May 2007 Archives

I love stories set in newspapers. Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is quite probably my favourite ever book - riotously funny. TV has had its fair share of programmes set around plucky newspaper reporters; most recently State of Play, but I even remember Lytton's Diary! And then there are films. Another favourite is The Day The Earth Caught Fire set in the offices of the Daily Express (back in the sixties I should rapidly point out).

I also quite like the films of Woody Allen. I've not seen every film, and I've missed a couple of his more recent entries like Melinda and Melinda, and Match Point. I suppose that like many others, I was put off a bit by the little local difficulty he had in his personal life.

But when I heard he'd made another film in Britain (Match Point was too), and it was set in the newspaper world, I was intrigued and looked forward to it. The fact that it starred Scarlett Johansson was no bad thing either.

Woody no longer gets big releases. He makes films as regularly as clockwork and I guess the sums all add up because the same people go and see them, and the studios keep backing them. Big name actors love to work with him (for much reduced fees one suspects) and the whole thing ticks over nicely.

Scoop (nothing to do with aforementioned Waugh novel) was released in the US last summer, and has since opened in a number of countries around the world. But noticeably, not Britain.

This is unusual in that there's a reasonable following for Woody over here, and the film was actually made here. On top of that, many famous British faces have parts to lesser or greater extents (mainly lesser, but we'll come to that). The latest word I hear is that no British distributor is going to pick up the film. So aside from the odd festival screening, it's likely to first pitch up on DVD or TV. The latter is a dead cert. since BBC Films co-produced the film.

I picked up a North American copy of the DVD to see the film, getting impatient with obviously foolish distributors in the UK. It couldn't be that bad could it? I mean as well as Johansson, the film stars Hugh Jackman and Ian McShane as well as Allen himself!

Well, I'm sorry to report that it really is that bad.

Woody has something of a starring role in the film alongside Johansson. She plays a young American visiting her British friend (the thoroughly underused Romola Garai), and she also happens to be a cub reporter on her college newspaper. For very feeble characterisation reasons, she stalks a famous film director (Kevin McNally in practically a cameo) and immediately jumps into bed with him to get her story. She fails.

Then she goes off with her friend to see a magic show being conducted by Woody Allen. I'm not quite sure where such magic shows are held, but they find one nonetheless. Allen's character is a hackneyed conjourer with a supposedly razor-sharp wit. But it isn't really. And Allen just plays Allen as he always does. Johansson is chosen from the audience to be made to vanish in a wooden box, but whilst inside she meets the ghost of legendary tabloid hack Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). Stay with me. He's been told in the afterlife that the renound "Tarot Card Murderer" who's killing prostitutes all over the streets of London is actually playboy rich-kid Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman).

Johnansson and Allen team up in the most unlikely manner to try to get close to Jackson and find out if he's the real murderer. This will be her big break after all!

What follows is a mess. The jokes are feeble, with more laughs in the average episode of My Family. The dialogue is poor, and the plot just freewheels along on its own without any care for logic.

Along the way, every incidental character our heroes run into is a famous face playing blink and you'll miss it roles. Especially bad is Charles Dance playing the editor of The Observer, and forced to say lines that he practically winces at on camera so terrible are they.

The end comes relatively quickly and you're not exactly surprised.

The only reason I stayed with this film is because I'd paid good money for it, and as I say, Johansson's not exactly unappealing on the eye. But the film is a stinker. Expect to see it cropping up sometime between Christmas and New Year on BBC2 without too much fanfair despite its stellar cast.

I see that Allen's next film, Cassandra's Dream, has also been made in Britain - it simply can't be any worse than Scoop.

I didn't actually know that Z for Zachariah was actually a book. I remember it as a Play For Today back in the eighties (1984 to be precise - ah the power of the internet). I remember it starring Anthony Andrews (late of Brideshead) and not a great deal else.

Anyway, my interest was piqued recently when I saw a copy of it pop up on a certain file-sharing site that'll remain anonymous. Reading a little more, I learnt that it was based on the novel, so I decided to give it a read.

Then I discovered that the book was actually aimed at children.

Oh, and the book has been relocated from North America to Wales. The premise is that there's been a nuclear war, and most of the countryside has been ravaged. Yet there's a valley that's somehow remained unscathed, and in it lives a young girl who's now all alone and is tending for herself, running her farm and generally surviving.

One day a stranger arrives...

And that's all I'll say. In some respects the novel is more of a novella, but if that premise intrigues you then read this book. Now I must go and catch up on the TV version (shhh...).

Nick Griffiths is a writer on the Radio Times amongst other places, and this is a memoir interspersed with Doctor Who. That sounds a bit strange but it all makes sense. Sort of.

He begins with Jon Pertwee and takes us through his early years and Tom Baker. He misses out ther rest, largely, which is a shame because I basically begin with Peter Davison. And yes, I knew him as Tristan from All Creatures Great and Small too.

But as Griffiths is a little bit older than me, his Doctor Who experiences stop as mine begin largely.

He talks about his nice upbringing, every so often leaping forwards or backwards to bring us a bit of his life as a fan of Doctor Who too. Near the start of his book, he explains that he's not some kind of complete obsessive, explaining where he stands on the scale. He puts himself in the mild camp, but we later read about some of the collectibles he's bought, and I rather think he's a little more obsessive than he lets on.

This is a fun read, and if you too were a child of eighties, then you're going to recognise a lot. Griffiths is much more into music than I was, so his life isn't really a parallel to mine, and indeed the book reminds me a great deal of the first volume of Andrew Collins' memoirs. If you liked that, then you'll like this.

Why do we keep getting new versions of TV and film classics adaptations? Every Jane Austen novel has now been adapted on countless occasions and you just know that there'll be more.

Even "definitive" versions of the classics don't stop someone else making the same story again a few years later. So we had a film version of Pride and Prejudice after the exceptionally popular Colin Firth TV adaptation.

There's a film version of Brideshead Revisited coming soon which seems pointless considering the incredible Granada TV adaptation of the eighties simply couldn't be surpassed. Andrew Davies wrote the first draft of this but is reported now not to be still attached - although I too think it's bizarre that they're filming in Castle Howard again.

