April 2008 Archives

So following the story that emerged a couple of weeks ago about Richard and Judy defecting to UKTV for their next chatshow, the question was which channel would they end up on.

Well today we learn that it is UKTV Gold that's going to get the "Dave" treatment. Dave, you'll recall, was previously called UKTV G2 or some such nonsense. But it got rebranded Dave, and importantly (though rarely mentioned) it booted UKTV History off its full Freeview slot to get massive exposure. Then, by carefully repeating lots of Top Gear, Have I Got News For You, Dragons' Den and QI, it became very successful as a free to air channel.

UKTV is going to try the same trick, and obviously the first question is what girls' name will they adopt? Kylie? Tracey? Clare? Sonya? 'Chelle?

Entertainingly, "the rebranded channel will aim to appeal to women under 30." Seemingly, the best way of doing this is to employ a couple of people who have been doyens of daytime TV for years, and will be 52 and 60 this year. Obvious really.

I should preface this entry by saying that it could be a little dull if you're not interested in radio research; that the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect my employer; and that I have no particular insider knowledge, beyond having used RAJAR for a long time.

RAJAR is the organisation that publishes radio listening figures in the UK. Figures are currently collected by carefully giving out over 130,000 diaries to people to keep for a single week over the course of a year. This is obviously a vast undertaking, but the UK has several hundred radio stations, the majority of which are local; so each locality has to have a representative sample of diaries if radio listening for those stations is to be accurately recorded.

The nature of this methodology means that listening figures are produced quarterly - and this Thursday at 7am, Q1 2008 figures will be published. Radio stations across the country are eagerly awaiting them!

Back in the mists of time - well 1998 - Kelvin MacKenzie, once editor of The Sun bought the station then known as Talk Radio. He rebranded it talkSPORT, but he had a problem. He felt that the RAJAR diary methodology discriminated against his station. In particular, he felt audiences were perhaps listening to his station but writing BBC Radio Five Live in their diaries. BBC stations on the whole have better awareness amongst the public, and that's especially the case for national services compared to their commercial competitors who don't have the marketing muscle of Auntie. On top of that, the diary methodology doesn't work well for one-off events - by its very nature, it's a 12 or 13 week average. So if you buy the rights to, say, a boxing match on a given Saturday night, you can't tell if you achieved an increased audience as a result for that one-off event. Sports rights aren't cheap, and aside from things like the Premier League, they don't always run every week at the same time.

So he sought help with a research company called GfK who had a sister company that produced a special kind of watch. GfK took audio captures of all the services they were monitoring, while the watches also regularly captured the ambient sound of wherever the watch wearer was. By examining the uploaded audio the watch had captured alongside the time of capture, and comparing it to its big database of radio (and TV) audio, the idea was that the system could tell you what service, if any, was being listened to.

Kelvin's company paid for the implementation of this technology, and he even took to publishing an alternative set of ratings. These showed far more people listening to his, as well as other services.

But in testing, the watch methodology didn't pass muster. So while he'd undoubtedly put meters on the map, and stirred up the industry, which led to plenty of calls to adopt metering, the system he'd adopted simply wasn't up to scratch. It also didn't really help his cause that he showed that BBC2 was getting more viewers than ITV - unlikely given the popularity of such trifling shows as Coronation Street, X Factor/Idol or Emmerdale.

The other viable system in the marketplace was from Arbitron, a massive US research group who are responsible for American radio ratings. They had their people meter (PPM), and over the last few years it has been tested extensively in the UK.

Arbitron's technology differed because it relied on a hidden signal embedded into stations' output. This signal is inaudible to listeners, but the pager-style devices Arbitron manufactured were able to detect them, and thus measure what station a listener was listening to and when.

Since the start of 2007, a test has been conducted in London, initially in partnership with the TV ratings company BARB and RAJAR. UK TV ratings rely on boxes in around 5,100 panellists' homes. The boxes also measure replayed material via video or PVR devices. But they do miss out on out-of-home viewing, e.g. watching the football in a pub. For some major games in large tournaments, that can be a substantial audience. Think of England featuring in the recent Rugby World Cup Final - a game played at 8pm in the evening.

