Last night I was flicking around the outer reaches of Sky, and came upon CCTV just as the top of the hour was approaching. So I decided to see how the awful Chinese earthquake was being reported in south western China on the English language version of the Chinese state TV service.

Well of course it was the main story, but what was really interesting were the pictures, or lack of them. Unlike the BBC or Sky, who seemed to have a reasonable quantity of imagery of collapsed buildings as well as stills of people being pulled from the rubble, CCTV mainly had images from other cities that had felt the force, but where buildings hadn't fallen, and where the worst damage was limited to cracks in those buildings' infrastructure.

Certainly they had people from the Chinese seismelogical organisations explaining the quake, and an interview with the Chinese premier explaining how help would be on its way. But little in the way of "action" footage.

It can't really be embarrassing for the Chinese government to admit that a major earthquake can cause large amounts of damage can it?

Meanwhile over on the BBC's dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about Robert Scoble being one of the first to share reports about the earthquake, as he used Twitter to pass on links and other people's "twits" to his gargantuan following on that service.

The tenet of the piece is that Twitter is becoming a news source. But I'm not sure I agree with this. As I said, when the UK had our insiginificant little earthquake a couple of months ago at 1am in the morning, I Twittered it, and read other people's Twitters prior to Five Live, Sky News and BBC News 24 beginning to report it. But does that really mean that Twitter's a news source? I'm not so sure. I still want verified information.

Twitter can be a way to pass on news stories, but it's limited to where the technology is available, and the use to which it's made locally. For example, I suspect that if something big happened in Brazil, it'd be Orkut I'd look towards. But as ringsting-iom wrote in his comment on the BBC blog, the mobile networks went down very quickly, so getting Twitters out isn't easy.

And I don't recall a similar Twitter explosion following the cyclone that hit Burma where of course the military junta keep everyone under very close scrutiny (and are now causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of its citizens by being very suspicious about all the aid being offered to them).

First hand citizen journalism will continue to play an important role in what gets reported, but it's not the same as a properly resourced news organisation with the facilities to check and double check what's happening - not what I think might be happening.

I'll once again preface this piece by saying that these are my personal views and don't represent those of my employer.

I wrote a week or so ago about the poor showing of commercial radio compared to BBC radio in the recent RAJAR results for Q1 2008. What we saw was commercial radio fall to a low share of hours while the BBC continued to rise.

And I mentioned at the time that all radio hours are holding up, but does that really show the whole story? I hope nobody minds too much, but I need to dispel a common myth. Commercial radio will often gloss over the "all adult" numbers and point to 15-44 year olds where commercial radio has been traditionally stronger.

But what's been going on there? Well here's the chart for overall listening among this audience:

The audience is holding fairly firm, although there has been slippage. But let's look a bit closer and compare commercial share with BBC share in this market:

This is one scary chart. Commercial radio is still leading the BBC, but it's obvious that the gap has closed considerably in recent years and we're now down to 51% plays 47%. At the current rate, the BBC is going to overtake commercial in the coming year.

So why is that? Well let's look at the commercial sector a little more closely:

This is even scarier. It's clear that the losses are coming from local commercial radio. National commercial radio hasn't done too badly - helped by national brands coming on-board largely via digital radio. But those small gains don't make up for the losses sustained by local commercial radio.

So why is this?

If there was a simple answer, I'm sure they'd all be doing it. But I'll return to investing in the product. That can be the only way to regain some of those audiences. Is that going to be achieved by networking? I'll let you decide that.

But let's return to something I glossed over a little earlier on - that overall decline in 15-44 listening. It's modest, but is it a sign of things to come? Am I just painting a picture of gloom? Well here's a chart that's a little better to look at - 15-24 listening:

Overall - a flat picture of listening hours. So they've not all gone to last.fm then! Phew.

Commercial radio's lead over the BBC is a bit better than among 15-44s, although there is a little recent dip that commercial radio could do without. But the next generation is still there to be won.

The one disappointment remains the continued slippage in local commercial radio. It's still significant, and again is only partially made up for by national brands.