And now we read that there's a new version of A Room With A View starring Timothy Spall coming, even though the Merchant/Ivory film version practically defined a genre. And the same, very busy Andrew Davies is adapting it and he said at Hay this week that it is a tough task because there was such a good film, but his version will have an "edge" to it.

You could argue that there's always room for another Hamlet, but stage plays are ethereal and there's always a new audience who's yet to experience the play. But films and TV series live on, with DVDs and satellite channel repeats.

New directors always feel that they can bring new visions and ideas to a project and attack the story in a different way, but I always feel that it's a little like deciding that you're going to remake a classic film. When was the last time that worked? Psycho? The Ladykillers? The Texas Chainsaw Massachre?

It's just a pity that we can't either adapt some less popular works in an author's cannon - ideally ones that have never been filmed before. Or perhaps - shock horror - actually commission new stories. I'm sure that someone must have written one, but I struggle to think of a costume drama, particularly a major one, in recent times that wasn't based on an original novel. I suppose there was the recent Lilies (which I didn't see), but the list must be short.

And speaking as someone who loved Andrew Davies' original series, A Very Peculiar Practice, why doesn't he write a few more original stories.

Read this.

This is quite easily the single worst "scientific" article I can remember ever reading. I really simply don't know where to begin.

Why is it acceptable for journalists on a national newspaper to write about science when they clearly have no qualifications, background or plain and simple knowledge of the subject? In any other sphere, you'd be laughed out of court if you came up with such nonsense.

I've got the paperback of Richard Dawkins' God Delusion at home in which he expounds on the dangers of religion. I'll withhold judgment until I've read it, but to my mind he's going after the wrong people. It's the singular lack of scientific understanding that's the biggest problem society faces today. [Update: It seems he pretty much said precisely this at the Hay Festival]

It took until the 18th century before England stopped trying witches, but it might as well be witchcraft that explains how some of these ridiculous new-age pseudo-scientific devices work.

I think it pains me that The Independent should publish such nonsense because even though I don't read The Independent as much as I used to, I've still got issue 1 bought when I was at school, and I've always thought of it as a paper of my time.

I will be buying it tomorrow in the hope that plenty of letters appear pointing out the error of its ways.

[Incidentally, while Googling around to find out when the last witch was hanged in England, I was aghast to discover that the last person to be tried under the British Witchcraft Act was Helen Duncan in 1944. If we bring the act back, can we lock up that stupid lot over on Living TV from Most Haunted and other shows, to prevent them, oh I don't know, giving away troop movements in Iraq or Afghanistan?]

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Anyone would have thought I'd stopped reading, given that it's ages since I've written up a book review. Rest assured that's not true. I'm just a little behind. Look to a flood of reviews over the next few days.

You've probably seen Mark Thomas on Channel 4. Well not latterly, since his brand of political humour seems to have disappeared. Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins are more likely to be presenting, with perhaps even Russell Brand.

Anyway, he still pops up from time to time. Last year Thomas presented an edition of Dispatches in which he got a couple of sets of school children set-up as arms dealers. Not because it was a good career path for them, but to explain all the various loopholes and legislative failures that let just about anybody sell anything they like to pretty much any country, irrespective of the regime.

I must admit that because I'd seen this film, I wasn't too sure whether it was going to be worthwhile buying this book. It'd just cover the same ground wouldn't it? Well, yes it does. But there's much much more.

Certainly some of the stories related here are from Thomas' various TV shows over the years, but there's a lot more, and this book forms a really good backgrounder into how arms dealing and the arms trade in general works. It's really really scary how easy it all is to do.

In places there are loopholes you could drive a tank through, but you just know that at the end of the day, even if it is illegal of me to directly ship, say, military trucks from India to Sudan while I sit on the end of an email address and mobile phone in the UK, unless someone finds out about it.

The tone of the book is typical Thomas - he is a comedian by trade after all. A good read.

In this age of terrible "reality" programming, this week sees the return of a wonderful reality show. As ever, this series sees the housemates couped up inside their newly designed structures. But you never know exactly what's going to happen next, and there's minimal interference.

Yes, Springwatch is back.

And in a completely genius idea, they're doing live streaming every night for a couple of hours. So instead of watching a house full of half-wits talking such nonsense that producers have to mute the sound and replace it with random bird noises, you can actually watch proper birds (and badgers) themselves in their natural habitat.

None of these birds are trying to appear in Heat magazine.

This is real reality.

Here's a little known fact: it's easier to win radio competitions than you might think.

Most people assume that there are thousands of people phoning in to try to win tickets, cash, a holiday or maybe even a car. But the truth is that it can be easier than you think to get through. I'm not talking about premium rate type affairs like ITV Play that limit the number of calls that even get through - I mean your regular common or garden radio contests, known as promotions in the trade, because they're usually paid for.

Of course for really big prizes, it's not quite so easy, but you'd still be surprised.

I'm not the only person who knows this sort of thing, and littered around the internet are forums and groups full of competition junkies. They regularly post details of new contests, answers to the questions and so on. From what I've read, if you put in the effort, you can make it pay, with valuable prizes being won by these regular entrants all the time.

Indeed a few years ago, one of these groups realised that a specific competition was almost certainly fraudulent because none of their members had won one of the copious prizes that were said to be on offer. When they considered the number of entries they'd cumulatively made to the competition, a bit of basic statistics revealed that they certainly should have won at least one prize, and probably many more.

Let's return to radio for a moment.

It's not normally in a radio station's best interests that the same contestants win all that stations' prizes. Listeners begin to recognise the same people winning all the time if they do, and will probably become disenchanted with the station. One of radio's great strengths is that it becomes a friend to you in a way that other media can't. The listeners may not enter competitions themselves, but they want to hear different people win great prizes. It's why TV game shows down the ages have always been popular - Deal Or No Deal being the most recent phenomenon; you don't know the people especially, but you're happy for them when they win.

So radio stations tend to have rules that try to "spread the love" a little. My own employer's rules state that:

Anyone who has won a prize within the last twelve months on a Virgin Radio station or virginradio.co.uk valued at £100 or more shall not be eligible to enter the competition, nor shall any member of such person's family (including, but not limited to, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents etc).

