Brit Boxes

That references yet another streaming service, one we do not have, which supposedly brings you all the UK stuff you can’t get anywhere else. To quote a character from another streaming service, that’s basically

Take the BBC, for instance. They have a perfectly good streaming service over there called the iPlayer, but you can only use it if your IP address confirms that you are in their home territory. This is a modern offshoot of a political thang dating back to His Majesty’s Government, back when His Majesty was a He even before HER Majesty- wherein the system settled on basing payment for British broadcasting, radio wireless at first, on licensing fees rather than advertisements. They are so religious about this principle that they cut references to commercial products from scripts and lyrics (hence the reference in "Lola" being changed in the UK version to "cherry cola" from "Coca Cola"). They also spend endless resources on playing Whack-a-mole with VPN servers that people try to use outside the UK to access the player by pretending to be in Chipping Norton or whatever. For many programs, therefore, the only solution is to order physical media from international sellers, and even they have to be decoded to allow them to be played outside Britain's Region 2.

Alternatively, you can wait, sometimes even longer, for the Beeb and her private British cousins to make deals with streaming services. Several years ago, the BBC announced something with their own brand that might’ve been a one stop shoppe for all things Who and QI. They called it BBC America, and they did indeed put on those two shows I was then watching, but only through cable, and in the case of QI, only for about two seconds. That, it turns out, had to do with licensing rights for the photos of blue whales and whatnots they were displaying behind the panelists. The Beeb-branded service was partially owned by a team of evil villains from the American cable industry, and like most of their products, they managed to totally muck it up. So Auntie’s signature sci-fi show has bounced around for years on various streamers- until the Mouse got in on the action.

After the end of the last full season of Doctor Who, Disney announced a partnership to distribute the show internationally except within the UK, also throwing boatloads of production money at the series so it wouldn’t be limited by UK government budget issues. The first two “special” of this new era have now aired on their US streaming channel, and I watched the second of them Sunday afternoon before heading out to our first concert of December, after almost going an entire month without seeing anybody in concert.

“Wild Blue Yonder” is almost entirely the work of the two series leads, David Tennant and Catherine Tate, Who except for one brief and sad cameo at the end, provide the only live action the entire 50 minutes of airtime. They laugh, they joke, they scream and come close to crying at times- as their current predicament, and the even bigger ones left by the current and previous showrunners, get canonically resolved. Ten/Fourteen now gets one more regular episode and then the Christmas special before the next handoff.There was no teasing at all of the next one, but it is been well established that an old character will be returning in the form of a well-known American actor, and it will likely be a very well done creation. No spoilers, sweetie.

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Other Britthings show up on PBS- often after long lags. Back when Sherlock was in its heyday, the US PBS executive was shocked, SHOCKED! to do a stateside promo for a season's US premiere and find that all the fans had somehow already seen it from its BBC airing months before.  PBS seems to have gotten a little better with that, airing the final Endeavour episodes relatively close to their ITV airing back home. Other BBC things, as we shall get to, still wind up in time loops. But Apple has managed to cut through a lot of that by self-producing content, just in time for their 40 percent monthly increase, that is actually worth most if not all of the price of admission.  Ted Lasso was their breakthrough series, set in  London but with mostly US showrunners and sensibilities. The other British-based one I've followed, though, is deep in the British spy thriller tradition....

only stinkier.

Slow Horses envisions a branch of MI5 that is essentially a "rubber room" for spies who performed badly enough to be demoted, are too untrustworthy to be be fired but not quite deserving of being killed.  They are given useless harmless tasks from a nondescript shack above a takeaway known as "Slough House," pronounced like the ough sound in "now" but the "slow" sound also works.  Their fearless leader is played by Gary Oldman, Sirius Black from the Potterverse, only here he is a rude; flatulent, dismissive dolt who is also still a better spy than any of the Eton-Oxbridge uppercrusters (led by Kristin Scott Thomas) who are in charge of the Real Secret Police.  The first two seasons introduced a ragtag crew of hackers and slackers who somehow solve the mysteries and End Of The World scenarios placed in front of them. Now comes a third, beginning in Istanbul Not Constantinople with an interaction between two Brits, and halfway through the first the trail of farts has once again  led us back to Oldman's Jackson Lamb character. I have the rest of the first and a second to slog through before the remaining four start dropping weekly on Wednesdays.

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Finally, there are the nice things we apparently can't have.

What I ain't got, and I ain't happy about the ain't got, is the final BBC series of Ghosts. A couple inherits a dilapidated British manor and its middle-class unexpected heiress discovers she can speak to the multiple ghosts, from prehistoric to mid-20th times, who had the misfortune to die on the premises.  HBO had been carrying the previous four seasons, not too delayed from Auntie's original airing of them. Then CBS started their own version which was still running until the US strike and is promised to be back at some point. We've never watched it, though, because the UK actors are just too damn good to duplicate.

Series 5 is out in the UK, but Max has dropped it, Paramount+ only has the first series as part of our sub, and Prime wants season-pass purchases but none yet for the final one.

Boo.