TV Eye

How unutterably evil is this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/credits/position.shtml

Leave aside the sizable reduction in number of credits you're likely to see (I doubt many credits will scroll legibly at this size in 30 seconds, they'll have to be a series of static slides) just imagine how it will look on the telly of -

a) someone you know who still has a 4:3 screen,

b) someone who has got a 16:9 set but constantly does stupid things with the screen settings to try to cut off important areas of the screen image and/or make everyone look like Eamonn Holmes (apart from when Eamonn Holmes comes on when they spend half an hour trying to work out how to change the settings back to shrink him to the correct ratio).

Monstrous. There are no safe areas there, let me tell you.

I wonder how long the BBC will be prepared to let cinema film credits roll now (they're already curtailed, speeded up and of course windowed)?

I suspect lots of people think this doesn't matter, but I suspect they think that because, like the people who've come up with these guidelines, they've been led to think of TV as just a load of product to be consumed by the yard rather than as the artistic output of creative people.

They'll also be busy having a wee or putting the kettle on and doing other vital liquid related tasks about the house by the point the screen's split up like this and won't care.

It's far more important we know we're watching BBC 1 and the BBC has a range of other viewing options for us than we find out who script edited or composed music for, or colour graded or foleyed up what we've just seen, isn't it?

Well obviously it is, that's why I'm part of the 0.1 percent of cinema audiences who sometimes likes to stay through the end credits of something I was impressed by, rather than rushing out the doors as soon as they start playing the movies tie-in chart single and telling you who Second Russian Man was played by. What a shame British TV seems to have decided none of its output deserves that same level of interest from a thousandth of its audience.

It's rubbish like this that makes me long for the end of schedules and the rise of time-shifted, on demand viewing, (and that comes hard from someone like me who grew up with limited but varied schedules on three stations in the pre-VCR days and liked the luxury of finding out quickly if there was anything on worth watching which that limited choice offered), though I'm sure that when downloaded rather than 'live' transmitted TV does become the norm some new and unpleasant branding, packaging and trailing conventions will arise, to make me whinge.

Bah. I'm old. I still think telly's worth a damn.

We'll never see the like of those jerky-scrolling, wobbly-weaving, paper glue and CSO abusing titles again. They were the best bit in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.