August 2007 Archives

I've just been listening to an amazing concert that I'm really annoyed I didn't go to. I'm talking about the appearance of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under its 26 year old conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Now before you go scooting on believing that I'm getting all high falootin' talking about classical music, you really do need to listen to this concert.

As I say, I missed it, not managing to read about it until the following Sunday, thus missing out on the BBC's Listen Again facility.

But fortunately on Wednesday the Prom was repeated on Afternoon on 3. So until next Wednesday afternoon you can hear it here. Fast forward about 1 hour 35 minutes to get to the start of the Prom.

And if the prospect of the Shostakovich fills you with dread, then skip another hour to 2 hours 35 minutes when a wonderful performance West Side Story's symphonic dances is performed by this massive orchestra of 200 12 to 26 year olds.

And then stay with it for some wonderful South American music and three encores.

Just read what others are saying here. More than one person is demanding a CD/DVD release of this excellent concert!

The concert was also on BBC Four, which of course I missed too. But I'm certain that there'll be some repeat performances over the coming weeks and months. The first chance to see the performance again is likely to be next Thursday's "Youth Orchestras of the World" on BBC1 at 10.35pm. I'll be tuning in.

Why does Venezuela have such wonderful young musicians? It's all down to a system that lets any child in the country learn a classical instrument. Hundreds of thousands have participated and leading to a musical renaissance. There's a programme all about it that you can download here.

A couple of great posts about internet radio revenues in the UK, from James (late of these parts) and Kevin Coy.

While I might rail on incessently about record companies desperately trying to extend copyright periods for no good reason, I passionately believe that performers and artists deserve a fair remuneration for the broadcast of their work in whatever capacity.

Companies like Last.fm seem to just avoid paying fair dues while others stump up.

Have I told you about my great new business idea? It's called Last.movies. Here's how it works. You tell me which movies you like, and you can stream them direct to your PC. My clever algorithm finds other movies you might like based on people with similar movie tastes, and the service will stream those movies to you too. It's great! All you do is log on and watch the movies you love, and movies you don't know but will love. Now I haven't done any deals with any Hollywood outfits, but I'm going to stream the movies anyway, and with luck my website will be so big that all the companies will keel over and do business with me at a fair rate determined by me.

What could possibly be the problem with that?

Just because my great idea is to stream movies you might like based on ones you tell me you like, it doesn't mean that I don't have to licence those movies

It's interesting to see that iTunes in the UK is now finally offering some TV programmes for anyone with a video iPod to actually watch.

More to the point, there might actually be a reason to get an Apple TV now (although I suspect that an Xbox 360 might be slightly wiser).

Previously there was a limited range of Pixar shorts or music videos to download. But today Apple has started selling a range of Disney sourced programming including Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy, with each episode costing £1.89.

I'm not completely convinced that it's worth my while paying for these downloads when I don't yet have an iPod video (although there are reports of what will almost certainly be new video iPods being launched on September 5 - think iPhone without the phone bit). And I also need to know what the quality is like. If I was to get an Apple TV and plug it into my (so far mythical) HDTV, would I get the programming in HDTV format? That's certainly not been the case in the US to date.

The programmes on offer seem to run up until the most recent series, but I'll be very interested to see how future releases. Channel 4 has in the past offered downloads of Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives with releases timed to coincide with their airings of the shows. But we all know that C4 won't start showing the new series of these show until January next year, yet they'll be starting on ABC in the US in September or October this year. So when will episodes hit iTunes UK? I'd expect that releases will still be timed to synchronise with UK broadcast dates, but in a global economy can we be sure? Time will tell. Lost is likely to be less of an issue with Sky One likely to be airing it in the same week as it airs in the US as it's trying to do with 24. And Channel 4 does have 4OD don't forget. But many of its US shows are available for rent rather than for purchase (99p for 7 days v £1.89 forever - hmmm). While Five's nascent download service has different rules for different programmes: an episode of CSI will cost me £1.49 to buy, while an episode of Grey's Anatomy is only available to rent for 99p.

Price is the other main issue. The complete first season of Ugly Betty costs £32.99 on iTunes, but the DVD box set is only £29.99 at Amazon. And the DVD version is not tied to a limited iTunes account. I can rip those DVDs to my PSP should I want to (albeit not quite within the letter of the law); I can lend those DVDs to all my friends; and I can sell the set on eBay when I'm bored of it. I should say, in fairness, that the complete third season of Lost also costs £32.99 whereas the DVD boxset is closer to £45 at Amazon. However, that's mainly because the UK distributors of this series like to release it first in two parts, and then as a boxset - a practice that's becoming all too prevalent, being replicated with Heroes and Prison Break in the UK. The US release is £32.99 at Playusa.

What's going to be interesting going forward is seeing when UK programmes start to arrive on iTunes. Why wouldn't ITV offer episodes of Coronation Street relatively cheaply? Certainly, I can catch up online for free, but some might pay 49p to watch on their journey into work. And it'll be really interesting to see when BBC shows end up there - perhaps indie produced ones like Kudos's Spooks, particularly when they'll be available via the BBC's iPlayer.

At the moment however, there's very little incentive for me to buy programmes via iTunes.

There was much excitement recently, when it was announced that a revamped Music Week would include a chart from Last.fm. This is the site, we're told, that really discovered the Arctic Monkeys and so on.

Now I must admit that I've never really persevered with Last.fm to the extent of using it properly. It might well introduce me to all sorts of music that I've not previously heard, but I'm always suspicious of just hearing the will of the masses. In other words, the most popular albums will always ride to the top because everybody has them.

Anyhow, it was with interest that I turned to this week's Music Week to see what interesting new songs are being highlighted by Last.fm.

Well the top ten is dominated by Kate Nash who has four songs in it, including the number one - Foundations, which is also her current single. The album only came out last week, so it's not surprising that everybody's listening.

The number two is Misery Business by Paramore (misspelt in the paper incidentally) which is a single released back in June that didn't trouble the charts too much reaching the dizzy heights of number 31. For a band like Paramore, this is probably helping their album, Riot, which currently sits at number 47.

Elsewhere we find Starlight by Muse at number 5. A great song undoubtedly, although it came out in September last year, so not exactly cutting edge. Just behind that we find Kanye West's Stronger, which is also the current number one. Then there's another Muse track, Supermassive Black Hole, a single from June last year.

Then there's Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's [sic] which is still high in the charts at number 6, although the album it comes from, Every Second Counts, was originally released last year. However, the album is currently unavailable, with an imminent re-release next week.

Finally there's Golden Skan by Klaxons which was released in, er, January this year.

What I'm trying to say here, is that this chart isn't much use for predicting the next big thing, aside from giving Kate Nash's record company some food for thought when they think about what to release from her album as a follow up to Foundations. And a few other record companies might be a bit miffed that some songs weren't as big hits as they might have been - but that's always been the case.

To be fair, there are two additional charts that Last.fm is reported to be supplying: a global version (this one is UK only), and a "hype list" showing artists that have risen most in the last month, and as the Guardian column linked to above suggests, it'll be this chart that'll be the most useful. But it remains to be seen how different it'll be from the radio airplay charts already published which obviously include pre-release tracks, as well the overall pre-release top 20, which is currently led by James Blunt (1973), The Twang (Two Lovers) and the very fine Scouting For Girls (She's So Lovely). Although with Razorlight's America at 17 and Lily Allen's Smile at 19, I'm not quite sure what "Pre-Release" actually really means.