So you can win more a single pair of concert tickets in a year, but you can't win a car one week and £25,000 the next. It's only fair to let a few different people win.

Similarly Magic 105.4 FM in London has some quite specific rules for its competitions too:

A person or people at the same residential address may not win more than one prize valued at £500 or greater within a one-year period following the first win.

But here are some other rules that Magic has in place for its competitions:

You must enter the Competition using your legal name.

We reserve the right to disqualify any entrant if we have reasonable grounds to believe the entrant has breached any of these Competition Terms.

You may only enter the Competition as an individual, any entries that, in our absolute discretion, have been made via participation in a syndicate will be disqualified.

We reserve the right, in our absolute discretion, to request a proof of identity and address in the form of your passport and driving licence, proof of your address in the form of a utility bill and proof of you vocal identity with an in-studio recording compared to your on air win audio.

A couple of odd ones there. Why does it worry about syndicates? And voice tests?

All becomes a little (but not much) clearer when you see a statement that's posted on the Magic FM website. Magic has a popular competition called "Mystery Voices" in which you have to guess the identities of three famous people from a very brief piece of audio. It's very hard, and each day that the competition continues, the prize fund increases.

Last time around it reached £168,600 before someone won the competition.

But according to Magic's statement:

Given the large sum of money involved and in accordance with our terms and conditions, we required the winner to provide proof of identity and to undertake a voice recognition test to satisfy the company that the participant had complied with the rules of the competition.

As a result of these exercises, Magic concluded that there was a serious breach of the competition rules, resulting in the judges' final decision to disqualify the winner.

Now I don't know the specifics of this instance, and in case there's any legal action pending, I'll talk hypothetically.

Hypothetically it's possible that someone has a "syndicate" of friends and colleagues who try to enter competitions. Perhaps they withold Caller ID to prevent stations seeing the same numbers come up. By using sheer weight of numbers (they might have additional lines installed at home), they get through to the station on a regular basis. They do still have to get the competition right. But if they've won recently before, it's a bit of a problem. The competition's rules say that they can't enter if they've won in the last 12 months. But they've got a friend's name and details who can replace theirs. This "friend" hasn't entered a competition on the station. The entrant names that person as the winner - they can share the cash out appropriately later.

But the station's a little clever, and wants to see a recording of the voice that called in is the same as the voice of the person who turns up to collect their cash. No match - no cheque. This is all hypothetical mind.

There are other oddities, hypothetically, used by "winners."

No they can't write the cheque in someone else's name because the winner "doesn't have a bank account."

The station can't put the holiday in someone else's name because "their cousin's going instead," and not at all because they've auctioned the holiday on eBay to someone else.

Yes you do have to come into London to collect your prize, and I'm sorry that you're "agoraphobic" - you're still needed here. We've got wheelchair access.

Why does your passport look defaced? Isn't that illegal?

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

For the most part of course, winners don't have to jump through hoops. Stations are just happy to dole out the prizes and move along to the next competition. Happy listeners, happy station with happy audio making for great programming. But stations wouldn't just want the same people to keep winning, particularly when their tactics might disadvantage other listeners. Hence stories like this one.

[As this entry is all about radio, I should reiterate that views mentioned here are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. Having said that...]

... or "Viewer Participation" is an essential part of all entertainment TV programmes now. Or at least it was until it was revealed to viewers that the TV companies were ripping them off in many instances.

But votes on programmes such as B** B****** have always been an intrinsic part and invariably there's always someone willing to pipe up about more votes being cast for the programme than at the last general election. What such "stats" fail to make clear is that the programmes practically encourage repeat-voting. As a rule Parliament doesn't like vote-stuffing in real world elections (well, unless you come from particular parts of Scotland, but let's not go into that now).

And if you're TV company is taking home 25p for every text and phone vote sent, then there's no real incentive to try to enforce a one-phone/one-vote rule. The BBC occassionally tries something to stop vote-stuffing when things like the Today Programme are electing their person of the year. But really, most people don't care.

Anyway, fast-forward to this week and C4 is reportedly cutting the cost of calling B** B****** by 50%, with no profit now being made by the channel. All very gallant.

But I'm curious to know what to think of the next part of the article:

Channel 4 said text voting had been axed because mobile phone operators cannot process SMS messages within a time frame suitable for the voting procedures on the programme.

Really? C4's always managed this in the past. Does that mean that text votes weren't counted in the past? Seemingly not:

"The voting has been fair and transparent throughout Big Brother's eight years on air, but given the recent focus on the use of premium-rate phone lines on TV we want to ensure the audience has absolute confidence in the evictions, which are absolutely integral to the show's success," said Andy Taylor, the Channel 4 managing director, new media.

Phew. That's OK then.

But a cynic might rather suspect that there may just have been, on occassion, instances where maybe not every single text vote was counted in the past. There was certainly an instance recently when ITV admitted that 11,500 Vodafone votes failed to be counted for an episode of Dancing on Ice. Fortunately for all concerned, the outcome of the programme's elimination would have been unchanged regardless of these missing votes. But to go back to a General Election analogy, even if one candidate won my constituency by 10,000 votes, that doesn't mean that I wouldn't mind if the van driving the ballot box from my village hall got lost, and its votes weren't counted (Or maybe the ferry coming from my island).

Nothing like covering your backside after the event is there?

In other reality news, is it just me, or is common decency and morality getting harder to find. In Australia there's the B** B****** contestant who's father has died but who hasn't been told. She's missed the funeral. Seemingly, she agreed to this course of events before entering the house, and her family are supportive. All I can say is that a lot of people have got their priorities very badly wrong. A fleeting attempt at "fame" is not worth it. In whatever passes in Australia for Heat magazine, she'll forever be remembered as the glory seeker who'd miss her own father's funeral to take part in a game show.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, three contestants are competing to "win" a new kidney. Words fail me.

Coming soon, text your votes in to say which prisoner on death row gets executed live on Friday night's show, and which gets a reprieve! You decide!

I'm on the move, and I want to catch a news bulletin. What should I do?

