There is an amusing video on YouTube of a couple of people giving a running commentary over BBC News wondering why they haven’t mentioned the earthquake (via Media Monkey).

The people in the video make some amusing comments, although they do exhibit the worst of the victim mentality that a lot of people in this country have. An inch of snow has fallen and it is the end of the bloody world. A train is five minutes late and it is an abomination that would never have happened under British Rail. An earthquake has hit us, woe is me. Etc, etc.

Maybe the guys in the video were being ironic when they kept on shrieking, “There’s been an earthquake! Hellooo? BBC? There’s been an earthquake!” But it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of people genuinely were enraged when the BBC didn’t cover the only interesting that has happened in their dull little lives. I have heard that Radio 5 Live has had a record number of text messages. That doesn’t surprise me, 5 Live being as it is the country’s premier forum for self-important people with anal passages in place of their mouths, wanting to phone in and describe how the world revolves around them.

Victoria Derbyshire’s programme in the morning was even worse than usual, amazingly enough. The callers I heard all said much the same thing. “My house was shaking! I thought a lorry had crashed into my house!” “I was lying in my bed and I was woken up. At first I thought it was a burglar. Little did I know that it was something even more serious!” YAWN

So parts of England got the shakes. Big deal. The stories about it on the BBC News website are a parade of mediocrity.

“The room just started shaking” Shaking?! How will you ever recover? “The quiet market town at the epicentre of the earthquake recovers”. Yeah, recovers from a few toppled chimneys!

The only casualty from the whole episode appears to be one poor man with a broken pelvis. While I certainly would not like a chimney stack to fall on top of my pelvis, it isn’t exactly September 11 in terms of casualties.

So I am not surprised that BBC News decided not to give it so much coverage. It is worth bearing in mind that after 0100 BBC News 24 ceases to be a UK service. What we get in the UK is essentially a simulcast of BBC World. As such, it reflects a global news agenda.

This is the way it should be really. UK news seldom breaks during the night, and there are few people in the UK watching at that time of night anyway. News channels are notoriously expensive to run anyway. I know certainly that Sky News makes a loss.

It would be difficult for the BBC to justify spending license payers’ money on a near-useless overnight UK service that would be watched by very few people. The BBC has a 24 hour UK news service anyway — it’s called BBC Radio 5 Live. From what I heard of their coverage, they did a pretty good job — as you would expect from the Up All Night crew.

If BBC News 24 / BBC World were to slavishly cover the earthquake like Sky News did, the majority of the BBC’s viewers scattered across the globe would have been equally indignant as the people in the UK complaining about the lack of earthquake coverage. I can just imagine people around the world uploading their commentary onto YouTube. “5 on the Richter scale? I have taken naps through that!”

People across the world look to the BBC as a source of authoritative world news. A piddly wee earthquake in Lincolnshire just doesn’t cut it. If it was an exclusively UK service like Sky News then you would indeed expect them to cover it. But it isn’t, so you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t).

I did actually watch a bit of Sky News’s overnight earthquake coverage and it was indeed execrable. In fact, the video I have embedded above highlights the completely different approaches of the two channels and why Sky News falls flat on its face so often.

BBC News might have been late to mention the story, but notably they got it right. They did not spend longer than required on the story, and they got the important details such as the epicentre correct. Meanwhile, Sky News were showing a map with Birmingham and Manchester pinpointed. Why? We don’t know. Sky don’t care about getting it right, as long as they can convey that something is happening — NOW!

In fact, Sky News’s coverage of the earthquake highlights everything that is wrong with 24 hour news. Media Monkey highlights their typically insightful coverage:

Sky News interviewer Faye Barker: “So, what were you doing when the quake shook?” Eyewitness, or should that be earwitness, from Lincolnshire: “I was in bed.” Barker: “Oh… [Pause]. And would you say it felt more like a juggernaut or a freight train going past?” Woman: “Er… a freight train.”

