The BBC is set to launch a special investigation into events at Television Centre in the 70’s and 80’s, using the tried and tested BBC 1 dramatic formula of time travel.
In the planned series, wrongdoing at the BBC TV Centre in the late 70’s is exposed by a plucky actress (to be played by now-well-over-18 Emma Watson) who is about to become Dr Who’s new fictional assistant in a perfectly respectable relationship with the much older Time Lord with no hint of impropriety. She tells all to fearless, era-challenged Alex Drake from Ashes to Ashes - who has herself been the victim of explicit entertainment-oriented sexism in the police force on prime time TV. But her boss, hard drinking Gene Hunt (Life on Mars) is too busy looking for the real life fictional villains who have stolen three valuable Mark 1 Daleks from a BBC Scene store in Acton to sell to a bearded villain from the rival ITV Sweeney.
In a final scene which BBC news-drama producers are keeping top secret, all the villains are arrested and appear before an edition of Crown Court, the ITV series in which fictional viewers played the part of real jurors. Wrongdoers are convicted, led off to prison, and five new BBC women newsreaders are appointed on the same day to celebrate.
The two hour drama is scheduled to be broadcast as part of the Christmas schedule this year, though the BBC points out schedules could very well change.
Russell T Davies, the new Director General of the BBC told a press conference: “We’re faced of course with the age-old problem of narratives involving time travel to the past. If events around the current scandal never happened, they need to be replaced. So, using the same time-techniques we’re going back to the soap opera Eldorado, which was axed in 1993. We’re going to de-axivate that axing , in fact tomorrow TV viewers will wake up to discover it has been on since 1973 and is now more popular than Crossroads.”
In a separate development China-born actor Bert Kwouk told a news conference that he had been employed by the BBC to build some “Chinese Walls” during the 1990’s,when work on the Pink Panther Films had dried up.
Mr Kwouk said “It was confusing. I arrived at TV Centre with the designs for some office walls, based on the Great Wall of China. But my line manager – a small balding man with retro-style glasses, a pointy collar and a blazer – said the walls were to be “metaphorical, rather than physical” then he tapped his nose, which I found confusing. Then he started talking about dealing with badgers. Only now have I come to realise this relates to the current news on bovine tuberculosis, though how he knew about that back then is a mystery. Although I never built any real walls, I was eventually paid for the designs. Or rather my service company was. I have never made any secret of my tax status.”
(hat tip to previous Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes subs)