June 2007 Archives
I visted the O2 last night (previously the Dome) for a "secret" Snow Patrol gig that was an invitation only affair for many of the people who worked on the site, or had something to do with it. My involvement is minimal to non-existent - I supplied the odd piece of data to a friend who works there.
The last time I got off the tube at North Greenwich was in 2000 when the Dome was originally open. I was vaguely curious about the delights it held in store at the time, but my real reason was that somewhere within, there was a machine that scanned your body and allowed you to create a digital avatar. You could then use this in various PC games. As it happens, I didn't really use mine as the resulting avatar really brought home how out of shape I was.
Anyway, last night I made my first return visit, and the Jubilee line delivers you straight to the neon lit venue. Once inside the dome, they x-ray your bags (or at least should), and then you can wander around the various shops and bars. There's an 11 screen Vue cinema, and a VIP bar which was quite smart.
I was whisked upstairs into one of the very plush suites which have a bar and eating area at the back, and seats in the arena at the front. All in all a very civilised way to watch a concert (Of course, this does now prevent me from writing a rant that I'd had building up inside me, about all the VIPs at that great "egalitarian" festival Glastonbury. Still, you do have to read Charlie Brooker on Glastonbury in Monday's Guardian). I preferred to sit on bar stools overlooking the seats in front of me into the main arena.
The arena is very adaptable with sports events including basketball, ice hockey and, er, Ultimate Fighting Championship events coming up. I also understand that for smaller events they can put in a fake ceiling to make the arena feel more intimate and cut-off the top tier of seats.
What about the concert? Well, I saw Snow Patrol on the Isle of Wight a couple of weeks ago, and they're very much a band that everybody likes a bit, but nobody loves. They're quite probably the biggest selling contemporary band in the UK, but they're just not a band you can get excited about. The invited audience at this gig certainly didn't get too excited. The band played gamely on, and had success with a couple of their really big numbers.
What I will say is that the acoustics are excellent. AEG, the American company who built it, are stadium experts and considering that it's a similar size to Earls Court or Wembley Arena, it sounds vastly better.
Finally, a really nice thing. There's a bit of wall somewhere near the main entrance which has the names of 11,000 or so people who worked on the project. And my name's up there! Names are sorted in alphabetical order, and although this terrible photo doesn't do it justice, I'm on the topline. I love it - even though I feel a bit of a fraud (See also my Lord of Rings DVD appearance).
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Five has been fined £300,000 by Ofcom - the largest ever fine for a public service broadcaster - for faking winners and misleading its audience with Brainteaser on five separate occasions.
Good.
Today Ofcom has announced that it will conduct a public consultation into Sky's proposal to replace it's Freeview channels with three pay channels on DTT.
As regular readers will recall, this proposal came as a counter measure to Setanta who will have Freeview, and also acted as a nice distraction for the launch of Virgin Media.
Anyway, now Ofcom has determined that a public consultation will take place in the autumn, with a statement in the new year.
I'm guessing that Sky will be a little frustrated at this outcome since it gives Setanta a few months to build their business.
[UPDATE] Sky isn't very happy at all.
And so to Hyde Park Calling - a festival that happens at the same time as Glastonbury, and so has an "old rocker" feel to it.
Due to a bit of a cock-up on my part, one of the newer singers I wanted to see, Terra Naomi, who'd I heard on the cover CD of this month's Word magazine, was singing the last lines of the last verse of her last song as I entered her tent. Not a great start then.
The set-up is one big stage and two smallish tents. I was actually quite worried about how small the tents were, because I was planning on seeing the Buena Vista Social Club in one of them later. I made a mental note to make sure that I arrived nice and early to see them.
On the main stage, I watched The Feeling perform essentially the same set as they'd performed at the Isle of Wight Festival a couple of weeks ago. That didn't bother me too much because I'd enjoyed it before, and they've got a few quite decent songs, and I got to hear their cover of Video Killed the Radio Star again. What a great song!
The one worry I had was that the heavens were going to open at any time. Most people were glancing in a worried manner skywards every so often.
Next up was Crowded House, who were pretty good. I say that, but I only stayed for a couple of songs before heading off to the second stage in one of the tents. I wanted to make sure I could get in for the Buena Vista guys.
