Sunday 3 June 2012

Why the BBC didn't make this customer happy

I think the Queen is a truly remarkable lady and I was really looking forward to watching the Diamond Jubilee river pageant today.  As well as the sheer spectacle and scale, I was looking forward to finding out more about the boats involved, their histories, their crews, and so forth - and also to hearing some of the music from the barges carrying choirs, orchestras and bands.

I thought the BBC television coverage would provide that.

How wrong I was.

They kept showing the same kind of picture, aerial views of the man-powered boats, and hardly had any coverage of the historic ships.  For example there was no mention at all of the "Matthew" replica.  The powered boats also only got a few shots in and very limited information.  And even for the man-powered boats, they only gave tiny snippets of information about one or two of the vessels and their crews.

And we didn't get to hear any of the music.

The BBC even kept hopping back to studio shots.

There was so much more they could have done with this afternoon's coverage - like more information about the different ships, identifying some of the lesser known Commonwealth countries' flags, playing excerpts from some of the music.

Instead the coverage came across as poorly researched and light on information - not at all what I would expect from the BBC.