Beeb courts controversy with funding decision

The BBC's relationship with new technology has always been controversial. It was heavily criticised in the late 1990s for spending licence payers' money on setting up websites.

It also faced criticism from independent dot-coms accusing it of competing unfairly and cross-subsidising by advertising web offerings using BBC1 and BBC2.

But its latest decision seems even stranger.

We're seeing dot-coms go out of business almost every day, businesses are struggling to survive and start-ups are finding venture capital harder to come by than ever before. Lay-offs are an almost universal experience for web-based companies.

Surely in such circumstances it is irresponsible of the BBC to offer second-round funding to the truly dreadful series Attachments. It was pants.

The series, for everyone who missed it, was chiefly enjoyable considering how bad it was. It aimed to do for geeks what This Life did for lawyers. The clichéd 'loft-office' set was bad enough but the plots were even more wooden. The characters were equally unidimensional.

It also featured more digital blunders than the average start-up. Large files were transferred round the office by floppy disk in the first episode. It was never entirely clear what the imaginary company did - some kind of music portal maybe?

Who cared? Who cares? All we can say is there are few things stranger than dot-coms (trust us, we know), and even fewer stranger than TV's interpretation of the phenomenon.

For an alternative insight, check out our review of boo hoo: a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe, the book about e-tailer boo.com, at http://www.silicon.com/a48491

For more on Attachments see: www.everyonehatesattachments.com

And for a collection of what we call 'digital blunders' go to http://www.silicon.com/digitalblunders