I needn't have worried as there was plenty of space when I got there and watched Jason Mraz finish up. He was pretty good from what I saw of him, but his fanbase and that of the next band didn't seem to overlap and they all left. That afforded me the chance to get right down to the front and stand on the railings at the dead centre of the stage. You really couldn't get a closer and better view.
And that's where I stayed for the entire show. The Buena Vista Social Club band was formed for the film of the same name by Wim Wenders back in 1999. Since then, a few of the big stars who came together for that film and the subsequent album and concert performances have died. But Cuba's an incredibly musical place, and those band members have been replaced. As the Wikipedia entry quotes, the band is "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person ... It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."
So today's version is not at all the same as the band we've seen in the film, although several "original" members are still there performing.
Nonetheless, they still play some quality music and a packed tent (made even more packed by the heavens suddenly opening and a much promised dumping of rain finally arriving) is soon dancing and clapping along to the great melodies.
I had a whale of a time.
Afterwards, I wandered out to watch a little of Peter Gabriel before I left to go home. I didn't hang around long, as one after another unfamiliar song was played. Then Gabriel announced that he'd held a vote on his website where fans had picked some of the lesser played songs for him to perform tonight. Suddenly, even though this was a "festival" where greatest hits sets go down fine, we were to become a fan club only event. I left.
Taking Liberties is that rarest of things - a low budget British documentary released in the cinema. It covers a subject that's very close to my heart, the reduction of civil liberties we've seen under the premiership of Tony Blair over the last ten years.
It tells its tale using a combination of archive clips, illustrative pieces of old film, and fresh interviews and pieces.
The film takes turns in examining the loss of several liberties including the right to protest, free speech, privacy, detention without trial, extradition and torture. It does these in a clever and witty manner.
Right from the beginning, you're scared quite what the authorities are now able to do. We're accompanying three coach loads of middle aged people who want to protest at an American airforce base. There are a lot of police watching them. They decide to turn the coaches around. There's no discussion. These are peaceful people. The police force the coach to return all the way to London. The drivers aren't even allowed to stop at service stations.
Some of the areas it covers are obvious, but at other times, even someone who likes to think they're aware what's going on is shocked by what they see. So we meet someone who's basically a prisoner in his own home. He's a suspected terrorist, yet he hasn't been charged with anything. Instead, he's under virtual house arrest, with a tag preventing leaving an arbitrary area around his North London home.
And I never expected to feel sympathy for a member of the NatWest 3. These, you'll remember, are three ex-bankers who have been extradited to the US. The member in the film even acknowledges that he's not likely to be the most loved person. Yet, with no evidence whatsoever, the British Government is happy to ship him off to America, where he must sit around and await a trial.
Of course there are sections on ID Cards, and there are bits on Torture. They cheekily use a clip of 24 which does indeed tend to suggest that torture works. It probably does help the populace at large believe that torture really does work. It doesn't of course. I'll tell you anything you want to hear if you start to hurt me.
The only problem I have with this film is that it's not going to be seen very widely. I rather suspect that most of the people who go along and see it will be the converted. I watched it at an early-evening midweek screening that wasn't especially busy. And I can't see that it's going to be very easy to get shown on TV because it is enormously partisan.
That said, I hope the DVD is released nice and cheaply and passed around as much as possible. It really is scary what is happening while we sit back and let it happen. We really are letting the terrorists win and we lose our freedoms.
The film's website is here.
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I'm sure earlier in the year, or perhaps late last year, I saw trailers for Live Free or Die Hard. But in the meantime, somebody noticed that Web 2.0 was a bit of a buzzword, and since this film is all about using the power of computers to bring down the state, it was renamed Die Hard 4.0. To be honest, it's a better title.
John McClane (Bruce Willis) is back, some twelve years after the last entry in the franchise. Relative new boy Len Wiseman takes on the directorial reigns, with John McTiernan who directed the first and third films getting a Producer credit. Who's Len Wiseman? Well he's directed those Underworld films and is married to Kate Beckinsdale. I'm not sure that thought thrilled me as I entered the cinema.
McClane's daughter is now a teenager and as soon as we meet her, we know that she'll be involved in the plot later on. McClane has to pick up a teenage hacker (they're all teenagers, right?) in a routine sweep for the FBI. But the fact that a hit-squad is trying to kill him alerts McClane to something more nefarious.
Bad guy Timothy Olyphant is leading a high-tech attack on the US, employing a group of skilled hackers to shut down transport, communications and power around the country with something called a fire-sale. Fortunately, while Homeland Security et al are left paralysed, McCane is able to get around with his young hacker accomplice to thwart their every move.