But although theoretically with PPMs all seems fine, there are still issues that need to be addressed before metering can work, and RAJAR has now determined that they're not easy to overcome in the short term, so they're ending the project despite having spent £3.5m to date.

As RAJAR states, there are some key elements that PPMs seemed unable to cope with to a satisfactory extent. Foremost of these is the breakfast peak. Unlike television, which sees peak audiences in the evening, radio's natural peak is at breakfast time. Most people live relatively busy lives and breakfast doesn't afford much leisure time; they're getting washed, dressed, eating breakfast, getting themselves or other family members off to work or school, and so on. So radio is the natural partner for keeping you entertained and informed. You can listen in the bedroom, the bathroom, your kitchen or living room. You may well then listen in the car on the commute to work, or on a portable radio or mobile phone on a train journey. So far, so obvious.

Yet PPMs seem to have under-reported this peak - to the point where this is no peak. In all likelihood that's because people simply don't take their pager devices into the bathroom with them, and then into the kitchen or living room. Thus listening at radio's most critical time of the day is missed out by them.

On top of that there are other issues: the devices can't cope with listening via earphones especially easily. And they're simply not convenient to carry everywhere you go. Panellists are expected to take them everywhere, but would you carry one on an evening out, or on a shopping trip on a Saturday? If you forget your pager half-way to the station in the morning, would you return to the house to collect it, or leave it at home and not record a day's listening? Short of implanting a chip in your head (not something the libertarian in me is desperately looking forward to), or perhaps using a mobile phone solution (since that's a single device that you just might carry everywhere), it's hard to see how meters will ever work in a fully satisfactory manner.

As a consequence, RAJAR has pulled out of this development for the time being, and is looking to other methodologies going forward. In the first instance, they're examaning the use of online diary completion technologies.

Some people are going to be disappointed - not least Kelvin Mackenzie (no longer directly involved in radio) who has called it "an absolutely shocking decision." He points to TV having used electronic boxes for years.

But Mackenzie is simply wrong, and his comparison with TV is specious. He knows that TV is viewed in a limited number of locations. And he well understands that the methodology that medium uses is also weak for smaller stations (the sample isn't really big enough for full figures for every programme on every niche channel in a multi-channel world), and nor does it properly cope with out-of-home viewing, as mentioned above.

I have a feeling that Mackenzie's won't be the only dissenting voice we hear over the coming days, but until we have something that's proven to work, the £600m commercial radio industry cannot rely on a device that doesn't even recognise the most important listening time of the day. And it's not just commercial radio that recognises this - Jenny Abramsky of the BBC is similarly supportive. It's going to be very easy to give radio a kicking over this, but RAJAR is absolutely doing the right thing in launching a thorough industry wide review under Morag Blazey.

Interestingly, yesterday saw Media Guardian's Radio Reborn conference (I didn't go, but James' notes seem very fine), which I believe included some Arbitron data to prove some points. Unfortunate timing for them really given yesterday was the day RAJAR made these announcements.

However it should be noted that at the same time, Canada is adopting PPMs to a greater extent.

But there are still ongoing issues in Arbitron's home US territory, where some groups - particularly those catering to ethnic stations - are still facing difficulties with PPM technology.

There's certainly still a watching brief over PPMs. But in the short term, they're not an adequate replacement methodology in the UK.

There's a fun "debate" over at The Guardian about whether or not Pulling is actually better than the much feted Gavin & Stacey.

I like them both. I missed out on Gavin & Stacey initially, for the most part because it's on the demented BBC Three which, as you probably know, I'm a massive fan of. But then BBC Two ran the whole first series one Saturday night, and I warmed to it immediately, watching all the episodes back to back.

Pulling is just riotous fun, with believable characters - albeit at the extreme of things.