A company called Lionsgate Films has been advertising recently on the tube as well as in newspapers such as today's Metro (Note: I saw the ad over somebody's shoulder - I still don't read Metro).

Here's a copy of the ad:

Lionsgate seems to specialise in offering recent US TV fare on DVD. Now none of the three series in the ad especially appeals to me: I saw The Lost Room and thought it was fairly average; The Dresden Files doesn't appeal, and I wasn't really taken with Weeds.

Nonetheless, the ad offers a free episode download, and I was curious. So I committed the URL to memory (lionsgatefilms.co.uk/viptv - not the easiest URL to remember when you're on the tube and out of internet access range) and gave it a go. As much as anything I was keen to see what format they were offering the downloads in. Windows Media perhaps, or Quicktime? Would I be able to play the episode on a PSP or iPod?

None of those.

A closer examination of the advert shows this:

"Download will be via streaming and will be the first episode of each series."

Huh?

Let me explain for the hard of thinking - download is not the same as streaming. Now I'm not about to go to the ASA to complain, but companies really need to be careful about how they advertise these things.

If something is a download, then I believe I should be able to save it somewhere and play it back later at my convenience without the need to go online. So don't advertise a "Free Episode Download" when it's not. How about "Watch an exclusive episode online" or "See the first episode free"?

In fact, I'm not sure why they don't simply make the episode available as a DRM-free download. If you like what you see, you may well go and buy the DVDs.

Do you follow the charts?

No, me neither. But I couldn't help noticing that Elvis is having something of a resurgence.

Currently there are three singles in the Top 40:

Blue Suede Shoes is a "new" entry at no. 13.
My Baby Left Me is a "new" entry at no. 19.
Suspicious Minds is at no. 26 having slipped from last week's no. 2.

What's going on?

Well a couple of things. First of all, Elvis's label, RCA, is releasing 18 Elvis singles over the coming 18 weeks to build an "Elvis the King" collection. Avid collectors dash out to buy these limited edition re-issues which can be stored in a box. The collection "commemorates" the 30th anniversary of Elvis's death.

But hang on. Didn't something like this happen a couple of years ago? Why, yes it did. On that occasion it was "celebrating" the 30th anniversary of Elvis's birth.

They seem to be a different 18 singles this time around, but there is obviously plenty of bonus material bulking it out. Suspicious Minds and Blue Suede Shoes are the most recent releases.

But what about My Baby Left Me? That's not part of either singles collection. Instead it's the first major Elvis release now his material is out of copyright in the UK. As Music Week reports on its front page this week, it has been reissued by Memphis Recording Service and sold exclusively through HMV. In this instance, the recordings have not been sourced from early vinyl, but from masters and safety masters that the record company has got its hands on.

As ever, it should be pointed out that the songwriters of My Baby Left Me, do get paid. It's just the performers (and producers) that don't.

It should be noted that aside from these singles, there are also a considerable amount of other Elvis material proliferating at the moment with a partwork having just launched, and collections of Elvis's films readily available. And if that collection of Elvis Number Ones from a couple of years ago is not enough, you could pick up Elvis The King instead (which does have a further 21 tracks including some biggies like Blue Suede Shoes and Always On My Mind which the previous collection didn't).

But you might want to wait for "Elvis Presley: The New York RCA Studio One Complete Series" coming before Christmas. It's another unofficial release taking advantage of the UK's copyright laws. I rather suspect that Elvis completists - those who're putting these re-issued singles so high in the charts - will be getting this CD too.

In today's Media Guardian, Alan Ruddock ponders whether the venerable London Evening Standard will survive the onslaught that has been News International's London Paper and Associated's very own London Lite.

It has been a year since the two free papers launched, and neither of them are yet profitable. The Standard has unsurprisingly taken something of a hit with distributors practically fighting over who's newspaper you take away free. There have been plenty of promotions and free gifts - I've gained iTunes vouchers, a natty little umbrella, an emergency phone charger and a handful of free audiobooks (in terrible quality incidentally). There have also been a selection of free paperbacks, and a variety of snacks - all given away by street vendors on payment of 50p for the Standard.

But the overwhelming problem is that the Standard is simply not a very good paper. It's nowhere near as bad as either the London Paper or London Lite which both leave me reeling; I really don't care at all what Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse was up to last night. Please don't tell me that and other non-news like it. If I wanted that, I'd buy Heat or one of those sordid downmarket equivalents. I care not a jot about what the latest off-the-rails American starlet has been up to, or how many hours in prison she had to spend afterwards.

I care more about whether the papers are being recycled and why London Transport doesn't put massive signs at the top and bottom of escalators telling commuters not to leave their papers there in the morning. How many jammed escalators are being caused by trapped freesheets?

The biggest impediment to me buying the Standard is not the alternatives, but the dire nature of the paper itself. There's no proper news in it. London news is minimal, with the editor seemingly wanting to turn it into The Daily Mail. But that's not what Londoners want - if it was, well, we can already buy the Mail if we have to. I want information relevant to me, and include both national and international news. Features are fine, as long as they're upmarket ones. Of course with the web at work, we've all got a good idea about what's happening in the world before we leave the office, but with a good set of journalists, the paper could add depth of coverage and background information. Instead we get more of what's already in the freesheets, and as a consequence, I don't buy the paper (unless it has a gift that's seemingly worth more than the 50p I'm being charged - but that's got to be unsustainable hasn't it?).

Whilst on the subject of freesheets, I should mention that I rarely if ever read Metro, although I do believe it to be generally a cut above the others. The reasons I don't read it are twofold: firstly, I prefer to read either a book or a proper newspaper on the way to work, and secondly, it's not distributed at my station. Actually, a couple of weeks ago, a telltale Metro dump bin was suddenly in place at my station, but was empty. A couple of weeks on, and I've still not seen any sign of papers. Now it may well be that they're all taken by 7.30am, which I'd find surprising, but it's a curious state of affairs.

And finally there's also Sport, the sports weekly that's doing fairly well by all accounts. I quite like it myself - except that I can rarely get it. The distribution at Oxford Circus seems to be a single person, despite there being upwards of seven exits to the station. Wrong exit? No paper.

Since Saturday was lovely, but I was indoors for too much of it, I though that some outdoor adventure would be an idea.

I quite fancied the beach, but it was blindingly obvious that thousands of others would also be heading beachwards, so I was going to have to be quite careful about where I went.

Much Googling (well - some, anyway) told me of Ringstead in Dorset. It seemed to be reachable by bike from a station, and I could get a train that wouldn't quite take me all day to reach it. So off I went, having first planned a route via my Anquet software. Sadly, a failing printer meant that I still had to pick up an OS map on arrival in Dorset.

A word or two first about the train. South West Railways 8.35am to Weybourne seemed quite empty when I first boarded it about fifteen minutes before departure. I managed to get my bike in one of the three non-reservable bike bays, and took a seat in the carriage that was designated the quiet carriage. No iPod for me on the way down then. Soon the bike bay designed for three had about eight bikes and the quiet carriage had been joined by a party of about twenty young Spaniards who weren't entirely quiet. Incidentally if you ever meet a mobile phone designer, please thump him from me, and insist that the ability to play music without the aid of headphones was the single worst thing to so far happen this century.

My Woking, the train was completely rammed, but I was pleasantly surprised by South West's legroom, and was buried in The Observer.

The train nearly emptied at Bournmouth, but I was heading to Moreton. From there it was a few miles, first down, and then up some quite steep hills until I was high above Ringstead.

