I only want one TV channel

published by pete on Tue, 2011-05-17 13:40

Here I sit with my SKY TV package. At the last count there were nearly 400 channels available to people who subscribed to everything. Since I'm not one of those, I decided to have a look at how the number of channels drops when you make decisions to exclude certain categories.
So, to start with, let's whip away all the various regional channels. The thinking goes that you'll still have your "home" region, but you don't really care about the South Coast news if you live in Doncaster. That brings us down to 332.
Next, removing all the prime channels, such as movies, sport and HD from the list gets us down to 238.
Taking out the +1s, since they aren't really different channels leave us with 186 channels and when the shopping (or "Lifestyle") ones are tossed: 170.
Leaving aside the childrens' "premium" and foreign channels and we have 103 possibilities for different things to watch. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? My problem is that when you come to see what those 103 channels are, you realise there's still an awful lot of culling left to do.
There's a whole collection of channels (Blighty? National Geographic?? Military History???) that have never touched me and that I'd never heard of until I started compiling this list. Dropping them, along with all the various dedicated news channels ends up with 51 possibles, for when I want to be entertained.
Even within that list, there are ones I've never, ever watched: Five USA, The Hallmark Channel, Crime & Investigation to single out a few at random. There is also a +1 that escaped the first cut by dint of having unorthodox names, so let's also say goodbye to Dave ja vu (nice try, BTW).
So when these have all gone, along with Sky3, BBC3, the Discovery group of channels (confession: I used to watch Discovery Home and Leisure but they didn't show any new material for what seemed like years, so I cancelled that package) and some others that sneaked into the list - such as Living which is duplicated by its new name: Sky Living I'm left with 25 channels that I might, possibly turn to during a channel-surfing moment.

So that's the channels sorted out. What about the stuff they show?

We're deep within the realms of personal choice here, so: in for a penny, in for a pound. First up: let's lose all the repeats. When I refer to "repeats", I'm disallowing stuff that was shown on one channel and then reappeared again on another - which then advertises it is "brand new on channel X", when in reality it's 10 or 20 years old and has been screened so many times, on so many channels that you wonder if it was just part of a job-lot the channel picked up cheap. So, repeats include anything that's been screened before: on any channel that I might have watched.

A quick run through with a TV programme filtering script reveals that on my favoured list of 25 channels, today there will/have been a grand total of 948 programmes - leaving out news & weather reports. Of those 59 are new, never seen before/ Fifty nine! that's all. Just over 6% of the programmes being shown on "good" channels might just make it through the first cut. Even worse: 26 of them are either early morning (from midnight - 6 a.m.) or daytime programmes - which includes some childrens' programmes on BBC2. When they are removed, simply because they're at the wrong time, I have the choice of 33 programmes that haven't been on before.

Obviously 33 programmes is an awful lot of TV to watch in one evening, so what's the problem? it sounds like a great deal of choice. However, I haven't even started to exclude programmes based on what they are; so far all we've done is discover which programmes haven't been on before. Since I'm no fan of soaps, reality, sport, celebrities, animal programmes, game shows or stuff about emergency services (police, hospitals, doctors, firemen etc.) there's more to be left by the wayside. When those genres are dropped from the list of "probables" I have whittled my potential viewing activities down to 8 programmes. However, looking at the titles and programme summaries I can't say I fancy any of them much. It's a good thing I'm going out this evening.

Out of interest, the channels showing new material (or at least "new" as far back as my programme database will go) on this tuesday evening are:

  • BBC1 (3)
  • BBC2 (5)
  • BBC4 (2)
  • Channel 4 (2)
  • Channel 5
  • E4 (4)
  • FX (3)
  • Film4
  • ITV1 (3)
  • ITV2
  • Sky Atlantic HD
  • Sky Living (3)
  • Sky1
  • Sky2
  • Watch (2)

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