From today, if I want to, I can subscribe to ITN's Newsfix on my mobile phone for £2 a week. Or maybe I'd prefer to watch the BBC's free stream of News 24.

What would you do?

(OK - so the BBC's stream is probably going to be limited to Windows Smartphones and their ilk).

Oh - and on a non-3G phone, each ITN bulletin will use about 500k. How much extra will that cost you on your data package?

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To the Hammersmith Apollo to see a great Pet Shop Boys concert with all your favourites in a non-stop show. Great stuff, and more photos to be found here in my Flickr stream.

You really do need to listen to this week's episode of MediaGuardian's Media Talk podcast. Presenter Matt Wells interviews C4 Chief Exec Andy Duncan, and really takes him over the coals in response to Ofcom's damning endictment about how Channel 4 and producers Endemol failed in their duty.

As Emily Bell and Janine Gibson, also on the podcast, noted afterwards, there'd be no point in fining Channel 4 as it would simply amount to a fine against producers. But they really lay into Duncan and Chairman Luke Johnson, and wonder how they can remain at the top, particularly with Gordon Brown said to seriously be considering a sell-off of Channel 4.

I'd absolutely hate to see Channel 4 privatised, but I've got to admit that in the channel's current hands, things really aren't going to be too rosy. We've still got the full fallout of the Richard & Judy telephone vote scandal to come (and you just know that listeners who don't religiously hold onto phone bills and take some significant time and trouble, are not going to be reimbursed).

John Naughton points to this excellent piece by Marina Hyde.

Anyway, that's enough on an issue that's sadly only going to serve to give C4 more viewers for the next series. I think I may well reinstate my "BB Email Rule" that automatically deletes any email that mentions the programme and automatically sends a response to the sender asking them remove any reference to said show before re-contacting me.

[As ever, these are my personal opinions, and do not reflect those of my employer]

All culled from Broadcast:

- Kudos is developing a new BBC series called Outcasts, an SF series about "social misfits and criminals" sent into space to find and develop a new home for mankind. Science fiction is suddenly cool again with the likes of Dr Who, Battlestar Galactica, and even Life on Mars (yup - it counts - get over it)

- Roberts is to release a fifty pound iPod DAB/FM plug-in. This sounds like a great idea, except that worryingly, it's "about the size of an egg." What? Not the same shape as an egg surely? And my Nano on it's own is only marginally larger than an egg. We'll have to wait and see.

- B*g B*****r is back next week, and Ofcom has just published its report on the outcome of the recent "Celebrity" edition. It's 70 pages, so read it at your leisure. In summary, C4 has to broadcast the Ofcom adjudication three times starting with the beginning of next week's launch show, and is seemingly bringing back a Right to Reply type programme. While I'm glad that it's not in Ofcom's remit to ban programmes, I'd happily concede this to them. Oh well - that means nothing to watch on C4/E4 at all for the next three months.

- And the Competition Commission is looking at Sky's 17.9% stake in ITV which effectively blocked a mooted merger between ITV and Virgin Media.

A busy day.

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Realising that the reason the woman in front of me exiting the tube this morning is walking so slowly is that she's checking her Blackberry the nanosecond she's back in reception.

(We'll leave aside my Facebook refresh tendencies...)

I didn't comment on it at the time, but the best "Continuing Drama" award was given to Casualty. This was seen as a bit of a surprise at the time (As were many of the other awards - and I'm sure Ross Kemp on Gangs is good, but that good?).

As I don't watch any of the soaps, I couldn't tell you whether Casualty was leaps and bounds better than the others. But then I read this interesting blog post over at The Stage. Referencing another post at Broadcast it explains that in fact despite the series being "Continuing", they're judged on an individual episode. Now I didn't see the episode they entered, but Scott Matthewman who has said it was very good with a somewhat higher calibre of guest star and director than normal.

Is this a fair way of measuring "Continuing" dramas. I don't doubt that was an excellent episode. And we've all seen the odd powerful two-hander episodes of Eastenders over the years. But surely this award needs to be based on a minimum of say, three, episodes. And ideally they should be randomly chosen.

Having said that, every other series award is also likely to be based on a single episode submitted. Is it really that hard for the BAFTA jurors to sit down and watch the whole series of Life on Mars or whatever? Consumers seem to lap up box sets. I'd have said that once you've reached the shortlist, judges should have to see at least six episodes of each show. If they truly work in the industry, they're probably watching these programmes anyway, but it's not that onerous a task. Booker Prize judges have to read hundreds of novels after all.

Oh dear - a very poorly argued episode on the supposed dangers of Wi-Fi. I just don't know where to begin with this sensationalist scaremongering.

The relative powers of different kinds of transmitters was ignored, the inverse square law was ignored, and it was mixture of facts and unproven information.

We heard about Sylvia who is supposedly electro-sensitive. The results of some research into her sensitivity were not in, but according to the programme Sylvia could tell two-thirds of the time whether or not there was electro-magnetic radiation. Except that we don't know how many trials were conducted, as two-thirds could easily be within the limits of randomly guessing.

Oh and by the way, this programme was brought to most of us via giant masts that broadcast with massive amounts of power to ensure that we can get the signal just about anywhere.

If someone can prove that there's a danger to Wi-Fi, then I'm happy to give it up, but at the moment, simply wandering around Norwich City Centre measuring signal levels is not really helpful.

How many of these people are using mobile phones? Microwave ovens? Listen to the radio or watch TV?

If we're truly worried about our childrens' schools then we need to site them all away from major roads and ban parents driving kids to school. The 100% proven damage from traffic fumes is far more serious. After all, we know full-well that asthma's on the increase.

I'm not alone in believing that this ridiculous scaremongering: checkout the feedback to the programme itself. It's all just really bad science.

(Oh and "3,000 hotspots"? Commercial ones maybe, but try closer to 300,000 when you take into account work and home hotspots. Without some kind - any kind - of scientific proof, I'm still not concerned)

Addendum - This was an email I genuinely received from someone who shall remain nameless in corporate HR. I really shouldn't reproduce it here, but I can't help myself:

WiFi has been in the news today following a BBC investigation into claims that WiFi can have long term health effects.
As you know, all of our buildings are WiFi networked to allow laptops users to work anywhere in the building. We continually monitor guidelines from the government's Health & Safety Executive (HSE) on WiFi and although there are some levels of concern, HSE advise us that no threat to human health has yet been proven from exposure to WiFi.