The production notes to the film explained that they wanted to do stunts with as much realism as they could before resorting to CGI. That seems to be true to a point, but there's also a lot of CGI as well, especially later in the film. A chase sequence where McCane, in a car, is being chased by a helicopter is good fun, and the denouement brings a cheer in the cinema. And a scene that ends with an SUV in an elevator shaft is also good.
But there's also a scene involving some kind of fighter jet and a truck. I won't say any more, but obviously CGI is used enormously, and the whole big budget sequence is terrible. It just doesn't work, and reminds you of that awful bit in True Lies that involved Arnie hanging onto a Harrier.
It's a shame really because overall the film's pretty good. Yes McCane keeps getting back up every time he's knocked down, which is a good effort considering Willis is now 52. But the story just about holds together, the villain is good, and the pace keeps up pretty well. But I suspect that for some visceral "real" thrills, we're going to have to wait for The Bourne Ultimatum later in the summer.
I'm not sure what the UK certificate for the film is going to be, but if my eyes and ears didn't deceive me, it looks as though a single strong swearword (inevitably added to ensure the film doesn't get too low a rating in the US) has been dubbed out for the UK - probably to get a 12 or 12A rather a 15. It's the first time I've noticed a dubbed word on a film soundtrack. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.
I saw this film at a preview screening, and can I just say that however much you might just have enjoyed a film, there's nothing more of a downer than facing a bun fight of 2,000 people (approximately the capacity of the Odeon Leicester Square) all trying to retrieve their mobile phones simultaneously. I know that phones like the Nokia N95 have five mega pixel cameras on them these days, but is phonecam shot movie really going to a major piracy concern? There's got to be a better solution. All that happens is that 2,000 people end their evening a bit pissed off.
[UPDATE] It seems that in the US, this film is still called Live Free or Die Hard whereas in the UK (and much of the rest of the world) it's Die Hard 4.0. A very curious state of affairs.
Being interviewed in Second Life is utterly pointless.
What next? Political interviews in the middle of Deal or No Deal?
Alan Johnston has now been held in captivity for 100 days.
The Progressive Patriot is one of those books that's going to defy categorisation in bookshops and libraries. It's part autobiography, part history and part social history.
Bragg takes us on something of a personal journey to understand his roots. We travel this journey, partly by way of his East End/Essex born family, but dip in and out of the history of Britain, and England in particular.
We also learn something of Bragg's musical heritage, from his early love of Simon and Garfunkel to his discovering of punk, properly in the guise of The Clash.
It's a good book, and I didn't read it because I'm particularly a fan of Bragg. I guess I admire his work more than love it. But he's an excellent story teller, and I always listen out for radio or television interviews.
I do have some issues with his slightly too accommodating views on ID Cards towards the end - but then you'd be surprised if I didn't. And sometimes, he still has to hammer home his politics a little more than is necessary, especially when it sometimes feels that today's Tories are actually to the left of some Labour policies.
Exactly which part of Cloud Cuckoo Land does Home Office minister Liam Byrne live in?
He's reported today as saying that Blair's pointless, over-priced, Big Brotheresque ID Card scheme will become a "great British institution" on a par with the railways in the 19th Century.
How exactly? The building of the railways brought great positive changes for every citizen as long distance travel was achievable and affordable to great swathes of the population.
ID Cards will cost a fortune and serve little to no good whatsoever. It'll cost billions of pounds - money that can be better spent on, ooh, schools, hospitals, social services. Useful things.
The Tories are against it. The Lib Dems are against it. Blair is for it.
Here's hoping that the sober Mr Brown will realise that it's just going to cost him lots of money for no purpose whatsoever.
Liam Byrne, you are a fool.
So I'm popping in to HMV after work to look for an album, and can't help but notice all the special editions of albums that are on sale. It's pretty typical these days for albums to be packaged in at least two different manners. It might be that one set comes with an additional DVD, although you need to be careful, since at the start of an album's life, there aren't typically all that many promo videos to give away. Or the album, might come in a larger pack with artwork, a booklet or some other wonder.
