Month: March 2009

  • The Prisoner – Coming Not So Soon?

    Broadcast Magazine has a new picture of Sir Ian as Number 2 in the ITV/AMC remake of The Prisoner. Slightly worryingly, the piece says that AMC is planning on airing it later this year, while ITV is showing it in 2010. Might I suggest that this is a bad idea if ITV wants to avoid…

  • Radio Radio

    A couple of worthwhile pieces in today’s Media Guardian for those interested in the radio industry. Global’s Stephen Miron gives an interview. The subject of licence roll-over is brought up. Classic FM is the first of the three INR licences to be renewed, expiring in September 2011. Global would like an extension rather than the…

  • Knowing

    This is a film I went into completely blind. I knew it couldn’t have had the best reviews of the week, but I hadn’t seen a trailer and didn’t really know anything about it. First things first. Nic Cage’s hair is very strange in this film. At some point soon he’s going to have to…

  • A One-stop Audio Shop – Cons (and Pros)

    In this week’s Broadcast magazine, Emily Bell suggests that it’d be a good idea for there to be a one-stop shop for audio. She’s referring, of course, to Tim Davie’s interview with Media Guardian on Monday suggesting that the BBC works with commercial radio to build a single “radioplayer.” “I’m talking about getting radio fit…

  • What I’ve Been Listening To This Week

    Third Reich & Roll is a cracking three part documentary from Radio 2. Stephen Fry narrates this story about how Nazi technology helped develop tape recording technology, and then the post-war development of multi-track technologies and stereo. Part 2 is available until Monday and details what kind of technologies various classic albums used, from the…

  • Keep Calm

    Inspired by the ridiculously popular WWII poster, and The IT Crowd. Personally I think another poster in the series – Freedom Is In Peril – is equally as relevant.

  • The Boat That Rocked

    Obviously, any film that was going to set itself on a pirate radio station in the swinging sixties was going to pique my interest. And so it was with the new Richard Curtis film. Richard Curtis films are big affairs – you don’t make films like Love Actually and Notting Hill and decide that your…

  • Ignorant Reviewer

    Friday night saw the first in a new series of Genius on BBC2. It’s a TV transition of the popular Radio 4 comedy presented by Dave Gorman. The radio series is very funny. The TV version is also very funny, being basically the same, except that you can see some of the mock-ups they’ve built…

  • Streetmaps in London

    Google Streetmaps has launched in London, and I was keen to see if I featured. A few months ago I saw the Google car taking photos: But sadly, it wasn’t taking pictures on Glasshouse Street where I saw it. View Larger Map The above photo was taken in front of the Jewel nightclub at the…

  • A Celebration of Radio Comedy

    Earlier this evening, the Radio Academy had one of its regular events – this one was a celebration of radio comedy. Jon Holmes hosted the evening, speaking to two excellent proponents of comedy on radio: Barry Cryer and Steve Punt. Barry Cryer picked some his “desert island” comedy classics and we were treated to excerpts.…

  • Duplicity

    I’m really not at all sure what I think about Duplicity, the new film from writer-director Tony Gilroy starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. It’s one of those twisty films that keeps you on your toes as it jumps back and forward in time to tell a story of industrial epsionage. Indeed one suspects that…

  • Secondary Ticketing Redux

    The other day I was talking about secondary ticketing and my despising of the general dishonesty of it all. Well now Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has explained the situation from a band’s side of things. He doesn’t like secondary ticketers, or “re-sellers” as they’re known. Like me, he considers them touts, or scalpers…