I took the footpath down, having to carry my bike a bit, and was soon on a stony, but relatively quiet beach. The water was quite cold, but after a few minutes, you could swim around quite nicely. I believe the redness of my face this morning may have something to do with spending a couple of lovely hours on Ringstead beach.

Then it was up to the clifftop and the bridleway. There's a coastal path that runs much closer to the edge of the cliffs, but cyclists are taken inland a little to a well signposted bridleway that's soon enough close to the cliff edge. Despite the awful weather we've had this summer, much of the path was completely grassed over, and great fun to cycle across.

I was heading towards Dagger's Gate (somewhat disappointing when I got there) and Lulworth. It had been many years since I last visited Lulworth, and although I guessed there'd be a few people about, I was in for an enormous surprise.

As I joined the road that lead down to Lulworth, I couldn't help but notice hundreds of cars parked on any grass verge they could. These were for people who were heading over to Durdle Door. I took the steep road down into the Cove itself and soon found an enormous car park jammed full of cars with literally thousands of people embarking on the climb to Durdle Dor from Lulworth.

This is a tiny village, yet it was completely over-run by tourists. I found it hellish.

I went down to the Cove, spent literally minutes there taking in the heaving throngs, and turned around to leg it.

A different steep road out of Lulworth took me to the edge of the military area to the east, and then it was a leisurely ride down to the village of Wool, where I got a refreshing pint from The Black Bear before catching the much less crowded train back to London.

Here's the route I took:

Via Roy Greenslade's blog come this link to a story about a mythical Fleet Street feature writer. Wonderful stuff!

Over on the BBC's Editors' Blog, Newsnight Editor Peter Barron invites readers to post their thoughts on the current state of British television. He's one of the organisers of the Edinburgh Television Festival and he's planning on putting the comments on both the festival website and the walls of the conference centre (I assume they'll be digital in some way).

Go away and read what people say - they have some quite interesting thoughts. And for completeness, I'm reproducing my thoughts here:

• Show some respect for programme makers - stop telling me what's on next before the programme I'm still watching has finished, and then shrinking the credits to an unreadable size whilst telling me again about what's coming up.

• Stop putting ever more invasive graffiti all over the screen - I'm trying to watch your programmes and don't actually care that much about how colourful and jazzy your DOG is, or the fact that this weekend is a "Morse Weekend."

• Address the training shortfall. With the BBC shrinking, we're left with media studies students wandering around with cameras a touch better than a home videocamera recording footage without caring about getting their white balances correct or worrying about whether the sound's audible.

• Step away from the overnights - big numbers are not the only criteria a programme should be judged by. Do not cancel a series or banish it into the wee hours if episode one under-performs. If you carry on doing this, I'll never bother even trying to watch your programmes again. If you're not going to invest your time in them, I'm not going to bother either.

• Combat internet downloads by airing shows as close as possible to US release dates.

• Stop paying silly money for US imports that are never going to be *that* successful, then leaving yourself high and dry with two of them when Sky One outbids you for season two.

• Stop stealing shows from one another's channels. Remember the outcry about Thames when it "stole" Dallas? It's a free market, but how about building your own shows.

• Don't behave like a petulant four year old when negotiating which channels your competitor's cable service can carry.

• Just because BBC Four exists (for now), that doesn't mean that BBC Two has to "dumb down" - step forward British Film Forever. This could have been a wonderful series, but is spoilt by a demeaning narration and spurious interviewees. The whole series is pitched at a level somewhere around the average Channel 4 list programme. Wasn't it nice to see an episode of Civilisation over Stephen Fry weekend?

• Prevent the seemingly likely severe cut backs in the budgets of such wonderful fare as Storyville, Timewatch, Horizon and other factual programming.

• Let's do something to combat the diminution of science on television. Guess what? Science is actually really really important.

• Stop public service channels featuring a single reality show across upwards of a third of a year. Channel 4, you do realise that I avoid your channel during the whole of this period don't you?

• Explain exactly why BBC Three costs twice as much as BBC Four. Isn't there enough television for 15-34s?
  

Obviously this is an ongoing story, and since I've spent the whole weekend in a field outside of Chelmsford, I'm basing this on Monday evening's coverage.

I noticed that the BBC had relatively few pictures on News 24 for their "B-roll" of Jamaica post the hurricane's passing. But it wasn't nearly as bad as the footage that CNN was using from the island. They had a reporter there, but they'd got the footage from a satellite camera phone, and it looked terrible.

I know that technology has allowed correspondents to go practically solo, but I'm amazed that CNN didn't have proper uplink facilities. ITN on the other hand had great footage, and a really good report with the correspondent showing before and after at one man's house.

Then ITN also had a live link with someone in Cancun - a GMTV reporter. I'd like to think that this was some kind of joined up thinking by ITN and GMTV, but I'm not altogther sure.

One final thing: why is the media so keen that the hurricane should go from a category 4 to a category 5 storm? As one expert commentator said, it's the difference between being hit by a bus and being hit by a lorry. It's going to do a lot of damage either way, whether it's 249kph or 251kph (the difference between categories).

0007183135

What an interesting week for sceptics on television.

On Monday night, Richard Dawkins began a two part documentary entitled Enemies of Reason.

Dawkins takes on a great many things - aside from religion - under that premise that superstition has taken over from reason. I can't really fault him on much. At one point he interviews Derren Brown and learns about Cold Reading - the foundation that most "psychics" use to deliver "readings." I'd have liked to have seen more of this. In the event Dawkins mercilessly took on some low level practitioners at psychic fairs and the likes.

A powerful message nonetheless.

You can currently see episode 1 here.

So it was interesting to see this programme, and then see what ITV is broadcasting just at the moment.

On Wednesday lunchtime, ITV1 broadcast "Have I Been Here Before" presented by Philip Schofield. How low he's fallen.

In the series, a celebrity - this week Doctor Who's John Barrowman - is placed into "hypnotic regression" by the most nasally annoying sounding woman. She then brings out of them the story of a previous life. Barrowman seemed to wilfully tell a tale about a Hungarian clown in the early nineteenth century. After the recorded "regression" an historian is set on the case seeing how accurate the story is and to what it extent is stands up. This is all done relatively loosely, and you certainly get the feeling that nobody wants to make too much of a fool of the celebrity. It should also be noted that Barrowman was quite a willing participant and a believer.

On Wednesday evening ITV1 broadcast "Star Psychic" in which self-professed psychic Sally Morgan does "readings" for celebrities as some kind of supposed "experiment." She starts with Lady Victoria Hervey, well known it-girl. She begins by telling us that she believes there must be more children than Hervey's half-sister. Sadly, Hervey's had two brethren die, but this isn't exactly top secret information. As we're told this by the wonderful psychic, the programme shows us newspaper headlines recording the deaths. And given that Hervey lives her life in the headlines of a certain type of celebrity publication, just about everything else a credulous Hervey hears, could quite easily have come from a cursory examination of magazine and newspaper cuttings.

The rest of the programme sees other "readings" performed on some non-celebrities and other gullible believers - Phil Tuffnell for example.

At one point we're introduced to a magician who we're told can perform this kind of thing as a trick - a clip shoes him bending a spoon, Uri Geller-style. He's then put to the test against Morgan with a stranger. Each has a couple of minutes to find out as much information as possible about this woman. The magician goes first and is pretty feeble. Derren Brown, he isn't. I know very little about Cold Reading (I still have to properly read Ian Rowland's classic on the subject), I'm sure I could have done better. Morgan then launches in and seemingly gets it all right very quickly. But of course our subject is very much a believer herself; a budding actress, she knows what the cameras are looking for. And I'd suggest that holding an "experiment" like that in the street is probably not the most appropriate environment.