But sometimes it's just stupid. Take the new Paul McCartney album. You can buy it in its normal packaging. Which is fine. And as we all now know, it's available from branches of Starbucks as well as from download sites (although sadly for Sir Paul, the Starbucks sales don't count towards the charts). But there's a "deluxe packaging" set that comes with a second CD. That CD has some sort of "making of" piece of audio with Sir Paul talking us through the tracks. An interesting, and quite possibly worthwhile extra. It's the other "extra" that you get with this CD that made my jaw drop in HMV. The CD - which was released just a couple of weeks ago, don't forget - also comes with "3 Bonus Tracks, Previously Unreleased."
Wha?
You mean these are three tracks that didn't make the album - released on the same day - yet made the "deluxe packaging" set. How can anyone describe them as "Previously Unreleased?"
OK - so they might be McCartney back catalogue songs, but seriously...
However, the award for showing the most affront must surely go to the recent Bruce Springsteen releases. His last studio album was the excellent We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions which actually came as a dualdisc. That is to say, it was packaged with a DVD (indeed I saw some packaging that came with a DVD and CD on the same disc.
But don't buy that version, released in April last year. To tie in with his tour in the autumn of last year, the album was re-released as the Land Edition (same price at Amazon), which comes with three additional songs and an extra four videos on the DVD, an extended documentary, and extended booklet. That's annoying for a completist isn't it?
But wait, if you saw the tour, perhaps you'd like to relive it with the Live in Dublin version of the album just released. Although be careful. You may instead want to pick up the version that comes with a DVD.
There's no word yet on whether or not this album will be re-released in a few months with a couple more tracks. Watch this space!
On a related note, as I wandered into HMV I noticed that their security barriers carried their regular adverts for a CD or DVD release. This week, it was Hot Fuzz which was released last week. Except I couldn't help but notice that the first 5 in £15.95 was cutout and stuck ontop of something else. It couldn't have been the 3 in £13.95 that they were charging last week could it? Why... yes it could.
The undoubted hit TV show of the last week or so has been a strange talent show called "Britain's Got Talent."
Now I haven't watched a single episode, but seemingly 11m tuned in for the final yesterday evening to see an opera singer win (Great! More light operatic albums on the horizon. We sure do need more of those).
So ITV must be really pleased then? Aside from a couple of incidents that rather suggest a stricter vetting procedure needs to be put in place for the (inevitable) next series, all seems good.
Well let me throw a small spanner in the works. Although the programme largely went out beyond the watershed, the final was broadcast at 8pm, and it seems likely that a reasonable proportion of those viewers would have been kids. The programme finished at 9pm, and the results show wasn't broadcast until 10pm. It seems most viewers would have tuned in for the results show.
But in between them was the frankly awful Talk To Me starring Max Beesley, that ITV's been hyping to the hilt over the last couple of weeks. Beesley plays a DJ in a radio station that's frankly unlike any I've ever seen, and despite shagging anything that moves, falls for his best friend's wife, while his teacher sister has fallen for a pupil. A great cast in a truly terrible script. Anyway, it's all relatively adult fare. So is sandwiching an entertainment programme around it such a smart idea? Viewers might have disappeared off to watch David Dimbleby take us scenically around the UK (coming just after BBC2 had taken us scenically around, the coast of, uh, the UK, but that's another story), or they might have been watching the adult themed BBC2 drama Sex, the City and Me, or even the undoubtedly adult-themed B** B****** on C4. But Talk To Me got 1.3m more viewers than it did last week, which is unusual for a four part series when viewers have missed part 1.
It just seems to me that something a little more family-friendly might have better been sandwiched between the final and results shows of a talent show.
[Note: As I didn't watch a single episode, for all I know Britain's Got Talent was full of smutty comedians and "exotic" dancers, making it appropriately complementary to an adult drama. But press coverage of opera singers and six-year-olds suggests not]
BBC Parliament is covering the Falkland Islands crisis by replaying the BBC News coverage of the time, linked by Brian "I counted them all out, and I counted them all back" Hanrahan.
I'm flicking between a Sky+ recording of this and Lewis Hamilton winning the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis.
Incidentally, isn't it ridiculous that the drivers put on their sponsors' wristwatches before the presentation ceremonies? With that, and the caps that have to have the tyre manufacturers on. And why do they even bother with national anthems any longer? They get the British anthem down to about ten seconds and even then, it sounds like it's coming out of a Binatone cassette player from circa 1983.
Mortified to discover that I managed to chose precisely the same father's day card this year as I did last year! That's what happens when you choose your card from the wide wide selection at your local newsagent. And it wasn't even a "Father's Day" card - just a plain one (Why do so many greetings card feel the need to pre-print some fatuous message? I can write a message with somewhat more meaning myself).
