

BBC Vs National Geographic - a subtle comparison - justlearning
http://naturenet.net/blogs/index.php/2008/07/28/bbc_vs_ng

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kierank
This happens with quite a few programmes that we have imported from the US.
Off the top of my head I can think of Mythbusters and Ice Road Truckers which
are dubbed by a British narrator with a lot of the dramatic music removed. All
in all it makes the programmes more factual.

Personally I believe this is because of the BBC and to some extent Channel 4
(a pseudo-public tv channel) keeping standards high overall. I doubt the
viewing public would accept such dramatised documentaries on the BBC
considering its heritage...

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maukdaddy
What's left of Ice Road Truckers if you remove the dramatic music and
dialogue? It's amazing how that show can spend almost an hour building drama
about how someone is going to finally fall through the ice, yet in the end
some random truck's tire slips in.

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Luc
I am not entirely sure it is a fair comparison - I would hope the Nat Geo clip
seems childish, as the author says, because it is in fact a children's
programme, while the BBC one is for a general public. I actually watched many
Attenborough documentaries with my daughter when she was younger, and there
were often tears involved, what with the cruelty of nature and such.
(Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary
Britains...)

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jan_g
>(Attenborough, by the way, must rank as one of the greatest contemporary
Britains...)

True, it's almost unfair to compare any documentary to his documentaries :-)
His books are also great, check out 'The Private Life of Plants'.

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dougp
I guess I haven't seen a National Geographic show in a while. I remember a
series following a cheetah mother with cubs and it was heartbreaking her
coming back after an unsuccessful attempt at a kill to find one less cub then
when she left. That is probably an example of the American style documentary
done right the connection you had with the cats helped with understanding how
bad the chances were for those predators.

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biohacker42
Is it just me or did _NatGeo_ start doing this in recent years? As a kid I
remember nature _documentaries_ which were very much like a video zoology
lesson. But over the years things drifted farther and farther into
entertainment.

Is there a way out of this? Can we do something with the long tail, where
there's different edits of a show and you sell the different versions to
different audiences?

Entertainment for the masses, education for the rest of us.

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doosra
I find this to be true with news reporting as well. Compare CNN v. BBC.

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J_McQuade
Although I must admit that I find the quality of BBC news to be slowly
declining (I don't care what Barry from Essex thinks should be done about
swine flu, thank you very much), I think the fact that it is directly
accountable to the public has a good overall effect on British newscasting -
we don't tend to get the vastly exaggerated (or simply false) stories making
the leap from tabloid to telly quite so much as seems to be commonplace in
predominantly commercial media ecosystems.

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10ren
The US narration reminds me of Iron Chef. But I learned something interesting
from both: some spiders have mobile retinae; and some have ultraviolet-visible
markings.

