September 2007 Archives

Jeremy Kyle used to work at Virgin Radio hosting the late night "Jezza' Confessions" show where he took calls and gave advice in between playing music.

But most people these days know him from his morning ITV show where his guests confront various issues.

Actually that's a pretty polite way of saying that some very stupid people from the dregs of society have been lured to Manchester with the promise of a night in a hotel and a free meal or too, in return for washing their dirty laundry in public in front of a judgemental host and audience.

It's tawdry television, and is pretty much indefensible. I had the misfortune of seeing a bit the other day when a youth had the results of a DNA test revealed on the show, only to discover that the person he thought was his biological father wasn't. He was in tears, and considering that the show is served up for entertainment purposes, you couldn't help but feel a voyeur in this person's very personal moment.

But it gets great ratings for ITV.

The show hit the headlines last week when a judge labelled the show has a "human form of bear-baiting."

"It seems to me that the purpose of this show is to effect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil."

"This type of incident is exactly what the producers want. These self-righteous individuals should be in the dock with you. They pretend there is some kind of virtue in putting out a show like this," said Judge Berg.

Judges can make crass and stupid comments at times, but it'd be hard to argue with these.

A couple of days later, and there were further allegations, denied, that an alcoholic guest was given lager.

Now comes news that the programme's sponsor, Learn Direct, has pulled out of the show. On the face of it, that's a sensible course of action for worthwhile organisation.

But I have a question:

What the hell were they thinking of when they sponsored the show in the first place?

Learn Direct is a government funded organisation, and the reported £500,000 a year sponsorship contract comes out of tax-payers' money. The sponsors knew very well what they were getting into when they signed up for the programme. Certainly, the kind of people who appear on the show, and perhaps many of the viewers are perhaps in Learn Direct's target market. But the programme hardly perpetuates the kind of values to which a good scheme should want to be associated. If there was televised dog fighting, they wouldn't sponsor that would they?

Nope - in the same way that Carphone Warehouse jumped from Big Brother earlier this year, Learn Direct is trying to get away from the sponsorship of a programme which they should have known was unsuitable from the outset.

Sponsorship can be a very powerful and effective way for an advertiser to get their message across, but it's key to match your brand with an appropriate programme. I'd be looking very hard at the Learn Direct marketing department if they were responsible for signing off this sponsorship in the first place.

* Obviously, as ever, these views represent my personal views, and not necessarily those of my employer.

Well the short answer is no.

But since a few people I know are beginning to get tempted, I thought I'd lay out all my objections to Apple's new wondrous piece of technology.

Cost

Most people in the UK who have large monthly spends are used to getting even the very newest phones free of charge with a new contract renewal. But that's not the way the iPhone is going to work. You have to buy the phone for £269 and then take out an O2 contract for a minimum of £35 a month. If you're already on O2, that might be fine, but it's not a great prospect otherwise. Apple take a cut of every penny the consumer pays to O2, which explains the somewhat inflated prices. I will concede that the data element of those packages is pretty good.

Technology

Why is this device not 3G? Higher speed technologies might not be the standard in the US, but that's really not the case in Europe and to release this product at a slower speed is just not acceptable. Yes there's Edge, and I was tickled to find that my Orange phone got Edge wherever I was in Skye recently, whereas it's pretty rare in London. But 3G is where it's at.

It may well be the best iPod that Apple have ever made, but it only comes with 8GB of memory. That's the same as you get on a iPod Nano. Given that the screen is going to encourage me to watch videos on it, there's simply not going to be space for more than a handful of videos, a few albums, some photos and a few podcasts. I'll have filled it.

For forty quid less, I can get twenty times the memory on an iPod Classic.

Practicality

I'll admit to not having actually played with an iPhone - the closest I've got so far is standing two deep back from someone playing with an iPod Touch in the Apple Store on Regent Street. But I'm not convinced by a non-tactile communication device. I've lived for nearly 18 months (and yes, I very much regret signing up for 18 months last time around) with an Orange M600, or HTC Prophet. It has a touch screen, and for some stuff like Google Maps it's great. But for dialing people it's rubbish, and texting is positively painful. You have to keep getting your stylus out to do anything worthwhile. Now while Apple's touch technology is undoubtedly much more sophisticated, it you can stand up with your hand on your heart and tell me that texting is easier than with a keyboard, then I might begin to listen.

And while the screen looks lovely, you just know you're going to have to put it in a fairly bulky case. The iPhone is a thing of beauty, but it's going to get grubby finger marks all over that screen (you should have seen those iPod Touches in the Apple Store), and you simply couldn't put it in any pocket without protection.

The Small Things

The whole ringtone thing is a disgrace - you have to pay extra to turn your iTunes tracks into ringtones, when every other phone in the category these days lets you play whatever music you've put on your phone as a ringtone.

Why can't I just install whatever programs I like on the phone? That's the whole point of smartphones isn't it? They're small computers. I can install whatever I like on my M600. I don't need a nanny looking over my shoulder deciding if I can be trusted with it. It's all down to me.

