On checking through the mid 1990s UK TV listings, Rosalie Goes Shopping got quite a healthy number of showings on Channel 4 back in the day: premiered in February 1995 (at 10 p.m.) and repeated again in January 1997 and May 1998, which is the last time a film by the director has aired on UK television (and which rather neatly coincides with MichaelB's mention of Channel 4 having to be responsible for selling its own advertising, beginning in 1998).MichaelB wrote: ↑Tue Mar 12, 2024 5:13 amCertainly back in the 1990s, it was usually the failure to land a TV sale that prevented a film from getting distribution, and opportunities were dwindling thanks to the 1990 Broadcasting Act forcing Channel 4 to start selling its own advertising and therefore pay a lot more attention to viewing figures (which they’d blithely ignored in the 1980s as ITV was effectively subsidising them).
And BBC2 was also showing fewer foreign-language films - ironically, the rise in availability of foreign language films on physical media in the early 1990s meant that there was no longer the same compulsion to show them on telly out of a sense of cultural responsibility.
Channel 4 also premiered Salmonberries in January 1997, which has been its single UK TV screening. But that's better than any of the films he made afterwards, which have never aired at all!