Sky News is also rightly being criticised today for a truly disgusting interview conducted by the diabolical Kay Burley. She was previously famous for her measured response on September 11: “If you’re just joining us, the entire eastern seaboard of the United States has been decimated by a terrorist attack.” This week she asked the wife of recently convicted serial killer Steve Wright the following question:

Do you think if you’d had a better sex life, he wouldn’t have done this?

What a vile question to ask. Not surprisingly, the interviewee burst into tears upon being asked that question. Imagine having that thought running through your head — “If only I had sex with my husband a bit more, those five prostitutes wouldn’t have been murdered.”

Unity, Jennie and Mitch Benn say all that needs to be said.

If BBC News lost respect for its slow response to the earthquake, goodness knows what Sky News must have lost.

I am quite a fan of Freeview. Even though I hardly ever watch any television these days, I think it is so wonderful to have that kind of choice fairly hassle-free for £20-odd. There have been quite a lot of changes to Freeview recently.

First came the unexpected and abrupt death of ABC1. It wasn’t a bad channel, but it always seemed like there was something that didn’t quite work about it. When it launched there were no adverts for months — so how was it funded? Then there was the distinct lack of space on prime-time on Freeview, which essentially made ABC1 a daytime-only channel.

ABC1’s schedule was therefore restricted to rather tame American comedies. The same ones. Over and over again. What’s more, they did that odd thing that digital channels sometimes do, of showing the episodes seemingly in random order. This was especially problematic for 8 Simple Rules. One minute John Ritter was dead, the next he had come back to life! And then he was dead again.

In a way this was a good thing though, because you knew what you were getting. Unchallenging, homely television. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I imagine that if ABC1 was around ten years ago, I would have loved watching it on the days when I was off sick from school.

Then came Virgin 1, which is Virgin Media’s latest little stone thrown in their big bear fight with BSkyB. “Oh, they think they’re so smart having a channel called Sky One,” some Virgin Media big-wig probably said on day. “We’ll show them! We can have Virgin 1.”

So, Ftn has been killed to death just when it was getting good. I loved Ftn in its later days. Its repeats of retro gameshows like The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye were strangely captivating. Then later at night there was always Takeshi’s Castle if you were up for vegetating a bit. While it was always Freeview’s worst channel, in the past year or so it had carved out a distinctive identity for itself.

The new channel, on the other hand, does not have a distinctive flavour. In fact, it is almost as if they looked at Sky One and decided “we want a programme like that, a programme like that, and a programme like that.”

In short, it is like a watered-down version of Channel Five. Do we really need another channel full of sub-standard American imports? I think not. I would have thought that, especially with the Virgin brand attached to it, they would have put a bit more effort in to make it more distinctive.

Then this week there was the launch of Dave. Dave is essentially a re-branding of UKTV G2, so it’s good to know they’ve gone from one silly name to another. A lot of people are going on about what a great name Dave is for a channel, but I think it is quite silly. They say that it’s based on the idea that “everyone knows a bloke called Dave”, which is true. The problem is that whenever I hear the name I think of that balloon-faced Conservative leader.

As for the programming it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Watching Dave is like being transported back to the 1990s. Have I Got News For You, Red Dwarf and Bottom are among its roster. Essentially, Dave seems to me like BBC Two 2. It’s the channel that BBC Three secretly wishes it could be, if only it could be unleashed from all of those quotas to do with repeats.

Then there is Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I can’t stand watching it, at least when it was hosted by Mark Lamarr. He seems like a genuinely spiteful person. He tells nasty jokes about people, which I don’t mind usually. But Mark Lamarr doesn’t seem to tell them in the sense of “I’m only having a laugh”. He seems to be genuinely nasty. I can’t stand watching it. For a further insight into the dark world of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, check out this blog post by Adam Buxton.

But without a doubt the worst programme on Dave is A Question of Sport. Why does this programme still exist, even in repeat form? It is just diabolical.

Fortunately, this crime is outweighed by the repeats of Whose Line is it Anyway. Now, why is Whose Line is it Anyway not on any more, huh?

