Month: October 2007

  • Bladerunner

    I’m really looking forward to Bladerunner: The Final Cut, essentially a big DVD boxset that’ll be the final version of Bladerunner, a classic SF film that’s definitely up amongst my favourites, but which has a troubled version history. But it’s a little disingenuous, for Ridley Scott to claim to claim that he has an aversion…

  • The Cotton Fields of Uzbekistan

    There was a great film on Newsnight last night highlighting the child labour abuse in Uzbekistan where during the autumn the schools all close and children are sent off to pick the cotton. They don’t have any choice in the matter, and they sleep away from their homes. This cotton is then sold by the…

  • Local Radio

    It’s probably best that I don’t comment too much on this issue just at the minute (In my current position I’m directly involved in this issue. At some point in the future I hope I will be able to blog about it). But I’ll point you towards a Media Guardian Organ Grinder blog entry about…

  • Correcting More Misleading Audience Figures

    As you may know, it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Today programme on Radio 4 this week, and there have been one or two pieces about it. A large piece in The Observer and something written by presenter John Humphrys himself in The Mail on Sunday. All very interesting, but the Mail piece has a…

  • Arguing Your Point

    Robert McCrum in today’s Observer has written about why It’s time to ditch the prize guys – arguing that it’s time for the Booker Prize to be radically reformed from the ground up. Except, it’s really not very clear why exactly he feels it needs this change. Certainly the Booker no longer gets the TV…

  • Interviewing Sigur Rós

    I’ve just been watching Verity Sharp interview the members of Sigur Rós for The Culture Show, who have a new concert film – Heima – coming out next month which looks wonderful. And seemingly there’s a Culture Show special specifically about the band coming up in November. The interview was somewhat better than one they…

  • Voting

    From today’s Observer: “Given that more people vote to evict contestants from the Big Brother house than in general elections…” This is something that you keep hearing. It’s simply not true. It’s nowhere near true. The story I’ve just linked on the BBC News site tells us that 27,128,130 votes were cast in total the…

  • Premium Rate Services On ITV

    So finally Deloitte’s report on premium rate services on ITV has been published. Well I say “published” but in fact, what we’re getting is an 11 page summary detailing failures on three specific programmes, and mentioning a number of other shows in passing. Once again, it’s turned out that ITV producers and researchers were regularly…

  • Comment Spam

    I’ve just been looking at this website’s “activity log” and was amazed to see how often comment spam comes in. Thank goodness that I’ve got some basic filtering in place. Yesterday there were 170 attempts to comment here (with one genuine comment), all of which failed because they didn’t pass my cunning challenge response box.…

  • CDs v Downloads

    For most things, if you opt to download the material rather than get physical media, if there’s any difference in price, it’s cheaper to download. Think of iTunes v CDs, or software that you can download from many sellers. There’s no postage or packaging to account for, and minimal physical production costs. So it’s odd…

  • Good Timing

    Today sees the BBC make its big job cuts announcement which will get loads of press coverage. So it’s completely random that ITV’s reporting on its phone-in scandal today as well. What are the chances?

  • Slide

    Slide is one of the more recent Hard Case Crime novels – those wonderfully trashy hard-boiled crime novels. In this instance we follow the twin stories of “Slide” and “The M.A.X.” as Max Fisher likes to call himself. The book itself, I discover, is the sequel to Bust which came out last year, also under…