BBC BASIC was far better than C64 BASIC.
It had a nice set of built-in graphics functions and an inline assembler, amongst other things.
I can still remember that VDU 23 was the command to redefine a character, so much easier than doing the same sort of thing on the C64 (copy the character set from ROM to RAM, get the VIC to use the RAM copy with POKE statements, modify the desired character)
C64 Basic was V2 of a dialect of the Microsoft derived Basic for the PET. It was out of date already compared to the latest V4 because the older version fit into a smaller ROM to save costs.