February 2005 Archives

Today's Media Guardian has an opinion piece by Emily Bell about the recent habit of stations canning series mid-run, and highlighting the recent case of the last episode of a Johnny Vegas sitcom failing to be aired having been "pre-empted" by an Ellen MacArthur special.

Somehow it seems ironic that on the day this piece appears, Mediaguardian.co.uk "lead" on a Channel 4 ratings story. In particular they highlight the fact that Nathan Barley only got 700,000 viewers on Friday night.

But isn't Media Guardian actually leading by example when it talks about this stuff? We never used to have a free outlet telling us how last night's programming fared. Now, as well as Media Guardian, we have daily reports availble from such avenues as Broadcast (which has always featured in depth ratings analysis), Media Week and Media Bulletin. It's all out there in the open. When once detailed overnights were only pored over by TV channel controllers, and TV buying/selling agencies/houses, now everyone and their mum gets a look. A show is very quickly deemed a hit or a failure after a couple of episodes. Big projects are examined in detail, and there is almost an undisguised glee if something big doesn't score immediately with the audience.

What we don't get are audience appreciation indexes, which are carried out privately by TV companies. So there may well have been only 700,000 viewers of Nathan Barley on Friday, but if they all loved it to bits, that's got to be important. It may also be that these people are generally hard to reach individuals - always worth remembering when, say, Champions League football doesn't return quite the same audiences as a regular episode of the soap it's bumped would have. If I never watch Channel 4 apart from Nathan Barley (and Time Team), then this programming is actually very valuable indeed.

I think that irrespective of the gains made by multi-channel television in the last few years, TV companies run scared more easily because of the heavy reliance everyone now makes on ratings. Even if channel controllers know all of this, there's still the public or "media" perception that the show's a relative failure. And no-one wants to wear that badge.

Quel surpise! Channel 4 commission the 100 Greatest Cartoons, just months after they land The Simpsons, and waddya know. The Simpsons comes out top!

Whilst it's undoubtedly funny, nobody would argue that the level of animation is fairly rudimentary. And indeed, the whole of this list is pretty worthless. South Park at no. 3? Family Guy at no. 5? In fact out of the top ten, only two are not either being made at the moment, or have been produced in the last few years. Indeed I'd argue that a lot of the recent computer animation films are more technique above quality.

But in general, this is a ridiculously biased list with short-lived poorly made films filling up the top the end of the list. I didn't really watch the programme that accompanied it, but couldn't help noticing that there was a longer discussion about the Beavis & Butthead "huh huh huh" (no. 32) than there was about Mickey Mouse (helped in the creation of a multi-billion dollar company - no. 31!).

Can you take any list seriously that puts Fantasia at no. 53 and Snow White at no. 60? And there's a distinct lack of those fabulous Tex Avery shorts that don't feature famous characters, such as Red Hot Riding Hood - one of my all time favourite cartoons which, criminally, isn't even available to buy in the UK.

On another note, when is C4 going to stop filling four hours of primetime television with such pointless fare? Wasn't Kevin Lygo putting a stop to all the Z-list commentators talking about clips that they've watched about 10 seconds before "commenting" on them. Something that was mercilessly parodied on the Armando Iannucci show over New Year.

The good news, according to Broadcast this week, is that ITV and C4 are favourites to win the vacant Freeview slot that's been put up for lease by Crown Castle. This means that we don't get another shopping channel. The bad news is that ITV wants to put a version of Men & Motors on the channel, and C4 is "exploring options including a gaming channel".

Somehow, I'm sure that Turner could have come up with a more interesting channel, as would Disney or even NBC Universal. Even better would have been David Elstein putting his newly purchased Hallmark on the platform.

How long do Top-Up TV have left on their lease of their space? If E4 left the fold, where would it go (since it's not currently on Top-Up TV 24 hours a day), and would Top-Up TV be sustainable as a business without this service?

