Improving but could do better (Sky 1)

Member Name: mikeb

Product:	Sky 1
Date:	20/05/01 (199 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Starting to make their own shows, concentrate on entertainment, new series shown here first

Disadvantages: Stil mainly American shows, tend to be alot of repeats

This channel has been broadcasting for many years now and seems at last to be making some headway in its attempts to turn itself into a reasonable mainstream channel, in the style of ITV.

In its early days Sky One showed almost completely American shows, both comedy and drama series, and always programmes that had already been screened on one of the terrestrial channels. As Sky’s subscriber figures have risen they have now found themselves with the money to be able to bid for the rights to show programmes like Friends first, which in turn has attracted even more viewers.

The next logical step for Sky was to produce their own shows and over the past couple of years they have started to do this in several areas. There have been a few attempts at the comedy half-hour/sitcom which includes the excellent Time Gentlemen Please and Baddiels Syndrome. Harry Enfield has also used Sky One to try out a few new characters and Kirsty Gallacher is currently presenting a weekly programme in the style of You’ve Been Framed, but with more nudity, called Kirsty’s Home Videos. They have also made The Villa, a cross betwen Blind Date and Big Brother and moved into serious drama with The Stretch starring Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson. Even the comedy sports gameshow has been done with Jumpers For Goalposts made by Paul Whitehouse and some of the Fast Show team which goes out at 10PM on a Monday evening. The advantage of these shows being made for subscription TV is that they obviously feel more comfortable in using more adult themes and language, Time Gentlemen Please for example is unlikely to turn up as a repeat on terrestrial TV, apart from perhaps late night Channel 4. There have also been several documentary series such as British Sex and the Uncovered series which also have adult themes.

Although there have certainly been attempts to introduce more homegrown programming into their schedule, it is still the imported American comedies
and drama series that dominate. The Simpsons, Star Trek: Voyager etc are still regular night time shows and during the day there are the usual audience participation talk shows like Sally Jessy Raphael, although Sky have filmed new series of Blockbusters so perhaps they will cut down on the American daytime shows in the future. The majority of the shows are also repeated on a regular basis which can be a bit annoying.

It is to be hoped that Sky’s interest in making their own programmes continues and extends and that the quality of such shows will rise so that Sky One will end up as genuine competition to the BBC and ITV, without having to use imported shows quite as much as they do currently. Certainly they have made some headway in recent years but I would think that money will be the deciding factor with more paying viewers leading to more and better new programmes.

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