Of course, we'll keep you updated on this if the situation changes. If you do have any questions please give me a call.

You don't know how much I wanted to give them a call and discuss the finer points of the issue to see exactly how up to speed they are. But I'm nice. And I didn't.

John Naughton and Sean French are baffled about how someone could put this sequence together of 100 quotes from 100 films counting down the numbers from one to one hundred.

Naughton thinks that it's un-Googleable. Well it's very Googleable. Or rather, with a good knowledge of various sites, you could do it.

It's worth noting that the sequence includes a lot of popular classics. Many of the lines are either familiar themselves, or come from films that have significant fan-bases. Those films have digital scripts and quotation collections to be found around the internet.

IMDB, for example, has a page that lets you search among quotes listed on the site. Using letters and numbers, you could quickly generate a list to get editing from.

As an example, a search for "thirty-seven" brought up Clerks, Men In Black (used in the video), Mission Impossible II, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, as well as other films I've not seen.

The editing is, of course, the slow part. But I'd also make use of somewhere like Drew's Script-O-Rama which has hundreds of scripts and transcripts for more searching and for finding where in the various films, the quotes occur.

Of course, if I was doing this, I'd share the load. I'd get a film studies class on the case. 30 students each finding 3-4 clips a piece would soon give me what I wanted.

Anyway, a seemingly impossible job without an obsession like Peter Greenaway, is actually very doable. And the guy who made it, writes about it here.

Some high/low-lights:

The ridiculous charade that is "Continuing Drama Series" when they mean "Soap" Award.

The look on Ross Kemp's face when he realised that "Ross Kemp on Gangs" had actually won. OK - so I've never seen an episode, but it must be really good to beat the others: Tribe, Stephen Fry - Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, and Who Do You Think You Are. Ross is off to Afghanistan tomorrow, although it wasn't clear if this means Ultimate Force has been recommissioned.

Graham Norton reminding us that the version of Celebrity Big Brother that was up for the Audience Award was the one before all the racism started.

The slight snarl on the face of Peter Jones when Graham Norton cracked a gag about ITV ripping off Dragons' Den with such shows as the forthcoming Tycoon (produced by one Peter Jones).

Why's Joan Rivers there?

If Planet Earth doesn't win "Best Factual Programme" then... well... [Moments later] And it didn't. Nuremberg: Goering's Last Stand won. Hmm. So just to check - if Planet Earth doesn't win the audience vote award (where it's up against Celeb Big Brother, Life on Mars, The Royal Family, and (*shudder*) The Vicar of Dibley).

Is it wrong to over-celebrate when your "News Coverage" award is about a tragedy? OK - he was gracious in his acceptance defeat. Still, the award might at least stop ITV cutting their regional news to the bone anymore.

Well "Drama Series" simply can't be either Sugar Rush or Shameless can it. Life on Mars must be odds on favourite by some margin. [Moments later] So The Street won. That's actually a fair result as it's a great programme even if it's not as much fun as Life on Mars. Oh, and I don't think it's really an "ITV" programme. Granada, certainly, but unless ITV commissioned it, then it 'ain't an ITV show.

Was the sequence of great TV detectives edited together from clips gathered from YouTube? Some of them looked awful. I'm not sure what the point of it all was.

Just a thought for these things, but how about miking up the presenters of the awards rather than the ungainly sight of Kris Marshall having to lean in from on high to reach the microphone?

Jonathan Ross couldn't be bothered to show up for his award. I'm sure it's a good reason. He did manage to broadcast his radio show yesterday, so he's most likely in the country!

Last time I checked, The Royle Family was a half-hour show (albeit with the special being longer).

Now we know why Joan Rivers is here. An in case you hadn't realised, this is a recording to bleep out Rivers' language.

What that means is that I can leap ahead and see all the rest of the winners. I'm pleased to see that Entourage won.

It's still very strange for a fellow nominee to collect the winner's award on their behalf. At least Stephen Merchant is actually a friend of Ricky Gervais.

Anyway, all the results are over here.

Here's a dull sounding subject which doesn't seem to have had an enormous amount of coverage this week. The House of Commons Committee for Media, Culture and Sport has published a report of recommendations across a wide range of media issues. There are 28 in total, covering a wide range of issues - I'll concentrate on just one.

We recommend that the Government should press the European Commission to bring forward proposals for an extension of copyright term for sound recordings to at least 70 years, to provide reasonable certainty that an artist will be able to derive benefit from a recording throughout his or her lifetime.

According to PPL, the UK is an unattractive place to record because you get 95 years copyright on recordings from date of recording rather than the paltry 50 you get here. Catalogue values are reduced as a result of this shorter period, so the argument goes.

Of course, most recordings that remain in copyright as they approach that 50 year limit are completely unavailable, unless you can hunt out old pieces of vinyl. Certainly, all the famous recordings are readily available - The Beatles, Elivs, Cliff Richard... But not the rest. The other songs that were in the charts.

Seemingly, the whole of the record industry agreed with the proposal to keep their recordings exclusively to themselves. Who'd have thought?

Read more here and here.

Incidentally, I can't help but notice that a certain amount of The Beatles back catalogue is now vaguely appropriately priced for recordings that are forty years' old or so. Sgt. Pepper is a tenner in Virgin just now. I don't doubt the musical genius of the pieces, just the appallingly over-priced nature of them. Until now, at least. It couldn't be anything to do with iTunes selling the albums at around eight pounds a pop someday soon?

Happy 45th Birthday Alan Johnston, wherever you're being held.

So what is localness?

I'm just wondering because today Xfm announced its much rumoured (within the radio industry at least) initiative to get rid of its daytime DJs and run an "all music" daytime schedule.

Between 10am and 4pm each day, Xfm will be running "Radio to the Power of U." And this will happen across all three of the current Xfm stations. It's worth noting that Xfm has just been awarded a South Wales licence too, so what will happen there I wonder?