Not sure what's happening to all the Amazon links to books on this website. If it's not righted quickly, then some remedial action's going to be needed by me.
[LATER] It seems that I'm not the only person suffering, and that it's likely to be some kind of weekend Amazon problem. I'll wait until tomorrow to see if it's fixed.
[LATER STILL] And Amazon seem to have fixed it now. But those temporary orange flash things are horrible.
I picked this up in Waterstones the other day, purely because it was the SF novel of the month. But I'm glad I did. John Scalzi has created an interesting world in which 75 year-olds, their bodies decrepit despite organ transplants and cosmetic surgery, sign up to fight for the Colonial Defence Force, millions of light years away from Earth, knowing that they'll never return.
Why OAPs should be fit for this kind of active service is unclear to the pensioners. But they sign anyway, and soon all is revealed...
I won't give the story away, except to say that this is a rollicking space adventure, and it's not Cocoon. There are aliens a plenty and battles all over the place.
It comes as no surprise to realise that there are more stories to be told in this universe. I'll be there.
As an aside, Marc Andreessen, previously of Netscape, has listed Scalzi as one of his favourite SF novelists of the '00s so far.
Nature Girl is the latest Carl Hiaasen novel, and once again we have the usual set of misfits and ne'erdowells. The novel mainly takes place amongst Florida's 10,000 Islands in the Everglades. The story is the usual complex affair of inter-twined happenings that, unlikely though it may be, all manage to be in the same place at the same time.
There's not a great deal else to say really. I'm not going to pretend that this is Hiaasen's best novel of recent years, but then it's not exactly his worst either. It's a little like he's on autopilot, but that's not a terrible thing. There's plenty of enjoyment to be had here.
This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly... well exclusively really... for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander's daughter, who's lately become a police officer herself in the series.
But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that's where this novel is set. It's not too clear where precisely we are, but the location is somewhere sub-Saharan and is told in flashback by a small "child". I only use those quotation marks because for a child as young as he is, the language he uses is remarkably mature.
Nelio is the street child who's life we hear about, and it involves slavery, death, hardship, and some episodes which remind me more of something like The Life of Pi or even Arabian Nights.
Nonetheless, it was a good, sad, book. And I daresay that I'm not the only Swedish crime reader who's been sneaked off to Africa as a result.
I'm really not at all sure how I've managed this, but I'd not previously a Neil Gaiman novel. This is a terrible oversight, since I own more than one, and I've been reading Gaiman's blog pretty assiduously for the last two or three years (it's really good). I did see the TV series of Neverwhere a few years ago - and it's finally got a DVD release here recently.
I did start a Gaiman novel some years ago, but for whatever reason, stopped after a couple of pages. As it turns out, it was Starburst. Although it took me a few pages to remember. But this time I carried on and was pleased that I did. This is a story largely set in Faerie just beyond the village of Wall. We follow Tristan as he visits the land and goes on many an adventure.
I won't say much more as it'd spoil it for you, but it's a wonderful short book and I now realise that I've got a wealth of Gaiman novels (and comics) to catch up on.
Of course it wasn't a completely random choice for me to start with Stardust. There's a feature film of it coming soon, and I always like to read the novel before I see the film. The film's trailer makes it look sumptuous by the way, although I suspect that the UK version of the trailer has rather more Ricky Gervais in it than is strictly accurate.
There's an interesting report in today's Observer which says that The Vicar of Dibley is likely to be accused of breaking BBC guidelines.
The episode in question is the one I questioned at the time back on New Year's Day 2005. Towards the end of the episode, viewers were shown a video supporting the Make Poverty History initiative, and all the fictional characters were then shown to be supportive of the cause.
At the time, I was very uneasy because it felt to me that BBC entertainment programming was being subverted for a particular charitable (and actually, arguably, political) cause. It's not that I disagreed with the cause - goodness, there can barely be a charitable cause that anybody could disagree with.
But it was notable that later in the year, when the BBC was broadcasting the Live 8 concerts, also in support of the Make Poverty History campaign, that they didn't show the videos that the crowd were shown. Chris Martin, introducing one of those videos, implored the BBC not to cut away as it had been, but to show it. The BBC didn't.
