Episodes
The first full series finished with an extended edition on US television billed as Screenwipe USA. A Christmas special was broadcast on 21 December 2006 and a review of the year 2006 special was broadcast on 31 December 2006. A third series 'with a massively increased budget' (according to a spoof voiceover at the end of the final episode from the second series), was revealed to have been commissioned on 9 May 2007. The 3rd series was preceded by a mini-Screenwipe on 12 May (shown on BBC Two's The Culture Show), which reviewed Grease is the Word and Any Dream Will Do. Shortly after the third series concluded, a Screenwipe clip show was shown on BBC Two, with repeats of the series airing on the channel in the weeks following. The third series featured a number of episodes focusing on specific themes, such as television news coverage and reality television series.
The fifth series of Screenwipe began airing on BBC Four on Tuesday 18 November 2008. The first episode dealt with (among other things) Manuelgate and television production costs (and the effect of the credit crunch on said costs). The second was focused on the changes in television advertising throughout its history, and the third was an extended edition composed entirely of Brooker's interviews with prestigious writers such as Russell T Davies and Tony Jordan. Episode four focused on "mission shows" such as The Great British Body, and featured a parody involving "pee-shyness" (paruresis), while episode five focused on children's programming through the ages. The final episode of the season was a review of 2008. In 2009, the show didn't return for another series, but a review of the year was scheduled as had been the case with previous years.
Read more about this topic: Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)