lowculture.co.uk

Monday, February 18, 2008

Three-er factor

FEARSOME! Being Human, BBC Three, 9.00pm
PIONEERSOME! Being Human, BBC Three Live Arena, 9.00pm
FINAL FRONTIERSOME! Being Human, BBC iPlayer, a bit later

It's been nearly a week since BBC Three was thrillingly reborn with a pink new logo, a handful of youth-friendly new idents and a YouTubey new BBC Three website as "the first non-news BBC channel to transform from a linear service to a fully joined-up, multi-platform venture – combining television and the web into a single, integrated offering". Obviously this means our lives are now better, but how are they better? What does new BBC Three mean for YOU, 25- to 34-year-old?*

Future future modern internet! BBC Three embraces the internet - that is to say, the futuriest bits of the internet based on the very futuriest concepts known to man - with Find Three, linking the viewer to such futurey activities as looking at photographs, watching clips of programmes and communicating with other human beings. Modern future modern modern future interactivity! BBC Three gives YOU, the viewer, the chance to appear as a continuity person with Be On TV, the exciting portion of the website where you can watch a video of a girl telling you how to get to the section of the website where you can watch a video of a girl telling you how to get to the section of the website where you can watch a video of a girl telling you how to get to the section of the website where you can watch a video of a girl telling you how to get to that section of the website and frankly it's not unlike the theoretical loop of infinity from Crime Traveller. Future modern future programmes! BBC Three's website has a Live Arena where you can watch programmes as they're broadcast! Simply place your TV next to your computer and move your head between the two during transmission hours for a heady simultaneous screenblast of future living. And then stream it on iPlayer and watch space and time quite literally fall at your feet in awe of your futuriness. Future modern modern future graphics! BBC Three thinks outside the box and adorns its website with crazy images of pears growing on stalks (yes, really!) and twisty cables and microphones and things that are mechanical but also organic and natural, because that's the world we're heading towards, as well as lots of tubes of pink stuff, because pink is also the future. Future future modern!

What it also means is a new! season of new! drama, new! comedy and new! comedy-drama, such as last week's Phoo Action, which wasn't very dramatic or very funny, or tonight's Being Human, which will hopefully be a bit more of both. Two young men - one a 120-year-old vampire, the other a werewolf - move in together, only to find their new home is haunted by the agoraphobic spirit of a previous tenant who died in dodgy circumstances. Writer Toby Whithouse draws on his previous experience blending comedy and drama with a supernatural twist and a creeping sense of menace and horror in episodes of Doctor Who, Torchwood and Where The Heart Is, while lowculture favourite Russell Tovey aka George aka the werewolf draws on his experience of being extremely fit and bares his arse on a number of occasions, including a particularly pause-and-rewatchable rear shot in this promotional clip from BBC Three's trailblazingly modern website. Best of all, they've stuck the important bit right at the start so you get to see it before the iPlayer stream strangles itself and the whole site goes into stasis. Welcome to the future!

_{*Over 34? Are you sure you shouldn't be dead?}