UK local radio stations have formats that stipulate how much local programming they carry. For the three Xfm stations these are as follows:

Xfm 106 in Scotland's licence says: "24 hours a day all locally made save for the occasional syndicated programme/features."
Xfm London: "24 hours a day (at least 16 hrs locally made)"
Xfm Manchester: "24 hours a day(at least 20 hours locally made)"

While London is more flexible, it's clear from Xfm Scotland's requirements that we must consider that this programming is indeed "local" because it's been chosen by local listeners.

Reading back through what Ofcom defines as localness, it's clear that the traditional idea of a DJ located within the area talking about that same area is not essential.

Localness can be both characterised and delivered in a number of ways (news, information, comment, outside broadcasts, what’s-on, travel news, interviews, charity involvement, weather, local artists, local arts and culture, sport coverage, phone-ins, listener interactivity etc.), therefore precise definitions can be unhelpful.

As ever, it's going to be the bits around the music that will make the station local. However we could start counting the number of angels that can fit on a pinhead if we're not careful with arcane requirements determining where your jukebox server is hosted mattering in Ofcom's eyes.

How is the new-look Xfm going to back-announce the songs it's playing? Particularly in the case of a station that explicitly must play new music? Xfm 104.9 in London's format as specified to Ofcom, describes (in part) the music it should play as follows:

Up to 50% of the output will be current popular alternatives (from the last two months), with the rest of programming made up of breakthrough tracks from the previous fortnight, classic alternatives and “roots” tracks which played a part in alternative evolution. None of those categories should exceed 30% of the output.

So who's going to tell listeners what they've just heard? The listeners themselves in recorded messages?

In the States, Jack FM is a format that's done relatively well in recent years, employing a DJ-less environment with a pre-recorded "snarky" voice breaking up the records. The playlist is a lot deeper than an average station's, and they play fewer ads. It's obviously an exceptionally cheap programming format, although in limited doses, arguably quite refreshing. However Jack FM plays tracks you already know. You're probably not going to be upset when a DJ doesn't tell you what you just heard. It's very different for new music.

The UK is soon to get its first Jack FM in Oxford, where a station is using the Jack FM format. In their Ofcom licence application (PDF) they promise non-stop music from 10am - 7pm with just two ad-breaks an hour.

Xfm claims that this change isn't a cost-cutting exercise, we're told, because "None of the presenters or production team would lose their jobs. The DJs affected will be moved to other slots, although the total number of hours they are on air will inevitably be reduced." Given that many DJs are paid on a shift by shift basis, that could well mean that the six DJs involved will have little to no income.

There's a discussion about the relative merits of this move over at MediaGuardian. My favourite quote so far is: "Just music is what iPods are for, except they don't have jingles and ads."

[Since this entry is explicitly about radio, I should highlight that these views are all my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer]

We all know that Flickr is really cool don't we? I mean, I've certainly always thought so. Until now.

That's why I was appalled to read this post from Rebekka who's easily one of the more famous Flickr photographers.

She put up a composite of several photos she'd taken of her home country Iceland and explained that they'd all been illegally downloaded and sold by a UK based company for money. Going through sales on eBay, she calculated that they'd benefited to the tune of several thousand pounds. She'd talked to a lawyer in Iceland, but being relatively poor and in another country, he'd been unable to help.

There were hundreds of comments below, not all of which I read, but which were very supportive of her plight.

And now Flickr has removed the whole thing.

Thomas Hawk (another great internet photographer) has more.

Not cool.

[Update] Flickr has apologised.

[Update 2] And fronted it all up in their blog.

The whole Sky on Freeview situation has become quite complicated, and it hasn't been made a great deal clearer today.

To recap: back at the start of February, on the day that Virgin Media launched, Sky announced that it wanted to launch it's own DTT platform. Sky is a part of the Freeview consortium, and has had three channels on the service since it launched - Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three (previously Sky Travel).

Sky planned to replace those three free-to-air channels with four subscription channels. To get four channels out of the space used by three, they wanted to adopt MPEG4 technology rather than the older less-efficient MPEG2 technology currently used by Freeview boxes. This would mean that none of the current 8 million or more boxes on the market would work with the new service. Sky would launch its own box with its own encryption.

The obvious reason for this sudden interest in Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT - the generic name for "Freeview" channels) was almost certainly because upstart sports channel Setanta had leased space to broadcast its service on Freeview using encryption technology supplied by Top-Up TV.

Hope you're keeping up!

Top-Up TV is a service that allows subscribers access to a limited amount of programming from additional digital channels not currently available on Freeview. It does this using a PVR device allowing viewers to watch previously recorded programmes. Crucially, a significant proportion of Freeview boxes in the market have slots for Top-Up TV encryption cards, and so can also be used to serve Setanta customers.

With football rights having to be divided into more at least two packages following a European ruling, Setanta has picked up some Premiership football - albeit the poorest package - and was going to be in an exclusive position to offer DTT customers access to those games.

By making this announcement, Sky wanted to be in a position to offer an alternative to DTT customers. The feeling was that the four channels Sky would offer would have been Sky News, Sky One (including all that expensive programming that's just been made unavailable to Virgin Media subscribers) and something like Sky Movies Lite and Sky Sports Lite - offering a single stream of each strand of programming, almost certainly offering football when played.

Then Ofcom came out with a curious statement. It noted that Sky had announced what it had planned to do, and then pointed out that "it will consult on any such proposals." In other words - Sky had yet to make its proposals to Ofcom as it legally had to. But should it do so, here are the things that Ofcom was going to consider. These included the benefits of migrating to MPEG4 technology, the detriment a reduction of services would bring to the consumer, the possibility of incompatibility of older boxes with multiplexes using both MPEG2 and MPEG4 technology (as the multiplex that Sky was broadcasting on would then be using) and the overall effect on consumer confidence.