We also get a series of "random" readings that Morgan conducts by ringing a central London phonebox and performing there an then, remotely. Except that the implied hidden cameras aren't especially hidden - one is clearly in view at face level. And the two complete strangers include a "healer." Well who'd have thought?

Like any of these programmes, there's been a significant amount of judicious editing to make the so-called psychic look good. All those misses that get very quickly glossed over, get left out, and the recipients, because they're believers, hone in on the "hits".

Most disturbing of all, though, was a sequence in which a member of the public, drawn from those who'd sent in videos, was given a reading, because they'd suffered a personal bereavement. When you've lost a loved one, many people are very vulnerable, and it's the despicable praying on these individuals that I dislike the most. I can truly understand that if I'd lost a parent or sibling, I'd want to know that I'd made my peace with them before the end. But hanging on the words of some phoney who's profiteering (in this instance, perhaps not directly from the member of the public, but certainly from the TV production company who undoubtedly payed her a wage for the series).

But of course Ofcom has very strict codes about how "psychics" and their brethren are presented on television. In high numbers of Sky you can find the likes of "Psychic TV". They all run small print to explain that they're "this is an editorial programme and is for entertainment purposes only". Nonetheless, they're very premium rate services - £1.50 a minute. Ofcom has some strict rules on the issue:

1.10(ii) of the Ofcom Programme Code says:

Demonstrations of predictive practices, whether 'psychic' or otherwise (eg horoscopes, palmistry), are acceptable only when they are presented as entertainment or are the subject of legitimate investigation. They should not include specific advice to particular contributors or viewers about health or medical matters or about personal finance. They should not be included at times when large numbers of children are expected to be watching.

As a result of this, neither programme professes to believe in what they spending 95% of the time trying to tell us is actually true. So Philip Schofield keeps saying that we can make our own minds up about whether John Barrowman really is the reincarnation of a clown. It doesn't stop him drawing parallels with his current life.

And the Star Psychic programme keeps saying that it's up to us to decide for ourselves. But every person in it is a believer, bar one, and he was put into an uneven contest.

Now I'd never stop people believing what they want - it's called tolerance and religious freedom. But when I know that people are using techniques that can mislead and hurt people, it upsets me. And then even more, those programmes are presented as entertainment with tinkly piano music.

I guess that all we can do is watch part two of Richard Dawkins' programme next week, and hope that plenty of other people do to.

Incidentally, The Observer's astrologer - yes, the serious Sunday newspaper that is The Observer, has its own in-house astrologer! - was featured on the first part of the Dawkins programme. He was fairly well turned over by Dawkins, unable to answer the most basic of his questions. He responded in the paper last weekend, and it's hilarious. Seemingly there aren't just 12 types of personality - there are 1,728 of them. Oh well, at least we can all be cateogorised into one of those 1,728 types. And there was me thinking I was an individual with freedom of thought. And if there really are so many types, why do astrological publications and newspapers only publish 12 horoscopes? Go away and read it. And then do yourself a favour, and get over to Bad Science.

I love Amazon. They contribute literally pennies to the running of this site. Let's put it this way, I've never actually reached the threshold for getting even an Amazon token from them from people clicking the links on this site.

Nonetheless, I use Amazon a reasonable amount, and they send lots of email advertising as a result.

One particular type of email is the "recommends" email, where Amazon examines what you've bought in the past, and looks for patterns amongst its other purchasers to perhaps direct me to another title I might be interested.

Except it never really works that well. I'm sure that there are teams of people in the States who sit there fine tuning Amazon's algorithms but basic things like books I bought as gifts rather than for myself are difficult to take into account.

Anyway, this a rambling way of telling you about the book I was "recommended" today. I bought Mission Song, by John Le Carré a while ago, and so I was sent this:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by John Le Carre have also purchased An Introduction to Godel's Theorems (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) by Peter Smith. For this reason, you might like to know that An Introduction to Godel's Theorems (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) is now available. You can order yours for just £42.75 by following the link below.

Wow. That'll go down well with people who love spy-thrillers.

I did study maths at university and am vaguely familiar with Godel and have heard of his incompleteness theorem. But seriously, this is a little specialist for the average reader.

I'm often going on about the iniquity of record companies and the things that they do or try to do. In particular, the foiled (so far) attempts to increase the performance copyright from the current fifty years.

But I must admit, I do have sympathy with the current campaign, highlighted in this week's Music Week by John Smith, general secretary of the Musicians' Union.

In the UK, PPL collects and distributes airplay royalites on behalf of the record companies and performers. PPL gets 5.25% of revenues of radio stations that earn roughly over £1m pa. While the MCPS-PRS Alliance collects and distributes royalties for composers, songwriters and publishers, and also gets 5.25% of revenues of radio stations that earn over the same amount.

In other words, UK radio stations pay the songwriters and the performers when they play a track.

This would seem fair to me, since most radio stations are generating their audiences because of the music they're playing, and the performances of those tracks. They're not getting session singers in to cover the songs after all. In the commercial sector, that audience is turned into revenue for the station. It's certainly true that stations add value to simply playing the music. They surround it with talent (your mileage may vary), and information services such as news and sport. They put the music in context, and select the music that they think their audiences will want to hear, not always what record companies want to push.

It's certainly also true that by giving tracks and performers exposure, they also help sell CDs and downloads, and make people want to go and see artists playing live - live performances now being one of the most significant areas of revenue with continued growth.

But without the material in the first place, music radio stations would have be able to attract audiences to their services at all. Most radio stations are under no illusions that they need music to survive, and it's their presentation of that music that makes them successful. It's notable that in the early days of BBC Radio and particularly the Third Programme (now Radio 3), there were limits to "needle time" - the amount of time that could be given over to pre-recorded records. Much airtime had to be given over to expensive live performances. But over time those requirement dissipated, and your average commercial ILR will play minimal live music, relying almost entirely on CD recordings.

The idea of paying both the songwriters and performers has been adopted throughout most of the world.

But, somehow, in US this has never been the case. Songwriters get paid, but performers don't.

Over the years various attempts have been made to give performers the right to benefit from radio airplay. But this has never come to pass. Hence there is now musicFIRST.

At first this might seem not to affect the UK, but of course British artists don't get paid. And surprisingly, US artists seemingly don't benefit from UK airplay since there's no reciprocal arrangement. I must admit, I suspect, but don't know for sure, that many acts do benefit, with localised setups ensuring that they do well. For example, The Killers are published by Universal in the UK. While I have no direct knowledge of how they're set-up I would be amazed if European performance rights aren't tied into a European domiciled company. I rather suspect that the artists that are missing out are those that are only published in the US and are played as import records in the UK. In this instance, it's likely to be smaller artists rather than bigger ones that are losing out (If anyone would care to correct me on this, I'd pleased to do so).

A cynic might argue that this concerted effort is only happening now because record companies are seeing losses and diminishing CD sales are not being replaced by download revenues. To a large extent this is probably their own fault, but that's not relevant. It is an iniquitous situation.

Now I am aware that this campaign is led by SoundExchange, the organisation that's responsible for one of the most ridiculous charging regimes for internet broadcasters in the world, and something seems to be doing its level best to snuff out the industry altogether. But I do believe that copyright owners and performers do deserve fair payments for use of their material. The key word there is "fair."