Despite the patchy output, the launch of Dave on Freeview seems to add a lot of value. It is replacing UKTV Bright Ideas, which I doubt will be missed by many people. The hours for UKTV History have been cut back, which might not be very popular. But let’s face it. Everyone knows that history channels only ever get ratings if they either

1. Show programmes that are nothing to do with history
2. Dedicate their entire schedule to programmes about Adolf Hitler’s second cousin twice removed’s hairdresser’s pet ostrich.

It’s funny how I was writing about media hypocrisy in relation to the premium rate phone-in scandals, only for the entire issue to resurface in a major way the following day. I have the power!

Anyway, I think the way the latest revelations have been covered by the media prove my point. Predictably enough, many people have sprung up to bash the BBC for fixing competition results. And while this is indeed despicable, what these people have ignored is the fact that every single other major broadcaster has done this. This is not a problem with the BBC. It is a symptom of the state of the MSM as a whole.

Earlier this year, record fines were handed out after viewers of Channel 4 and Channel Five were defrauded. Votes cast via premium rate phone lines were not counted on ITV programmes. Today the boss of GMTV resigned.

It is worth also remembering that the BBC is the only major broadcaster in the country that hasn’t had its fingers in the utterly deceitful quiz scam channel craze that has dogged airwaves of the past two years. In this sense, the BBC looks pretty clean compared to its commercial rivals.

Because most of the faked BBC competition results (with the exception of the truly shocking Liz Kershaw ones) were of the “panicking producer” variety. Meanwhile, the commercial broadcasters built up an entire industry that was desliberately designed to misleadingly part viewers with their cash.

It is nigh on impossible to think of a commercial broadcaster that has not played a part in this massive scam. Programmes such as Quiz Call (set up and formerly owned by Channel 4; still broadcast to this day by Channel Five), ITV Play and Quiz Night Live (produced by Endemol and broadcast on a channel owned by Telewest / NTL / Virgin). Viacom’s TMF broadcast Pop the Q, Emap’s channels featured the truly dire Cash Call. BSkyB have Sky Vegas. Few commercial broadcasters are clean.

None of this is to excuse the BBC though. Encouraging viewers to use premium rate phone lines to enter non-existent competitions is unacceptable. But the BBC cases do not have nearly as strong a whiff as the ones involving its commercial rivals.

And there is not a smidgen of the hypocrisy that has come from the newspapers surrounding the premium rate scandals of this year. Newspapers were quick to jump up and down when Richard & Judy and The X Factor got caught up in it all. But they remained conspicuously quiet when it came to similar premium rate phone lines used by themselves.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s own coverage of the scandal was notable for how harsh it was on itself. I have always felt that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant allegations of bias, the BBC provides incredibly dispassionate coverage on any stories that involves itself.

I remember that on the day of the Hutton Report I was glued to BBC News 24. While you could argue that the BBC would be biased in favour of itself, for the same reasons Sky would be biased against the BBC.

It’s just that the magnifying glass is forever focussed on the BBC, so they cannot afford to be biased, particularly when talking about themselves. So they way they covered it was professional and detached, although there was a slightly surreal moment when you could see everyone in the newsroom rushing towards the corridor where Greg Dyke appeared. For a journalist to maintain a stiff upper lip when the story literally surrounds them in this way is seriously impressive.

I first learned about the BBC phone-in problems on BBC News 24 itself, and you would have thought that the scandal was almost as seismic as Hutton. But the problems seem to be roughly on a par with ITV’s problems with The X Factor, and certainly nothing reaching the outright deception of, say, Richard & Judy or GMTV.

And, as Matt Wardman points out:

have Sky manipulated their phone-ins? If they had, how would we find out?

That is the key. Only the BBC has the ability to be as self-critical as it is, even though it can sometimes do a lot of damage. And they never seem to get any thanks for it.

• More on the fake television scandal from Scaryduck

I wonder if one of the great promises of digital television will not be kept in the long run. Theoretically, Freeview offers viewers more choice than the old five analogue channels. At first it was true. As well as the five channels we already knew, ONdigital launched with plenty of sport and film channels, childrens’ channels and a variety of other niche channels.

That’s still kind of the same with Freeview today. But Freeview is becoming a victim of its own success. There are dozens of channels on Freeview. But once you take away the shopping and quiz channels, many of the remaining channels spend much of their time broadcasting shopping and quiz programmes, or advertising their own subscription services.