A nice article from The New Yorker about the fact that not even close to one billion people watch the Oscars. I regularly rail against such hyperbole, but this comes just after the Superbowl. And then we'll get the Olympics and the World Cup. To put the Oscars in perspective, you should know that in the UK they're broadcast exclusively on pay television (upwards of £20 a month to get the channel that shows them), and they're live at 1.30am - just before a work day. OK - they'll get rebroadcast at a sensible time the following evening - but if the show gets more than half a million in total I'd be amazed. 4.4m watched the BAFTAs a couple of weeks ago.

I suppose I'm lucky that I don't have Sky and get even more shopping channels. But Best Direct is one of the tackier ones I do receive. They're one of those channels that just shows "infommercials" on loops. So one second it's yet another weight-loss machine, and the next it's an inflatable bed.

But last night I caught the best one ever - for Merlin. First of all we were told that the presentation was coming direct from the largest shopping centre in Europe - in Vienna! I'm sure that you'll agree that such credentials are awe inspiring. Then we saw the sizeable set being set up in the middle of one of those atriums (atriaa?) that you get in the middle of Bluewater-style shopping centres.

Next we were told that the director of this particular infommerical was actually the best infommercial director working in Europe today. Wow! So we're getting the Steven Spielberg/Martin Scorcese of infommericals. I settled back on the sofa for this.

Then we were introduced to our three presenters, all of whose names now escape me, despite the fact that we were repeatedly told them throughout the "presentation" as well as the location of the shopping centre where it was taped. They were all of either Austrian or German extraction. And at least one was supposedly a TV star. But then anyone can be a "star". (As an aside, there's an ad for a magazine on the tube at the moment boasting of it's coverage of A List celebrities, and then featuring Abi Titmuss on the cover...)

Finally, after all these introductions were complete, the Merlin product was revealed to be... a food processor! But not just any kind of food processor. This one was 3D! Imagine that, much better than 2D or even 1D. Can you imagine trying to process your 3-dimensional food in a 2-dimensional food processor? And most food processors are only 1D we were told. Wow. It puts a whole new spin on such stories as Flatland. Food processing in multi-dimensional space is mind boggling.

Anyhow, the demo continued, and it became obvious that our Germanic speakers were being dubbed. Now if there's one thing us Brits have never managed, it's the art of dubbing. Somehow everyone seems to stand too close to the microphone and adopt a certain type of dubbing voice. Three presenters speaking rapid German meant three dubbers. And they kept up with the pace. I'm guessing the whole thing was not recorded with multi-track audio, so we had effects for when the processor whizzed around.

And there was the audience. It must be said, that the audience was a little sparce for such an important infommerical. But when it came to cutaways of them laughing at the feeble jokes, the noise they made was more akin to a packed comedy club in terms of both numbers and the size of the laugh. I guess something must have been lost in translation.

Needless to say, the presenters showed the boundless enthusiasm that only such presenters can. This only lessened when they realised how inadequate their previous food processors had been. Cut to mournful black and white footage of your more traditional kitchen fare.

The technology on show was astounding however. As well as having a whirlpool action, there was an intergral juicer with the device featuring a "nano-filter"! A bit like nanobots somehow I guess. What they really mean is that it comes with a filter with small holes. Nano actually refers to one-billionth. So in this case, the holes are what? One billionth of a KM? The fruit plunger was also talked up, although this a big bit of plastic to the fruit through the blender.

Oh yes, and finally it should be pointed out that your traditional food processors are big unweildy things that you can never move easily around from, say, your kitchen counter. I mean, what if you wanted to move it to your living room. A real pain right? Not the Merlin. It's really small, so you can take it with you anywhere. And I'd imagine it's especially useful for people with families of more than, oh, one person, since it can cope with such plentiful quantities.

Put me down for one!

(Incidentally, in the least exciting television slot ever, Attheraces is now showing an hours of Sky Vegas Live television at midnight. The only problem is that cable doesn't have the intereactive part of it, so you can't play along, in which case it's literally a case of watching meaningless coloured balls being virtually chosen. My respect to the presenter who manages to keep talking and name checking the txt-like names people adopt. Sad buggers wasting their cash on these games however)

Ever ready to make a quick buck, Richard Desmond's Express Newspapers group is now wanting to make charges to broadcasters for the right to have their channels included in his papers. He wants digital channels to pay for their appearance in his rags!

