At Least I Was Generally Quiet.

It was around 8pm on November 13th (13/11/15) that I realised I'd need a second double espresso just to make it through to midnight. It was pretty much as I was putting that empty coffee cup back in its saucer that news of the Paris Massacres started to break. I don't feel like I've stopped since.

As a result I didn't really do anything for Christmas. Instead I used it as an opportunity to take a break. Christmas is generally a good time to do this because most of Europe, the Americas and large parts of Africa were also taking a break meaning that it's the quietest time of the year.

For example at the height of COP21 I was getting around 140/50 Tweets per hour. Recently that has dropped to a much more manageable 30/40 although it has started to creep up again.

Rather than rushing around doing things and generating news at this time of year people in the UK tend to stay home watching the big Christmas TV events. The main one of these this year was the last ever episode of worldwide hit "Downton Abbey" being broadcast on ITV on Christmas Day (25/12/15) itself.

Although I've never been much of a fan this is such a big show that none of the other networks even attempted to compete. The BBC in particular seems to have instead focused on stretching its efforts out across the other 11 days of Christmas with a show called "Dickensian."

Set probably a year before Charles Dicken's classic "A Christmas Carol" this begins with the murder of Ebeneezer Scrooge's business partner Jacob Marley explaining how he became a ghost. It then tries to solve the murder mystery bringing in many of Dicken's other classic characters such as Oliver Twist, Miss Haversham, Little Nell etc as potential suspects.

This struck me as rather an interesting idea. Unfortunately the BBC have set aside 10 hours to tell this story. Even at a quiet time of year that's quite a significant time commitment over the course of 11 days. To make matters worse the BBC have decided not to show it as 10 one hour episodes but as 20 thirty minute episodes.

If that wasn't annoying enough they're not even showing an episode a day nor a double bill of episodes each day. Instead they're showing two episodes a day broken up by an hour in between. Therefore managing to catch all the episodes requires the sort of effort and organisation that no TV show is good enough to justify.

The reason for this strange scheduling is that Dickensian has been sandwiched around the BBC's premier soap opera "Eastenders." This is a show that doesn't so much have fans as addicts. The hope seems to be that the BBC will trap Eastenders viewers into also watching Dickensian and in the process show them what proper TV drama looks like.

This strikes me as an extremely poor decision because the BBC seems to be insulting its target audience while at the same time making it far too complicated for people like me who might watch Dickensian casually to bother.

Anyway now I've got my eye in I might attempt some actual work later.

14:50 on 28/12/15 (UK date).