English Entertainment
‘Dark Angel’ worth sampling despite occasional speed bumps
Star World is counting on the science fiction genre to widen its audience base and maintain viewer loyalty. Dark Angel from the mind of Oscar winner James Cameron premieres tomorrow at 6:30 pm with a repeat at 10 pm.
The series takes the casual telly buff down an unusual turn. The plot kicks off in Wyoming where a secret government lab is building an army by creating children with superior DNA trained to fight and kill. The opening scene reminds one of Cameron‘s True Lies with its ice blue photography. The setting is 2009 and when the show starts, 12 of them escape.
Not long after a computer targeted electromagnetic pulse is triggered off, turning America the land of the free, honey, milk, blah blah into a third world country (TWC). Food riots and unemployment rule the roast. All electrical equipment, including bank and financial records are destroyed. The scene then shifts a decade later to 2019 in Washington. One of the escapees, Max, played by Jessica Alba is trying to search for the other 11.
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The first episode shows promise. It has more dramatic elements than Alias which is more action oriented. That is not to say that Dark Angel doesn‘t have eye-popping visuals. Check out the scene where Alba flies from one building to another using a rope in order to burgle the home of a cyber journalist who runs Freedom Streaming Video. He has dreams of making a rotten society more liveable as it were. He tries to make a start by exposing the shenanigans of a business baron who is substituting a drug used for cancer treatment with sugar pills.
The drug is being sold in the Canadian black market while war veterans go untreated. The journalist soon susses out who Max really is. Alba is effective in conveying a woman going through her normal routine in a chirpy manner while trying to deal with a tormented past by taking pills to stop nerve seizures. The flashbacks showing the tortuous routine the kids were put through are one of the highlights of the pilot. Before she is trying to maintain a low profile, Alba is understandably reluctant to help the journalist in his crusade as she finds him to be too idealistic and not practical enough.
The show manages to let a wry sense of humour slip into the proceedings courtesy Alba‘s friend who happens to be a lesbian and one hopes to see more of her as the series progresses. On the flip side, a couple of trite situations like a police officer‘s visit to Alba‘s home do bog down proceedings to a certain extent. Also, one found it odd that a pulse could destroy everything electrical to such an extent that we are clueless as to how to fix the problem, though of course, we created the darn electrical gadgets in the first place.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