So some scary charts, but ones that need to be faced up to. Some remedial action is needed, and it can't all be the BBC's fault.

Here's a complete non-story: Madonna swore twice during her post watershed performance that was broadcast live on BBC Three and Radio 1 as part of the station's Big Weekend in Maidstone.

So there were swear words in programme that featured a warning, and viewers got an apology anyway. Anyway, she's edging 50, and has to do anything she can to stay "cool" doesn't she?

Personally I think the real story was probably Madge asking the assembled Radio 1 listeners whether they were high. That seems to have drawn no press condemnation at all!

Overall, it was a pretty flat set - a couple of tracks from the new album and absolutely nothing older than music. When she started strumming Satisfaction on an electric guitar it was just terminally embarrassing. As Lisa Verrico, from The Times said, it was like "an embarrassing auntie desperately trying to be hip."

Incidentally, is it me, or is the Mail's recently revamped online offering a little off-message compared to the printed edition? Here's their shocked report of the short set replete with perhaps less than family friendly photos. And here's a photo of actress Natasha Richardson, along with a helpfully zoomed-in photo to illustrate the story.

Taking advantage of the fine weather, I hit the nearby countryside this afternoon (sadly, in a moment of poor planning, sans camera) and found myself following a section of the London Loop. I must say that I think I may attempt the full walk over the course of the next few months - it's always dangerous to set self-imposed deadlines.

Anyway more of that anon, if and when I start doing full sections. But the walk did afford me the opportunity to catch up with a lot of listening. There is, of course, a certain school of thought that says that it's terribly anti-social to go walking whilst listening to an mp3 player, but there's such a lot of great radio out there, that my commute doesn't afford me enough time to get through it all.

A lot of these were recommended by one of my new favourite sites - Speechification - which describes itself as "A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it." Every week, they highlight a few hidden gems that you may have missed.

So today I was listening to Robbie Williams and Jon Ronson Journey to the Other Side (Still available to listen again until this Tuesday on the BBC Player, or the Speechification link is here). Robbie Williams comes out as likeable, but a bit gullible. And of course, if you haven't read it, you really need to read Jon Ronson's book Them.

Speechification also recommend Stephen Fry's recent speech on the future of public service broadcasting. I watched this on BBC Parliament on Saturday night (albeit with a sound issue part-way through, where Fry seemed to start all over again). I find it generally quite hard to disagree with Fry, and in this case, he's pretty much on the money all the way through. It's also worth watching, listening to or reading David Attenborough's contribution last week.

Then there's The Reunion featuring cast and crew from Withnail and I. Speechification wasn't the only place I'd heard this recommended - I think it was Mark Ellen on the very fine Word Magazine podcast who also mentioned it. It's a great piece of radio, and I don't know how it is that I haven't previously listened to The Reunion before. Now I must admit that this film would be one of mine if we were playing a variant on that appears in one of David Lodge's university-set novels where characters in an English department name famous novels they've never read. Yes, I've never seen Withnail and I, even though it's regularly showing in HMV sales for about two quid. I may well chase it down this week and make good on the hole in my cultural knowledge.

And there's plenty more to listen to over there...

PS Has someone at Deutsche Grammophon, the massive classical music label, really forgotten to renew their website registration? It seems so.

Well here's a turn-up for the books - the first series of Ed Reardon's Week looks as though it's finally coming out on CD. You can put your cash back in your wallet, as it's not due to hit become available until September if the listings on Amazon or the BBC Shop are anything to go by.

So four years on, and after a couple of false starts, fans of the series might be able to get hold of legal copies.

[Now updated a bit]

Are we all excited by Freesat which launches today?

Actually it's a good time for it to come onstream. OK, so the website (as linked to by the BBC Press Office) doesn't work, but it can't all be smooth.

Onboard from day one are all the BBC channels, all the ITV channels and all the Channel 4 offerings. There's no mention of Five's digital output, which is odd as I thought that these channels were broadcast unencrypted on Sky Digital. But then Five's not part of Kangaroo either...

