April 03, 2008

BBC HD for the next seven days...loadsatorchwood!


It's been a while, but here's some of the programming on BBC HD in the next week that caught my eye:
Friday: penultimate episode of Damages. Final episode of Torchwood.
Saturday: football – no, really! FA Cup semi between Portsmouth and West Brom, kicking off at noon. Afternoon with the kids series Dinosapien. Repeats in the evening except for I’ll Do Anything (rather than watch that tosh…)
Sunday: drama special Casualty 1907 followed by an hour Tony Blair. Great use of HD, BBC...
Monday: Delia, Gavin and Stacey (interesting combo) and repeats, leading up to the season finale of Damages. Incidentally, early kick offs this week for the school hols and some kids programming before the usual 8pm stuff.
Tuesday: repeats surround the latest from Hotel Babylon.
Wednesday: Dan Cruickshank on Architecture in HD and yet another repeat of the last Torchwood episode. Three showings in five days!
Thursday: NO TORCHWOOD! And for those sartorially challenged, three hours of coverage of the first major of the year as the US Masters kicks off.

Incidentally, the last poll suggests that most of you have seen little improvement with BBC HD since it lost its "trial" status late last year and I'm inclined to agree. Aside from a burst of activity over Easter, it's still swamped with too many repeats, especially of the music shows, and there are too many top BBC programmes missing from the schedules. A few more films wouldn't go amiss either. Still, to my mind a better offering for HD than the C4 simulcast, rumoured to be on the platform soon (but don't hold your breath).

2 comments:

GJD said...

In fairness, April is already a massive improvement over March. One live football game and a weekend of HD golf? It does bode well for further HD coverage of major sporting events (and this year's FA cup final, j/k!).

Nialli said...

Coverage of the US Masters Golf tournament runs Thursday 10th April to Sunday 13th April, from 9pm to midnight on the first two days and 8.30pm to midnight on the latter two days.

The FA Cup Final will be in HD too, though I was less than impressed with the picture during Saturday's Semi Final. Shame they didn't cover the Grand National in HD.

If I recall correctly, last year we had the British Open and all of Wimbledon on BBC HD, so there's more sport to come in the summer.