Conclusion

Maybe the second generation of iPhones will be better. Apple won't be able to dictate pricing quite as rigidly, and there'll be more competition to keep things keen. Flash memory will be cheaper so there'll actually be a decent amount of disk space on the phone, and 3G will be included. There might even be the odd button on it. Perhaps then I'll take another look at it.

Yes, the phone's a thing of beauty, but that's not enough.

In the meantime, I'm much more tempted by the HTC TyTN II which although it's still touch screen, has a keyboard for email and texts which pivots, and is the closest device to my previous ever favourite, the Psion 5. I just have to wait for Orange to get it.

This week, Heat Radio has relaunched using an advertising free format. Instead it's using sponsorship to earn revenue. In this respect it's similar to stations like Virgin Radio Xtreme which launched with Sony PSP for the first six months.

Heat magazine isn't exactly regular reading for me. I'm not, and indeed, have never been in its target demographic. But I thought I'd give it a try. A wraparound on trade magazine Media Week advertised a trade competition at the URL heatradio.com. I clicked through, but all I could find was the said competition. At least it'll let me click through to hear the station though won't it? Not easily, no.

It was all very strange: heatradio.com is a great URL, so it's odd that they're not using it for consumer purposes rather than trade ones. I won't draw too much attention to their schedule which suggests that 2am follows 1pm.

Instead you have to click through to heatworld.com. Now while this might be the regular Heat destination website, it still should be all a little more seamless. Heatworld, incidentally has to be launched as a seperate window or tab, which means pop-up blockers can get in the way.

Then there's another strange thing. The top story on Heatworld is one that's been doing the rounds in the radio industry following an appearance on Holy Moly a couple of days ago. The wrong file was played out for the news, and listeners instead heard the newsreader degenerate into lots of swearing as she realised her script wasn't all there. As it's unlikely that some punter was recording the output of a digital radio station like Heat, you can only imagine that the audio came from someone within EMAP radio (Heat's owners) itself. Heatworld links to a YouTube "video" of this audio.

This couldn't have been a first week "stunt" could it?

But I'm still trying to hear Heat Radio.

A tab at the top links to www2.heatradio.com - a very different site to www.heatradio.com which is odd because usually the inclusion of numbers just refers to a series of servers serving the same code up. Again, it launches in another window.

Still no audio though. Now you have to launch the radio player - another window - with the curious URL www.whatson.com/heat/. The player is a little large for my liking, and effectively works as a player for the whole of EMAP radio. The link to buy songs directly on iTunes via Tradedoubler (that's how they earn some cash from the transaction), is neat, but it all feels a little cumbersome.

As for the actual output? Well it's not really my thing as I say, so I don't think I'll be listening too much...

Boris Johnson has now been formally chosen by the Tories as their candidate for the London Mayoral elections. That's what a few appearances on Have I Got News For Your can do.

Now far be it from me to really believe that his key election promises are those that the media has highlighted, but let's just have a look at them shall we?

He wants to get rid of "bendy buses" and replace them with old Routemasters. I'm really not at all sure how he's going to manage that. I hate bendy buses for a number of reasons: they're very dangerous for cyclists and motorcyclists as they turn around corners in some of our narrow and congested London streets. They take up valuable road "real estate" being so long. You could get more traffic in that space if you used a double decker. And I loved using Routemasters with the ability to jump on and off where it was convenient rather than waiting for a bus stop.

But surely this is a complete non-starter. Those bendy buses will be on leases that run for years to come. The various companies that operate the services won't be able to get out of them. And where are these Routemasters going to be found? They were clapped out, frankly, when they were retired, with barely any leg-room since they were built in another age when people were smaller. The entry and exit are cramped. All the old buses were scrapped or sold off - it's not as though there are garages full of the things sitting around like army Green Goddesses during a fire brigade strike, just awaiting further use.

There are a couple of routes still served by Routemasters, but they're the exception rather than the rule, and they're mainly for tourism purposes. Double deckers would probably be the solution.

As for claims that he's going to put the tube right - well good luck. I'm all for improving it, but I don't believe that it's something that's easily achievable. It was our new Prime Minister - the then Chancellor - who forced Public Private Partnerships on the tube, with the result that Metronet is now in all sorts of trouble trying to maintain services. Ken Livingstone has hated these things from the start, so I'd be amazed if Boris can do anything.

Still real commitments are still thin on the ground, so we'll have to watch and wait to hear some real policy initiatives.

Languages always change and develop as we start to use words that never existed before. But there's one area of language development that I really don't like, and it's the use of marketing-speak in everyday language.

I have too pet peeves - "content" and "premium." They can be used separately, and are particularly terrible when they're put together.

Content is now the catch-all word for programming, audio, video, pictures and of course the written word. I agree that it is a handy word - a catch-all. But the reason I loathe it is that it somehow dismisses the essence of what is being produced. It suggests that one piece of writing, or one produced programme is much alike the next. It relegates each individually produced piece to the same status as baked beans going into their cans in a factory; content is something that you purchase by the yard.