Much more interesting is the various channel's HD offerings. Naturally BBC HD is there, but the soon to launch ITV HD will be "launching exclusively on Freesat." Does that mean that ITV is deliberately withholding the channel from SkyHD and Virgin Media HD customers? If so, that seems like a strange attitude.

In fact initially ITV HD will be availble as a red-button service - a logo will appear when a programme is available in HD. I assume that this is due to the regionality of ITV meaning that having more than a dozen simulcasts is a mighty expensive issue. BBC HD doesn't have this issue as it's a separately programmed channel - effectively an HD version of BBC1/2 with repeats to fill the empty slots.

I assume that Freesat will have its own EPG, separate from that of Sky Digital, but it still seems a little odd that there's not a spot of SkyHD for ITV HD. Perhaps it'll be for a limited time?

We're told that by the end of the year there'll be upwards of 200 channels broadcasting on the platform, which means either that there'll be an awful lot of shopping channels, or some channels that currently get some subscription revenue from Sky or Virgin Media, are going to be completely free-to-air.

I've already speculated that UK TV Gold, in whatever guise it comes in when it relaunches, is a sure thing for being completely free-to-air - that's been the major part of the success of Dave. But could channels like National Geographic or Discover go down this route? We'll have to wait and see.

Sky has been doing very well lately, with continued growth despite some serious digital challengers in Freeview and, to an extent, Virgin Media.

But Sky HD is in fewer than half a million homes. This chart suggests that a free-to-air HD offering could be successful.

Source: BSkyB plc

The biggest concern that Sky must have is churn of current subscribers. With the credit crunch likely to make people reappraise their bills, and with a relatively inexpensive box available which won't even mean a new dish installation, downgrading to a free offering could be quite attractive for a lot of people.

In the short term, the channel list is a little sparten with no UKTV channels, no Discovery channels, no EMAP or MTV music channels and of course, no Sky channels. The news offering is a little light just now - you'd expect CNN to be there for example. Sky News is probably politically a no-no for BSkyB.

What's most exciting is that the spec of Freesat means that the return path for interactive services is via an ethernet connection. Sky boxes use an internal modem and the phone line for interactive gaming, shopping and paying for films or sports events. Ethernet seems a very 21st and sensible solution. And most excitingly, it opens the door for the iPlayer to be available via the service.

Once there are a few more channels on board, Freesat is going to be a very compelling offering.

Lots of today's RAJAR press coverage focuses on the "battle" between Radio 1's Chris Moyles (34) and Radio 2's Terry Wogan (69). There are charts like the one below, a version of which appeared in today's Times.

It all looks pretty close between the two breakfast DJs.

But is that chart completely fair? Chris Moyles is seemingly getting very close to catching Wogan. I'm sure it's a great story for BBC PR to be talking about. But it's not really comparing like with like.

The numbers being talked about are weekly "reach" figures - the number of different people, in the course of a week, who listen for at least 5 minutes to a particular show. But while Terry Wogan's show runs for two hours daily from 7.30 - 9.30am, Chris Moyles' show runs for three and a half hours from 6.30 - 10.00am. If you have a longer show, you have more opportunity to generate a higher reach figure.

It's an old radio trick to bump up listening figures by extending a show since ordinarily journalists and others will just compare the overall figures with one another without regard to a show's a length. Indeed, if you're being really unscupulous, you might compare your new longer show's figures with your previous shorter show's numbers. Unless you're doing something really wrong, you should see a nice increase!

But occassionally it does cause difficulties. If you look at the reporting of the London breakfast show marketplace, you'll see that Capital 95.8 is crowing because Johnny & Denise is the biggest commercial breakfast show with 943,000 listeners. But Johnny & Denise run from 6.00 - 10.00am, whereas Jamie Theakston & Harriet Scott on Heart only run 6.00 - 9.00am. If you compare the audiences for those shorter hours, then Jamie & Harriet get 893,000 listeners, while Neil Fox over on Magic gets 831,000 (his show ordinarily runs 5.30 - 9.00am), and Johnny & Denise get "just" 829,000 listeners. That 9.00 - 10.00am hour is pretty big, and if your DJs are willing to work it, then you get quite a bump in your overall figures.

