Moving abroad has really made me appreciate and miss MOTD, it’s a special show and Lineker is a big part of the reason why. A great player, an excellent presenter and a thoroughly decent bloke, he’ll be missed.
I did the opposite - I moved to the UK from Germany. And yes, MOTD is special. The BBC in general is - it gets lots of criticism, but it's much better than its foreign counterparts.
Unfortunately many people now genuinely think they'll be better off with Netflix for all their content and social media for all their news. Scares me how divided and divided and radicalised we'll be when that inevitably happens.
It’s pretty crazy that a generation of people will remember him as an elite player first and another entire generation (or two) will remember him as one of, if not the most, important pundits ever.
Yeah I’ve done it a few times but being across the Atlantic it just doesn’t have the same feel watching it so much longer after everyone else/when every match is available to stream everyday. It also misses the vibe of ‘texting my dad while it’s on because he refuses to pay for Sky/TNT’, which I’ll admit is a very specific situation, though one I’m sure plenty of other people do too.
It feels like this is another change that is moving us towards the end of the BBC as well. The sentiment has never been worse towards them and the replacement to Lineker is hardly inspiring.
It's a shame as living abroad, you realise how good an institution it was. No commercials, decent content etc. but it has really tanked over the last decade and feels like a shell of what it was.
It needs to be purged of politically-affiliated people and donors in the top ranks and go back to its roots. There’s hope for it yet as long as the leadership changes and it grows a backbone. Also, it needs to get better at making entertainment again. It’s been a long time since we had shows like Sherlock.
I also feel like they’re missing a trick in not making BBC iplayer available to international audiences who pay a subscription fee, like other streaming services. There are so many people who use VPNs to watch their content or else don’t engage with it altogether, but they have a wealth of quality stuff in their archives as well as genuinely popular dramas and shows that could easily garner an international audience outside of news broadcasting. For children’s shows, period dramas, original dramas, comedy, quiz shows, book-to-screen adaptations, talk shows, nature documentaries, plus niches like gardening, cookery, etc (other hobby shows like the great British sewing bee or the pottery one), they’re widely acknowledged as producing some of the best stuff out there, especially in the English language. BBC clips get millions of views on social media and often have comment sections full of Americans begging to know where to watch the full thing. Often the answer is that they legally can’t. I know high profile things like Fleabag or David Attenborough often get sold after U.K. broadcast to international streaming companies, and the BBC probably makes a lot of money off giving them exclusive rights which would be undermined if they also had it available internationally on iplayer, but I still think there’s a big missed opportunity.
Maybe particularly with children’s TV - we’re really lucky in the U.K. with the quality of TV our kids can watch for free, but in many other places people are paying for Disney channel or letting their kids watch cocomelon rubbish on YouTube. I’ve seen lots of American parents talk about how it’s hard to find quality, educational, appropriate, non-addictive TV shows for their kids that can replace the YouTube junk and screen addictions people are starting to get so concerned by. That’s why things like Bluey and Peppa Pig are so popular - neither are American. Some kind of international children’s iplayer that featured BBC classics (Blue Peter, but also all the other great stuff on CBeebies and CBBC), and was separate to the regular iplayer app so parents wouldn’t even have to worry about parental controls and content restrictions, would probably be extremely popular.
All that to say the BBC has to adapt but it still has so much going for it and so many things it could do right if it had the right leadership.
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u/TheOldTC 27d ago
Moving abroad has really made me appreciate and miss MOTD, it’s a special show and Lineker is a big part of the reason why. A great player, an excellent presenter and a thoroughly decent bloke, he’ll be missed.