After the long, slow death of the Beeb’s flagship Film show, a radical rethink is needed if the public broadcaster’s claims it takes movies seriously are to be believed
For the Film programme, it’s been a long goodbye. The BBC’s flagship film show for TV has been on its deathbed for a long time now. Running for only a few months a year, with a rotating and sometimes rather desultory-looking list of presenters, it has had a variable and very late time slot. Indeed, its own producers were sometimes left in the dark by BBC executives about what exactly was the plan for a programme that still had a devoted following.
Its glory days, by common consent, were in the 70s, 80s and 90s when it was hosted by the avuncular, rumpled, lovable – and extremely knowledgable – Barry Norman, who like Michael Parkinson was part of a generation of presenters recruited from the ranks of print journalism. His catchphrase, invented for him by Spitting Image, caught the public imagination because it fitted Barry’s easygoing, open-minded attitude to criticism … “and why not?”
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