Lizzie and Sarah

There seems to be some sort of (possibly manufactured) controversy around the timing of the macabre BBC comedy Lizzie and Sarah (you can see it on the BBC iPlayer here for the next week or so). Apparently, showing it at 11:45pm was effectively burying it. Well, yes, and no.

Few people are going to up and ready to watch an extremely dark comedy at that time of night. But then again, this isn't the sort of thing that sits well with an earlier broadcast time. It takes Nighty Night - itself an incredibly vicious and nasty comedy - and ramps it up all the way to eleven. It contains murder, jokes about war crimes and teenagers being run down, and also an extremely fat person having sex. And it is difficult to imagine a comedy that involves a shot of a man (pun intended) with a massive bullet hole in his head being broadcast in the same slot as, say, Last of the Summer Wine. Maybe the BBC did bury it; maybe they couldn't think about when else to broadcast this exceptionally dark piece of television.

Then again, the audience for this sort of thing (and I count myself as among the target recipients of this brand of nasty humour) may not watch it on TV anyway. Personally, I watched it on the computer on iPlayer. Just as I watch entire seasons of TV on the computer, rather than on their original broadcast date on TV. Examples include Misfits, The Inbetweeners and the most recent series of Peepshow. In fact, the only thing I make an effort to watch on TV on its original transmission is (of course) Doctor Who. Everything else can be caught at my leisure online.

I think the way in which a lot of people (and the sort of people who would be willing to watch something as horrible as Lizzie and Sarah) has changed, and the internet plays just as large a part (if not a larger part) than the idiot box in the corner of the room. In fact, part of me believes that the BBC is very aware of this, and the broadcast time of Lizzie and Sarah was decided upon in the knowledge that the likely viewers could catch it online even if they weren't about to watch its original transmission. In fact, I could even believe that the BBC has helped stir up this controversy in the hope that a difficult to broadcast programme goes viral. Certainly, Lizzie and Sarah has got attention that it would not otherwise have got had it been broadcast at 9pm on BBC Three...