Depending on how you cut the cake, you get different results.

So what would the chart look like if we compare like with like hours for Wogan and Moyles, using Wogan's more restricted 7.30 - 9.30am hours? Something like this:

OK - it's a little hard to see without rescaling the charts a bit (something I currently can't do with Google Spreadsheets), but instead of a difference of 380,000 between the two in the most recent results, the "fair" difference is actually 1.02 million which is still quite considerable.

So always be a little aware about what's being compared and between who.

As ever when talking about radio, these are my own opinions and do not represent those of my employer.

In radio stations up and down the country, radio station bosses have been examining their RAJAR results last night and first thing this morning.

Media Guardian has plenty of detail about the overall results. And you can get the raw figures direct from RAJAR.

But there's an interesting blog piece my Media Guardian radio correspondent John Plunkett highlighting the least positive aspect of today's results: the continued growth of BBC radio at the expense of commercial radio.

Now you might say that as someone who works in commercial radio, I would say that this is a negative. As an intelligent reader of this blog, it's quite likely that you listen to lots of BBC radio. And you wouldn't be alone - I do too. And everytime the future of the BBC is threatened, I worry about the future of the whole UK broadcasting environment. The USA is not a model I want to follow.

But with this RAJAR, the BBC's share of radio listening has grown from 55.4% to 56.8%, while commercial radio's share has fallen from 42.4% to 41.1% (Note for the curious: the "missing" 2% or so, is to stations that aren't on RAJAR including web and international listening).

Now those might seem quite small percentage changes, but actually 1% of radio listening is 100,000 hours per week - a not inconsiderate amount. And more to the point the BBC's share is now higher than it has been since the advent of commercial radio (and RAJAR). And that's despite many additional commercial stations having launched throughout the duration of this chart.

The problem is that the BBC is just too successful. And it's in that environment that the likes of Peter Bazalgette is again suggesting that Radios 1 and 2 are privatised.

Now I've argued before that that would be catastrophic for commercial radio, with those two services taking the lion's share of revenues.

One thing is clear: depite more calls on leisure time than ever before, radio listening is not decreasing overall. All radio listening increased by 1.5% quarter on quarter - surely a testament to the medium.

But whose fault is it that the BBC is "too good"? Have commercial operators done less than their level best in recent years? Has the BBC's guaranteed income meant that it's been able to sign all the top talent, leaving the bare bones for commercial radio? Is it because the BBC is able to cross-promote its radio services on television to a far greater extent than a commercial operator is able to (having to pay for advertising airtime)? Or has commercial radio simply not invested in their product enough, perhaps having to worry more about servicing the needs of their shareholders rather than those of their listeners?

While I'm sure that champagne corks are popping up the road at Broadcasting House, the political ramifications of a completely dominant BBC are also likely to be carefully examined.

Unlike television, the playing field isn't level. The BBC has the lion's share of the most attractive spectrum with four national networks on FM compared to a single national commercial network in Classic FM. But commercial radio would never be able to support such institutions as Radios 3 and 4 (Channel 4 Radio, if and when it finally launches will surely be closer in tone to Five Live without the sport, and not Radio 4 as is widely perceived). But there are commercial alternatives to Radios 1 and 2. Your local commercial pop station probably shares a considerable amount of the Radio 1 playlist, and Radio 2's audience has certainly decreased in age over recent years (Q4 2007's RAJAR shows that the average age of a Radio 2 was 53, in Q4 1996 it was 59 - and that downward pattern has been consistent), as specialist music gets pushed to the outer reaches of the schedule (following the sad death of Humphrey Lyttleton, will any jazz be returning to Radio 2?).

If and when there's a full replacement to analogue radio in one or more digital formats, then commercial radio will have a more level playing field. And it's encouraging that a further half a million DAB radios were sold in the first quarter of 2008 taking the market total to 7 million. At the same time, 18% of all radio listening is now digital (whether via DAB, digital television or the internet). But we're a way off a full digital future at the moment with continued uncertainty about which digital path should be taken. And the funding inequity is always likley to be in place, especially in a marketplace where advertising expenditure is threatened by both a recession and the growth of the internet.