Having a Freeview channel is like gold dust for a broadcaster now. But this means that if a company only has one channel on Freeview it has to make the most of what it’s got. Now, instead of each channel catering for its own niche, channels are scurrying around chasing the average viewer. So instead of having loads more choice than we did in the old days, we now have slightly more choice.

It’s a bit like local radio stations. There are millions of them, but as far as I can tell they are almost all exactly the same. Listeners don’t get choice here. They get the same bland middle-of-the-road pop music with over-excited presenters yelping over the top. I mean, how many radio stations have a slogan along the lines of “Classic hits and today’s best music, only on 97.3 Scrotum FM”? All of them?

Freeview still has a lot of quality channels. But most of the choice comes from the BBC, Channel 4 or (at a stretch) ITV. Even then, you sense that this is only because each of these broadcasters have multiple Freeview slots to fill.

Disney has one channel on Freeview: ABC1. Its diet of cheaply imported, inoffensive daytime-friendly American comedy has barely changed in years. Yawn.

BSkyB has three channels: Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. That was, until they decided to replace Sky Travel with a general entertainment channel especially created for Freeview, Sky Three. So what about the fans of travel programmes? They’ll have to make do with gameshows that were originally shown on Sky One five years ago and cheaply imported American comedies. Boring. (Apart from Futurama, of course!)

Even Channel Five couldn’t manage to come up with interesting Freeview channels. Overnight it brings us The Great Big British Quiz, one of the worst quiz channels there is! Past the watershed, Five US is filled with wall to wall repeats of CSI. During the day we are treated to cheaply imported (imported from the past, that is) episodes of Happy Days and comedy backwater Joey. Pass me the pillow.

Five Life is so inconsequential, I won’t even go into it. All it ever seems to show is The Ellen DeGeneres Show (a cheaply imported American chat show). I shat my duvet out of boredom.

The latest culprit to contribute to the increasingly tumbleweed-infested airwaves is Viacom, whose sole Freeview channel is TMF. It used to be called The Music Factory. Just one problem. You’ll never find any music on it. This was understandable when it showed MTV programmes such as Newlyweds or Dirty Sanchez. For one thing, it brought MTV programmes into terrestrial homes which I guess you should be grateful for. And there was still a (tenuous) link to music.

But now TMF has brought into its schedule “classic comedies” such as Cheers, Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years. WTF!!! TMF is now even unrecognisable to what it was last week, never mind a few years ago! What do these programmes have to do with music?

Even the higher quality Freeview channels, such as ITV2, More4 or E4 show more than their fair share of American comedy and drama. Sky took off their travel channel to show more American programmes. MTV have changed their music channel beyond recognition to show more American programmes. Now Channel Five have an entire channel dedicated to it. So where has the variety gone? We may have more choice, but we no longer have variety.

But there is a silver lining! Ftn has been on Freeview almost since the very start, but it was easily the most uneventful channel on the lineup. This was despite all the potential. It could draw from the pool of Flextech channels, which surely have a few quality programmes to rub together. But whoever was responsible obviously didn’t care. Ftn was like a piece of shit on your shoe that you hate so much that you won’t even bother to wash it off, so instead you scrape your shoe all over the pavement as you walk along and hope that it just goes away. Yes, Ftn was exactly like that.

Until now, that is. On New Year’s Day, Ftn’s schedule was shaken up to include more quality programmes. The phone-in quiz shows and Thomas Cook TV segments have gone, and they’ve been replaced with repeats of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye!

Wow! Those were three of my favourite programmes when I was young! The fact that these programmes are now almost twenty years old messes with my mind. What’s even more amazing is just how much of The Crystal Maze I can actually remember, despite it being made way back in 1990.

I know what you’re thinking. These are just cheap repeats like all the other stuff. Well yeah, but at least it’s not Dawson’s Creek. Now, start the fans please!

Sky Mix will become Sky Two again, while Sky Three is to launch on Freeview! A clever move for Sky, and yet another improvement to Freeview!