Now while I might have some idealism, I realise that a lot of television really is purchased by the yard. I'm sure that there are some skilled producers working on some of these shows, but when a daytime commissioner orders 250 hours of buying/selling antique programming, they probably don't really care what it looks like as long as it delivers a satisfactory audience.

Indeed perhaps the recent malaise in TV standards, which surely has been put down to people no longer really caring about the audience, can actually be laid at the feet of the word "content"?

Premium is even worse. I suppose that I first came across premium in relation to lagers. In ye olde days, we'd have all drunk whatever lager the brewery who owned the pub offered. There was unlikely to be a great deal of choice. There was branding of course: who can forget those Hoffmeister - follow the bear ads. Or perhaps it'd have been Skol that you drank? There was always Heineken or Carlsberg, and there were cheaper or more expensive lagers. But along comes Stella Artois which was "reassuringly expensive."

That's fine, but then the expression "premium lager" began to creep out of the pages of the marketing press and into the wild. What exactly is premium about these lagers? Well Holsten Pils has always claimed that more of the sugar turns to alcohol, but is the process involved in these lagers' manufacture truly that different? Is there a "premium" brewing process?

A cynic like myself rather suspects that Skol is manufactured in a vat right next to the one used for Stella. Sure, there'll be some different ingredients and processes; the drinks do taste different after all. But aside from the "brand values" each drink is afforded, I remain unconvinced.

From a consumer's point of view, the marketing works - Stella is the biggest selling lager in the UK. There's a certain snobbishness prevalent when you walk into a bar or pub and try to avoid the cheap lager. It may well have a lower percentage of alcohol (which is actually becoming more popular), but like any other product the same marketing rules apply.

Premium isn't just used in lagers of course - there are premium brands, and worst of all, premium content...

In my last post I mentioned that I was pleased to be able to watch Channel Four News when I get in without having to record it first. The reason I was pleased to see it this evening was because there was an excellent report from Burma where as we know, there are enormous anti-government protests.

It's an important story, as Burma is one of the most repressive regimes in the world, where Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been under house arrest since 1990.

But there's another thing that's just really beginning to annoy me. The country's name.

You see, it's the corrupt generals themselves that renamed the English language version of the country as Myanmar. I'm happy to go with the name that most Burmese, and free Burma organisations use themselves prefer - Burma. The BBC and most major news organisations in the UK use Burma. But plenty of web reports use Myanmar. And I even saw Myanmar over someone's shoulder in Metro today.

[Update] I've just seen that the BBC News website covers this very issue in some depth.

It's all about the plus ones it seems just now. Channel 4 is terribly excited about it's newly launched +1 channel allowing you to see programmes that were on an hour earlier. It has always confused me that they're called "+1" channels - surely they should be "-1" since it was on an hour earlier?

Anyway the only use I get from them is if I'm recording more shows at the same time than my PVR can cope with. But I've just found a use for Channel 4 +1 - I can watch Channel Four News when I get in. Usually it's just about over before I reach home. Now I can easily catch it. Although it is weird hearing the continuity announcer on Channel 4 +1 explaining that over on +1, The Simpsons is just about to start. For that I need Channel 4 +1 +1 (or +2) don't I?

Discovery Channel does have both Discovery +1 and Discover +1.5... I think I prefer the FX solution. Their sister channel is FX+ and they just rejig the network quite a lot; it doesn't take long to find another airing of Dexter.

Hello lawyers at Schillings! (I'm pretty sure, there's nothing illegal, libellous, or defamatory on this page, but be sure to let me know if you think otherwise! Send me a comment. You and your client have certainly done us all a favour by drawing attention to the man).

I've no idea if they'll read this or not, but it seems that they're having enormous fun at the moment busily shutting down the websites and blogs of people who don't like new Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov.

Have I mentioned that I thoroughly recommend Craig Murray's book Murder in Samarkand?

I've just pulled my copy off the bookshelf and Usmanov is referred to on pages 56, 207, 283 and 366. He used to be Prime Minister of Uzbekistan.

This is the man who wants a blocking share of Arsenal, so aside from anything else, he's someone I'm very interested in, as every Arsenal fan should be.

There's loads about this elsewhere at the moment, and I'd start here and here.

NB. At time of writing, both Craig Murray's and Boris Johnson's websites are still down.

You can't move for Phil Collins at the moment. Geneis has just embarked on a new tour of North America for the first time in something like fifteen years. There's a new book out about the band. But mostly, there's that Cadbury's ad:

Over in the States, there's a new ABC sitcom called Carpoolers which is being trailed with this clever take on the same song:

The best use of the song is still surely the wonderful footage of Crockett driving around in his Ferrari in the pilot of Miami Vice:

Incidentally, Popbitch informs me that In The Air Tonight is likely to make the top forty this weekend. That's iTunes for you.

