While you finish the remainder of your tasty chocolate snacks, why not sit back, relax and catch up on the TV that you missed while you were napping through the delightfully long Easter weekend.
The BBC’s epic adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager came to an end on Easter Sunday.
So before the sun miraculously parts the clouds, the daffodils thrust their heads through the earth and the rain stops, there is just time to catch up on all top TV that you may have missed.
Later this month, NBCUniversal will launch Hayu, a new subscription online video service devoted to reality television shows, such as The Real Housewives franchise and Don’t Tell the Bride. It follows hard on the heels of Seeso, another subscription video on-demand (SVoD) offering from NBCU, but this time devoted to comedy and entertainment shows, ranging from Saturday Night Live to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
This slow-starting series is both beautifully shot and engagingly presented.
The show centres around the ways food is prepared around the world and the role that food, and eating, impact us on a social, cultural and personal level. Each of the four episodes is named after one of the classical elements (earth, air, fire and water) and examines how these four elements form the basis of every meal that we eat.
The immensely popular show returned to our screens in early February, welcoming back tormented police woman Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and TV’s most feared man, James Norton as rapist Tommy Lee Royce.
Last month, a media storm broke out about a landmark change in children’s TV viewing habits. It was widely reported that, for the first time, “young people are spending more time online than watching TV”, according to “The Monitor Report 2016” by Childwise.
This was quickly challenged by Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial television. But it highlighted some fundamental questions about the rapidly changing landscape of TV, online and mobile viewing:
To many adults, the choice of viewing options for children is as incomprehensible as the whistling language of The Clangers. There is now a myriad of platforms, apps and subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) services offering access to children’s shows. They include Amazon, Netflix, Freeview Play, YouView and Sky Go.
Children can watch their favourite CBBC shows, such as The Next Step, via the BBC iPlayer – or catch up with Nickelodeon brands, such as SpongeBob SquarePants, on the app Nick Play.
Speaking at an RTS Early Evening Event Davey said that despite the proliferation of ways of watching content linear channels would continue to survive.
“Channels will always be around. | cannot see a future where they don’t exist,” said Davey, a pay TV veteran who was part of the team that helped establish the pioneering satellite broadcaster in the early 1990s.
“There is a revolution going on but it’s happening a lot slower than people think…
The reboot is part of the platform's push into original kids television. The shows join the network’s own children's programmes and in-house production Turbo Fast.
Other programmes include Beverly Hills and Inspector Gadget.
Next year more kids' shows will include The Greenhouse which is a live action series set in an elite boarding school in America. Joining this programme will be Hasbro Studio’s first programme for Netflix, Stretch Armstrong.
Introducing the commissions, Channel 4’s Head of Drama Piers Wenger promised “a consistent presence of topical, entertaining drama across the schedule.”
Wenger also gave a nod to the production partners on the shows. In a recent interview with Broadcast magazine, he forecasted that next year at least 80% of Channel 4’s peak-time drama output would be co-produced.
