Month: October 2009

  • RAJAR Q3 2009

    Today sees publication of the latest RAJAR figures and there are a few things that are food for thought. FIrst of all, it wasn’t the greatest RAJAR for commercial radio which slipped back a little against a strong BBC which saw increases in share for all its national analogue networks with the exception of Radio…

  • London Newspapers

    Associated Newspapers has just announced that the London Lite will shortly be closing. This has surely been inevitable since the Evening Standard went free a week or so ago. Clearly as well the journalists mentioned in the The Guardian’s report, there are also an awful lot of part-time distributors losing their jobs, as well associated…

  • The Informant!

    The Informant! (I guess the exclamation mark is important) is the latest film from director Stephen Soderburgh, and if I said that it was about one man taking on liars and corporate greed, you might wonder if Soderburgh was revisiting the territory he first examined with Erin Brokovich. But this is a very different film…

  • Dear Lemon Lima & Capitalism: A Love Story

    Dear Lemon Lima is one of those many films that you have see completely blind at a film festival. According to IMDB it’s only had a screening at one other film festival and I can’t see details of a release date which is a terrible shame. Vanessa Lemor (Savanah Wiltfong) is a young teenage girl…

  • Compare My Radio

    I was in Sweden recently, presenting at Radio Days 2009, and letting a Swedish audience know what we’d been doing in the last 12 months as we morphed from Virgin Radio to Absolute Radio. One of the things I noted was that Absolute Radio publishes its playlist online, and includes the number of plays the…

  • The Permanent Way

    After I recently saw The Power of Yes, it became apparent that this was not the first production that David Hare had produced in this way. In 2004, there was The Permanent Way, a National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production that carried out a similar dramatised investigation into the state of British railways following privatisation and…

  • Steampunk

    The Oxford Museum of Science is currently home to a great little exhibition on the subject of Steampunk – seemingly the first collection of such artworks ever collected like this in the world. I’ve always found steampunk to be an interesting area with the wonderfully creative machines that they built. I suppose my introduction would…

  • Fantastic Mr Fox, Topper and Dirigible

    The London Film Festival opened on Wednesday, and this week I caught a few films: Fantastic Mr Fox, which was the opening film of the festival (I wasn’t at the premiere sadly), a UCLA restored version of Topper, and a Columbia restoration of Dirigible. Fantastic Mr Fox is a terrific stop-animation version of the Roald…

  • The Force

    There’s a lot of rubbish on televison. Most of it in fact. But once in a while there’s something good. And even more rarely, something exceptional gets aired. Last night on Channel 4 we got the latter. The Force is a new three part documentary from Patrick Forbes. He’s made some excellent observational documentaries in…

  • Is Sky One Becoming the UK’s HBO?

    Short answer: No. I alluded a little the other day to this, but I think it’s a discussion worthy of its own topic anyway. Every couple of years or so, Sky One gets a new controller – most recently Stuart Murphy who was appointed at the start of this year. Every new channel controller wants…

  • One More Radio Drama

    Here’s something that links the last two entries on this blog. Following The Power of Yes yesterday, and the radio I was mentioning, I caught up with something else from the BBC World Service that I’d not previously listened to. The Day That Lehman Died details events in the US over the weekend when the…

  • Some Recent Radio (and TV)

    Apologies in advance – just about everything I’m going to mention here is now beyond the iPlayer’s Listen Again window. The BBC World Service has just finished another Worldplay series, this time based on the subject of science. The last piece was called Moving Bodies by Arthur Giron and starred Alfred Molina. It was actually…