dismantle the BBC. All very well for the rich & the Bullingdon Boys who can afford other forms of entertainment, but what about the rest of us?
I note in passing that a large proportion of the programmes offered by the Masterpiece people appear to be from the UK. And a large proportion those have a heritage, costume drama flavour. Oxford colleges, stately homes, whatever. That is clearly what we are good at these days.
Reference 1: http://www.pbs.org/.
Reference 2: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece.
Further developments. Yesterday evening I came across the part of the Masterpiece operation which delivers their programmes over the Internet, much in the way of BBC's iPlayer. However, when one came to press the button to do just that, all the programmes listed were blocked because the system had detected that I lived in an area to which licensing restrictions applied. Presumably they get my area from the IP address of the wifi unit through which I am talking to the Internet, but whether that is all or part of Canada, or all or part of Ontario, I have no idea. In any event, not so public broadcasting service after all.
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