The bottom line is that radio stations need performances for them to suceed. Similarly, artists need radio stations to promote their records. But it's probably not an equal balance. Paying for the right to play music seems equitable to me.

In this week's Marketing magazine, Ray Snoddy discusses the Alex Salmond proposed Scottish Broadcasting Commission (not online currently, but it should appear somewhere here - free registration may be required).

The gist of the argument is that national news emanating from London, does not cover Scottish issues properly and indeed ignores them. Many discussions about legal issues or education, are in fact English, and don't apply in Scotland (For example, you can be found "not proven" in law, and there are no tuition fees for Scots attending Scottish higher education institutions).

I can't deny that, as Snoddy says, the only times Scotland (or Wales or Northern Ireland) really hit the headlines these days are when there's been a nasty murder, or some kind of freak weather conditions.

But then you could argue the same for Cornwall, or the North-East, or East Anglia.

The problem is that unless the story affects, or is of interest, across the whole of the UK, then it really doesn't belong on the national news; not when there's a regional or local news programme following it.

Now it's been a while since I last saw the local news programme on BBC1 in Scotland between 6.30 and 7.00pm when the whole country gets its main local news, but surely that's where a proper Scottish news belongs. Perhaps it should have the authority that the main national news has, as part and parcel of the devolved parliaments we currently have.

I get worried when there are calls for a more parochial view of news. Arguably, we're already too local in our outlook. I recently had the misfortune to watch the BBC Six O'Clock News, and it's not exactly where to go if you want to find out what's going on in the world. It's far too UK-focused for my liking. Fortunately we have the much broader Ten O'Clock News and Newsnight later in the evening.

Surely it's doing a disservice to Scots if the Six O'Clock News becomes the Scottish Six O'Clock News?

I completely agree that news editors in London need to be wary of pushing London-centric news stories up the order because they're close to home. For example, there's a lot of coverage currently of various murders of young males in South London. Does it deserve the level of coverage it gets compared with any crimes occurring, say, in Glasgow? Are Scottish viewers really not interested in the flooding that took place in central England?

Of course the wider idea that we might end up with a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation in place of the BBC is laughable. As soon as you break up a structure the size of the BBC, you're left with significantly fewer resources, and simply would be unable to make anywhere near the same level of programming that currently can be achieved by pooling resources. If Snoddy is right, then more resources should be spent in Scotland. And I suspect that much of this is behind the suggestion that Casualty, currently produced in Bristol, might move across the Severn to Cardiff, so that, voila, it's a Welsh production all of a sudden (Kind of ludicrous since Casualty, although set in the fictional Holby, is patently supposed to be Bristol, since that's where it's always been made). However, I'd still be interested to know where Film 2007 is actually shot, since it's a BBC Scotland production fronted by Jonathan Ross, who lives in London, and who almost certainly views all his screenings in London screening rooms (Undoubtedly there are Scottish screenings for local critics, but I'd hazard a guess that there are fewer overall).

The danger of breaking up the BBC in that way is that we end up with the patchwork quilt of public television that America has, with a couple of strong stations in some big cities, and everyone else struggling to cover the local news and their staffing costs.

It's interesting to note that there's no BBC Radio England, although we do get lots of local stations, and while there is a BBC Radio Scotland, you don't get BBC Radio Glasgow or BBC Radio Edinburgh.

I suppose this all boils down to whether or not Scottish citizens want to remain part of the United Kingdom. As someone who would qualify to play football for Scotland, I'm opposed to any kind of break-up. I genuinely don't see what there is to be gained.

Jed Mercurio first sprang to attention with the wonderful medical TV series, Cardiac Arrest. At the time he was a practising doctor and wrote under a pseudonym.

He went on to write a novel, Bodies, in a similar vein, and of course this was made into that rarest of things - a decent BBC Three drama series.

Now he's written another novel, and this has absolutely nothing to do with medicine or the NHS. To be fair, he's also previously written TV dramas set well away from medical matters too.

In Ascent, we follow the career of the fictional Yefgenii Yeremin from being a child in the bombed out post-war Stalingrad, and into the Russian air force where he flew during the Korean War under the guise of a North Korean.

But not everything in his career is going perfectly, and the Space Race is taking place, with many top pilots on both sides becoming astronauts and cosmonauts.

I don't want to spoil the story any more by saying how his life develops, but it's evident that Mercurio has done an awful lot of research. The Korean war section of the book is full of dogfights and plenty of technical terms which are just enough to make you feel like you're in the midst of something truly happening, but not so much that you're completely lost with all the terminology.

A pacy book, and if you enjoyed the HBO mini-series of a few years ago, From the Earth to the Moon, you may well enjoy this.

Earlier this year, Michael Dibdin died, aged 60. But he left us a final Aurelio Zen novel. I've been reading the series about the Italian detective for years, and so it was with a slightly heart that I picked up this latest tome, knowing that it was be my last acquaintance with the man.

If you've not read the Zen novels, then you're in for a treat and should probably head right back to the start of the series - Ratking.

As for this final book? Well, Dibdin liked to always take us to new parts of Italy and so this time we find Zen on temporary assignment in the south in Calabria where an American lawyer, who was supposed to be helping out with a forthcoming film about the Apocalypse, has been murdered in a particularly brutal fashion.

But the locals aren't giving the police any information. And it seems that all is not quite as it seems with the search for the impending films location scouting. It needs Zen to take control and crack a few heads.

If I'm being honest, this isn't the greatest Zen novel, but it's not the worst. There are comic characters like Jake, the millionaire dot-com slacker who's funding the whole enterprise. And his right hand man seems to have stepped out a Carl Hiaasen novel to a certain extent. But I enjoyed it enough. It's just a shame that we won't be getting any more.

A couple of years ago, I went along to Borders after work one evening and saw Jon Courtenay Grimwood and a couple of other authors talk about their new SF books. Prior to that, the only Grimwood I'd read were his science fiction book review columns for The Guardian.

This tale is quite intriguing. Bobby Zha is a Chinese American who works for the San Francisco police department. Unfortunately for him, he's murdered. But he comes back, in the body of someone else entirely, returning from a long coma. Fortunately, the person who's body he inhabits is very rich.

Now unlike many a protagonist, Zha is not especially likeable. Despite being a "good cop" (TM), he wasn't averse to taking back handers, in kind, from prostitutes and generally misbehaving behind his wife's back.

But he's keen to find out why exactly he was murdered, and what his partner had to do with it.

We embark on a very noirish story, with plenty of suspicious goings on. And the 9Tail Fox? Well, I'll let you find out yourself.

I'm all for inclusiveness but, let me list the specialist subjects on Mastermind this evening:

The life and career of Henry Ford
German wines
The life and works of Frida Kahle
The life and career of Jennifer Aniston

No. That last one is not a typo. Guess who came last?

You guessed right!

At the beginning of the general knowledge round, John Humphreys talks a little to the contestants about their specialist subject. Sadly I got in just too late to see him ask about Aniston's post Friends career, or relationship with Brad Pitt.

Every year, when the likes of me complains that one quarter Channel 4's peak time output over the year is used up by a single programme, others will point me to all the viewing figures it achieves. It massively bumps up the channel's share across the year, and reports even suggest that it accounts for a frightening amount of Channel 4's overall revenues. We can't forget that there's a "celebrity" version too.

So I may hate it and not watch it while others do. What's the harm?

