Great telly, carefully disguised and hidden away by the BBC

Posted by Remote Control on January 3, 2008 7:33 AM | Permalink

ALMOST as much of a Christmas tradition as carol singing and over-eating is the filling up of rolling news channel schedules with 'reviews of the year.'

Ok, so that's a bit of an exaggeration, but seriously, it wouldn't be Christmas without BBC News 24 and Sky News packing the back half hour of every hour with some pre-recorded programme.

Normally, they're enough to make you switch off and go in the hunt of something slightly less obvious. Repeats of Friends on E4, perhaps.

But this year has been a bit different. News 24 has filled out 30 minutes in most hours by showing repeats of a series called Our World.

And without exception, they were all great.

The premise is quite simple. A well-known TV reporter, say Alistair Leithead, the BBC's Afghanistan correspondent, gets time off from the day job to go and film 30 minutes of telly about lives which would otherwise go unreported.

In his case, Alistair - who, like most rolling news on-location reporters appears to spend much of his life answering impossible questions from presenters in the studio desperate to fill air time - met a doctor, his wife and four children who are working to improve the health of some of the poorest people on earth.

The poor people in question live in Northern Afghanistan. There are no trappings of the modern world here, not even a satellite dish (that's not a flippant comment - even the cave-dwellers of Tunisia have Sky rigged up these days) and the child mortality rate was something like 35%. Thanks to this doctor, it is now down to 25% and getting lower.

It's a remarkable achievement, and one which is told very well in half an hour. That 30 minutes gave Alistair time to set the scene, look at how the doctor and his family have coped with the move, found out why they moved, and looked at their impact. That can't be done in three minutes. And sadly, with the current trend for documentaries which pretend to reveal loads but actually tell us nothing new (Panorama next Monday is going to reveal grown men stalk little girls in chat rooms - honestly) Our World is a breath of fresh air.

As much as it is possible to make top nor tail of the News 24 schedules, during the year, Our World appears to be on at 8.30pm during the week and at various times over the weekend.

The BBC World website rather grandly states "Our World showcases BBC journalism at its best, as it exposes and evaluates global issues" and, for once, it's not a boast too far.

It really deserves a prime-time slot on one of the main channels, too.