Television review and preview

The BBC has a great selection of programmes about the economy and city news this week to watch, set the recorder for or download afterwards from the i-player.

Last night BBC2 showed the first of a 3-part series ‘Million Dollar Traders’, the latest reality game-show concept in which ‘eight ordinary people are given a million dollars and a fortnight of intensive training to run their own hedge fund’. Hedge fund manager Lex van Dam wants to see if they can beat the professionals. They could not have predicted that when they started trading in June last summer, the markets would start to go into meltdown, and then it seemed a little unfair of their mentors to blame these rookie investors for making losses when the all the professionals were in the same boat. Several of the eight seemed to lack the X-factor needed to take the plunge into such choppy waters, but as there is no Strictly Come Trading facility to vote one of them off the team, we can see next week if they made a miraculous recovery.

Another 3 part BBC series starts on Wednesday, ‘The City Uncovered with Evan Davis’. In the first episode Evan looks at Banks and How to Break Them, and the role the banks played in the biggest financial chaos in living memory. To find out what went so badly wrong, Evan returns to first principles, and explains exactly how a bank is supposed to work and what happened when banks abandoned their traditional role. According to the Sunday Times TV preview for the week (which makes the programme one of its top 5 for the week), he finds the root of the problem in David Bowie’s sale of the rights to his back catalogue to Bowie Bond holders in 1997. This will be at 9pm on BBC2.

At the other end of the economic scale, on BBC1 tonight at 10.35 an episode of ‘Skint’ returns to Vernon, who has featured in this moving series before. Psychiatric problems and terms in prison contributed to his becoming homeless, but now on his feet and selling The Big Issue, he cannot generate enough income to pay off an old credit card. He has plans to deal with the pressures, by becoming an apprentice bathroom fitter, but according to the BBC preview, things do not go according to plan. This too is recommended by Sunday Times critics and covers a number of issues relevant to the Distribution of Income part of the AQA unit 5 specification.

A question to consider for AS microeconomics:
Is the BBC i-player a pure or quasi-public good?