The problem is that people like me watch far less Channel 4 than they normally do. It gets to the point that if I'm channel surfing at 9pm, I don't even bother pressing 4 (well 104) to see what's on. I know that I'm not going to be interested.

Yet, the channel does have other programming, and since its best mechanism for informing me about its upcoming programming is using its own promotional airtime, I miss out.

A case in point is Cape Wrath. I didn't see a single trailer for the programme, and missed the first episode altogether. It was only because I knew about Showtime broadcasting the series as Meadowlands that I knew about it at all.

There's an interesting new series starting tonight called Enemies of Reason, presented by Richard Dawkins. I may not always agree with him - I've yet to read my copy of The God Delusion - but I find him interesting and worthwhile. And any attack on homeopathy, astrology and the like can only be good in my books. Yet, if it weren't for the Sunday papers pointing me the right way, I wouldn't know it was on. Again - I've not seen a single trailer.

Athens - The Truth About Democracy, presented by Bettany Hughes, only came to my attention when I heard her interviewed on the Simon Mayo show on Five Live (more specifically on his podcast).

Finally, I know that there's a new series on The IT Crowd starting soon on the channel. I've not seen the trailer, but fortunately others in forums I frequent have seen it, and have effectively alerted me accordingly.

These are four series that I have, one way or another, found out about. But I learnt about none of them thanks to Channel 4. There may well be other worthwhile series or one-off programmes that have aired recently. But I don't know what they are.

I'd have thought that any TV exec worth his or her salt must realise that giving us too much of a successful show is a very short-term solution. The soaps are spread too thin these days, and yet we're threatened with yet another episode of Eastenders (at the same time as we hear that series like Timewatch, Horizon and Storyville are threatened with cuts, while BBC3 or 4 might actually be axed - but that's for another blog entry).

Over the weekend, during the start of the Premier League we saw pitchside advertising, and yellow bracelets in rememberance of Madeleine McCann. News coverage was also ongoing, marking 100 days of her disappearance.

Now I won't talk about her particular case any more because I have no real knowledge of it. But it does seem to me that the media has, overall, carried a ridiculous amount of coverage of this story.

For the family, of course, it's a tragedy. And if I were in their shoes, then I'd probably try to gain the same amount of publicity as they've managed. But there's no two ways about it - the coverage has been disproportionate. Many many children go missing every year. Some put it as high as 77,000! And while the majority are probably short term runaways, there are many more who are never seen again. But we don't get coverage of many of them.

As a commenter here says, a girl had been missing in Essex for two weeks near Manningtree. It was big news locally, but I didn't know anything about it until I saw the local East Anglian TV coverage last weekend. Sadly, a body has now been found. And for every child missing in East Anglia, there are more in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the north-east, the south-west, the midlands and so on.

We don't hear about them.

So why has this case brought such a media storm? Is it because she's a cute little girl with media-savvy parents (or advisors)?

And why has so much of the under-lying insinuation in the reporting been "aren't Portuguese police rubbish? They can't handle a case like this. Send in the Met."

All round, this case makes me very uncomfortable. The coverage is mawkish, and in many cases, being covered for commercial ends.

0330447548

The last time I went to the cinema, there was a table just past the ticket desks where, should a guard have been on duty, they checked bags for nefarious things such as video cameras. In fact, I had my DSLR in my bag at the time and was looking forward to having a conversation with the guard about the fact that, no, it can't shoot movies. It can shoot three frames per second, but that wouldn't be much use to anyone (actually, thinking about it, it might have improved Transformers enormously).

But I didn't have to worry because there was no guard on duty at the relatively early showing I went to. By the time I came out of the cinema, mid-afternoon, there were many more people going in, and a guard now dutifully checking those bags. Obviously pirates don't go to early screenings.

Once inside the cinema we were treated to a specially made Ratatouille trailer/anti-piracy film explaining the terrible shortcomings of illegal DVDs or downloads, and telling me that it was much better watching the film in the cinema.

Obviously, as someone who paid to get into the cinema, I'm obviously just the sort of person who buys their films on dodgy DVDs from someone at a car boot sale or outside a pub somewhere.

Before the main feature started a pair of slides from FACT come up on the screen reminding me that it's a crime to record any part of this film, and that I should alert someone should I see anyone else doing it.

I get similar short, unskippable "adverts" a the start of several DVDs that I've bought.

Piracy is obviously a problem, which Hollywood and others have to combat. Which is why it's odd that they actually do so much to aide and abet piracy.

I'm talking about screener DVDs. A brief look at any torrenting website at the moment will show you that The Simpsons Movie is readily available to download - and it's a rip of a DVD. All the more ironic as Bart's blackboard at the start of the film reads "I will not illegally download this movie."

Why does Fox even produce a screener DVD? You just know that as soon as a DVD is out in the wild, it's somehow going to end up on the net. So don't make them in the first place. By the time the film is released on DVD somewhere in the world, there are obviously going to be rips, but until then, just don't manufacture any at all. Of course people will smuggle video cameras into screens, and poor quality DVDs will show up at car boot sales across the country, but most people realise they're rubbish. If pirates get hold of rips of DVDs, then that's a whole different thing.

I noted a few weeks ago that following the controversy over Tintin in the Congo, it was storming the Amazon charts (it's currently 115).

So it was interesting to note that in Hergé's own home country, state prosecutors are considering whether charges can be brought. Ridiculous, I know. Plenty of racist/sexist/homophobic books are available to buy - not least Hitler's very own Mein Kampf. And so they should be. We shouldn't be trying to whitewash (pun intended) our history. We should understand that for good or bad, these views were accepted by many people in our past.

Anyway, I was also tickled, in some perverse way, to note that the very store where all this trouble started, when the title was inappropriately placed in the children's section, is now displaying the book on its front of store tables.

Walk into Borders on Oxford Street currently, and you'll see Tintin In Tibet proudly placed on the first table you come to as you enter the shop!

I mentioned a Reuters report in the States highlighting the lack of awareness and equipment in the lead-up to digital switchover in the US on 18 Feb 2009.

Today, US Today has a further piece on the issue, and it's worth a mention for a couple of things.

First, there's this quote:

"This scares me politically. There is no anger that comes close to the anger of an American that cannot get television," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said at a hearing last month.

A politician who really gets it. And secondly there this:

As of March, manufacturers must make new TVs digital-ready, even small, inexpensive sets.

That mandate, assuming "digital-ready" means built in digital decoders, is better than anything I've heard in the UK, where I can still buy plenty of cheap TVs that don't have DTT in-built.

But you know, the more I read about this, the more worried I become. First of all, I'm amazed that a country the size of the US is attempting to make this transition in one go. No region by region changes as we're getting in the UK. No test town like Whitehaven, from where learnings can be taken before larger areas are switched over.

Nope - the whole country having analogue switched off on 17 February 2009, with digital starting the next day.

And this is happening in the middle of February at the height of the TV season. That won't affect TV ratings at all, will it?

And at least we in the UK have got an easily Googleable website - DigtalUK - which is full of advice on how to make the transition. I can find no equivalent website in the US, even though the overwhelming majority of Americans get to make the change before most Brits.

In the US, the department that's responsible for the switchover is the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Their website is absolutely horrendous and makes very few allowances for consumers. Indeed, they seem to link to a third party Associate Press (sic) video to explain how digital converter boxes work!

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, and maybe it's just that there's a really obvious website that I've missed which doesn't come top of the Google rankings in the UK (Google results are regionally adjusted), but I simply don't believe that's the case.

