I Voted Saxon!

“No Stig For You!!”

I know it’s not the geekiest show in the world, but I do enjoy Top Gear. (The UK version, mind you. The Australian version was too try hard for my tastes). I suppose in a way it IS geekery, well in a car geek kind of way. Although being raised in a car family, it kind of passed over me. No, the reason I watch this show it is because it is so damned funny. For a long time in Australia, the SBS has been airing the series a little while after the UK shows them, usually a year behind. Late last year, one of our commercial stations Channel 9, bought the rights off of the SBS in what has been said for quite a lot of money. It’s kinda sad for SBS, a part government/part commerical station getting the show taken off of them mainly because it was one of their highest rating shows. That’s the harsh reality of television these days though, and a couple of weeks ago they started showing Season 14 on Prime Time on 9.

Well, kinda.

Being the week before the Winter Olympics, they had a double bumper – Episode 1 and The older Winter Olympics special. Fair enough. Because of advertising and the two episodes, they chopped quite a bit from the first episode. No news, no Power Lap, mainly the Star in the reasonably priced car and the challenge. I grumbled, but shrugged. Thems the breaks. Luckily shortly after the show aired, Itunes had the original episode as broadcast from the UK available. Now the Olympics are over, and I go to check what we have airing tonight? Part of episode 4, and the other half from the American Road trip, back from Series 9 in 2007.

How can commercial stations screw up television so much? We’ve all seen the American Road trip before. Hell, it’s even available on DVD in Australia! I understand that they have the rights to show all the old stuff now that they own everything but series 1, but why don’t they wait a couple of weeks after airing the ORIGINAL NEW episodes they have now? Due to BBC budget cuts, they’re only running 7 episodes a season anyways! They have plenty of time to show best of episodes in the weeks to come. I just hope itunes are sensible enough to release the proper episodes as they’re meant to online. I’ll find out in a few days as the tv shows update..

It’s silly things like this, and other commercial stations dropping cult TV shows half way through original airings (Torchwood, Veronica Mars are two examples that spring to mind) that Australia is the second largest country in the world for downloading/bittorrenting our television.