Up Jonathan Creek

I've been watching some of the more recent episodes of Jonathan Creek recently, and I was rather disappointed. The writing didn't seem to be up to the usual standard. There were lots of loose ends in the plots, and the whole things looked a lot more sloppy than before.

Today I discovered the reason after downloading an episode that I had missed. BBC America, which has been showing these episodes over here puts them on from 8 - 9pm. So far, so good. But there are lots of adverts shown during the programme, probably about 15-20mins worth every episode. That leaves 40-45 mins of actual show. The episode I downloaded is 60 mins long, and has no adverts in.

That's right, BBC America has been hacking large lumps out of the programme in order to fit more adverts in. I'm actually pretty disgusted with this behaviour. Imagine reading a book where 1/3 of the pages had been covered over with adverts and, worse still, about 1/30 of the pages are covered up with a big sticker telling you the name of the book that you are reading and the publisher.

It just makes you glad that internet piracy is alive and well to give me the information I seek without the casual brutality towards the creative content. Hmm.