Guess where I was last night? I had my camera confiscated at one point, and was very pleased that I slipped the memory card out of it and into the palm of the person next to me, as I was directed to some lockers to hand it in. It was an unnecessary subterfuge since they didn't try to delete any pictures or take the memory card. They just wanted me to stop taking pictures and were pretty nice about it really. I just claimed to be completely unaware of the rules - I hadn't even seen the ticket until that evening (true).

Today I read that the small purple person (Google indexes this site pretty well so I shan't make it easy for them) has contracted lawyers to remove lots of illegal fare. I assume that many of those YouTube videos will be the thousands of camera phone videos that everyone else in the audience was taking without incurring the wrath of security.

I note that Virgin Media customers will be able to get "dynamic interactive content" from BBC Radio services later this month. Basically this gives you lots of "now playing" type information when you're watching a BBC Radio channel.

As the press release explains, this has been available on Freeview for sometime. And the release also coyly mentions that "BBCi now visualises radio listening on most major digital TV platforms."

In other words: you can get it on Freeview, and you can get it on cable. But you can't get it on Sky.

If there's one glaring in hole in Sky's otherwise very good system, it's the lack of flexibility in their radio section, without even basic Now & Next functionality. You can't see anything beyond a description of the current programme on the EPG - certainly not a list of programmes over the coming days. And you can't set your Sky+ to record a radio programme without prior knowledge of programme times, and an understanding of how to manually record things.

Let's hope that releases like this get Sky to pull their finger out and do something. It really can't be that hard!

There's an interesting piece about Apple's pricing for video in Variety at the moment. It seems that Apple would quite like to drop prices from $1.99 to 99c an episode, and not all the studios are happy. ABC/Disney might bite the bullet, but as an unnamed commenter for the piece says 'it doesn't make sense to charge the same amount for an episode of "The Brady Bunch" as for "Lost."'

Will Apple be able to get away with it? Or will other studios fight back like NBC?

Tonights episode of The IT Crowd was as great as ever, and opened up with a mock video piracy warning:

Well, I've bitten the bullet and upgraded to MT 4, and so far everything seems OK. I got it working pretty much straight out of the box, and I took Sixapart's advice and did it as side by side install to allow me to only move across folders that I actually needed. That said, once I'd run the upgrade, MT 3.3x didn't see any blogs, so it's 4 all the way now.

There are a couple of things that I need to fix. I believe I should be able to use CAPTCHA to allow comment approval going forward. But the current system works well, so I'll leave that for another day.

More pressing is MTAmazon which just showed a neat little icon of the current book or DVD that I'm watching. For reasons beyond me, that stopped working a couple of weeks ago. But now with MT 4, I don't yet have a complete solution.

In fact, the whole site needs a visual overhaul - it's something that I've been meaning to do for ages. Back in June this blog celebrated its fifth birthday (yes it passed me by too). I check today, and I've published over a half a million words. Anyway, watch this space as I get around to giving the place a good spring autumn clean.

This evening I saw Stardust, the film based on Neil Gaiman's novel. The film has already had its US release, and it's fair to say that it didn't perform outstandingly there. But is that a fair reflection of the film?

I'd say not.

The problem is that it's a really hard film to market. The closest comparisons are either the wonderful The Princess Bride or perhaps The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. It's a fantasy tale set just the other side of the village of Wall, as Tristan goes in search of a fallen star to give to his true love.

Much as Charlie Cox gives a great performance as Tristan, and Claire Danes is lovely as the star - Yvaine. The real scene-stealers are Michelle Pfeiffer as the evil witch Lamia, and a brilliant turn by Robert De Niro as a camp sea captain. De Niro is great at comedy.

The film doesn't take itself enormously seriously, and you'll recognise just about every person in the film. As I suspected, Ricky Gervais is a relatively minor character, over-used in the trailer.

But overall it's a cracking film.

It doesn't open in the UK until October 19, but it'll be worth searching out when it does.

Just one small other point. In the past I've been known to moan about preview screenings where the distributors insist that you hand over your mobile phones before the screening, leading to inevitable bunfights afterwards when several thousand people all try to get them back simultaneously. After tonight's experience, I beginning to think that maybe they've got it right after all, and I've got it wrong. Because this film opened in US some time ago, security was relaxed and nobody asked me for my phone. Naturally I turned it off. Not so, the woman in the row just in front of me who arrived late to sit with her friend. Even though the film had started, she fired off a text. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But ten minutes later she was still texting and even phoning. In a darkened cinema, the effect was akin to someone waving a torch around in front of me. Eventually, with no end in sight, I leant forward and asked her very kindly if she would turn it off. She did, but five minutes later, she and her friend left the cinema. Good. People like that deserve to be kicked out of cinemas. It's relatively common for security guards to peer at audiences during early releases to check we've not somehow smuggled a camcorder into the cinema. I wish that they'd instead deal with anti-social mobile phone users. That way, I might actually begin to enjoy the cinema experience some more.

So this week it finally happened; the Danny Baker podcast went to subscription only.

