At the same time that Sky is relaunching Sky One (again) it appears that Virgin Media TV is still trying to find a positioning for its free-to-air rival ‘entertainment' channel Virgin1.
One of Marketing's more sensitive journalists (Ed) stumbled across a programme that seems to exemplify the problem with Virgin1 - Kinky and proud - and he is still recovering from the experience.
At 9.30pm last night the channel transmitted this show featuring a deviant who puts a neck brace, mouth bit and arm-binding device around his semi-naked middle-aged partner and leads her around pretending she's a horse. Apparently, according to the ‘trainer, he gets a kick from imagining having sex with the horse.
This sort of rubbish is indicative of the problem with the expansion of multi-channel television - small programme budgets lead to broadcasters buying the cheapest and seemingly shocking content for the very reason that they want to shock so that they register somewhere on the EPG.
But surely there's a line somewhere that shouldn't be crossed and that's got to peak-time family viewing time on free-to-air entertainment channels. Virgin Media needs to realise this, although I don't fancy its chances of trying to find a genuine reason for the channel to feature on anyone's viewing repertoire.
