Johnny Shakespeare, the first play in the BBC's new Afternoon Play season.
When I was at university, we used to follow a custom called the "Neighbours Lunch". We would get up at midday, prepare some awful concoction involving baked beans and bread, or sometimes pasta and Ragu sauce, and eat it in front of Neighbours. It was good, even if Neighbours was bad.
Well, the Neighbours lunch just got better. I'm not a great TV fan, preferring to sleep or drink, but the latest scheduling decision from the BBC looks set to be a real boon to students, home-workers, freelancers, skivers, poets, flâneurs, mums or dads, the retired, those off sick and other assorted stay-at-homes. Where daytime TV used to be a sludge of cheap time-filler, the new Afternoon Play at 2.05pm is an attempt to programme something of quality during the day. Proper drama with proper actors, just right for that after-lunch dip. Today's showing, for example, is Johnny Shakespeare, a play by Jim Cartwright, he of Little Voice.
And not only that, but the Afternoon Play is followed by the slackers' perennial, Wildlife On One. After five minutes of news, we turn to another great show, Lazy Town. Clearly someone at the BBC, a friend to daytime believers, is trying to keep us glued to the telly and away from work, whereas in the past, the low quality of daytime TV could be seen as part of a sinister plot to return the bored worker to the factory as quickly as possible. Now there might be something worth skiving off for. And these shows perfectly fill the dead zone, those dragging hours between two and four, when most of us find it very hard to do any work at all. Truly, telly to nod off to.