That last point would seem to be especially important since later this year, the first community in the UK completes its television digital switchover with the analogue signal being switched off. And we're hearing plenty of stories about the failure to understand what this means, with news this week that many landlords and tenants not understanding the implications. And Ray Snoddy rightly highlighting something in this week's Media Independent that I've been shouting about for years. That is, that politicians really don't have a clue about how big a backlash they'll feel should digital switchover not be incredibly carefully managed. Snoddy uses the analogy of local elections and voters kicking out councils that drop from weekly to fortnightly bin collections. Seriously - these are the things that really matter to voters. I really hope Gordon Brown keeps a very close eye on proceedings for his sake!

But getting back to Sky and DTT - today saw two further developments. First of all, a story from Marketing magazine (free registration reqd.) claimed that Ofcom had shot down Sky's request. In particular, the thorny subject was the lack of plurality in news provision with Sky News being removed as a free-to-air service. Mediaguardian reported the same story somewhat differently (irrespective of the comments below the Marketing story), saying that the Sky News provision had emerged as "an issue."

"There are discussions going on about this but we are miles away from taking any decision," the Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, told MediaGuardian.co.uk.

So what does this mean? Well for one thing, Sky obviously did get around to formally approaching Ofcom - something I'm not sure has been public knowledge up until now. There's always been a suggestion that the 'proposal' was just to act as a spoiler to Virgin Media's launch while at the same time creating confusion in the Pay DTT market and perhaps causing potential Setanta subscribers to hold off.

Well now we know that they definitely did want to do it, but that Ofcom wants to investigate the matter further.

But my question is this: if Sky News is the sticking point, what's to stop Sky putting Sky News onto the Freeview platform at all? They don't offer their premium entertainment channel, Sky One, for free. They could surely replace it with, say, Sky Two. Indeed, it's widely understood that Sky News is not a money making operation - those Skycopters cost a lot to keep in the air. Is it not possible that James/Rupert Murdoch mightn't just shut down Sky News if he wanted to? Then what could Ofcom do about it? There'd be no plurality in news provision, but with there no longer being an ITV News channel, what are the options? Hold open a spot for CNN?

I guess we'll have to wait and see. What's 100% clear is that Sky's not going to have a DTT offering in place in time for August and the start of the new football season. That gives Setanta a bit of a head start. Sky can still catch up, and it's possible that they might work out a way of leaving Sky News on Freeview, but either buying up some bandwidth or compressing their signal down further, to allow it to continue with its plans. I guess we'll have to watch this space.

Even if John "Foghorn" Sweeney did come out as a bit of a clown towards the end of the Panorama on Scientology, they remain a somewhat sinister "religion." And "sinister" is not a word that any religion should really want itself to be described as. You've got until next Monday to watch it again online.

Radio 3's new slate of plays looks good. No mention of Stoppard though.

And get a first look at Eastender's Zoe Slater as The Bionic Woman - now confirmed for NBC's autumn schedule. There are plenty of other Brits plying their trade in Hollywood on TV projects just now - they must be getting jealous of Hugh Laurie's success.

There've been one or two pieces recently bemoaning the sad departure of several treasures from Radio 4 and Five Live including in particular A World In Your Ear.

Essentially, it's too expensive and labour intensive to put together. I must admit that it's one of those programmes that I know I enjoy, but never find enough time to listen to. Which is my fault, I know, but if I only I could download them...

The BBC Trust has recently authorised the go ahead of on-demand services. In the press this was widely reported as the iPlayer and the Beeb's TV catch-up service. But non-DRM audio downloads also form a part of this, and with only book readings and classical music being excluded, I'd hope that the majority of radio documentaries such as A World In Your Ear will now be included amongst the BBC's podcasts - certainly those without music issues anyway. A science programme or two would be nice to begin with. And I'm sure that Jeff Randall's Weekend Business would be enormously popular.

As an aside, the two exclusions specifically mentioned in the Public Value Trust final conclusions document were classical music, for which the record industry has successfully argued against because it might damage their business (I vehemently disagree with this), and audiobooks, since this is a burgeoning area (I'd have thought that there was little danger here, since the copyright of the books will almost certainly remain with the publisher or author, who'll be free to insist that DRM-free downloads should not be made available since they're selling their own CDs or using a service like Audible).

However, comedy programmes and plays are not excluded, and I really hope that we'll start to see downloads of some these made available. Again, the copyright might well remain with the authors of the plays, and agreements might need reaching. But given the vast amount of drama produced that has no further anciliary use on either CD-releases or BBC7 repeats, I'm sure a great deal could be released. There'd certainly be music issues with some plays, but for others where specially composed music is used, those could again be overcome. Most writers would be happy that their work reaches a wider audience surely? And since nearly all radio drama is broadcast during the day, the potential for reaching a significantly increased listenership is enormous.

Here's ITV's schedule tonight:

19:00 Emmerdale [Farm] - Trashy daily soap
19:30 Coronation Street - Less trashy nearly-daily soap (Never watched and not about to start)
20:00 Road to Ruin: Tonight - Sir Trev introduces a film he may not have even watched. All about the state of our roads.
20:30 Coronation Street - Episode positioned solely to get BBC1 viewers to turn over after Eastenders.
21:00 Driving Me Crazy - "In the first of three programmes offering celebrities the chance to get something off their chest on the subject of motoring, John Sergeant rails against the 4x4." I get annoyed about 4x4s. But an hour? At 9pm? Almost certainly done better by John Ware's recent BBC2 series.
22:00 Teen Boob Jobs: Too Much Too Young - Dear God no. Is this what we've come to in 2007? You just know that the audience they're aiming for is one that wants to ogle teenagers' breasts.
22:30 ITV News - I really feel sorry for ITN. Newsnight's the better option here isn't it?
23:00 Film: Predator - 20 year old film with Arnie.
00:55 Champions League Weekly - ITV is contractually obligated to show this.
01:25 Glitterball - Ripping off our stupid viewers.

I did watch Stephen Fry's Kingdom on ITV last night, and what became really obvious is the lack of suitable other programmes to trail during the ad breaks. The Bill? The network premiere of Ray? That Shane Ritchie thing later in the week?

I suppose The Last Detective is OK-ish. And there might be a new Miss Marple on Friday - I prefer Joan Hickson to be honest. But ITV still has some real work to do. A non-soap, non-one-off drama series might be an idea.

