A disenchanted woman spends her hen night in a bingo hall with her unhappily settled friends, then calls the wedding off. A man from Essex dates a girl from Wales, but their best friends profess to hate each other. A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost share a house.
The last is the glorious one-line premise for Being Human, which was a weirdly suburban supernatural drama co-starring Aidan Turner, now of Poldark and low-slung towel-wearing fame. The Essex-Wales relationship was the set-up for heartfelt comedy Gavin & Stacey, co-written by James Corden, now better known for hosting CBS's Late Late Show and winning Tony awards.
And the woman who decided having fun is incompatible with marriage is Donna in Pulling, starring and co-written by Sharon Horgan, last seen in New York working on her new HBO comedy, Divorce.
All three shows were originally commissioned by BBC Three, the channel that will “go dark” next Tuesday, when it will be reimagined as an online brand with a logo that looks a lot like BBC II! .
“Some people are resistant to change,” lamented the BBC Three head of marketing, who unveiled what many took for the image of an excitable BBC Two expressed in Roman numerals.
Viewers who signed the #SaveBBC3 petition are certainly resistant to this particular change, which involves a 50 per cent slashing of its content budget. The petitioners, along with many producers and celebrities, make the strong argument that this is a case of younger viewers being short-changed once again.
The British government has effectively ordered the BBC to cut its overall budget by 10 per cent over five years, and the path of least resistance has led it to the BBC News Channel, which has been rendered a shadow of its former self, and to BBC Three, the easiest of easy targets.
It's a shame. In its 13-year life as a proper channel, BBC Three was the site of valiant experiments and risks that often paid off. Irish actors and writers were among those to benefit. In the case of Horgan, there is a clear career trajectory from Pulling to Divorce (via Channel 4 hit Catastrophe and some shorter-lived, near-miss sitcoms). There might not be a Divorce if there hadn't been a Pulling.
Not everyone was a fan. Jeremy Paxman, some way past the channel's key 16-34-year-old demographic, once asked then BBC chairman Michael Lyons on Newsnight whether he thought the BBC should really be making programmes such as Help Me Anthea, I'm Infested and My Man Boobs and Me.
BBC Three would have been doing something wrong had it appealed to Paxman's generation, but there were definitely times when its adult-baiting appeared a touch try-hard. And it wasn't always brave. Its reality format Don't Tell the Bride, for example, could have been made in any decade since the 1950s.
There was also an argument that some programmes were unfairly shunted off to BBC Three, where they languished in comparison to how they would have done had they been shown on BBC One or Two. Some, like Gavin & Stacey, were "rescued" by BBC One; others, like Pulling and The Fades, were axed too early and should have been given a bigger push.
The new BBC II! still has £30 million (€39 million) to spend, which is about twice the non-sport content budget of RTÉ2. It will be spending 80 per cent of this on “long-form” content (TV as we know it) and 20 per cent on “short-form” comedy, entertainment and documentary. It is looking for content that lends itself to clever “activation strategies”.
In this new guise, it will have to cut through layers of digital noise if it wants to unite its content with an audience – a tough gig even with £30 million. If a ghetto effect applied to BBC Three programmes in its life as a television channel, it will only intensify from next week. The BBC acknowledges this by promising that its original commissions will eventually pop up on BBC One or Two, aka “real” TV.
Teenagers might not be as loyal to linear television channels as their parents, and they may watch fewer and fewer programmes as they go out on air, but there is still a massive advantage to being high-up the electronic programme guide on regular television. It feels premature and political, not progressive, to give up this position now.
But it is surely the direction of travel. Observers with little connection to the channel, including those in the Irish broadcasting industry, will be keen to see how BBC Three’s online-only existence pans out. For anyone who has had the wit to imagine a television landscape in which on-demand habits dominate, rather than complement, traditional television, it will serve as a handy guinea pig.
