If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve already drifted away from Strictly Come Dancing. There was a time where I would blog about my thoughts several times through each series – at one point the BBC included a link to one of my posts on their website. That saw views skyrocketing, let me tell you. But last year, I didn’t watch the show at all. None of the celebrities particularly grabbed my attention, and boy that show eats up a lot of your time if you get invested properly.

The BBC hosted their replacement for the absent Glastonbury festival this weekend, putting on four huge shows across the UK and welcoming the great and the good of the music world to play at them. There was far too much content to enjoy in one weekend, so I’ll be perusing the iPlayer for at least the rest of this week and maybe longer. One performance that did stand out, however, was the Manic Street Preachers on Friday.

Yesterday, I talked about the concept of diving headfirst into a new subject of your choosing and just going for the learning ride. This is something I’ve struggled with before, and particularly when it comes to history. I didn’t enjoy history that much at school, but have since found a fondness for finding out how the world has come to be in the position it is in today. The trouble with history is it is a HUGE SUBJECT.

Recently, I’ve been trying to watch more educational television alongside all the more sensational Netflix stuff or traditional half-hour comedies. This desire has meant checking out a lot of BBC Four and BBC Two, and I really enjoyed the four-part factual show on the latter: World’s Busiest Cities. Presented by Anita Rani, Dan Snow and Ade Adepitan, the show delved into what makes four very different cities across the globe tick.

The format of visiting a subject through a certain number of tangential objects has been done a few times, but I’ve found this recent iteration from the BBC fascinating. Tim Harford, one of the Beeb’s resident economists, covers fifty things that have, in some way, shaped the economy that we know and live with today. If you had to list some things, you’d probably say credit cards, interest rates, banks, etc, etc, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

I quite enjoy the BBC’s seasons, where they focus in on one particular subject across a majority of their platforms. But the latest one, called Sitcom Season, has me scratching my head. I love a good sitcom, new or old, but part of these plans involve bringing back a whole host of classic comedies and revitalising them for the new generation. For example: “Porridge, the classic prison sitcom, returns nearly 40 years after Norman Stanley Fletcher served his time.

There was a lot of consternation doing the rounds this week when it emerged the BBC have plans to switch BBC Three from a TV channel to online only distribution. I can’t say that it’s a hugely surprising move, particularly as they have made a big push recently with putting the episodes of comedies up on the iPlayer before they appear on TV. The big pink Premiere logo appears on the show, and you can watch it online long before it reaches the schedules.

A marvellous video from the BBC has emerged, showing three trips from London to Brighton via train from three very different time periods. The journey was filmed in 1953, then thirty years on in 1983, and then this year, another thirty years on. The videos have been sped up and put side by side, and it makes for one of those viewings that I find oddly compelling. I thought more would be distinctly different, but aside from the type of train whistling past, it’s only in London that you can see real differences.

Disappointingly, I wrote this post last month and - thanks to having to get the screen captures off the iPad and general forgetfulness - have only just remembered it was tucked away in my drafts. It is still interesting though, so let’s just wind back and pretend it’s the 27th January rather than February. It’s not every day that you see a tweet from your significant other waxing lyrical about Antiques Roadshow, and when that occurred to me last week, I had to investigate further.

Quite a while back now, Mr C and I ventured towards Manchester to see what all the fuss was about with these new television studios at Media City. The move away from London towards a new settlement a little further north is full of political interest, but that’s not why we wanted to go. Just to see all that broadcasting power contained within some beautiful buildings is like heaven for us.