It seems as though all the channels are holding firm, in the full knowledge that TV listings are one of the major reasons people buy newspapers. I hope that some of these channels also stop providing his paper with preview tapes, photos, or access to personalities.

Of course the prim and proper Express still finds the space to provide listings for his porn channels despite being aimed at Middle England - not that I'd dispute the fact that many Middle-Englanders do subscribe to such services...

Still it's nice to see that the Associated/Express war-of-words is alive and kicking with reports about Desmond's tangential involvement in a mob-case being heard in New York at the moment. You just have to sit back and enjoy it all.

I think I can see both sides of the Ken Livingstone situation, with him claiming to have been targeted by Associated Newspapers over the last 24 years.

On the other hand, being told your job is like a concentration camp guard's is not very pleasant.

Now Blair's weighed in, speaking on that most august of programmes, The Wright Stuff on Five. Surely you're not appeasing the powerful Daily Mail Mr Blair?

So it's interesting to read the thoughts of a selection of journalists who either currently work for Associated, or who have worked there. Just about all of those who are in any way critical are anonymous, because they know what a powerful behemoth Associated is, and they know that they may have to work there one day. Murdoch famously said that he thought at one time there may only be his stable of papers and the Daily Mail.

My flat basically doesn't have central heating. But it's OK! It tends to be quite warm all year around anyway. But when it does get cold I turn on the big storage heater in the living warm, but there is one small side effect - the warmth tends to send me off to sleep. I lost a good deal of Sunday afternoon due to this.

So last night was pretty nippy, and I'd had a nice meal and was settling down to watch Look Around You. I'd got most of the way through it, I think, when I drifted off. Next thing I know, I wake up, and I'm learning business French on the Learning Zone! I must have slept right through the Masters Snooker where the BBC were pesisting in calling Jimmy White "Jimmy White" and not "James Brown" as he wanted due to a sponsorship stunt with HP Sauce.

Did you know that when you conclude a deal in France, it's ordinarily celebrated with champagne? Well I know I didn't, although I'm not sure that every deal is conlcuded in such a manner. I mean, if I order a box of pencils from my stationery company, that's a deal isn't it? But hardly worth a bottle of anyone's champagne surely?

In utterly unrelated news, I was watching the latest episode of Lost at the weekend and in one of the flashback segments someone Charlie's trying to rip off speaks about her dad being out "buying a paper company up in Slough". A not-really-that-subtle allusion to The Office by J.J. Abrams, one Lost's producers, who had Ricky Gervais guest star in his other show, Alias, last season.

It's a busy time in radio at the moment with Lord Ali making a bid for my employers, Kelvin taking the Wireless Group off the stock market, and now Jazz FM renaming to Smooth FM, and losing all pretence of actually playing any Jazz.

Obviously, I'll be watching carefully to see what happens were SMG to decide to sell Virgin Radio, but as is the way with these things, it's out of my hands and my control.

The reason for Kelvin delisting is interesting. Supposedly it's because the city doesn't understand how speech radio stations make money - and he finds it hard to get investment as a result. I'm not surprised - speech radio is expensive. Is there more to this?

Finally Jazz FM is a name we're going to miss. Smooth FM will definitely reign in Magic in London which has just had a storming RAJAR. But it'll take more than one decent RAJAR to really prove to me that Magic is number 2 in London. But I wonder if they'll keep doing "Dinner Jazz", which has been their most successful proper(ish) jazz strand. It's also noteworthy that they'll continue to produce an online only jazz radio station playing pure jazz. With good investment, and a great name, they should continue to be one of the largest internet radio broadcasters in the world. It's just the small task of making money from it...

So BBC1 is showing the BAFTAs as I type, and I decided I'd have a quick look at the BAFTA site to see who all the nominees are.

Well of course BAFTA have put up the full list of winners! Yet the programme is descibed as being "live". The red carpet stuff seemed to be shot in daylight - which ended several hours ago.

So I imagine the whole thing's on an hour or two delay. But I'm wondering whether the website announcement was made while the show was still happening. So a text message to Martin Scorcese in the auditorium *might* have been able to inform him of The Aviator's upcoming win as best film.

Just popped over the Betfair site, where betting is "suspended" on all the BAFTAs. Is this usual?

This all comes in the same week as the Brits where once again the awards are televised 24 hours later to edit out swearing, and dull bits to fit a neat two hour slot. But as I recall (I didn't see it this year), there are rules about how many of the awards broadcasters are able to talk about when it's happening live. It doesn't matter that an award winner is a matter of public record - they keep a very tight lid on these things, even in our digital age will mobiles everywhere.

[UPDATE] It seems that the awards actually kicked off around 6.00pm, so even allowing for the awards that are presented early and not televised, the whole thing was probably over by around 8.20pm which is around the time I logged onto the BAFTA site. I should have checked a few newswire sites to see how quickly the winners were announced. It kind of spoils it for the viewing audience though.

I know we mostly think of him as the loveable fool who's hosted a couple of Have I Got News For Yous, but sometimes he speaks incredibly good sense for a Tory. His stance on ID cards is one of those times.

We can now only hope that there are members of the upper house who can see sense and send this scare mongering expensive curbing of our civil liberties to the bottom of the Thames (or at the very least into a nice recycling bin).

Well the campaign for a national holiday is going great guns at the minute. At time of writing, a massive 34 people have decided to support my ongoing campaign to gain us a public holiday on the occassion of HRH Prince of Wales' wedding.

Some naysayers have pooh-poohed the idea, pointing out that we never got a day off for Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones' wedding. What I say to those people is that Prince Edward is not the immediate heir to throne. It's different see?

Anyway, once again the power of the web has come into its own, as demonstrated by that incredible list of 34 people, including some whose names I don't even know.

Sign up now! http://www.petitiononline.com/08042005/petition.html

For the last year or more, there have been major refurbishments taking place at Kings Cross (and more particularly, at St Pancras where the Eurostar will terminate when the highspeed link is complete). The underground station has been, and still is, going through major renovations, and this week has seen the introduction of new ticket barriers for leaving the station.

What they've cleverly managed to do, is make the barriers operate more slowly than they did before, particularly if you live on a non-Oystercard part of the transport network and still have to push your ticket into the slot everyday. This means that with the sparkling new ticket machines, it now takes longer to get through than it did before! Brilliant.

I think the designers are probably the same people who oversaw the introduction of full colour cashpoint machines. Back in ye olden days, you'd pop your card into the green-screened machine, punch your PIN, select cash and, say £30, and get your card and the cash back all within 15 seconds or so. Now the machine munches your card slooooooowwwlllly, serves you a few ads for services you don't want, spends an age "processing" it, thinks about disgorging the cash and about an hour later you walk away with the money. How can advancements in science slow this process down?

On a completely unrelated subject, I think I saw the strangest street hawker I can remember at the top of the stairs to the entrance of Oxford Circus station this evening. At first I thought he was one of those guys who sell used Travelcards, or maybe he was selling things to put on your mobile phone that light up when it rings. No. He was selling USB Data Drives! In Oxford Street at a tube entrance in a shifty manner. Is this the new version of the knock-off perfume that they used so sell from those brown bakery trays?

So Charles and Camilla are to marry. But isn't interactive television a wonderful thing? At only 25p or so a go, you get to have your say!

But as I type, the viewers of Sky News have voted 62% against approving of the marriage. Now I'm no constitutional expert (particularly as our constitution is actually unwritten), so I'm not sure whether this is binding or not...

Anyway, the whole shebang takes place on Friday 8 April. But at the time of writing, it's not been made clear whether or not this is a national holiday.

Now I'm not a raving Royalist, but I do believe that we, the people, should be able to share in the nuptuals of the future King of England. And as such, it seems only right that we celebrate with a national holiday. The fact that this means a free day off work on a Friday, is neither here nor there, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was getting on some kind of bandwagon just because I fancied a three day weekend. You can't possibly believe that I could be as shallow as that.

Anyway, I ask all readers of this site, both of you, to please sign my petition and hopefully we can swing the Government into action and give the people what they want!

Sign here: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/08042005/petition.html

An article on Mediaguardian (free registration reqd.) talks about Bill Gates' ownership of Corbis, the world's second largest picture library. But what's incredible is the bit about the Eiffel Tower. Depending on the time of day you take a picture: by day it's public domain, but at night you have to pay the person who put the lights up! And it seems that although you can see the Hollywood sign from all over the place, you might have to pay someone to publish its image. Even if you're standing in a public street.

If I stray onto private property to get a picture of a building, I can understand that I might have to pay a facility fee, but if I'm on a public road, surely I can publish what I like? In the same way that I can publish pictures of whoever I like that are taken from a public place (that's how the paparazzi make a living).

Help! We're being overrun by illegal immigrants. I know this to be true because both Mr Blair and Mr Howard are saying so.

They're all coming through the tunnel or something. And they're over-running the country like the aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

For goodness' sake, don't go downloading the Government's own statistics that show that the number of children being born annually is falling over the long term, leading to a decreasing population without us letting people into the country.

Anyway, people are falling over themselves to become cleaners, and nannies, and crop pickers and the numerous other shitty jobs that we just love doing ourselves.

So let's just get this clear. We only want to import doctors and nurses from countries whose states have already paid for their expensive education - preferably third world nations - and teachers, because our own young don't want a lousy job embroiled in pointless beaurocracy that even requires people to pay to become one.

We don't need anyone else OK?

It's nothing to do with racism you understand, it's just that they're stealing all our free health services, in spite of the fact that at the same time, we're sending people abroad for their health services.

It's neither here nor there if there are low paid jobs that need to be filled, and asylum seekers (OK - they can't actually be "illegal" because at the moment, they're "seeking" asylum. It just hasn't been granted or denied yet) who want to work, must simply not be allowed to do so, and must instead be given handouts from the state to stop them making their own way in the world.

If for one reason or another, we've made your country unliveable, by, oh I don't know, invading it or something. Then tough shit!

I was just about to pen an amusing piece about how the whole world (well Western world anyway) has gone plastic/rubber bracelet mad. I was going to point out that since Lance Armstrong launched the Livestrong bracelet last year, we've seen a massive explosion in bracelets including a blue bullying one, a white Make Poverty History one, and most recently a pair of intertwined black and white anti-racism in football ones.

But a bit of a Google search later reveals that a journo at BBC online has just beaten me to it. Bastards. And they've managed to list far more bracelets than I was aware of. I would however add that as far as I can see, the least deserving cause I've come across with bracelets available is the NBC daytime soap loyalty bracelets. If you're a big fan od Days of Our Lives or Passions, you can (or rather could - since I think the promotion's finished) get a bracelet for your show, and then maybe see your name listed in the credits of the show during sweeps month. (Sweep month, incidentally, is the strangely archaic way of getting ratings for the vast swathes of smaller TV stations in the US. Because there are too many to do regular ratings, they do a fuller survey at two points in the year. And since everyone knows the dates that this'll happen, all the networks go hell for leather putting out strong programming through this period to gather as many viewers as possible. Advertiser rates are then set based on this short period, irrespective of the fact that everyone's pulled enormous stunts to get viewers watching. Radio in the UK was once the same with the biggest survey happening during the second quarter of the year. So it was in this period that every station spent the bulk of its marketing budget and put on its biggest promotions. Remember "31 Days In May" on Radio 1?).

Returning to my original theme, it's worth noting that I own no bracelets for three reasons:

1) They're really jewelry and I don't like wearing any jewelry aside from a wristwatch. I'd find a bracelet severly irritating.

2) They're too much of a fashion accessory. Do charities that had previously adopted ribbons now feel as though they have to move on to bracelets? Do something original and stick to it, like Comic Relief's red nose, and the Royal British Legion's poppy.

3) There's no "end date" on these campaigns. I prefer acknowledging charities at certain times of the year. Both Comic Relief and the British Legion fulfill this by having days associated with them. A couple of weeks beforehand is enough. It's not as though any of us are continuing to give to the charity beyond the date we bought the badging device. So permamently wearing your Aids ribbon or whatever, almost says that you're "milking" that initial donation for months afterwards. And if you do give a Direct Debit, then excellent, but do you really need to keep broadcasting the fact that you give "to chariddee mate, but I don't like to talk about?" Remember those cars that used to keep their Comic Relief noses on for a full year or so beyond the end of Comic Relief day? Didn't you want to go around and cut them off? Of course charities need your money all year round, but if they all went for permament fixtures on our bodies and clothes then I'd have no space left. With several bracelets, red noses, stickers, pins, poppies and ribbons. I'd certainly be colourful. We end up getting back to deciding which is the more important charity. Is it Tsunami survivors, people who sacrifice themselves to keep our country free, those who're working on cures for some of the world's worst diseases and viruses, or the thousands who die daily due to hunger and suffering brought on by their country's debts and civil wars? I'm not ranking them in order.

There I go again, ranting on about charities which seems incredibly, well, uncharitable of me. But at least I didn't get started on those street hucksters who techniques I simply can't abide to get you to sign up (particularly as many of the people doing the "huckstering" are not the volunteers you see in stations and on high streets with their collecting tins, but paid professionals who get to keep up to the first nine months worth of contributions from your Direct Debits before the charity starts to benefit. Much better that you sign up direct with the charity yourself). I seem to have the sort of face that makes them bound into view when I walk by. And they never even seem to learn that the day before, a completely different charity was working the exact same place in the street, which, if it happens to be on your lunchtime sandwich run, leads to more "no thank yous" than is healthy for anyone.

Today, I got seperate emails asking me to join reader panels for The Evening Standard, The Times and The Sun. Apart from the fact that I've obviously been too free and easy with my email address, what does this all mean?

Well News International obviously embarked on some reader research today. I think it really means that a lot of different media outlets, have spotted a very cheap way of conducting research.

I should hasten to add that I'm not really a regular reader of any of these publications. I do partake of the odd offer however.

It's always entertaining listening to the hyperbole surrounding the Superbowl. 800 million people were watching apparently, according to one commentator (we had the choice of Sky or ITV - but not Five, who of course do nothing to support the sport in the UK besides show several live games a week and regular highlights. Still you wouldn't want to be loyal to a channel would you?). And then I heard that it'd be the biggest single televised sporting event this year! Just as well that there's no European football championships then, or a World Cup final, or an Olympic Games.

But I'm sure UEFA would say that something approaching a billion viewers will watch the Champions' League final (Sadly their archives of old press releases aren't immediately obvios to me, so I can't find proof that this is what they say). Of course a billion is still way over the odds unless China is far more interested in the NFL than I'd previously thought. I do understand that the Germans like it.

One strange thing that I did note was that ITV had an "international" commentary feed that I think explained a little more what was happening, while Sky had the Fox feed including promos for shows on that network. The really strange thing was that although they weren't quite in sync, with ITV just behind Sky for the most part, very occassionally Sky fell behind ITV. Strange. Oh, and the two feeds sometimes chose different camera angles, so different directors to illustrate what the different commentary teams were saying.

Needless to say that like every other year, I fell asleep before the game finished, and the winners were announced as an after-thought on the Radio Five news this morning. As it should be. I wouldn't have minded staying awake until half-time to catch Paul McCartney though.

Over the last couple of weeks, Gmail has changed around how it highlights the invites you have left quite a lot.

Now, all of sudden, instead of having six invites, I have fifty! Are Google entering a new phase of opening up Gmail? This new openness suggests that an invite is no longer a valuable commodity, not that it really has been of late. But Google still isn't opening itself up for new accounts just by logging in. Maybe they never will...

Is Trackback Spam the new Comment Spam?

Worth noting that since I introduced the "you can't comment until you log in" thing with Typekey, I haven't had any Comment Spam at all. Mind you, I've not had many comments either...

The other week in a moment of reckless abandon at the football I ordered a drink of Bovril for the first time in about 20 years - seriously! The last time I remember drinking it I was at Enfield FC. I should first of explain that my local Co-op has been accurately described as being something out of Soviet Russia - the choice isn't exactly overwhelming. So when I couldn't find it I wasn't exactly surprised. Next stop was Waitrose where much searching later revealed an out of stock notice adjacent to the Oxo. Never mind - I'll pick one up at the Tesco near work.

So this evening I stopped by and was faintly surprised to find it in stock given that the store's raison d'etre is to sell pre-cooked meals.

As it turned out I was close to missing the train at Finsbury Park so I had to run up the stairs. As I reached the top I heard my train. I ran faster.

Smash!

My carrier bag split and one brand new jar of Bovril hit the concrete in a mix of broken glass and brown syrup. All £2.67 of it.
And I missed my train.

With half an hour to kill I visited a couple of other convenience shops, but the best I could come up with was Marmite.

Am I fated never to taste Bovril again? (Well obviously not, I'll just have to go and buy another jar. But that doesn't make a good end to an entry does it?)

Over Christmas, I was thoroughly engaged by I Capture The Castle on BBC2. This film came out in 2003 and I must admit that it passed me by. The film stars the then newcomer Romola Garai (who I knew as Zoe from Attachments) as Cassandra as well as Tara Fitzgerald and Bill Nighy. I loved it.

So I was in my local Ottakers a couple of weekends ago, and the Dodie Smith novel was in the staff recommendations case. (I'm led to believe that certain bookshops now "specify" the books that their staff should recommend. Surely not?)

The first thing to note is that the film is an exceptionally accurate reading of the book. No important plot point is missed and I didn't recall any changes. The book is completely told from the point of Cassandra and is broken into "books" that represent her exercise books as she fills them. The introduction to the book, which of course I left until I'd finished it, talks of all the writers who've been inspired by this novel, and if I'd read it aged 14, I think I would have been too.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it - I did enormously. It was thoroughly charming and well worth reading.

Incidentally I had no idea that Dodie Smith wrote One Hundred and One Dalmations, the work for which she's best known. Of course given my sometimes irrational hatred of all things Disney (with the exceptions of Fantasia and the Jungle Book), I'm not quite as familiar as some. But there always seems to be a documentary about her on BBC Four which I completely fail to watch.

While it will be hard ever to extinguish from my mind, the bit from Jam featuring the day Robert Kilroy-Silk "went mad", running naked around a shopping centre. But in the meantime, he's just formed a new political party - Veritas.

Of course he's just left the UK Independence Party who were pretty anti-Europe - indeed I'm not sure if they had any other policies. Although it's interesting that he's chosen that pan-European language Latin to supply him with his party's name. Veritas means "truth".

And lest we forget, that before he became a bigoted anti-Arab, Express commentator, and purveyor of miserable daytime television, he was once a Labour MP.

Sadly I missed the BBC3 programme about him on Monday, although I expect it'll get another 50,000 repeats. And I can confidentally say now that I'll be missing each and every one of them.

Thank goodness that the government have published their advice on what I can and cannot do should I be attacked in my own home! I recommend downloading the PDF and pinning it up somewhere so that you can regularly consult it.

I certainly needed to know what the definition of "reasonable force" is. For example, can I just ward off the blows or can I pulp the interloper's head with a baseball bat?

It also seems that I don't have to wait to be attacked, which is a good thing. But only if I'm in my own home. Hmmm. What about the garden?

There are a few rules and regulations regarding me actually murdering the intruder, but I suspect that they're all just legalese. And I can chase the intruder away, but since it's no longer self-defence I can only use reasonable force. Those who played rugby at school, like myself, will be pleased to learn that a rugby tackle or single blow is fine. It's unclear whether having rugby tackled the attacker to the ground, I can then strike him a single blow. Also, if the blow glances off, say, the side of the head, or the intruder manages to block the blow, it's unclear whether I'm allowed another shot at it. Do we then enter the realms of multiple blows and, therefore, unreasonable force?

One big no-no is that if I get into a squabble with my dealer, I shouldn't then beat him to a bloody mess and then pretend he was trying to burgle me. The police, it seems, are onto that little game.

So, all in all, some useful pointers. However, it does open up more questions. And I feel certain that potential intruders to my home will not now arm themselves to the teeth in case vigilante residents such as myself now decide to take the law into our own hands Tony Martin-style.

The Home Office can spend as many hundreds of thousands on useful leaflets such as this in my opinion, because it all makes this country a safer place!

There's lots of complete nonsense being spouted about a survey supposedly listing the world's top brands.

Supposedly Apple is the brand with "the most global impact" in 2004. Complete nonsense. This is followed by Google, then Ikea, Starbucks and Al Jazeera.

These brands are patently the ones that affect a certain type of monied middle-class westerner the greatest deal. But if you're trying to tell me that they're admired by your average Nigerian, Chinese or Indian then I'd say you're very much mistaken.

Apple got in because of the iPod. Fine device undoubtedly. But they've sold something like 10 million worldwide (and for worldwide, read US & Europe) which is a drop in the ocean compared to say, oh, Coca-Cola.

Google is a fine brand, if and only if, you're a member of the minority of the world with online access.

They probably don't all drive over to their local Ikea on bank holidays to buy furniture in Africa.

And the closest African Starbucks franchise is probably somewhere in Kuwait. Indeed I'm not sure that it'd have much impact in South America where they, er, grow the coffee.

Oh, and Al Jazeera doesn't have that great viewing figures around to the world compared to CNN and the BBC, so how does it do so well?

Let's just check the fine print shall we?

A total of 1,984 brandchannel readers from 75 countries voted online between November and December 2004.

A shortlist for each region is provided but readers are given a chance to write in brand(s) to compensate for omissions on the part of brandchannel.

So less than 2,000 people with internet access voted, and chose primarily form a pre-picked list. What that list was, we're not told.

Certainly, the methodology goes on to state that the brands must have been "highly visible" that year. But then which year doesn't Ford or Coca-Cola outspend Apple in advertising? And which global detergent brands aren't more visible?

Still, thousands of column inches, including these ones, will be spent carefully dissecting the list and looking for positive stories, when the whole thing is a complete puff-piece.

I've been catching up with a radio comedy I've read nothing about anywhere called Ed Reardon's Week. Episode 4 is on the BBC's Listen Again player at the moment, but I knew I was going to enjoy this when "Ed" began his diary bemoaning book reviews and how "Fattie" would be laying into his book on Late Review, then again in The Guardian before once again taking it apart on Front Row. Who could he be talking about?

Ed is a writer from the old school who once penned an episode of Tenko, and had a novel adapted into a movie starring Sally Fields, but who now lives in penury and has to write books like "Pet Peeves" to make ends meet.

What really makes this series are his rants. 11.30am on Fridays is probably not the best time for this little gem.

UPDATE - Last week's Feedback covered scheduling of Radio 4 comedies. It seems that although the "prime" slot is really 6.30pm, shows which might need a little more concentration, go out at 11.30am or 11.00pm at night. The biggest available audience remains at 6.30pm. Feedback also mentioned that Ed Reardon's been recommissioned.

Nathan Barley is nearly upon us - although I've only seen the trailers on the web rather than on air, so little C4 am I watching these days (Well there wasn't a trailer for it during Time Team at the weekend, so that's me screwed - and I've got a fortnight's worth of Shameless to catch up on, although I'm still making my mind up about how good this really is).

The trailers are well worth watching and I'll be tuning in eagerly a week on Friday. The really scary thing is that the office they seem to be based in is so scarily similar to the offices of certain types of companies I've been in.

The flash Wasp Speechtool is great.