Leaving aside digital for the moment, the only other direct way that commercial radio will be able to compete is "networking" - sharing programming across many stations in a group or groups. Ofcom has recently relaxed the rules on networking and already Global Radio and GCap Radio have announced plans to network parts of their main daytime output - much off-peak programming is already networked. While that might be a profitable short-term solution, followed to a logical conclusion there is the danger of depriving local communities of local programming. And let's not forget that localness is all but gone from television already.

Networking also reduces the entry points for new talent into the industry. Remember that most of our top DJs actually started in local commercial radio. If there are no slots left to try new people, then we reduce the opportunities for discovering future talent. But go away and read Matt Deegan on this subject.

Overall, it's important that the BBC does do the sort of things that commercial radio can never do. That doesn't mean not producing services that are attractive to 15-44s, but to do this intelligently, and always remembering that "crushing" the opposition is not likely to help anybody's cause. Commercial radio doesn't deserve special priviliges - commercial radio companies are in the business to make money after all. But state funded services mortally wounding these business is not smart either.

As ever, the views here do not necessarily reflecft those of my employer.

So following the story that emerged a couple of weeks ago about Richard and Judy defecting to UKTV for their next chatshow, the question was which channel would they end up on.

Well today we learn that it is UKTV Gold that's going to get the "Dave" treatment. Dave, you'll recall, was previously called UKTV G2 or some such nonsense. But it got rebranded Dave, and importantly (though rarely mentioned) it booted UKTV History off its full Freeview slot to get massive exposure. Then, by carefully repeating lots of Top Gear, Have I Got News For You, Dragons' Den and QI, it became very successful as a free to air channel.

UKTV is going to try the same trick, and obviously the first question is what girls' name will they adopt? Kylie? Tracey? Clare? Sonya? 'Chelle?

Entertainingly, "the rebranded channel will aim to appeal to women under 30." Seemingly, the best way of doing this is to employ a couple of people who have been doyens of daytime TV for years, and will be 52 and 60 this year. Obvious really.

I should preface this entry by saying that it could be a little dull if you're not interested in radio research; that the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect my employer; and that I have no particular insider knowledge, beyond having used RAJAR for a long time.

RAJAR is the organisation that publishes radio listening figures in the UK. Figures are currently collected by carefully giving out over 130,000 diaries to people to keep for a single week over the course of a year. This is obviously a vast undertaking, but the UK has several hundred radio stations, the majority of which are local; so each locality has to have a representative sample of diaries if radio listening for those stations is to be accurately recorded.

The nature of this methodology means that listening figures are produced quarterly - and this Thursday at 7am, Q1 2008 figures will be published. Radio stations across the country are eagerly awaiting them!

Back in the mists of time - well 1998 - Kelvin MacKenzie, once editor of The Sun bought the station then known as Talk Radio. He rebranded it talkSPORT, but he had a problem. He felt that the RAJAR diary methodology discriminated against his station. In particular, he felt audiences were perhaps listening to his station but writing BBC Radio Five Live in their diaries. BBC stations on the whole have better awareness amongst the public, and that's especially the case for national services compared to their commercial competitors who don't have the marketing muscle of Auntie. On top of that, the diary methodology doesn't work well for one-off events - by its very nature, it's a 12 or 13 week average. So if you buy the rights to, say, a boxing match on a given Saturday night, you can't tell if you achieved an increased audience as a result for that one-off event. Sports rights aren't cheap, and aside from things like the Premier League, they don't always run every week at the same time.

So he sought help with a research company called GfK who had a sister company that produced a special kind of watch. GfK took audio captures of all the services they were monitoring, while the watches also regularly captured the ambient sound of wherever the watch wearer was. By examining the uploaded audio the watch had captured alongside the time of capture, and comparing it to its big database of radio (and TV) audio, the idea was that the system could tell you what service, if any, was being listened to.

Kelvin's company paid for the implementation of this technology, and he even took to publishing an alternative set of ratings. These showed far more people listening to his, as well as other services.