Instead, I suspect that nobody's really considered those who are going to get left behind. We're talking about the elderly, the poor, and minorities. These are the people for who every dollar counts and has to be accounted for. They're the ones who are going to lose their TV. Politicians countrywide beware.

What a mess.

Last Sunday, Sky One started showing series two of Weeds.

This coming Monday, Showtime, the US premium cable channel that makes the series is starting series 3 (Link to the Showtime website now unblocked for non-US visitors!).

I really don't understand why, in this day and age, Sky is taking so long about bringing its new shows across the Atlantic. Unlike the average US network show, cable shows tend to run consecutively without mid-season repeats. That tends to be the reason that the new series of, say, ER, will only begin in January. By the time the series ends in the UK in May, it'll only be a week or so behind the US.

Sky has begun to learn from this, and now broadcasts shows like Lost and 24 within days (or at least a couple of weeks) of their US airings. Now it's picked up Prison Break, it looks like the same pattern is going to take place.

Why the rush? Because downloading shows from the States is pretty easy, and if you don't get in quick, there's a good chance that a chunk of your potential audience has already seen the show. But, I hear you say, Heroes on BBC2 is getting great audiences despite having aired on NBC last autumn, and Sci-Fi earlier this year. That's because 1) the BBC has done a great job promoting it and, 2) it has true mass-market appeal and isn't limited to a satellite only channel.

With the best will in the world, Weeds is never going to get gangbuster numbers, yet the audience to which it's aimed may well have gone seeking out new episodes by now. And even if they didn't illegally download, the US DVD boxset came out a couple of weeks ago. It just seems odd to me. And one would think that Sky now knows that they need to be showing the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica TV movie in the same week as its US airing (or even ahead of time like they did season one), if they don't want it to impact on ratings.

0224072862

Does television fakery know no bounds!

This morning's Telegraph presents the picture below and exposes it as - shock, horror - a CGI creation.

Wow. Who'd have thought? Next you'll tell me that the word "Mountain" isn't really there, floating in the sky, either!

Look, if there are genuine things to expose, then do. If it turned out that helicopters were dropping presenter Griff Rhys Jones onto the top of mountains rather than him climbing them, then they might have something. But opening credits of TV shows? They always come from the computers of graphics designers. Even the most senile of Telegraph readers will understand that. But seemingly, not the paper's editor.

Once upon a time you could be pretty sure that if you wanted to listen to your local football team, one station locally or another would be carrying a commentary.

In recent years the prices for rights have increased as local clubs, especially Premiership ones, have more competition, and stations battled to win the rights. But with radio revenues having flattened in recent years, rights became very expensive and many stations stopped broadcasting them. I suppose the equation works something like this: if your club is very big, with a large enough fanbase, and you charge the right price, you might be able to do better selling your commentaries direct to fans.

In London, Capital Gold (from yesterday, just "Gold") used to have the rights to several London clubs, including Arsenal. Indeed, the overspill of rights owned by what was then Capital Radio, meant that Xfm broadcast games on a Saturday afternoon too.

The first really big deal for Premiership rights was the one the then newly launched Century did with Manchester United in 1998. As well as getting rights to all their games, they also got advertising perimeter boards in Old Trafford which were surely very valuable in their own right. I'm told by people that know that this really cost an arm and a leg.

But there does seem to be an imbalance in which clubs sell their commentary rights, and those that don't or can't.

In London, unless you're one of the major Premiership clubs, you're unlikely to get a deal. So clubs like Crystal Palace have done deals in the past with BBC London, the local BBC radio station, to see that coverage is either carried via their website, or the DAB/Sky version of the signal.

As casual TV viewers might have noticed from the torrent of adverts at the moment, this season is the first under a new deal which sees Sky's exclusivity of live TV coverage of the Premiership ending after an EU ruling, with Setanta picking up some rights. But the same has also happened in radio. In the past, BBC Radio Five Live picked up national rights to all the available matches, including the option to broadcast an alternative 3pm Saturday match. One way or another, commercial radio was priced out of the national market.

But this season, under the same EU directive, Talksport has picked up one of the seven packages of matches. They have 32 games at 3pm on Saturdays, thus ending the Five Live Sports Xtra alternative - I imagine the Beeb will use this service to broadcast other sports. Five Live is left with 192 other games - hence their current radio trailers pointing out that they'll broadcasting more Premiership football than anyone else. By way of comparison, Setanta will broadcast 46 games, and Sky will broadcast 92. Incidentally, Talksport's package means that they get second pick of the 3pm Saturday games, although as we all know, the "glamour" ties tend to be those broadcast at any time except 3pm as they're the ones moved by TV companies. What's slightly curious about this arrangement is that the BBC still doesn't announce which tie it will broadcast at 3pm on a Saturday. Traditionally, this was so as not to dissuade people from going to the game rather than sitting at home and listening to it. But obviously games are chosen well in advance, with Talksport already advertising their fixture on air. Given that they get second pick, the BBC already knows what it's going to broadcast. Oh well.

Elsewhere around the country, on the south coast, Portsmouth has actually taken a stake in a couple of local stations to ensure broadcast commentaries are made available - perhaps hoping to grow its fanbase, even though it sells out every fixture already (there are always more football strips to sell). Meanwhile Town & Country Broadcasting has bought The Saint from Southampton FC, and is renaming it Radio Hampshire, again with full commentary rights included. In the north-east, were football is essentially a religion, Century NE has rights to Newcastle United and Sunderland games.

And Centuy's previous commentaries are now moving across to Xfm from this season. It seems likely that the rights were negotiated during the same of Century to GMG from GCap towards the end of last year, with the still GCap owned Xfm taking control from this season. Otherwise it'd be most peculiar given the Century deal still had another season to run. In the West Midlands, Beacon has both Wolves and West Brom deals.

With BBC local radio it's a bit more mixed. BBC London has Spurs rights this season and almost certainly others, and Leicester City is on BBC Leicester. Coventry is on its local BBC station. I believe that Man Utd's deal is exclusive, leaving BBC Manchester to cover Man City and Bolton, splitting the coverage across FM and DAB when necessary.

The whole thing is very piecemeal. But it'll be interesting to learn who gets Arsenal and Chelsea, unless they decide that selling commentaries direct to fans is more "cost effective."

Of course, this is all to do with league rights. FA Cup, League Cup, Champions' League, UEFA Cup, internationals and others are all separately negotiated, and often on a non-exclusive basis.

Vivienne Parry, one time Tomorrow's World presenter, bemoans the state of science on television. And has anyone seen one of these Maggie Philbin pieces? See also here.

And yes, I know that BBC Four is partway through an excellent Science You Can't See season.

[Update] The BBC - just to be clear - has insisted that Tomorrow's World is absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly, not returning. Well, thanks for clearing that up!

0571236154

A couple of entertaining bits from this week's Media Guardian.

Anthony Lilley of Magic Lantern productions bemoans the BBC's iPlayer, and in particular the pointlessness of the limitation in how long after a programme's aired you can still get a download. And allied to that is the expiration date on programmes. He does point out that this doesn't really stop people going down the peer to peer route if that's all that's still open to them.

Obviously this was a restriction that the BBC was forced to put into place, despite the fact that I've always been able to record programmes onto video tape, record them to DVD, save them to my PVR or even record them direct to my PC with something like Windows Media Centre. Oh well.