The BBC has to be impartial about these issues. Otherwise it runs the risk of government interference. Yes, there are always going to be those times when the Disasters Emergency Committee is given some airtime to highlight the plight of Darfur or Chad. But those should be the exceptions and not the rules. They're also occassions when we know we're watching a charity appeal. Hijacking top-rated sitcoms is not the way to go, however successful it might actually be.
[UPDATE]
The BBC Trust has published its report, "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel" and it make for interesting reading (OK - I found it interesting reading anyway). It does indeed go into the Vicar of Dibley episode, and indeed covering the whole of Live 8, in some detail (read pages 55 to 60). As report notes, this isn't an issue that's going to go away.
This summer the BBC is going to be covering the Al Gore backed Live Earth concerts. Superficially, there wouldn't be anything obvious that one could argue about the righteousness of the cause. But it could become something with a political edge. And although it's another country, suppose Al Gore decides that he is going to run for president after all?
I was pleased to note that the report even looked into the "making of Live 8" programme that was broadcast later in the year. This was made by Brook Lapping who have an excellent pedigree for documentaries. Yet they're owned by Bob Geldof's production company.
I had the same issue with a couple of documentaries about the original Live Aid that also aired in 2005. Objectivity is what we're missing here.
At the very least, if you're making a documentary about your owner, you should at least put an on-screen acknowledgment at the start of the programme. Similarly, music documentaries about specific artists are another area where they're often produced in conjunction with the act's record label. A longer version is often available in the shops on DVD the next day. Indeed, I suspect that this programming is often supplied to broadcasters either free, or very cheaply, since there are inevitable album sales from the back of them (last weekend, Jarvis Cocker was the subject of a South Bank Show, and featured on The Culture Show. It's no coincidence that press ads for his album mentioned both appearances. Being on TV sells albums, although in this instance, I believe that both shows were made fully by the BBC and ITV. Having said that, ITV adopted the same font throughout, that Cocker uses on his new album).
When Take That recently reformed, they had a primetime show on ITV which was co-produced by themselves. You'd only have learnt this if you read the credits very carefully (and that's something that's becoming harder to do).
In the same way that The Times will note that it's owned by News Corp when discussing the fortunes of Sky or Twentieth Century Fox, TV companies need to acknowledge who actually produced the documentaries they're airing so the viewer can at least be informed and make any judgments as a result.
Both David Dimbleby and Andrew Marr have major documentaries on our screens at the moment.
Dimbleby is presenting How We Built Britain, in which he travels the country in his trusty Land Rover visiting buildings that help explain the story of our nation. He does so wearing a pink shirt.
Meanwhile Marr is presenting his History of Modern Britain (probably not the correct link but BBC2's baffling website is painful to use). He spends an episode a week broadly speaking covering a decade of British politics. He travels the country in a blue shirt with a pink v-neck sweater.
I suppose it's because these programmes are shot out of sequence that it's easier to dress the presenters in the same clothes for a full series. It's just that to the viewer, it does begin to look like Marr and Dimbleby only a have a single shirt each. I realise wardrobe probably bought a dozen of each, but nonetheless, if you choose pink, we are going to notice!
Back in February, I posted a piece about the new style Lynx deodorant cans and said that I thought the design was faulty.
Well, as the comments to that post seem to confirm, I'm not the only person who's noticed the fault. OK - four other people isn't a great deal, but these are people I don't know, and who were so disappointed with the product's design that they Googled to see if anyone else had noticed the fault. There must be plenty more people who've got faulty cans who didn't Google for others in the same boat.
And there are more people who've blogged on it including Mr Biffo (new book out now) and this person here who's a little worried about being sued.
Well I'm not so worried, because it seems to me that the design is flawed. I'm sure that if I complained I'd be sent a replacement can, or a voucher for one at least. Unilever need's to acknowledge this, and redesign their cans.
In the meantime, I've not bought another can of Lynx since the new design arrived, and I'd suggest that you do likewise. Look - I'm not especially in their target market, but a deodorant's a deodorant, but if the can won't work, then I won't buy the can. And a drop off in sales will bring about a redesign in the long run.
I really did get my Google Talk application letting me know that these two emails arrived in fast succession.
The BBC finally announced today what The Stage had already told us - there is to be a Stoppard season on BBC Radio this summer.
The headline piece is the radio debut of Stoppard's most recent work, Rock 'n' Roll, which is shortly to transfer to Broadway.