But in testing, the watch methodology didn't pass muster. So while he'd undoubtedly put meters on the map, and stirred up the industry, which led to plenty of calls to adopt metering, the system he'd adopted simply wasn't up to scratch. It also didn't really help his cause that he showed that BBC2 was getting more viewers than ITV - unlikely given the popularity of such trifling shows as Coronation Street, X Factor/Idol or Emmerdale.

The other viable system in the marketplace was from Arbitron, a massive US research group who are responsible for American radio ratings. They had their people meter (PPM), and over the last few years it has been tested extensively in the UK.

Arbitron's technology differed because it relied on a hidden signal embedded into stations' output. This signal is inaudible to listeners, but the pager-style devices Arbitron manufactured were able to detect them, and thus measure what station a listener was listening to and when.

Since the start of 2007, a test has been conducted in London, initially in partnership with the TV ratings company BARB and RAJAR. UK TV ratings rely on boxes in around 5,100 panellists' homes. The boxes also measure replayed material via video or PVR devices. But they do miss out on out-of-home viewing, e.g. watching the football in a pub. For some major games in large tournaments, that can be a substantial audience. Think of England featuring in the recent Rugby World Cup Final - a game played at 8pm in the evening.

But although theoretically with PPMs all seems fine, there are still issues that need to be addressed before metering can work, and RAJAR has now determined that they're not easy to overcome in the short term, so they're ending the project despite having spent £3.5m to date.

As RAJAR states, there are some key elements that PPMs seemed unable to cope with to a satisfactory extent. Foremost of these is the breakfast peak. Unlike television, which sees peak audiences in the evening, radio's natural peak is at breakfast time. Most people live relatively busy lives and breakfast doesn't afford much leisure time; they're getting washed, dressed, eating breakfast, getting themselves or other family members off to work or school, and so on. So radio is the natural partner for keeping you entertained and informed. You can listen in the bedroom, the bathroom, your kitchen or living room. You may well then listen in the car on the commute to work, or on a portable radio or mobile phone on a train journey. So far, so obvious.

Yet PPMs seem to have under-reported this peak - to the point where this is no peak. In all likelihood that's because people simply don't take their pager devices into the bathroom with them, and then into the kitchen or living room. Thus listening at radio's most critical time of the day is missed out by them.

On top of that there are other issues: the devices can't cope with listening via earphones especially easily. And they're simply not convenient to carry everywhere you go. Panellists are expected to take them everywhere, but would you carry one on an evening out, or on a shopping trip on a Saturday? If you forget your pager half-way to the station in the morning, would you return to the house to collect it, or leave it at home and not record a day's listening? Short of implanting a chip in your head (not something the libertarian in me is desperately looking forward to), or perhaps using a mobile phone solution (since that's a single device that you just might carry everywhere), it's hard to see how meters will ever work in a fully satisfactory manner.

As a consequence, RAJAR has pulled out of this development for the time being, and is looking to other methodologies going forward. In the first instance, they're examaning the use of online diary completion technologies.

Some people are going to be disappointed - not least Kelvin Mackenzie (no longer directly involved in radio) who has called it "an absolutely shocking decision." He points to TV having used electronic boxes for years.

But Mackenzie is simply wrong, and his comparison with TV is specious. He knows that TV is viewed in a limited number of locations. And he well understands that the methodology that medium uses is also weak for smaller stations (the sample isn't really big enough for full figures for every programme on every niche channel in a multi-channel world), and nor does it properly cope with out-of-home viewing, as mentioned above.

I have a feeling that Mackenzie's won't be the only dissenting voice we hear over the coming days, but until we have something that's proven to work, the £600m commercial radio industry cannot rely on a device that doesn't even recognise the most important listening time of the day. And it's not just commercial radio that recognises this - Jenny Abramsky of the BBC is similarly supportive. It's going to be very easy to give radio a kicking over this, but RAJAR is absolutely doing the right thing in launching a thorough industry wide review under Morag Blazey.

Interestingly, yesterday saw Media Guardian's Radio Reborn conference (I didn't go, but James' notes seem very fine), which I believe included some Arbitron data to prove some points. Unfortunate timing for them really given yesterday was the day RAJAR made these announcements.