A Media Guardian correspondent suggests closing down BBC Three to save some cash. Writing after reading last week's interview with BBC 3 controller Danny Cohen, he says that the channel hasn't shown a single programme he wants to watch and therefore should be closed down.

I'm not entirely sure about that, although Cohen's wish to lower the average age of the channel is concerning. It seems that if you're really young, you get a digital BBC channel - Cbeebies. If you're a school age child, you get a channel - CBBC. If you've left school and are still under 35, you get a channel - BBC Three. Everyone else gets, BBC Four.

69% of the population are 35 or over, so this isn't exactly a fair split. Yes, I'm sure that BBC1 and BBC2 superserve an older demographic to a certain extent, but let's also consider the various amounts spent on some of these channels according to the latest BBC Annual Report:

I'm still not sure why BBC Three gets nearly twice as much as BBC Four. I won't deny that BBC Three's share is somewhat greater (1.30% for BBC Three in June '07 compared with 0.41% for BBC Four), but that's as much as anything down to programmes like Eastenders getting second runs on the service.

Here's the most recent top 10 programmes on BBC Three and BBC Four that I have details for:

As you'll note, just about all the programmes are transfers from BBC1 or BBC2, or spin-offs based on Neighbours, a popular BBC1 programme. Doctor Who came in at 11 and 12.

The highest BBC Four programme was at position 29, and that was a repeat of Life on Mars.

In other words, repeats of major programmes, or spin-offs of them, are still the main driver for both these channels.

I would disagree that no worthwhile programme has come from BBC Three - Bodies would be a very good case in point. But claims about launching Little Britain should be taken with a pinch of salt. Programmes like this may have made their debuts on BBC Three, but were always going to "transfer" to BBC1; to say otherwise would be pretending. I note too, that new episodes of Heroes are debuting on BBC Three.

Finally, a report in this weekend's Observer noted that like the drink industry, the gambling industry is going to limit the appearance of their logos on football shirts to adult sizes only. This is something I'd highlighted before as being essential. The details remain to be seen, but I'd hope that they take a more mature attitude than the drink industry which has ensured that anyone currently in a deal, can go on advertising alcoholic drinks on kids' shirts until the end of their current deal.

Seemingly, there's concern that kids won't want shirts devoid of sponsors' names because they're not the same as the ones their heroes wear. On the contrary: I'd actually pay a few quid more for a sponsor-free shirt!

Last week, BBC2 aired a special edition of Top Gear, in which Jeremy Clarkson and James May drove a vehicle to the "North Pole" against Richard Hammond who was on sledge pulled by huskies.

Now while it was as entertaining as ever with lots of boisterousness as is the norm, there are three specific issues I have with this programme:

1. First up is Jeremy Clarkson's end comment:

"I'd set out to prove that polar exploration could be easy - but it isn't. It's brutal and savage. The fact is though, that two middle-aged men - deeply unfit and mostly drunk - had made it. Thanks entirely to the incredible machine that took us there. They'd said we'd never get to the Pole because of the damage the car has already done to the ice cap.

"Perhaps then that's what we've proved most of all - really - the inconvenient truth is, it doesn't appear to have even scratched the surface."

Very witty. But it's pretty meaningless, and the fact that all the snow and ice they expected to see, was actually there, doesn't mean that the polar ice-caps aren't disappearing.

2. The "North Pole"

All the way through the programme, we were led to believe that Clarkson et al were heading to the North Pole. You know, the one visited by Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen (there's some dispute about whether Peary could have navigated to it). It;s the one the Russians have just tried claiming for themselves. That's the pole we all think about. It's also called the Geographic North Pole.

But there is another "pole" - the North Magnetic Pole. This is where the Earth's magnetic field points vertically downwards. It moves around quite a lot - as much as 15km a year. And it's quite some way from the Geographic North Pole.

However, the programme didn't bother with such niceties and just said the guys were driving to the "north pole."

Well needless to say, they went to the more southerly magnetic pole, because it's easier to get to. Oh, and they didn't even get to the magnetic pole, because they went to its position in 1996 which is where Polar Race finishes. They didn't really mention that there was a race taking place on the same course at the same time either.

I've no problem with them travelling across that country (as long as they cleaned up after them), but let's be honest about what you're doing guys.

3. Toyota's Involvement

Top Gear always has to tread a fine-line about commercial sensitivities. Everytime they make a beautifully shot film about a car they like, they're effectively giving free airtime to that car. As a result, I'm sure every manufacturer is falling over themselves to provide the BBC with their products.

But in this instance, the commercial crossover is deeply worrying. The car that the team used to travel to the "pole" was a specially adapted Toyota Hilux. The backup team also used some Hiluxes, as well as a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Obviously they had to use some branded vehicle to get there. But visit the Toyota website and click on Hilux. Currently you'll see a Flash animation which starts with the "Arctic Hilux." This is the specially adapted vehicle the Top Gear team used. Clicking on it takes you to a standalone Toyota website - invinciblehilux.co.uk. This site details how the trip was planned and conceived.

The Hilux used was specially adapted by a company called Arctic Trucks. If you visit their website currently, you'll also see plenty about the trip.

So essentially, an "expedition" paid for by the BBC is being used in a quite blatantly commercial manner to advertise these two companies' products.

OK - that's not something that's anything to do with the BBC.

But there's also the small matter of the very commercial Top Gear website. No, not the one on bbc.co.uk - that's about the TV show. That one is all very nice with a few clips from previous programmes. The site I'm talking about is topgear.com. It has the same logo, but isn't to do with the TV show. Oh no. It's the Top Gear magazine's website. It's owned and operated by BBC Worldwide, the arm of the BBC that sells CDs, DVDs, and books, and also publishes magazines amongst other things. This website is stuffed full adverts and has loads of content (hate that word), with news, features, games, test reports and so on.

The TV website has very little on the polar challenge. The magazine website has plenty, with features and blogs. It's pretty clear that this is the site that people are really expected to go to.

Now I'm not accusing anybody of doing anything wrong. I'm sure that all the usual rules about commercialism are being adhered to. It's just that it makes me very uneasy to see a BBC TV show being used in this manner. And let's not forget that it was the Toyota Aygo that was featured in a car "football" match last year when a dozen or so cars were driven around as the players. Plenty of damage occurred, and somehow I don't think that the BBC picked up the bill for all those vehicles.

All in all, a very murky business.

Dave Gorman is stopped from taking photos of funfair rides because he might be up to no good and trying to take pictures of children. Even when he shows that he's completely innocent, the police tell him to leave.

The daily newspaper I once worked for, The Bath Chronicle, is becoming a weekly newspaper. It's been around since 1760, although I'm not sure if it's always been a daily. They reckon the weekly will run to 250 pages. That'd make it the Sunday Times of weekly newspapers.

I tried to buy a train ticket for tomorrow earlier on and came across a few difficulties. First of all, I couldn't find an online system that lets you book a cycle reservation, so I had to phone up. But not before I'd first tried to buy my ticket. The system asked me how I'd like to collect the tickets - either same day delivery (not cheap) or through a FastTicket machine (free). I selected the FastTicket option. But they don't have a FastTicket machine in Liverpool Street where I want to depart. One of the small stations near me does have one, but seemingly, one of London's main terminals doesn't have one. Neither does Waterloo come to that! The next problem was the cycle reservation. After being put on hold for several minutes I was told that pre-reserved spaces were full, but that there was always space for walk-up ticket buyers. So, I can take a risk and show up at the station and try to squeeze the bike on, or I just forget about the bike, and go without it.