BBC Four & CBBC to close

[tellyblues]

It's BBC1 and 2 which are supposed to be "in the middle" channels, catering for everyone, yet there is little on there for younger viewers.

Yeah, but I'm not talking about the whole schedule, there's nothing wrong with having one or two shows here and there, including live events (which they've always done, with the first incarnation of the channel).

Let's not be extremely "pedantic"; the channel needs to stay afloat in 2022, having Masterchef Australia is not going to kill the original concept, anyway. Even the likes of ITV2 and E4 cater a slightly older audience than intended, now

And again: Cbeebies and CBBC, regardless of any "pumped up" nostalgia of the past, will never ever merge again

I'm not suggesting they should ? None of what I think is driven by nostalgia - I won't be jumping up and down like mad if a CBBC block returned to BBC1 or 2, but it is (should be) imperative that viewers of all ages are catered for on these channels. What is mustered up at present is laughable.

Masterchef Australia and the African Nations Cup aren't just one or two shows. Both aired for a prolonged period compared to ordinary programming. Yes, a great way of filling the schedules and in Masterchef's case remarkable since the series was from 2018. Before BARB stopped reporting figures for individual channels, every edition of Masterchef was right up there in BBC3's most popular shows but if you happened to venture further down the list you would see that other shows on the channel were pulling in pathetic amounts. What's the betting that when a report on BBC3's performance comes out it focuses on selective figures and one or two unrepresentative highlights from the channel to somehow prove that it has found its intended audience instead of the majority of original commissions which have failed?

The mistake made with all of these offshoot channels is that you need to produce more content to make them viable but they generally end up as full of repeats that die a death in the end, as unless you have an enormous budget most of what is shown will be old or cheap content that people don't want to watch. Another problem is that there may be a format that could play on BBC1 or 2 but is "saved" for BBC3 or BBC Scotland etc so that these channels have new content and it's difficult to make the switch thereafter because it's seen as too much of a jump and there is a more bankable though still poorly performing show on BBC1 which stops it, for example. In any case, you would get people turning their noses up at something because of wrongly presuming that a channel is for them because nothing remotely edgy or youth-orientated has been shown there for years. What's the worst that could happen - them watching another channel?