However it should be noted that at the same time, Canada is adopting PPMs to a greater extent.

But there are still ongoing issues in Arbitron's home US territory, where some groups - particularly those catering to ethnic stations - are still facing difficulties with PPM technology.

There's certainly still a watching brief over PPMs. But in the short term, they're not an adequate replacement methodology in the UK.

There's a fun "debate" over at The Guardian about whether or not Pulling is actually better than the much feted Gavin & Stacey.

I like them both. I missed out on Gavin & Stacey initially, for the most part because it's on the demented BBC Three which, as you probably know, I'm a massive fan of. But then BBC Two ran the whole first series one Saturday night, and I warmed to it immediately, watching all the episodes back to back.

Pulling is just riotous fun, with believable characters - albeit at the extreme of things.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of running the two back to back for the past few Sunday evenings. Gavin & Stacey is much the safer sitcom, and frankly could be running on BBC One or BBC Two. Pulling is edgier fare, and the lower ratings it has been attaining reflect that. You could just about watch Gavin & Stacey with your mum. I'm not sure she'd appreciate Pulling as much.

Still all this pales into insignificance as we learn that Two Pints of Lager... has been recommissioned...

ITV is dipping its toe in the iTunes water by making available some of its back catalogue on the iTunes television store.

This is no bad thing, but I think that it does again highlight some of the issues that dealing with Apple can introduce. Despite some of the series being over forty years old (The Saint - series 4), the price of each episode is fixed at £1.89. That's just too much.

Last year the Daily Mail actually gave away the whole of Brideshead Revisited, so charging £1.89 an episode feels steep. Certainly there are savings to made by buying the whole series, but at &17.99 its still a couple of quid more than the boxed set on Amazon. The DVDs, of course, work in many more places than in iTunes and on an iPod. They're also in higher resolution, and come with various extras all of which are lacking from the iTunes store version.

Now I don't want to poo-poo this venture, as it's genuinely a good idea to get these programmes out into as many places as possible. But it's quite telling that no current programmes are being made available. The most up to date show that has been released so far (and to be fair, today's day one) is Lewis - series 1, obviously. Wouldn't want to let series 2 out of the gate just yet.

I think the problem really still lies with iTunes insisting on a fixed price for a programme, be it a brand new one hour drama or a decades old half hour comedy. Retailers should be able to adjust their prices as bricks and mortar retailers do. It may be that you can sell this week's Headbangers for 49p, but Foyles War should cost £3.50.

It's undoubtedly an experiment, and ITV is to be applauded. But what we're all waiting for is Kangaroo - the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 service that Ashley Highfield is leaving the BBC to run. Kangaroo is going to try to effectively be a commercial version of the iPlayer. While details remain unclear, I'd expect both paid and ad-funded models to be tested. Video DRM is always going to be more of an issue, but even if all the service does is put everyone's programming in one place and playable with one piece of software, then it's got to be better than the piecemeal channel by channel approach that's taken place so far.

Of course a cynic might wonder whether Kangaroo is the reason that only archive programming is being made available to iTunes at the moment. If I can buy Foyles War on iTunes for one price, and on Kangaroo at another price, then there's true competition. But ITV doesn't want the service it owns part of to be undercut by someone else. Nor does it want Apple to run away with a nascent market before it's had a go itself - that's something the music industry has come to regret on an enormous scale.

By the way, if all this talk of Brideshead Revisited makes you want to watch the series again, there's a free route: ITV.com has the whole series available to stream on demand. It tends to only work with Windows and using Internet Explorer, and it's ad-funded. But there it is, free of charge.

In fact ITV.com has a great deal of classic drama, comedy and kids programming available to stream including Press Gang, The Jewel in the Crown, Rising Damp, Cracker, Morse, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Prime Suspect and much more. The interface is clunky, and it's hard to work out what's there, but they've got a great deal.