Charlie Brooker's Guardian Guide column yesterday was not devoted to any programmes at all. Instead he rightly broad the barrel of his guns to bear on new BBC commissioning rules regarding end credits.

Now this might sound like something of an esoteric subject, of little concern to anyone other than editors who need to ensure that everything's in the right place.

Well - it's far more important than that.

It means that creatively we're no longer leaving any time at the end of programmes for a little bit of reflection or even discussion amongst your friends and family. Instead, the nano-second that the action is complete, the credits will shrink and we'll be immediately informed what's coming next.

Of course, if you're watching a channel aimed at people with short attention spans (BBC Three and, er, BBC Two!?) you already get "coming next" banners distracting you from the programme you're actually trying to watch right now.

If I was a senior Equity or other broadcast medium union representative, I'd be extremely unhappy that credits are being treated with quite so much disdain. Never mind the fact that programme makers are now being creatively constrained.

To be completely fair, there is one very small part of the new rules I do agree with - horizontally crawling credits are to be banned. I've no problem with them creatively, but they tend to go by so fast you simply can't read them. This is mainly because of digital/analogue transmission issues. If the crawl is slowed down - like those on news channels - there's no problem.

Like all great new initiatives, these trends come from the US, where networks are desperate to hold on to viewers. It's now very usual to have no gap between the end of one programme and the start of the next. The credits get shrunk and a programme trail plays alongside it. When the 30 seconds of theme are up, the next programme starts straight away. Other trails come around the copious ad breaks during the programme. They certainly don't want you channel surfing.

Indeed they're actually getting to the point where one programme is ending at the same time as the next programme is starting.

Add to that all the pointless DOGs becoming ever more present on programmes (It's 'Morse Weekend' on ITV3. I know this because it tells me the whole time. And there's the really completely pointless "Something For The Weekend" DOG on Tim Lovejoy's not-at-all-like 'Soccer Saturday' Sunday morning show) and we're in a wasteland of graffiti all over our screens.

And these things are becoming ever more pointless. I now find that I rarely watch live TV outside of the news and sport. So telling me what's on next is useless unless I've already recorded it.

According to The Stage, Radio 3 is putting together a Stoppard Season. This is expected to include the recent Rock'n'Roll as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I'm hoping that Radio 3 opens up its archives and repeats its 1993 production of Arcadia featuring the original cast. I never did get around to cleaning up my awful cassette recording of it, but it's a wonderful play - quite possibly my all-time favourite - and aside from a repeat the following year, hasn't been broadcast since or commercially released anywhere (please do let me know if you think this is incorrect).

Anyhow, it's something to look forward to this summer!

Excellent news: Uri Geller is being sued (Via Bad Science).

I can't believe the number of times that Dixons Stores Group can put out effectively the same press release, and still get the media lapping it up.

Today, it's the shock-horror news that they're no longer going to sell blank cassettes. Are we going to get this same story every time DSG makes a decision about what products they're going to stock?

We've already had VCRs, Analogue Radios (not remotely true as they still sell worldband radios as well as AM/FM radios built into mini-systems), CRT televisions (even though in many cases, they're still better than their flatscreen equivalents), 35mm film cameras (nobody's making them much, so it's moot) and even incandescent bulbs (seriously - who goes to Currys to buy bulbs?). I expect I missed the LaserDisc, Disc Camera and Eight-track Cartridge announcements.

Isn't reporting these releases the equivalent to building a feature from a press-released "poll?" Mabe Argos is missing a trick by not listing junked items between its catalogues.

It's just lazy journalism.

To Arsenal to see the final game of the season. A draw meant that Man Utd deprived Chelsea of the Premiership title.

But isn't it just typical of Mourinho that when the steadicam operator was circling him as he want onto the pitch he swears at the cameraman. The BBC's highlights carefully cutaway in time. But it was obvious what he was saying - and it was less Portuguese than Anglo-Saxon in origin.

I truly believe that England does indeed have the best domestic football in the world. We laugh at countries like the US and their Major League Soccer "franchises." Premiership football is now sold at a big premium throughout the world - why else is the FA going to court against YouTube if not to protect those rights?

But we really do need to become more professional in our attitudes towards the media. That means players too. No swearing. No mouthing of swearing. No failures to give broadcasters interviews. These are basics. At Arsenal today, the latest Nike advert promoting the forthcoming new Arsenal away kit uses the genius of pre-war Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman. Would he have stood for some of the things that still pass in the English game?

Maybe I did Horizon a little bit of a disservice a few weeks ago when I moaned about the appalling state of it. I still stand by everything I said then, but it's become obvious that the BBC front-loaded this run of the series with poorer programmes.

It's still true that some of the subject matter we've had this time around would have been better served it QED (or a reworked Tomorrow's World) still existed on BBC1, but it's true to say that there have been better editions recently.

There was the programme about The Moon For Sale which was a reasonable consideration about why we're returning to the moon. Battle of the Brains completely belonged in another series, but it was a good programme nonetheless trying to examine what intelligence really is. Skyscraper Fire Fighters was worthwhile. And this week's The Six Billion Dollar Experiment was a triumphant return to form looking at the Large Hadron Collider and the science behind it. It did exactly what good science TV programming should do - tackle a complicated subject, and make it accessible to the viewer. So congrats to James Van Der Pool and the team on this episode.

Next week, it's "How to Commit the Perfect Murder."

Hmm.

I still hate the Flash-laden Horizon website, complete with an utterly pointless vote for each programme. Seriously - we don't need to make every programme interactive by including a "vote" element - particularly when most of those voting really don't have a clue about the real science behind it (currently 46.8% of voters think that the 2+ billion euro machine shouldn't be switched on).

Hey! Every other muppet is launching a range of clothing. Obviously, I have zero designing skills, but I have worn clothes nearly all my life, so I must know something right? I'm not even a singer.

Get queuing now, as my exclusive range of geek-wear will be available from 9am Monday in branches of Halfords, where you'll also be able to pick up my patented engine de-greaser anti-aging cream. Seriously - it works. Some woman on Horizon said so. And it'll all come in my limited edition, environmentally friendly black bin-liner. They're trading on eBay for literally pence.

Coming soon, my childrens' books...