I'm not sure about the wisdom of running the two back to back for the past few Sunday evenings. Gavin & Stacey is much the safer sitcom, and frankly could be running on BBC One or BBC Two. Pulling is edgier fare, and the lower ratings it has been attaining reflect that. You could just about watch Gavin & Stacey with your mum. I'm not sure she'd appreciate Pulling as much.

Still all this pales into insignificance as we learn that Two Pints of Lager... has been recommissioned...

ITV is dipping its toe in the iTunes water by making available some of its back catalogue on the iTunes television store.

This is no bad thing, but I think that it does again highlight some of the issues that dealing with Apple can introduce. Despite some of the series being over forty years old (The Saint - series 4), the price of each episode is fixed at £1.89. That's just too much.

Last year the Daily Mail actually gave away the whole of Brideshead Revisited, so charging £1.89 an episode feels steep. Certainly there are savings to made by buying the whole series, but at &17.99 its still a couple of quid more than the boxed set on Amazon. The DVDs, of course, work in many more places than in iTunes and on an iPod. They're also in higher resolution, and come with various extras all of which are lacking from the iTunes store version.

Now I don't want to poo-poo this venture, as it's genuinely a good idea to get these programmes out into as many places as possible. But it's quite telling that no current programmes are being made available. The most up to date show that has been released so far (and to be fair, today's day one) is Lewis - series 1, obviously. Wouldn't want to let series 2 out of the gate just yet.

I think the problem really still lies with iTunes insisting on a fixed price for a programme, be it a brand new one hour drama or a decades old half hour comedy. Retailers should be able to adjust their prices as bricks and mortar retailers do. It may be that you can sell this week's Headbangers for 49p, but Foyles War should cost £3.50.

It's undoubtedly an experiment, and ITV is to be applauded. But what we're all waiting for is Kangaroo - the joint BBC Worldwide/ITV/Channel 4 service that Ashley Highfield is leaving the BBC to run. Kangaroo is going to try to effectively be a commercial version of the iPlayer. While details remain unclear, I'd expect both paid and ad-funded models to be tested. Video DRM is always going to be more of an issue, but even if all the service does is put everyone's programming in one place and playable with one piece of software, then it's got to be better than the piecemeal channel by channel approach that's taken place so far.

Of course a cynic might wonder whether Kangaroo is the reason that only archive programming is being made available to iTunes at the moment. If I can buy Foyles War on iTunes for one price, and on Kangaroo at another price, then there's true competition. But ITV doesn't want the service it owns part of to be undercut by someone else. Nor does it want Apple to run away with a nascent market before it's had a go itself - that's something the music industry has come to regret on an enormous scale.

By the way, if all this talk of Brideshead Revisited makes you want to watch the series again, there's a free route: ITV.com has the whole series available to stream on demand. It tends to only work with Windows and using Internet Explorer, and it's ad-funded. But there it is, free of charge.

In fact ITV.com has a great deal of classic drama, comedy and kids programming available to stream including Press Gang, The Jewel in the Crown, Rising Damp, Cracker, Morse, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Prime Suspect and much more. The interface is clunky, and it's hard to work out what's there, but they've got a great deal.

I can't help but agree with Roy Greenslade on the subject of London's evening freesheets. They're both still uniformly abysmal with not a single thing to read. The trouble is that even the paid for Evening Standard is woeful with its ridiculous vendetta against Ken Livingstone and Mail-lite features. A bit more news would be nice. I actually have an "Eros" smartcard charged up with enough cash for ten copies and I've still not bought an issue for ages (aside from the day they were giving away a free Nicci French novel).

And while I know that London Underground is paid handsomely to allow distribution of both The London Paper and Metro in its stations, does that revenue really cover the vast cost of clearing up the mess? Despite signs telling people not to, every morning there's a pile of read/discarded copies of the paper at the bottom of central London escalators. These just go on to get jammed into the mechanism of the escalators causing un-needed delays to exiting the station when they go out of service.

[Update: Love this]

Meanwhile in further parochial news from this parish, our local Soho Post Office is closing. Or rather, it's moving to the other side of Oxford Street and into WH Smiths. The net result will be that Soho - home to a rather large media and creative industry - will not have a single Post Office left.