I was hoping for a repeat of Radio 3's 1993 original cast recording of Arcadia starring Bill Nighy, Felicity Kendall and Rufus Sewell. But instead we're getting a new production of the play on Radio 4. There are also new productions of The Fifteen Minute Hamlet and Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead.
There's also a repeat of the 1988 production of Albert's Bridge, and repeats of a 1991 production of In The Native State, a 1978 adaptation of The Dissolution of Dominic Boot and a "1989 re-edit of the 1970 production" of Where Are They Now?
It all begins two weeks tomorrow with Albert's Bridge followed by Arcadia the next day running a nice and lengthy two hours and fifteen minutes (a good forty five minutes longer than any normal Radio 4 play).
I can't wait!
And so it has come to pass... The BBC has adopted its new "squashed into the corner" credit policy with quite dire results.
You can no longer hear the programme's closing theme music, since audio from the top video preview plays over the top.
You sometimes can't read the credits because they're too small. I sat about five feet away from a 32" TV the other night, and couldn't read the Dr Who credits at all. The font was too small to be legible.
You sometimes can't read the credits because they're not correctly aligned. Several programmes in the last couple of days seem to have an "oducer" and "rector." Which is nice.
If I made programmes and could throw my weight around, like Stephen Poliakoff for example, I'd insist on having my credits go out in full size and unmolested.
As it stands it's quite simply insulting to viewers.
Oh, and if the idea is that running these simultaneous trails will stop be channel surfing, it actually does the exact opposite. Now I know that when a programme ends, I might as well immediately flip channels because I'm not going to be able to see the credits or hear the closing theme music anyway.
I hate hate hate the new style credits.
Is everyone looking forward to mooted new TV channel "Virgin 1"?
It's said to include programmes currently on other Virgin Media channels like Bravo, Challenge, Trouble and Living. And the channel will be available on Freeview too.
For Virgin Media customers there'll be on-demand functionality.
"It will be a creative tour de force and a cutting-edge example of any time, any place content," said Virgin Media Television head Jonathan Webb.
Now a cynic might suggest that this channel already exists. It's called FTN and it's terrible.
Does anyone ever watch it? According to BARB, it had a 0.3% share in multi-channel homes in May (this is actually not that bad in the world of multi-channel, but to put it in comparison, ITV2 had 1.9% and E4 had 1.3%).
I'd be a little more interested if I'd learnt that Virgin Media buyers had been out in Los Angeles last month for the LA Screenings. This is when, once US networks have announced their schedules for the next year, international buyers go and play the game of roulette, doing deals for those new shows (and renewing deals for older shows), all the while hoping that the ones they buy don't get canceled. Last season, many did, and the few episodes UK networks committed to are now showing up in drips and drabs.
[Update] Well it seems that Virgin Media has been shopping in LA. The front page of this week's Broadcast reports that it has bought The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a Terminator spin-off scheduled for this autumn. It's also picked up all of the Star Trek franchise, some 624 hours of programming.
There are also a couple of new commissions (including, ahem, one from a sister company of my employer, Ginger TV).
This all does sound a little more exciting than before admittedly. A little more exciting anyway. But there are going to be an awful lot of these general entertainment third tier stations.
* Note that despite working for a similarly named company, I have nothing to do with Virgin or Virgin Media, and these views are my own and don't represent my company blah blah blah.
You can't fail to want to read a book called The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril can you? And just look at that cover!
This is pulp book set in a pulp era. I should explain a bit more. The novel has two protagonists, Walter Gibson who used to write The Shadow, and Lester Dent who penned Doc Savage. These were two incredibly popular pulp magazines that were effectively monthly short novels published on cheap paper with fantastical covers. Now I'll be perfectly honest, and will admit that I've not really read any of these pulp titles, but I'm inclined to maybe give one or two a go.
These two rivals don't especially like one another, but in this entertaining novel, they end up getting involved in a complicated real-life case involving strange Chinamen, toxic gas, and strange sects.
There are plenty of other real-life characters who get involved in the case, not least HP Lovecraft and a certain L Ron Hubbard (he hasn't invented a "religion" at this point, and is instead an up and coming pulp author).
I could get into the story a bit more, but it's as rip-roaring and believable as the pulps it's gently mocking. So I'll just say that this is page-turner. It maybe goes on a little long with a couple of false endings, but I liked it nonetheless.