A bit of background. Danny Baker's been on the radio for years. In 2005, after a good stint on breakfast on BBC Radio London, he won the Sony Radio Award for DJ of the year. He promptly quit, returning to the station six months later to take over the drivetime (well 3pm-5pm) show.

Baker devotees have consistently listened to the streams of these shows, and certain websites link to torrents of these programmes converted to mp3s.

Fast-forward to earlier this year, when Baker met, through very strange circumstances involving him inviting random listeners to help out on his show, Paul Myers, founder of Wippit, a music download service.

Baker was persuaded to give podcasting a go. So while he kept doing his BBC London show, he started doing a second, largely musicless podcast version of the show which is kept entirely separate from the BBC. The internal politics of his being able to do this are curious. His BBC London show is not available as a podcast - podcasting is still an experimental service at the BBC. And it turns out that Baker actually has no contract and is paid on a show by show basis. So Baker just did the show.

Wippit has built him a studio, and he does the show with his regular retinue of Amy Lamé, Baylen Leonard and David Kuo one or more of whom may appear on each show.

The podcasts were successful, but it was obvious that they were being done with a view to being charged for at some point - these people are giving up their time, they're not necessarily all really wealthy, and if the show was going out on radio, they obviously would be paid.

So after an August largely spent on holiday, this week saw the first of the new "in colour" paid for episodes.

The deal was that you could buy a week's worth of shows - each running around 45 minutes - for £2. Is this a good deal? Should I subscribe?

It's been pointed out to me that £2 a week for 52 weeks is only £31.50 less than a full BBC TV licence, and I obviously get more than a single 45 minute radio show a day from the BBC.

The nearest comparison I can make is the Ricky Gervais podcasts. He too initially launched them free, with The Guardian, where they immediately caught fire, and were soon topping the iTunes charts (not that it's ever too clear exactly how those charts are determined - but they're the best measure we've got). Then Gervais did a deal with Audible, and the next couple of series were paid for via that site. The price was around 95p an episode, and at the time I decided that I wouldn't subscribe. As well as having an issue with incompatibility with my then mp3 player, I just didn't feel like I was getting value for money from a largely unscripted and easily produced show. It felt like three friends - talented and funny friends, certainly - were just sitting around a microphone shooting the breeze.

Is the Danny Baker show different? Well, yes. They've prepared material in advance, and there's greater interaction with the listeners. Yes, it is still effectively a paid-for radio service, but at 40p a show it doesn't feel to pricey. And I could take up their subscription offer at £4.95 a month (or £50 a year) which obviously reduces the cost even further.

So I decided to buy a week's worth. That's where my troubles began. Maybe the Wippit site is being so overwhelmed this week that they can barely cope with Baker subscribers, but I had an experience not dissimilar to Mark Lawson's attempt to buy Setanta.

First of all I had to contend with registering. This gave me lots of server-crash error messages and failures. I actually gave up at this point and came back the next day, to have another go, with very similar results. Then I discovered that I had somehow registered because my email address was already on their system. Recovering my password failed repeatedly, but I finally managed to get into the system.

I found the programmes I wanted and tried to check out. I got to that point where you press the button and your card is charged. I got a blank screen. Sure, I could go back, but I didn't want to get charged twice. I checked my account history and discovered I'd been charged £2.08. The 8p was a transaction charge that I hadn't previously noticed. It might only be 8p but come on, build that into your overall price - Apple manages it should I buy a single track for 79p.

I managed to finally download the three shows so far this week, but the downloads weren't speedy, and there was no indication of the file size as I embarked on the download.

Overall the website feels flaky with pages not loading properly. A really disappointing consumer experience. A friend similarly went through an awful experience buying the shows, taking a full hour to get the programmes to download.

None of the music download services I've used are that great. Apple has the benefit of its own application to let you buy the music, but it can be difficult to navigate, and slow to load. eMusic is fairly fast and easy to use, but finding the music you want (ignoring the general availability of albums you'd like) is difficult. Audible is opaque at first, but you eventually find your way around satisfactorily, even if it sometimes takes you multiple button presses to get to where you want to end up.

But Wippit has to be the worst. They need to get some designers and engineers in to make the site more robust. They've got the content, but that's only part of the consumer retail experience. If I hadn't really really wanted to try the programmes, I'd have long given up on this site.

And I haven't even listened to the shows yet!

[UPDATE]

Obviously Wippit has been struggling. Last night I got an email directing me to a different server that's solely for downloading the Danny Baker podcast. That worked a lot better.

[UPDATE 2 - 23 October 2007]

I had an email from Wippit yesterday letting me know that the ADBS is back from Wednesday 24 October. There's a ten minute special in the meantime which sort of explains what the problem was. Interestingly, Baker's talking about "winding down" his BBC London show.

The big question is this: has the Wippit sign-up procedure improved in the intervening month or so?

I'm torn. I admit it.

On the one hand, it annoys the hell out of me that one company's product launches gets so much coverage. But on the other hand, at 6pm last night I was sitting at my desk hitting refresh on Engadget's excellent live blogging of Apple's latest launch event.

