Today was the day that literally dozens of people had been waiting for. Nottingham finally has a local television channel, which is not available on Sky or Virgin Media (we have boxes for both but Notts TV broadcasts on Freeview). Notts TV only retweet praise and not criticism, which might turn out to be a good thing, but they are another company whose staff budget seemingly doesn’t stretch to employing someone to answer emails. This is why several pitches of mine and my comedian friend Craig have not been taken up. Given how Nottingham’s idea of creativity seems to involves either ignoring or turning ideas down before using the idea anyway, we might one day see our ideas being used without credit or money coming our way (the Broadway Cinema model). Having seen the four companies that make up the consortium, this is another example of Nottingham’s closed door cliquey attitude taking hold.

I don’t have access to Freeview, so I missed out on this monumental none-event but did receive several messages from a friend I won’t name about how terrible the viewing experience was. Another friend posted a status on Facebook about how embarrassing it was to watch. I wish I’d seen it now as I love watching so-bad-it’s-brilliant television and film (which is what inspired my online series Charity Shop Film Guide).

When I lived in York at the beginning of the 2000s, they experimented with a TV station, YorkTV (all one word). It soon achieved cult status for its amateurish output of locally made programmes. In the morning there was news and current affairs, and then it went for a large part of the day to a home shopping channel, presumably saving money by sharing channel space. Between midnight and the morning show there would be back to back music videos, and everything was peppered with a range of advertisements shoddy enough to make those fondly remembered “Taj Mahal Tandori, only five minutes’ walk from this cinema” cinema adverts look like Citizen Kane. For the children there was a couple of hours in the afternoons and weekend mornings which involved someone badly reading a story, interspersed with Jimbo And The Jetset and Bertha, one assumes the only cartoons they could afford the rights to.

The jewel in the YorkTV crown though, was a daily early evening text messaging show. Each day a different subject; sport, food, sex tips and advice and so on. Two people who couldn’t have presented themselves out of a wet brown paper bag sat on stools and talked to each other and occasionally read out text messages that appeared on the screen.

Is Notts TV anything like that? I hope it is, I’ll buy a Freeview box especially for it if it is.

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