I can't help but agree with Roy Greenslade on the subject of London's evening freesheets. They're both still uniformly abysmal with not a single thing to read. The trouble is that even the paid for Evening Standard is woeful with its ridiculous vendetta against Ken Livingstone and Mail-lite features. A bit more news would be nice. I actually have an "Eros" smartcard charged up with enough cash for ten copies and I've still not bought an issue for ages (aside from the day they were giving away a free Nicci French novel).

And while I know that London Underground is paid handsomely to allow distribution of both The London Paper and Metro in its stations, does that revenue really cover the vast cost of clearing up the mess? Despite signs telling people not to, every morning there's a pile of read/discarded copies of the paper at the bottom of central London escalators. These just go on to get jammed into the mechanism of the escalators causing un-needed delays to exiting the station when they go out of service.

[Update: Love this]

Meanwhile in further parochial news from this parish, our local Soho Post Office is closing. Or rather, it's moving to the other side of Oxford Street and into WH Smiths. The net result will be that Soho - home to a rather large media and creative industry - will not have a single Post Office left.

I realise that at least I'm lucky enough to still have a Post Office within walking distance, with many planned closures leaving whole communities without access to one at all. But the Soho Post Office is regularly jammed with people. On a recent trip, my knowledge of Key Stage 3 Science increased enormously as the queue snaked around slowly - I read the only interesting literature on offer whilst for a window to become free.

So there's enormous demand, and yet economics dictate that it's cheaper to sit inside another store where I very much doubt there'll be room for as many counters. Ironically, Soho will still have drop-off points for DHL and FedEx deliveries. Is it any wonder that the Royal Mail struggles?

On Friday, The Guardian published a very good chart showing the relative growth of each of the major media in the UK's advertising revenues.

The chart ends with a 2008 estimate that internet advertising will outstrip the whole of TV.

Yet I think we need to be a little careful here, and make sure that we're not comparing apples with oranges.

While I don't doubt that the sums being talked about are accurate, as we enter a recession it seems very odd that so much new money is entering the advertising market. While other media are showing either flat revenues or very slight declines, the internet is seemingly outstripping the entire market by a large factor.

Without the numbers behind the chart, it's hard to tell the exact numbers, but broadly speaking, the cumulative effect of this chart seems to show overall advertising growth of around 7% between 2007 and 2008. Obviously these are estimates, but with a struggling retail sector, I'd be amazed if this was truly the case.

The main thing to know is that the revenues being reported here for most media are display. And while there's a lot of display coming into online, that's still probably not where the bulk of Google's revenue growth is coming from. AdWords and the like are more akin to classified advertising which isn't included in the newspaper figure. This has certainly taken a pummeling in the local, regional and even national press, and I'd be surprised if even the Yellow Pages hasn't taken a significant hit.

Anyway, an interesting chart - but treat with caution. Advertising money does not grow on trees even if you are the internet.

As you may or may not know, His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films of all time. The film is screwball comedy and was made in 1940, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It was written by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the latter two of which had written the play, The Front Page, on which it was based.

The wonderful Howard Hawks directed it, and it famously has possibly the fastest dialogue in any film ever made. The characters regularly speak over the top of one another, and indeed the final screenplay ran to 191 pages for a 92 minute film. Usually, screenplays run at around a minute a page.

In 1940, you had to record the sound all at once without multi-track capabilities, so a sound mixer had to switch between microphones as the characters spoke the lines.

Anyway, a link on Waxy's Links the other day pointed to a version of the film edited a couple of years by Valentin Spirik which removes all the film's dialogue. The end result is an 8:25 edit of the film. It's also embedded below:

What we're left with is very revealing about the speed of the film with jump cuts aplenty that mightn't seem out of place in a 21st century reality show.

The full original film is in the public domain by the way. That means that you can stream it or download it yourself at the Internet Archive.

The public domain nature of the film means that you'll see plenty of ridiculously cheap DVDs kicking around of it. The problem is that they mostly come from poor prints. So I do recommend the Columbia Classics DVD which is pretty cheap itself and uses an excellent print (ignore the comment that says otherwise at Amazon - I suspect that they're looking at a different DVD - there are many around).

For more on Howard Hawks, I'd also recommend Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy.