April 2005 Archives
It's being re-edited to be shown as a film at Cannes!
In the run up to a general election, we're bombarded with poster and newspaper ads for the various parties. But broadcasting rules prevent parties from buying advertising on radio and television.
And rules over the number of candidates being fielded determine which parties get broadcast - even unpleasant ones like the BNP.
But what has amazed me is the lack of awareness of these rules by the main political parties in regard to radio. They all send their broadcasts to BBC Radios 2 and 4, but all the main parties are entitled to broadcasts on national commercial radio - ie. Classic FM, Virgin Radio and Talksport. The broadcast should go out between 5pm and 9pm in the evening.
To date, only the Labour Party has bothered sending Virgin their broadcasts. The other parties are entitled to them, and the audio must exist because they supply it to the BBC so there's no additional cost involved in supplying radio, but they either don't know or haven't bothered. The latter can't be the reason since they must want their message heard by a million or more people. So it's incompetence!
In the run up to a general election, we're bombarded with poster and newspaper ads for the various parties. But broadcasting rules prevent parties from buying advertising on radio and television.
And rules over the number of candidates being fielded determine which parties get broadcast - even unpleasant ones like the BNP.
But what has amazed me is the lack of awareness of these rules by the main political parties in regard to radio. They all send their broadcasts to BBC Radios 2 and 4, but all the main parties are entitled to broadcasts on national commercial radio - ie. Classic FM, Virgin Radio and Talksport. The broadcast should go out between 5pm and 9pm in the evening.
To date, only the Labour Party has bothered sending Virgin their broadcasts. The other parties are entitled to them, and the audio must exist because they supply it to the BBC so there's no additional cost involved in supplying radio, but they either don't know or haven't bothered. The latter can't be the reason since they must want their message heard by a million or more people. So it's incompetence!
I seem to be getting a surprising amount of Russian spam in my Gmail account at the moment. And when I say Russian spam, I mean spam that's actually in Cyrillic text. Very strange.
The Sun's backed Blair for this election which is not remotely unexpected. So I was disappointed to hear it given such import on the news this morning.
The Sun only back winners, and in a two horse race, they're not going 50-1 outsider. What would have happened if The Sun had backed Howard and Blair had won? They'd have looked like losers. So they didn't.
In London, as you may or may not know, they've been phasing out the old Routemasters and introducing bendy-busses. You know - the things that take up twice as much space as the old ones, and that don't let you jump on and off whenever you like.
Anyway, I still don't quite understand ticketing on these things. In Central London, buses don't take cash any longer. If you're an occassional traveller, you should buy your ticket at the machine by the bus-stop. Or you can buy a pre-paid Oyster card. Or you can buy books of tickets in advance which save you a few quid.
But the thing is, the driver is no longer interested in you. We Londoners are used to either the conductor or driver taking an interest in whether or not you have a ticket or cash or a pass. Now, unless you're handing a pre-paid ticket in, the driver doesn't want to know. And you can get in via any door.
If you've got an Oystercard, you're supposed to swipe it past one of the readers throughout the bus, but initially there were problems with these - they didn't know the time, so couldn't be linked through to the central system.
But if you're like me, with an old-fashioned paper pass, you don't show it to the driver, and don't swipe it against anything. You just get on and sit down, and maybe wait for a ticket inspector.
But if I can do that, what's to stop everyone else on these busses doing that?
So it seems that the record industry in the UK lost £650m in the last two year due to piracy.
No it didn't.
The "shortfall" identified by TNS would simply not have been spent at all. I don't doubt that the music was downloaded but that's not the same as "losing money". It's money that would never have been spent.
Don't forget, album sales went up in 2004 - up 2.6% from 2003. At the same time, legal downloads are going through the roof (and are now included in the main UK chart), and DVD music (and film) sales are soaring.
So how does that square with all these millions of pounds that have been lost? According to the TNS report £376m was lost last year. Obviously a chunk of that was single sales. But if we convert it into album sales at around £14 each, that's an additional 27m albums. This would have meant a 19.4% increase in album sales rather than 2.6%.
OK, I've played a bit fast and loose with numbers there, attributing all that lost cash to album sales. But the same story applies. It's the same fallacy you get in the software industry about lost sales of Photoshop or Microsoft Office. Let's face it, most of the people currently using a piece of software that retails at between £300-500, would not be using it they'd had to pay for it.
So can I make a plea to the media not to blindly repeat trade organisations' press releases and call it news. Particularly when they include phrases like "much of which would have been invested in new British music" when talking about that "lost" cash. Surely they meant to say "much of which would have further lined the pockets of major international artists" since they're the people who're getting downloaded the most.
Last week Kamel Bourgass was jailed for 17 years for plotting to spread ricin on the streets of London. He'd been earlier convicted of the murder of a policeman, Detective Constable Stephen Oake, during a raid to a arrest him back in 2003.
The trial had taken place in camera, and so it was only on last Wednesday, when he'd been convicted that reporting restrictions were lifted. Why exactly were reporting restrictions placed on the trial? It wasn't in case Al Qaeda caught wind of what was happening, it's because Bourgass had already been convicted of the murder that took place while he was being arrested. If that had been reported, then it would have prejudiced the following case(s).
He was convicted of attempting to spread ricin, including "smearing it on car door handles in the Holloway Road area of north London".
Fair enough. A pretty nasty terror attack averted.
Last Wednesday evening, the BBC reported the case in detail on the main ten o'clock bulletin, and pretty much repeated the same Mark Easton report on Newsnight, although covering it in slightly more depth this time. A version of this report can be found here, along with a link to the video.
It all made quite a scare story. Indeed it seems to have been a long term Al Qaeda plan if everything was to be believed.
David Blunkett, then Home Secretary said: "It is absolutely certain that al-Qaeda were planning and preparing for co-ordinated attacks. We were very close indeed to disaster. We were actually much calmer and much more reassuring to the public than we felt ourselves."
But is it all as straightforward as it seems?
Why were four co-defendents of Bourgass acquitted? Lack of evidence seems to be the reason.
And is ricin a good poison for a terrorist to use? The BBC's own site suggests that it's very easy to make but is actually quite hard to ingest needing to either be injected into the bloodstream, put in an aerosol spray at close quarters or put into food or water. (Incidentally, it's really not hard to find out how to make ricin if you want to do something so stupid)
So is there really evidence to suggest such a largescale plot as was reported?
Following this case, we next get the Met Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair pushing for ID cards following the case. This comes at a time in an election campaign where only the Labour Party have got ID cards in their manifesto. Not really a time, then, for cards to be talked about by an "independent" person. Here's a link to his interview on Breakfast With Frost.
But what I don't understand is that surely we're being peddled a myth about Al Qaeda and what the true limits of what it's really capable of. I mean, I saw the Adam Curtis documentary series, The Power of Nightmares that pretty much refuted much of the accepted wisdom of the power and influence of Osama Bin Ladin.
Indeed Adam Curtis spoke after receiving an award for The Power of Nightmares at the Broadcasting Guild Awards on Friday.
"The extrapolation from the very tiny bit of evidence that was reported in court to the reports we did on the Six O'Clock News and other bulletins was not in any way justified," he said.
"As someone who had been in the court room and watched the trial collapse, I could not understand how you could take that very limited evidence and extrapolate from that a story of a threat as ghastly as September 11.
"In the post-Hutton era I think that raises very serious questions. I could not understand how the facts could be used to stand up such an interpretation and frightening portrayal. I was baffled and astonished."
As a coda to this, last night were the BAFTA television awards, and The Power of Nightmares won the factual series award. What we saw on television was Curtis and a couple of others come up onto the stage, say exactly two words, "Thank you," and then get off. It seems that what we saw was severely edited (the awards were once again not live).
Today's Media Guardian reports that his speech criticising media coverage of this very case, was cut by the BBC:
Mr Curtis, a senior producer in the BBC's news and current affairs department, said reports of an "al-Qaida plot to poison Britain" that could have consequences "equal or greater to 9/11" were "massively exaggerated or a complete fantasy".
But apparently it was nothing to do with politics! A BBC spokesperson "denied it was politically motivated, and said it was one of a number of edits made to the awards because of timing."
Oh. Right.
(Incidentally, I thought the overall coverage of the BAFTAs was poor. The direction was shoddy, with cutaways to celebrities in the crowd who were often the only ones *not* laughing at the jokes - nothing like a sour Alistair MacGowan. And then major categories, including, disgracefully, the Richard Dimbleby award to Jon Snow, were chopped down into an "earlier this evening" segment. They did find time for the "Best Soap Opera" award. And finally, many of the factual categories didn't get the clips package before they were awarded, so we had the sight of host, Graham Norton, rushing over to the lectern after the thank yous had been made, to let us know we were going to see a clip of the winner at least. It all came over very poorly on screen.)
See also here and here . Finally this is definitely worth a read.
Sky News actually have an inset live video feed of the chimney at the Vatican out of which white or black smoke will appear, depending on whether or not a new Pope's been chosen. Are they going to keep this up for possibly as long as the next few weeks?
The comments and letters pages of trade magazine Broadcast have been bristling with columns and letters mainly expressing disbelief that the BBC have not commissioned a second series of Outlaws from World Productions.
World are rather bitter about this.
You know, a cynical person might think that there was some sort of organised campaign happening.
Now I haven't seen this series, although I do think it suffered from the BBC Three to BBC 2 transition that means that the first publicity bite of the cherry sees it doomed to get smallish audience figures. The second set of publicity can't be as great when it reaches BBC 2, so that damages your audience possibilities as well.
But if this as a good a drama series as everyone's making out, then shouldn't Channel 4 be snapping at World Production's heals to grab the series?
SwitchCo has now launched with a mightily impressive website!
This is the company that's going to responsible for getting us all to convert to digital. What that translates to is the company that gets the rap when things don't all go quite as planned. It's kept at arm's length that way.
In 2005, it seems to me that getting access to party manifestos during an election should be pretty straightforward. Just download them in an accessible and easy to use format that's cross platform.
Adobe's PDF format would seem to be the choice to make. And most party's have used it, with one very notable, and very surprising exception:
The Conservative Manifesto
The Labour Manifesto
The Green Party Manifesto
Plaid Cymru's Manifesto page (it's not there yet, but previous ones are in PDF)
SNP (no sign of their manifesto yet)
Veritas' PDF library (no sign of a manifesto yet, but lots of PDF documents all written by Robert Kilroy-Silk!)
The UK Independence Party (no sign of a 2005 manifesto yet. Previous ones available as PDFs)
So who's missing from this list of the great and the really not-so-good-at-all?
Yes the Lib Dems. Their manifesto is available in an Online DM version. It's easily screen readable, but downloading is a different matter. It's an executable that as far as I'm aware is not Java, but a bespoke PC solution.
If you're a Mac user, or fancy reading a manifesto on your PDA or Smartphone, or Linux machine, you're going to have to read what they describe as the "plain text" version. But it's actually a rich text file which is no bad format. It's just a shame it's not correctly described as such.
Personally, if it were my manifesto, I'd want to make it as available to all as possible. The other parties have done so. The Lib Dems haven't.
They thought it'd never be made. Lots of times it didn't. But now it has. Finally the Hitchhiker's film has arrived.
Obviously this was a preview screening, and I was surprised by the scale of it, with it getting an Empire Leicester Square screening, with a queue winding through Leicester Square on arrival. This was because a significant bag and phone check was taking place. Bags I understand, and I can appreciate that they don't like you taking cameras into preview screenings. But phones?
Yes - if your phone has a camera, then they were holding onto them for you for the duration of the film. And what proportion of mobile phones do you think have cameras these days. Nearly all of them, that's what. Particularly in hip and trendy London. And they were basically running a cloakroom for cameras in a cinema that must seat a few thousand (The Empire is either the biggest or second biggest screen in London). Now they may be able to collect the phones in reasonably easily, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that getting them back at the end of the film is going to be a nightmare. It was. It could have been worse but I was close to the exit and am big enough to "push" through to the front of the "scrum" that was trying to reclaim their phones at the film's end. Can film distributors really be so scared of phone camera images of their films? Am I really likely to try to film the whole thing with the built in video cameras that many phones have. Not exactly DV quality are they?
Anyway, enough of my travails, since I was in the privileged position of getting a free screening of a film a week or so before it opens. And they did give us all a free Hitchhiker's towel - which was rather a nice touch, and a very imaginative gift.
But what about the film itself?
I've got to be honest. I went in with some trepidation. I've listened to the radio series many times over the years. And I loved the books, and the TV series was very good too. So I know the source material pretty well, and I had read an outstandingly negative review of the film from MJ Simpson, who knows his Hitchhikers very well and runs an excellent site that's as up to date as anything on the web.
First the good news. It's not that bad by any means. The film's well made, with distinctive and impressive effects. And it doesn't stray far from the plot that we all know and love. In fact, it's almost takes too few liberties and is perhaps just a bit too reverential to the source material.
Martin Freeman plays Arthur Dent, and is probably a little young to my mind, and just a little too like Tim from The Office. But I was perfectly happy with Mos Def as Ford Prefect which I though was going to be a harder character to accept. And Sam Rockwell is pretty good as Zaphod. Yes, his second head is done a bit differently, but he was fine. I don't think I've seen Zooey Deschanel before who plays Trillian, but she's pretty right for the part. You can quite believe that Arthur met her at a party in Islington once and could get her out of his head.
All the voice actors are fairly good too with Stephen Fry as the book, Alan Rickman playing the depressed Marvin amongst others.
As I say, the film follows a well trodden path reasonably closely. Sometimes it feels rushed, but then they probably actually needed to cut a bit more out (I can't believe I just typed that). So we get the house getting knocked down and before you know Arthur and Ford are onboard the Vogon ship, having poetry read and being expelled from the airlock.
It's worth mentioning at this point, that "The Book" sequences are awfully similar in style to the animation that was in the TV series. When I say that, I mean a simplistic, cartoon-like style rather than flashy computer graphics. Think of one of those safety notices you get in plane seat pockets. Now animate it. I thought it worked well.
Many of the usual diversion are included along the way, and the film is stylistically in keeping with what I'd have hoped for. There doesn't seem to have be any especially jarring music to flog a soundtrack album with, the graphics in the Slartibartfast scenes are particularly well rendered.
But. There is a but. I was just a little under whelmed by it all. It just wasn't funny enough. All the lines were there... well most of them anyway. But maybe it was the delivery. Sometimes it was the film's audibility (which seemed to be an issue with Mos Def and some of the Vogon dialogue), but I wanted more chuckles, if not exactly belly laughs. I was smiling all through the film, but I thought it could have been that bit better. I didn't begrudge the removal of much loved jokes, but I wanted well delivered lines, and I think more could have been done.
But the film's by no means terrible. It's just not fantastic. The book and radio series are rightly held up so highly, that they're always going to be a tough act to beat. That's not to say, however, that we shouldn't strive to try.
I've got no idea how the film will play in the States, since the one serious worry I did have was that the quintessentially English humour would be lost in a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza, but that's not the case. I don't know what the budget of the film was, but it can't have been small, and one would think it'll need to do well in America too. I'm not sure it will though.
I suspect that there were a lot more references to previous incarnations than I picked up on, but it was good to see the TV series version of Marvin in a queue, and Simon Jones (Arthur from the radio and TV series) appears as a disembodied head warning people to stay away from Magrathea.
In the last three weeks, we've had updates on three different classic British science fiction properties: Dr Who, Quatermass and now Hitchhikers. I don't think that this has been as successful as Dr Who, but it's a decent effort, and deserves to be seen.
In the meantime, the BBC have been press releasing stories about the last ever series of Hitchhikers on the radio, so there's still more to look forward to.
Su Doku or should that be Sudoku? Whichever, it's the craze that's sweeping the broadsheet-reading nation. And I was completely unaware of it until last Sunday.
That was when I was looking in a bookshop and happened to notice a Su Doku puzzle book that seemed to be in the bestsellers section. A quick flick through revealed some kind of numerical/logical puzzle. Maybe the sort of thing I'd like? I bought the book.
It seems that The Times introduced the puzzles to their paper last November, but that they originate from Japan. The numbers are pretty irrelevant since the puzzles are completely logic based and they could be replaced with letters or symbols. Being logical, they can be a bit more accessible than crosswords - at least to me - and so that's an advantage.
Anyway I completed a few and quickly became hooked. Yesterday's Independent redesign introduced a puzzle to that paper I notice, although with puzzle #1 they presented an example solution (in the place where in future, yesterday's solution will appear), and they managed to misprint it. So it really won't help the novice.
But the Indie isn't the second paper to jump on the bandwagon. That's the Telegraph which quickly appreciated the puzzles' apparent popularity. Now both The Times and Telegraph run daily competitions. With The Times, you can win a bottle of champagne by noon each day, whereas the Telegraph gives you until 9pm when you can win a pair of theatre tickets. So far, the Indie is sticking to doing it for the love of the puzzle.
From what I've now heard either the Mail or the Mail on Sunday is also running a puzzle.
But the rivalry between The Times and the Telegraph is legendary and that's equally the case with Su Doku puzzles. The setters of each paper's puzzles have their own websites (here and here). And the rivalry spills over into the setters. Here's The Times' setter mentioning that other sources of puzzles "might be faulty." And here's the Telegraph on The Times' claims.
Needless to say - there are computer programs around the solve the puzzles for you, although it does seem a completely pointless passtime. Aside from the intellectual exercise of producing such a program that is. (Having said that, I have been known to sit in front of Countdown with a palmtop anagram program, gleefully beating, or at least equalling the scores the competitors get. The numbers game, I'm relatively good at on my own thanks.)
But I'll leave computers alone, and try to get good at these puzzles on my own terms.
I notice that Channel 4 have scheduled Desperate Housewives to last from 22:00 until 23:05 this evening - 65 minutes. And yet as an American programme, it actually only runs for between 42 and 43 minutes. Since we're only allowed an average of 7 minutes of ads per hour in the UK, are C4 packing all of their ads into this one show?
My advice is to download the ad-free version. Or better yet, just don't bother. It's not actually all that good. It's just a soap.
The new look Independent launched today. The fact that it's moved from six to seven columns per page is absolutely an advertising thing since newspaper advertising is sold by the column inch. Get an extra column and you have all those extra inches to sell!
But the paper did need a redesign. Nothing too radical, but hopefully now it'll cope a little better in a tabloid environment. Over the last year or so The Independent has made much of its single issue front pages and, although it may seem churlish of me, I've not been satisfied with what it's been doing. I say churlish, because in the past I've praised what Liberation have done with their single issue front pages. But overuse is a bad thing, and it's something that the Indie has definitely been guilty of. Obviously a tabloid format essentially dictates that you have only a single front page story, but now there's a right hand column signposting a few more stories inside.
I'm not sure that the bar across the top of the back page giving topline weather, financial headliness, and a TV highlight, really works. It eats into the space that sport gets. And if there's one thing I do want on a back page - it's sport.
The Review section has been folded into the main paper and it all works fairly well, although I think that TV is a bit too hidden. I always feel that it should be somewhere around the centre pages.
Overall it looks quite good. Nothing revolutionary, but good. It's a shame that they're not able to move to the "Berliner" format that The Guardian's planning, which is a slightly larger tabloid size more common in Europe (as the name would suggest). That feels like it's going to be a good size and I look forward to it.
Some interesting, if somewhat unclear, new developments in radio to talk about. First off, there's podshows.com which aims to deliver specially-made "radio" shows straight to your mp3 player. There are a host of DJs that you've heard of like Tony Blackburn and Paul Gambaccini amongst others, all of whom are supplying shows. You then just pay your money (ranging from 49p to £1.50 as far as I can see) and download.
There are a few issues that still have to be ironed out. The website admits that not all the shows can actually be downloaded at the moment for music licensing reasons. Instead they need to be streamed. That's actually quite crucial isn't it? Still we'll wait for the rest of the "paperwork" to be cleared up.
Then there's a somewhat confusing FAQ which actually suggests that the shows won't necessarily work with Ipods. Now that is a problem (albeit the same kind of problem Napster and most of the other non-Itunes sites have to face). I assumed that this must be because they're serving the files as in Windows Media format (the FAQ speaks are DRM issues). But a test download conducted here at work reveled one of the files, at least, to be an MP3. Maybe that's because only 60% of any given music track is played in that show? That's one of the compromises they've had to make according to this Mediaguardian article from yesterday.
I suppose my main question is whether anyone is willing to pay 99p for a breakfast show. And not just the one on offer at podshows.com, but any breakfast show currently broadcast in this country. Yes, you have the flexibility that not even the BBC Radio Player can offer, but how much is it worth? A fiver a week. Maybe someoone like Howard Stern could get away with it. And maybe a spoken word service offering book readings, plays and comedy, but I'm not sure that anyone else could. Paying for radio, an essentially disposable medium, is not something we're used to. It'll be an uphill battle.
The other development I mentioned is from this story (in Media Guardian again) about UBC. They're developing a service that let listeners buy tracks they hear on the radio as they listen through their DAB sets. They're talking about using a datastream alongside the broadcast to get a clean version of a track without DJ or whatever. But this will mean new radios with SD Cards to download tracks onto. Exactly how you then access those tracks isn't clear from the article. I assume that you'll have to unlock them somehow - perhaps via a website. Either that, or the radio will have to be hooked up to a PC somehow. It all seems a little complicated, but then I haven't heard the details.
All of this is fine, but is there any advantage in buying music tracks this way? Shazam seems an easier method (although even that could be better).
Anything where there's too much complication is just not really going to work as a business. And requiring people to go out and buy new hardware just so they can spend even more money in the future? Now if they gave away sets based on future revenues that might make sense. But that's not a sensible marketing strategy. Don't forget that there are still questions about how profitable Itunes is as a business, the argument being that it's really there just to sell hardware.
Keep it simple, and then you might have something.
A new Mankell book is always welcome, and I've waited for the paperback this time. Before The Frost is the first Linda Wallander novel, and featuring our favourite Swedish detective's daughter on her first case.
Actually it turns out not to really be her first case since the majority of the novel takes place before she has actually started with the Ystad force. As usual, dark doings are taking place in Skane, and while her father's leading the case, we see things from the eyes of Linda who tends to lead things along. Indeed her friend may be caught up in things.
We open some twenty years earlier in Guyana where a sect has committed mass "suicide". As ever with these prologues, you're not sure where you're going. But things clear up as the novel progresses.
The Mankell novels are popular throughout Europe, and you feel that they're finally breaking through properly in the UK now. Indeed Random House have set up a website - mankellholicsanonymous.com to promote this latest paperback.
Good fun - well fun's probably the wrong word - and well worth a read. Roll on - The Man Who Smiled in the Autumn.
Oracle Night by Paul Auster is his most recent novel, following events that have happened to Sidney Orr in the early eighties. A struggling writer, he's recovering from a near fatal accident. He starts a new book once he buys a notebook with almost magical properties that help him reinvigorate his writing.
Nothing's straightforward as one would expect and the twists and turns do not pan out as you might expect.
The books's well worth a read, and I'd recommend it.
Can it really be true that rugby union want to do away with automatic promotion and relegation? I really do wonder about the rugby authorities.
So we end up with a league that becomes meaningless dead rubbers by the end of the season, with the dull games that would bring about. Of course there's also the possibility that a major club would be relegated in the last season that relegation occurs, and gets shut out as a consequence.
Add this to the fact that club rugby on terrestrial television is limited to a handful of Powergen Cup games and post-midnight highlights on Sunday evenings, and you're looking at a sport that really doesn't think about its own future.
This story just goes to show how poor some TV ratings reporting really is. Media Week are calling the 6.2m on BBC1 and 1.1m on ITV1 who watched the Royal Wedding on Saturday a "damp squib."
For some reason Media Week (who in the same paragraph considered the 7.7m who watched the Grand National, a success), go on to compare the figures with those who saw a wedding the night before on Coronation Street.
So let's see, they're comparing the culmunation of a popular storyline on the nation's most watched television programme in prime time, with a wedding between two middle-aged people on a Saturday lunchtime. Are they mad? There's no way 12m could have watched the wedding since all the shops were open and people have lives to lead. I daresay that many more watched Charles' first wedding, but then we all had a national holiday to encourage us to watch.
The Media Week article is just poor quality journalism.
The Independent has an interview (be quick, it'll probably disappear into a subscription area in a week) with Johnny Vaughan today - or Vaughany as he seems to be called in the text.
Just one small point on Fighting Talk: "Naturally, the Americans are all over it and want to buy the rights."
Erm, isn't this programme basically a reworking of several American shows that air on the likes of ESPN and get a showing on NASN over here? I'm thinking of Pardon The Interruption, Around The Horn and Rome Is Burning.
Fighting Talk is a certainly an enormously entertaining programme, and I'm looking forward to hearing the mp3 of this week's show which had Terry Wogan standing in for Christian O'Connell. But original?
I know that I've moaned about this before, but I still find it intensely frustrating that just about no publications in this country take television reviewing seriously. Look at the writers you get for film reviews: everyone from Philip French, Adam Mars-Jones and Derek Malcolm right through to Will Self. The serious papers have proper writers who take the art seriously. Yet the same is just not true for television.
Today's Observer really puts it all into context for me. This was the paper that once had Clive James as their television reviewer. He published his collected criticism in books subsequently. Does anyone honestly think that Kathryn Flett's thoughts are worthy of anything more than tomorrow night's fish and chips wrapper?
The TV review page is one page in any newspaper that I always feel that I must read; I suppose because it's more likely that I've seen one of the programmes under discussion than I've seen a new film or read a new book. So it annoys me intensely when the limited space available (not all that limited - it's the better part of a full broadsheet page) is wasted on complete fluff. In Flett's case, that's always going to be the new series of Footballers' Wives (Check - last week) and the latest piece of reality fluff (Check - top of today's column).
Needless to say, she loves the latest common denominator to which television has sunk - Playing It Straight - which I was unfortunate enough to see some of Saturday morning. The premise seems to be that a girl is put on a ranch with 10 blokes and she has to pick one. But the catch is that some of them are gay and she has to work out who. Cue lots of campness amongst the men. And this crap is going out for the next umpteen Friday nights on Channel 4 (A station, incidentally, who actually decided to repeat the WHOLE SERIES of The Friday Night Project over the last week having decided allowing an audience to see it not once, but twice already - Friday with Saturday night repeats - was not enough pain).
I have some real "issues" with this kind of dross. First and foremost is the idea that the picker should be instantly attracted to any of the men who are chucked in front of her, and more-so, that any of the men should be attracted to her. I suppose she has at least a one in ten chance of finding someone interesting. The blokes don't - it's her or nothing.
Then there's the morality of having to identify the only gays in the hacienda. "You're gay and you're straight! Do I win a hundred grand?" I suppose the producers think that breaking the stereotypes is a worthwhile thing - heterosexual men can have hair-straighteners too! Maybe next time it'll be identify the good Catholic girl having to weed out the Jews?
As I mentioned above, the part of the programme I saw was on Saturday morning, and Channel Four managed to broadcast an expletive filled version of the programme (well there was at least one "fuck" in it). From this I'd make two further points:
1) Ofcom should pull them up on this. Even though they apologised at the end, it's very poor from a channel like Channel 4 to let that out at 11.30am on a Saturday.
and 2) What the hell is this kind of programming doing, with or without swearing, going out on Saturday mornings? That's just not suitable programming for that time of day.
To think that this comes from a channel that once brought us GBH, a programme I'm planning to rewatch in the near future. These days, with honourable one-off exceptions, multi-part dramas seem limited to the likes of No Angels and Teachers. Standards have fallen very badly.
There's been much discussion in recent days about the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) announcing that more money is being spent on the internet than is on radio.
I must admit to being a little untrusting of this information and I'm not sure that like is being compared with like. And I don't just say that because I work in radio. We also sell internet advertising and have a highly trafficed site. But I'd want to examine those numbers closely.
Anyway, there's a reasonably relevant article in New Media Age highlighting what radio is doing to confront this challenge. In the first place, radio remains the most natural bedfellow of the internet with a "listen while you surf" approach which works. You can consume radio equally as well or even better via the internet than you can using a traditional set. And witness the success of the BBC's radio player; if only all radio stations were able to strike the sort of deal the BBC have done to allow their content to be listen-again-able (it's not technology that holds other stations back - it's lack of the legal right to play the music again).
I do get a bit upset when supposed new developments such as The Bug are hailed because they allow radio to be timeshifted Sky+/Tivo-style.
This isn't new. I'll say again what I've been saying for a while. Ever since Psion launched the Wavefinder, PC owners have been able to do this. It's just a pity that there aren't similar products on the market now. A quick look around reveals only this model from Aria which isn't being shipped at the moment due to XP SP2 driver issues.
Mediaguardian are reporting (free reg. reqd.) something that I've always believed to be true: that switching over to digital by 2012 is unrealistic.
The report in question from Mediatel Insight (which sadly I don't have access to since the Mediatel subscription I have is only basic), includes a survey amongst advertising industry executives.
Steve Hobbs of Carat is reported as saying:
"No government can afford to unilaterally disenfranchise a significant element of the electorate from its ability to receive TV broadcasts"
He does seem to get it:
"Carat is sceptical that the transition can be achieved within this period without a definitive statement of the government's financial commitment.""Ten million homes currently do not have digital TV and many of the homes that currently do have digital TV also have legacy analogue sets that will require digital facilitation or will otherwise be made redundant.
"Given that about 70% of the current 10m analogue-only homes have at least two sets that means at least 17m sets will need a £50 Freeview decoder. Many homes will also require an aerial upgrade and scart connections to recording devices."
"The total cost of upgrading these 17m sets alone is potentially £100 to £200 each. The likely return from the sale of the analogue spectrum is currently estimated to be less than £2bn."
He then goes on to note that the change from 405 to 625 lines took 20 years.
My take on this issue remains that for digital switchover to take place, ALL equipment currently on sale should be compatable with digital already. If I buy a TV set today, in 2005, in Wales, the Borders region or the Westcountry TV region, then according to the Ofcom timetable, my brand new equipment could be defunct in as little as three years' time.
To make my new set work beyond then will require getting an additional box wired in with hassles of extra remotes, and another appliance requiring power which also leads to an overall increase in power consumption (kind of ironic at the same time that the government Energy Savings Trust is in the middle of a campaign to get us to reduced our appliances power consumption).
Of course that Ofcom timetable isn't yet official, but I look forward to our new government letting the electorate in those parts of the country know that they're about to be disenfranchised from their TV.
Trade magazine Media Week emailed me to complete one of those online surveys, the results of which are obviously going to form the basis of a future article.
At the end of the survey it explained that I'd be entered into a free prize draw to win a holiday which was partly sponsored by Formula Won. Who are they I wondered? So I clicked on their website and discoverd that they're a media recruitment company. On their homepage it says "Click to enter", but when you click it launches into a massive Flash splash pop-up along with music.
Can I humbly suggest to all recruitment companies that they don't use loud music and flash graphics on their websites. Sounds and moving images are not the most subtle of things, and an employee idly surfing in the workplace for a new job probably doesn't want attention drawn to their activity.
The Trocadero must, incredibly, lose more money than anything else in the capital.
Let's see what it has going for it.
1) It's just off Picadilley Circus and is close to Leicester Square in the heart of London's West End.
2) It has loads of space within it.
3) It can be adapted to either hold many different outlets or a single attraction.
But it's mostly empty. In its basement, which directly links to Picadilley Circus tube station, are several permamently failing businesses including money exchange places, barbers and bars. As far as I know, all of these businesses are currently closed.
Some of the exterior places do seem to do OK. The HMV is always busy. There's a popular nightclub - On Anon. And a cafe and casino which probably do OK. There's a UGC cinema which does so so business. And there's Planet Hollywood which is still around, although the downstairs sections and screening room have been made into a separate private members' bar and cinema.
Yet inside it's mostly empty. Where once there was an IMAX cinema, there's now a temporary "Titanic" exhibition. There's a full-size bowling alley or at least there was last time I looked. And plenty of space for games machines. But the internet cafe has closed. And where once Sega had a massive multi-floor gamesworld, there's now nothing at all. McDonalds moved out some years ago. Other attractions have been and gone over the years. Without a doubt there are hundred of square feet of real estate going to waste.
I don't know why nothing's ever worked there. Maybe the layout just doesn't work for anything with little space on each floor, but many floors. But I find it amazing that nobody's been able to make it work.
Having said all that, if you do happen to pass by, there a great "mini-bowling" alley that's much better and more affordable than the full size one. At just a pound a go, you get 10 rounds on a shortened alley with smaller ball and smaller skittles. Great fun, and I can actually win at it (unlike the full-size version). Now where's my Big Lebowski DVD?
The latest in the Alexander McCall Smith series of "detective" stories set in Botswana is more of the same - no more, no less.
To be honest, I'm practically reading these on autopilot now. I'd say that this took me no more than 3 or 4 return journies to work to get through. It's perfectly adequare and I daresay I'll carry on reading these while McCall Smith continues to publish them, but I don't know that they're exactly stretching me. But I'll leave the stretching to other authors.
So following on from my post about the New Order Bluetooth ad the other day I've been trying to think of other possibilities using Bluetooth technology.
Every year at work we entertain clients at the V Festival. I'd like to be able to use this technology to do something clever for them like this. A bit of Googling reveals that this advertising "installation" works using something called Hypertag technology. Undoubtedly this'll cost a few quid to buy into.
So my question is this: could I replicate this set-up with a PC and a Bluetooth adpator (if we ignore the infra-red option for a second)? Could I not just continually "blast" a Bluetooth signal, constantly looking for devices to latch on to and offer downloads?
If that's the case, then something simple could be set up. Exactly what we'd want to offer clients I don't know, but let's not worry about that now. Maybe MMS imagery of bands that play live there.
A colleague at work did point out that there are some downsides of receiving stuff without asking. Could a future trip through the high street see your phone run out of memory as all and sundry dump stuff onto it? Even though you have to "Accept" the downloads, by the time you're asked, it's already on your phone. And it could get rather irritating if you happen to work somewhere that's doing this constantly.
But I'd love to be able to give this a go. Any suggestions, please use the comments.
I've been playing with satellite photos for the last couple of days. First of all there's the new satellite photos to be found on Google Maps which are lovely IF you happen to live in the US (or at least want to see satellite photos of the US).
But then I found out about NASA's World Wind which is quite simply one of the most brilliant and completely free programs to be found anywhere on the internet. It's a colossal 200MB or so download (bit torrents available) which gives you an application that needs both Direct X and .Net - so Microsoft only. You start with a representation of the globe seen from orbit in space. You can spin it any way you like to find the part of the planet you're interested in. And then you zoom. And zoom. And zoom. On the fly it begins loading in more detailed satellite imagery, where available, and more detailed pictures emerge. You can see mountain ranges and rivers. Then you see cities and then towns. If you choose the US, you can zoom in so far that in major cities you can actually pick out individual cars. It's incredible.
And it's fast, loading up the maps on the fly as you go. So good internet connectivity's required.
And oh, it's 3D.
Go to a mountain range, like the Himalayas, and you can then change your angle of view and the mountains are rendered in 3D before your eyes. You can zoom around and fly about like a deranged flight simulator pilot.
I simply can't think of a better tool for children's geography lessons. But never mind kids - this isn't just for them! You can also pick out recent incidents and appropriate satellite photography's overlaid. You can also compare historic photos to show major fluctuations in parts of the planet - perhaps around a volcano, or icebergs off Antartica.
This is simply phenominal software. A goodish PC with a decent graphics card are desirable, but I managed it with a superfast PC with loads of RAM and a fairly basic graphics card.
I love maps. Really - I do. This is stunning software that I could use for days and days. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
The other day I was in Borders in Oxford Street having a bit of a wander after work looking at books and so on, when I had a look at my mobile phone and realised that I'd been sent a midi file of Krafty by New Order. I'm on a few junk text message lists, and it's possible that I once gave my phone number to a record company that are now pushing ringtones and the like to get me to buy New Order's new album. I just hoped that I hadn't been charged three quid for a ringtone (Incidentally, why do people pay so much for ringtones when the actual tracks only cost 79p each at Itunes?).
I was back in Oxford Street today and I realised what had happened. I didn't get sent the ringtone by the record company - I got it from a window display in HMV. There's a big ad for the New Order album in the HMV's window and I'd noticed it a couple of times over the last week or so. What I hadn't noticed was that in the middle of poster there's a "hole" where you point your mobile phone to receive an audio demo by infra-red. How did I receive the ringtone via infra-red without knowing? I didn't. It's also being pushed via Bluetooth. Before I visited Borders, I stopped by in HMV, and must have spent enough time browsing near the front of the store for the data to reach my phone. I still had to choose "Accept" but I did so the previous week out of curiosity, and in any case, if you've got it on your phone, you've been charged at that point anyway.
All in all, it adds up to a very clever marketing idea. Possibly not new, but something that'll be used more and more I've no doubt.
I've only recently got a phone with Bluetooth and I'm still a little new to it, but a brief "look" around in a pub the other week brought at least ten other phones in close enough proximity. I still haven't tried bluejacking though.
The Pope's finally died and the rather macabre and more than faintly disturbing sight of the world's media camping out waiting for an old man die is over. We've now moved on to the rememberance of his life and some of the great things he's achieved.
Make no mistake, some of them were very great indeed. His staunch opposition to communism heralded the falling of the Berlin Wall. His world travels reinvigorated the Church wherever he went. He brought the Papacy into the 20th century (at a very late stage).
In later years, I think we've been more aware of his conservatism, with a failure to confront some of the Church's more pressing issues like the ordination of women, the falling numbers of clergy and the appalling cases of paedophilia. And then there was his failure to change the Church's opinions on contraception, particularly in light of a rampant AIDs epidemic that's hurting Africa badly.
These are issues that the next Pope will have to address. And that choice of Pope will have more impact on a secular world than is maybe given credit.
In 1982 the Pope visited Britain and as a good 12 year old Catholic boy I travelled with my family to Mass at Wembley Stadium. I didn't get to actually go into the stadium since tickets were limited - to 100,000 or so. Instead I was in the car park with dad as we waited with tens of thousands of others. I can't remember how bad the travel must have been that day given that upwards of 200,000 were there that day. Before going into the stadium, the pope-mobile took a tour of the car park and we all cheered him as he passed by. My parents have cine film of that day somewhere. Dad wouldn't let me take the film myself since he thought that it would be a shame that I'd only get to see the Pope through a camera's viewfinder!
Anyway, sorry though I am that he's gone, the Church has an opportunity to make a very important decision at this juncture.
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