[paz]

BBC4 are currently showing a three part documentary series called Games Britannia, which looks back at the history of board games. It's on Monday nights, so I'm guessing most people haven't seen it, but the first two episodes are available on iPlayer here, with the final episode being shown next week (and appearing on iPlayer soon after).

[Gileh]

Just watched the first two and was a bit disappointed by how, like  'James May's Toy Stories', it totally ignored the story of Games Workshop. GW is very rooted in tabletop and board games (especially early in it's history), has been a thriving home-grown industry for 20 years and has a high street presence to this day. This outlier gets ignored because it doesn't fit into the simple 'woe is Britain, it was all great and then the big American boys came and bought it all up and spoiled it' nostalgia driven-narrative of the twentieth century. I'm sure the fact the GW is not family based, not easily accessible and not very cool doesn't help get it on TV either.

This is why I don't like TV documentaries: they so often ignore the issues in order to tell predictable stories.

ETA The third part actually does give a good deal of attention to D&D and GW, and puts some interesting ideas across. The chronology, facts and connections are all just a little bit iffy, but the ideas are still quite interesting.