So much was hoped for. Not quite as much was delivered.

There's a new Nano which, while smaller and with video, I'm not convinced is actually in a good form factor being just about square. Perhaps if I play with one in an Apple store I'll think differently, but given that you can watch video on it, how are you supposed to comfortably hold it? It's also disappointing that the memory size hasn't increased, with just 4GB and 8GB models available. My current Nano is 8GB already (yes these new ones are cheaper).

I'll leave Americans to stew about the price cut in the iPhone just a couple of months after launch. I think that's an implicit acknowledgment that the product's been overpriced to date. When we hear about European, and particularly British carriers, the pricing will be really interesting. Whoever gets it, will surely give it away pretty cheaply or even free for new customers who switch. Charging upwards of £300 is not something the mass market is prepared to do here.

But I am a bit disappointed in what we must now call the iPod Touch. Certainly it looks cool, and having WiFi and a big screen is great. But it only comes in 8GB or 16GB sizes because the memory's flash. In the UK I can pay £269 for a 16GB cool looking video player? Or I can pay slightly less for a 160GB iPod Classic. It's simply not value for money. You're surely better off getting one of the new slim PSPs and a decent sized memory card. Given that video is a large part of it's raison d'etre, you're not going to get many episodes of TV shows or films on it before you run out of memory. My Nano just has music and podcasts and is regularly jam-packed at 8GB.

The 160GB iPod Classic does look interesting since it has a hard disk that might actually take my entire CD collection.

Oh, and there's no sign of the suggested digital radio (not even an included FM radio which is pathetic really) which doesn't surprise me, with no formal standard adopted.

Nor is there any sign of any BBC programming on iTunes. I think that was a wild rumour based around the fact that in the UK, Apple used BBC Television Centre to beam back Steve Jobs' presentation.

And I don't understand why WiFi isn't built into all the new iPods. The Zune managed it.

Apple did announce some kind of buy it now service in Starbucks using the iPod Touch, but I'd have thought they'd have the ability to do much more.

How about this? Your WiFi iPod lets you stream radio via Apple's iTunes service. Apples uses a music matching service much like how Shazam works with mobile phones, that compares the audio you're hearing with all the tracks they have in their iTunes database. They can then easily identify the track you're hearing from your favourite radio station, and you can buy it there and then.

I mentioned the NBC/Apple spat about video pricing the other day, and I still stand by the idea that pricing should be variable as it is in nearly every other product or service that you can buy. But I'm not too impressed with NBC's solution which is to go with Amazon's (US only) Unbox service, since that just serves DRM'd Windows Media files. No use for an iPod or PSP - surely the two most popular digital video playback devices. I know NBC seems perversely scared about DRM-free content, but they do need to remember that they're broadcasting this stuff free-to-air in HD. Just make it easy for consumers to buy, and buy it they surely will. Oh, and price it cheaper than DVDs - just like downloads tend to (but not always) cost less than CDs.

Anyway, the device I'm most interested that was announced yesterday is the Sony Alpha 700. Quite pricey though...

Wandering through Virgin Megastore yesterday, I came across two unlikely compilation albums - unlikely for very different reasons.

First there was Cained.

It's a compilation of Michael Caine's favourite chillout tracks. Yes - that Michael Caine.

According to Caine's "blog" he truly did pick these tunes, with the idea coming when he had dinner at Elton John's house and he showed himself to be very knowledgable about chillout music. Who knew?

And then, for a very different reason there's The Saturday Sessions. This features tracks recorded live by artists who've appeared on Dermot O'Leary's show. Now this album has a relatively eclectic collection of songs by some excellent artists, and I've no doubt that Dermot is a lovely guy who'd be great company down the pub. But seriously - look at the album cover:

Stop giggling at the back.

Come on. Leaning against a wall? With a guitar! He's not playing himself on these tracks is he? I guess that at least if you downloaded this album via iTunes, you could elect to dump the album artwork.

Mediaguardian asks whether we watched Dumped or Hell's Kitchen (now with Marco Pierre White).

Obviously, I watched neither. I can report that the trailer for Hell's Kitchen seems to be exactly the same as The Restaurant over on BBC2 - both showing people slinging food around the place (the BBC has already had to respond to complaints that its food-fight trail was a gross waste of food). Indeed the series are largely the same except that the BBC show has Raymond Blanc and isn't using celebrities.

Instead, can I recommend last night's Panorama which featured a school-masterly Vivian White wandering around Swindon brow-beating slacker youngsters into getting off their backsides and actually going out and finding a job. It was hilarious.

Swindon, you see, isn't a bad place to find a job. It's just that these kids preferred to sit at home on their Playstations and picking up a £45 job-seeker's allowance instead of finding something better to do. At least a couple of them actually managed to end up with proper jobs by the end of it. The sight of Vivian White turning up at their homes at 5.30am to make sure that they set off for their early shift at the Honda plant must have put the fear of god into them. And they thought they'd left school!

