Dover 24/7: Britain’s Busiest Port (Ch4)
Rating: Four out of five stars
Rowan Atkinson‘s brother Rodney, an impassioned if somewhat eccentric political campaigner who has died aged 78, once organised a novel protest against BBC bias.
He urged viewers infuriated by Auntie’s ‘journalistic incompetence’ to ‘exchange their colour television sets for black-and-white’ and buy the cheaper TV licence to match. This would slash the income of what he called ‘the most important source of Left-wing propaganda in Britain today’.
That was in 1990. Even then, the black-and-white licence was an archaic holdover from the post-war era. Incredibly, it still exists today, proof of how anachronistic the whole BBC funding system is.
A full licence, for those who do not qualify for reductions or exemptions, is £180 a year – or £60.50 for black-and-white sets. I’d love to hear from any readers who haven’t bothered upgrading their televisions since the 1960s and still pay the cheaper fee.
Last year, 3,600 people purchased the lower-tier licence. Back in 2018, the BBC admitted it no longer checks up to make sure these people aren’t sneakily watching in colour.
The colour licence raises around £3.8 billion for the Beeb every year, about two-thirds of its total funding. If we all switched to black-and-white, they’d find themselves £2.5 billion worse off.
Televisions manufactured before the introduction of colour broadcasts will only pick up BBC and ITV, so we wouldn’t be able to watch Channel 4.
This might not bother you, especially if, like Rodney Atkinson, you’re allergic to Left-wing propaganda.
Pictured on the show (L-R): Police Sergeant, James; Vessel Traffic Services Officer, Daffyd; Chief Operations Officer, Emma; UK Border Force Officer, Robin; Duty Operations Officer, Rachel; Project Manager, Keyur
Vessel Traffic Services Officer, Daffyd is seen with a pair of binoculars onboard a boat. Dover 24/7, now in its second year, is a charming mix of the mundane and the marvellous
I’d miss it, though. Channel 4’s quirky, low-budget documentaries such as Dover 24/7: Britain’s Busiest Port, chronicling the day-to-day activities of ordinary working people, are part of a tradition stretching back to the Look At Life series of short films that were shown in cinemas – in the days when no one at all had colour TVs.
Dover 24/7, now in its second year, is a charming mix of the mundane and the marvellous. One segment followed two middle-aged police officers, Ian and Neil, as they helped a couple of ferry passengers change their car’s wheel, after it clipped a bollard.
Hard though it is to imagine anything more low-key or inconsequential, I find factual TV like this oddly absorbing.
At other moments, the show can be unexpectedly dramatic: as a storm brewed out at sea, the engineers chose that moment to shut down the port’s electrics for maintenance.
Inadvertently, they switched off the radar screens which, in the maritime equivalent of the air traffic control tower, left the duty officer plotting the course of 25,000-ton ferries with a pencil and paper, under the emergency lights.
Then, as a gale blew, a yacht in distress signalled for help outside the harbour. This had all the ingredients of a disaster movie. Black-and-white wouldn’t do it justice.
