Well. I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas. I must say that these last few days have been extremely hectic for me, and not at all in the way I expected. I was hoping to spend my holidays working on writing, but that became unfeasible this past weekend, and my best-laid plans of having an update ready for Christmas went awry. Assuming no further complications, I do want to have an update ready for all of you by the end of this year. Of course, I have to catch up on everything and with everyone else, first - you may have noticed that I was offline for about five days, the longest I've been offsite since before I started posting here. And that duration would have held true even if AH.com
hadn't been down for a longer-than-expected period. I just want you all to know that I would
never absent myself from this site or quit writing TWR voluntarily - I've been given so many wonderful gifts through them that leaving them behind would be horrendously ungracious. I hope that all of you enjoy the rest of your holidays
And what is the level of detail exactly?
Knowing what we know of what happened - probably nothing much in the way of detail, and largely more vague generalities as it pertains to the media. That's all you really need, eh?
Dan is quite correct - this is
not a political timeline, and any political aspects will always be secondary to the popular culture aspects.
There were limits to the amount of non-British (i.e mostly American) content that could be shown on British TV in the Seventies, but no limits on how often an individual American show could be repeated. Star Trek was repeated fairly often during the Seventies, with the repeats being shown in the same sort of timeslots as the original transmissions (weekday evenings on BBC1). So it's most likely that the extra episodes of ST ITTL will be broadcast in the timeslots that were used for repeats IOTL. The one thing that won't happen is that ST will replace an OTL British show.
Fair enough. Interesting that
Star Trek enjoyed such a plum timeslot even after it fell out of first-run - consistent with the situation in the United States ITTL, with most NBC affiliates carrying the show at 7:00 PM for a number of years, though I still haven't decided
how many years. I imagine it would have started tapering off by the time the miniseries was green-lit - in fact, that might be an impetus for such a thing - and the successful airing would spur wider syndication to close out the 1970s.
NCW8 said:
Mind you, as Doctor Who during the Yank Years includes some content produced by Desilu, it might be partially counted against the quota of non-British programming on the BBC. I must admit that I don't know how such arrangements were handled in the Seventies, but I can't see the Unions being happy about the post-production work being out-sourced unless some such arrangement were made.
I can't help but wonder if loopholes might be employed here - no set of regulations is airtight.
NCW8 said:
Another question is which episodes ITTL would be considered too violent for broadcast by the BBC. As a reminder, the OTL episodes were Plato's Stepchildren, The Empath and Whom Gods Destroy (plus Miri, which was only broadcast once).
I must say, British mores about that sort of thing certainly seem more... idiosyncratic than American ones.
NCW8 said:
Edit: The Lords of Space and Time episode will likely be dropped from the repeats because it was partially produced in Britain and so will fall within the Equity rules limiting the number of times a programme can be repeated.
This is consistent with the
Star Trek syndication package in the United States, and is therefore easily arranged.
We need a slight picture into:
- Whether a fourth network will be launched in the 1980's
If this happens, it will be well-covered.
MatthewFirth said:
- What's happening with the fourth network in the UK?
If this happens, it will at least be mentioned.
MatthewFirth said:
- Who's winning Grammy's and Oscars!
I've never really mentioned the Grammys before, and I don't intend to start now - this timeline hasn't focused on music to any significant degree.
As for the Oscars? Perhaps, perhaps...
By all means
Added to the Wiki!
Remarkable detective work, Nigel!
Odd - it has the plot I remember, but the version I read was in script format rather than written as prose like that.
Perhaps it was revised into a script in some later iteration.
He didn't, as such. At that point he was thinking that taking it off the air for a few years would save the show, get people looking forward to it again. Grade deliberately sabotaged it in an effort to destroy it. Important difference, and frankly the idea the queen wouldn't see that (or at least see Grade was the reason the show was so wounded the other man put it down) or have read the interviews he made that clear, is a bit odd.
Welcome aboard, turkishproverb, and thank you for helping to illuminate that for us
Real life can be such a pain, eh?
'Tis the season to have finals, and fa-fa-fa-fa-family stuff.
And to think how much hairier things got
after the two of you posted this
e of pi said:
I'm sure Brainbin will be back with an update as soon as he has time to give it the attention it needs to keep to his usual standards, and I hope he doesn't feel the pressure to get it to us a moment before then.
I will say one thing: this stretch without updates, coupled with my time away,
has inspired me to devise a certain resolution. More details will follow...