Just returning to Dumped for a moment. First of all, have a read of this, and in particular the comments - she gets lascerated.

"Then it escalated into collecting empty water bottles out of the edit suites we were cutting the series in so I could take them back to the office to recycle."

Maybe you could try drinking filtered water or *shock horror*, tap water from a glass and then you'll eliminate the plastic bottles totally...or is that too obvious?

I'm truly astounded that it took the involvement on this programme before you realised that rubbish actually "went somewhere". What did you think happened, that it vanished into thin air like magic?

And finally, have a look at the following poster from a bus-stop in Tottenham Court Road:

A clever poster this, surely? Lots of crushed cans advertising Dumped.

But click on the photo above and have a look at the fullsize version of the image. There are a suspiciously large number of Pepsi Max cans marked 45p.

Surely they used waste cans for the ad didn't they? I mean they wouldn't have gone out and bought some crates of cans, poured away the contents and then crushed the cans just to illustrate conspicuous waste? I mean, that'd be terribly wasteful wouldn't it?

Well here's a film that's not likely to get shown in Saudi Arabia - The Kingdom of the title.

The Kingdom is the first of a series of films set in a post 9/11 world with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fairly bogged down.

It begins with a skilfully edited credit sequence that uses smart graphics and archive footage to tell a potted history of the United States' involvement with oil in Saudi Arabia following its unification in 1932. It runs right through to the identification of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers being Saudi.

The film proper begins with life in a Western compound being savagely interrupted by a series of murders and explosions that kills over a hundred. Then we meet a small and elite FBI team run by Jamie Foxx with Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Chris Cooper, who all want to travel to the kingdom and investigate the attack on the ground. But it's politically sensitive, and they're warned off.

Foxx doesn't take no for an answer and soon they're on the ground, and trying to work with a Saudi government who's suspicious of them and doesn't necessarily want to help either. There are one or two good guys, but effectively it's an uphill battle, not helped by Jeremy Piven's US government official locally based.

The politics of the piece are quite interesting, with an explicit understanding made that the only reason the US is involved is because of oil, yet the whole of Saudi Arabia is made to feel incredibly dangerous.

Whenever the characters are out and about, the close-cut camera work is constantly finding suspicious cars and people for our eyes to fall on. Could any one of these contain a bomb or harbour attackers? The Steadicam-free handheld camera work makes us feel more uncertain. You never quite know what's around the corner. While it's not quite of the same calibre as Greengrass's, it all adds to the general unease.

The performances are superb, and although a couple of action sequences feel a little too "Hollywood", it's really well made. Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman are good as the two assisting Saudi police officers. There are couple of things that remind me of a John Sayles film - obviously the presence of Chris Cooper in the cast, but also Danny Huston's Attorney General. Could Sayles have script doctored this film? Actually I note that writer Matthew Michael Carnahan is now working on the big screen remake of State of Play which possibly isn't a bad thing.

And although the ending begins as being a little too twee, there's a wonderful little coda, that makes you think about everything that's gone before.

The only tiny thing I'd have changed is to rename the arch villain of the piece - he's named Abu Hamza, the same as the infamous hook-handed cleric from the Finsbury Park mosque.

But well worth a viewing when this film opens in October.

The Bourne Ultimatum is the final* part of the Bourne trilogy which bears little to no resemblance to the Robert Ludlum books. Incidentally, Ludlum is one of those masterful authors who manages to publish new titles despite being long dead.

Anyway, back to the film which is once again directed by Paul Greengrass. What can I say? It's superb. It begins seconds after the previous film, The Bourne Supremacy has finished, with Bourne on the run in Moscow. He's getting ever closer to finding out who he is, but he's still against some mean CIA black-ops who will stop at nothing to get rid of him. The action moves from Italy to Paris to London to Tangiers to New York. And along the way we get some fabulous visceral set pieces.

In London there's a frightening CCTV sequence set in Waterloo Station as Bourne tries to rendezvous with a Guardian journalist.

In Tangiers, there's a great sequence set on the rooftops with Matt Damon's Bourne and Julia Stiles' Nicky. You really don't know what's going to happen, and although Bourne is always likely to survive, the same is not true for anyone else around him.

Once again, there's an awful lot of handheld work here, with fast-cutting meaning that you're really in the midst of the action. It's done superbly well, and the action and pace just never lets up. It really is like a skillfully designed roller-coaster with the occasional chance for you to gather your breath before the next thrilling element.

I came out absolutely full of admiration for all concerned.

*Paul Greengrass jokingly told Simon Mayo that if Spurs finished in the top 4, he'd make another one. This is obviously unlikely in the extreme (Greengrass himself is a Crystal Palace fan), but even then, with Mayo taking his joke too seriously, he found himself backing out of it in the course of the interview. Not that Spurs is going to manage it, with Martin Jol surely counting the days not until he's out.

So we get two sets of interesting pieces of news today.