The success of Freakonomics was almost certainly the reason that this book got the green light from the publishers. That's not to say that it's bad, because it's not. Seemingly based on a column from the Financial Times, the author attempts to use economic theory to explain day to day things that we experience.
For example, he looks at the way the takeaway coffee market works, and examines how the pricing of these expensive beverages is determined (basically, it's our own fault that our disposable income means that we can spend two quid on a coffee at a station).
It's all fascinating stuff, and I definitely learnt quite a lot reading this book.
But I don't always agree with the author's views. For example, he's of the opinion that all those people working in Far-Eastern sweatshops were doing so out of choice, as they earn more and therefore have better lives as a result. Except it's not always their choice. Society might dictate that you have to work there - if your family says you do something, you do it. And there are well documented cases of bonded slavery where children are "sold" to factory managers who force the kids to work off the debt in a manner not dissimilar to loan sharks.
One or two differences of opinion aside, this is still a worthwhile book, and the examination of the game theory behind the infamous UK sell-off of 3G licences probably makes the book worth reading on its own.
Ah. The new evil empire. This book probably isn't available for £3.73 in your local branch of Tesco (and what is it about that .73 price point?), but you should seek it out in your local bookshop - assuming you still have one.
We've all heard many of the stories about Tesco, and I'm not shy about talking about them myself in this blog. But it's worth reiterating some of the main points.
Our high streets are dying because you can now buy everything you need from just one shop. And seemingly, consumers are completely happy doing that.
Why exactly are those prices so cheap? Who's having to pay for it? Why does Tesco have a massive land bank that actually stops competitors getting a foothold in the market?
It's not just Tesco, although they're worse than most. If we all want all our high streets to look exactly the same, then we're going the right way.
I noticed the other day that locally, we're getting a new Tesco in what was a car show-room. It's very near a commuter station which won't do it any harm. And it's right across the road from a perfectly good Budgens. It's half a mile from a Tesco superstore, and another mile away from the next one in the same direction. We're slowly but inevitably giving ourselves no choice whatsoever.
This is the book that the British Government really didn't like being published. Indeed I've even heard stories of people being stopped from taking it on the plane with them!
Nobody stopped me at Stansted with it when I went away with it recently.
Murray was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan where he was something of a non-conformist. As well as being somewhat younger than the traditional elder statesmen we imagine our ambassadors to be, he was a lively confrontational way about him. In his time in service he said what he thought to peoples' faces, gaining a great deal of kudos.
He also called it the way he saw it with the UK and US Governments supporting a repressive regime that was hurting its own people, all in the name of supporting the "war on terror."
This gung-ho attitude did not make him the most popular person in civil service, and he was regularly told off and investigated.
Murray doesn't paint himself as perfect, and it's clear that he admires an attractive woman when he sees one (and isn't afraid to share this with his readers). And the break-up of his marriage probably doesn't help his cause.
But whatever his personal failings - and he doesn't hide them - you can do nothing but admire his perseverance and only wish that we had more members of our ambassadorial service like him. The book does Blair and his cronies no favours whatsoever.
I didn't pick up a copy, but it seems that The Independent on Sunday's readers aren't overjoyed at the changes that were made over the weekend...
Wow - finally football clubs are doing the decent thing, and withdrawing alcohol sponsors' logos from their kids size football strips. Other sports including cricket clubs are doing the same thing.
Well - I say "football clubs" and "cricket clubs" when I actually mean the Portman Group is doing it (they're the people who are sort of responsible for the Drinkaware website you see linked to on many alcohol ads - it's complicated). The Portman Group is run by the major alcohol manufacturers and exists to keep its members in check. A cynic might say that when they see the writing's on the wall for something, they make the first move; taking the initiative.
Anyway, the agreement suggests that from January next year, all sponsorship contracts will exclude kids shirts. Except that as The Times reports, Liverpool has just resigned with Carlsberg for three years, so the contract won't fall under the new rules until it expires. That's in the spirit of the agreement isn't it?
And then there's the small matter of gambling companies...
In this false-color image, the Cassini spacecraft captures Saturn's glow, represented in brilliant shades of electric blue, sapphire and mint green, while the planet's shadow casts a wide net on the rings. The colors represent different wavelengths: red is thermal heat originating within the planet; in blue, icy ring particles shimmer in sunlight scattered through the rings; in green, a thick covering of high-altitude hazes strongly reflect sunlight.