First of all, after a significant amount of rumour regarding the future of Doctor Who, and David Tennant in particular, the Beeb has announced that 2009 won't see series five. Instead there'll be three specials. This isn't surprising given that Tennant is now committed to an extended run in the RSC in the latter part of next year at a time when he would be filming the next series.

Series five will be shot in 2009 for a 2010 airing. If you read the Mediaguardian piece you'd think that this absolutely means that Tennant and Exec Producer are imminently leaving the show. It doesn't though, does it? It means that they're likely to be with through to the three specials.

Meanwhile BBC 2 has managed to do a deal that'll keep Heroes airing on it for the series' life. Series one has aired on the Sci-Fi channel with BBC 2 only getting rights to air it after that initial run. From series two onwards, BBC 2 has exclusive rights. And now they've done a deal that sees the series staying with the channel at a pre-agreed price. This isn't a bad deal to do really, since it prevents Sky One or some other competitor coming in and snapping up rights - q.v. Lost, 24 and Prison Break. I believe that Five did something similar with the CSI franchise very early on.

Not that there's any guarantee just yet that Heroes will even make it to series three. It's unlikely in the extreme that it gets cancelled anytime soon, but never put anything past a US network.

The Sun cut its price in London and the South East today, from 35p to 20p. People in London and the South East obviously need to save our pennies more so than people in the rest of the UK. Goodness, with one bedroom flats going for £300,000, you need to save all the 15 pences you can get.

I suspect that it was widely advertised on television, but I didn't see it - The Queen sits as yet unwatched on my PVR.

But to push the discount further, somebody at News International (or should that News Group Newspapers?), decided that they could maybe use a number of their London Paper distributors to help The Sun along. So this lunchtime there were street vendors dressed in red, as opposed to the London Paper's purple, trying to flog copies for 20p. They didn't seem to be having much luck, with no papers sold in the several minutes I stood there watching (I was waiting for a bus - I'm not that interested).

And I wonder, don't you need to have some kind of street traders' licence to sell newspapers? Surely I can't just set myself up on Regent Street and sell whatever I like? I'm sure they've got them.

NBC Universal has fallen out with Apple over the pricing of their products on iTunes with the result that Apple will not be offering any new material for sale from the company via its store. That means no new seasons of Heroes, Battlestar Galactica or The Office - three series that have sold very well on iTunes in the past.

For the most part, people are looking at NBC and thinking that they must be mad. Why would they make it harder to legitimately get hold of downloaded versions of programming when users can just download a torrent of the same programme without any payment.

But I've got to say that actually I think that NBC should be able to price their programming as they see fit. Some reports suggest that under NBC's proposed pricing structure and suggest that costs might rise from the current $1.99 an episode to as much as $4 or even $5 an episode. Well, that's really for them to determine. If they charge too much, then they won't sell any programmes, and that's the nature of a free market.

Apple's insistence in controlling pricing doesn't allow for product differentiation. Heroes is a premium NBC product just now and perhaps can command a premium, whereas an old episode of some eighties detective show might only be 50c. Yet on iTunes it's $1.99 and there's no flexibility. Why shouldn't some of the forthcoming new series be sold at greatly reduced prices to garner interest?

If I walk into my local HMV, or scour the virtual shelves of Amazon, DVD box sets are sold at vastly different price points. I mentioned in my piece a couple of days ago about the launch of the television section on the UK iTunes store that season tickets for series are sometimes more or less expensive than their physical DVD equivalents.

There are many reasons for differentiating prices - sales, old programming or stock, promotions. It's for the retailer and distributor to determine what a series can be sold for.

Similarly, music should have differential pricing too. We're all used to picking up classic albums relatively cheaply. Yet compare a few classic albums on Amazon and iTunes and there can be a vast differential:

Highway 69 Revisted - £9.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Bridge Over Troubled Water - £7.99 on iTunes, £4.97 on Amazon
Parallel Lines - £7.99 on iTunes, £2.97 on Amazon

Yes - Blondie is exceptionally cheap! But old songs and albums really shouldn't be that expensive. And iTunes needs to be able adapt to variable pricing.

Of course, iTunes single price means that Brits pay 79p a track compared with 99c in the US. At the current exchange rate that should be more like 50p. Similarly TV programmes are all £1.89 a show (irrespective of whether they're a 22 minute South Park episode made for peanuts, or 42 minute episode of Grey's Anatomy made for millions of dollars an episode), compared with $1.99 a show in the US.

A lot has been made of Hulu, the new Fox/NBC destination to watch streaming programming. It's basically an attempt to break YouTube's stranglehold. But it's going to stream shows, not let you download them to your iPod or PSP. I wouldn't be surprised if within days of it launching somebody hasn't built a tool to snatch a file version of the stream as you can with YouTube.

In other news, it was interesting to note in HMV today that you'll be able to buy the pilot episode of Heroes for £2.95 on Monday. I can't see them releasing the whole series this way, which makes it an odd experiment. Why not either give it away, or make it a covermount on something like SFX magazine if it's just to drive DVD sales?