I realise that at least I'm lucky enough to still have a Post Office within walking distance, with many planned closures leaving whole communities without access to one at all. But the Soho Post Office is regularly jammed with people. On a recent trip, my knowledge of Key Stage 3 Science increased enormously as the queue snaked around slowly - I read the only interesting literature on offer whilst for a window to become free.

So there's enormous demand, and yet economics dictate that it's cheaper to sit inside another store where I very much doubt there'll be room for as many counters. Ironically, Soho will still have drop-off points for DHL and FedEx deliveries. Is it any wonder that the Royal Mail struggles?

On Friday, The Guardian published a very good chart showing the relative growth of each of the major media in the UK's advertising revenues.

The chart ends with a 2008 estimate that internet advertising will outstrip the whole of TV.

Yet I think we need to be a little careful here, and make sure that we're not comparing apples with oranges.

While I don't doubt that the sums being talked about are accurate, as we enter a recession it seems very odd that so much new money is entering the advertising market. While other media are showing either flat revenues or very slight declines, the internet is seemingly outstripping the entire market by a large factor.

Without the numbers behind the chart, it's hard to tell the exact numbers, but broadly speaking, the cumulative effect of this chart seems to show overall advertising growth of around 7% between 2007 and 2008. Obviously these are estimates, but with a struggling retail sector, I'd be amazed if this was truly the case.

The main thing to know is that the revenues being reported here for most media are display. And while there's a lot of display coming into online, that's still probably not where the bulk of Google's revenue growth is coming from. AdWords and the like are more akin to classified advertising which isn't included in the newspaper figure. This has certainly taken a pummeling in the local, regional and even national press, and I'd be surprised if even the Yellow Pages hasn't taken a significant hit.

Anyway, an interesting chart - but treat with caution. Advertising money does not grow on trees even if you are the internet.

As you may or may not know, His Girl Friday is one of my favourite films of all time. The film is screwball comedy and was made in 1940, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. It was written by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the latter two of which had written the play, The Front Page, on which it was based.

The wonderful Howard Hawks directed it, and it famously has possibly the fastest dialogue in any film ever made. The characters regularly speak over the top of one another, and indeed the final screenplay ran to 191 pages for a 92 minute film. Usually, screenplays run at around a minute a page.

In 1940, you had to record the sound all at once without multi-track capabilities, so a sound mixer had to switch between microphones as the characters spoke the lines.

Anyway, a link on Waxy's Links the other day pointed to a version of the film edited a couple of years by Valentin Spirik which removes all the film's dialogue. The end result is an 8:25 edit of the film. It's also embedded below:

What we're left with is very revealing about the speed of the film with jump cuts aplenty that mightn't seem out of place in a 21st century reality show.

The full original film is in the public domain by the way. That means that you can stream it or download it yourself at the Internet Archive.

The public domain nature of the film means that you'll see plenty of ridiculously cheap DVDs kicking around of it. The problem is that they mostly come from poor prints. So I do recommend the Columbia Classics DVD which is pretty cheap itself and uses an excellent print (ignore the comment that says otherwise at Amazon - I suspect that they're looking at a different DVD - there are many around).

For more on Howard Hawks, I'd also recommend Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy.

A good piece on the BBC News website regarding the "guilty until proven innocent" attitude that seems to be taken more and more with regard to taking photos in public. (Via Boing Boing)

Austin Mitchell MP is also leading the charge against this nonsense.

And obviously, those CCTV cameras are always on you!

I've heard a few really entertaining media related pieces of audio in the last couple of days.

The first is a Daily Mayo podcast from last week when Gabby Logan was sitting in for Simon Mayo. She was interviewing ITV Executive Chairman, Michael Grade.

Unfortunately, because it was last week, and the BBC only keeps their podcasts alive for a week, it's no longer there. But fear not - readers of adambowie.com can listen in using the player below (at least until someone gets annoyed and tells me not to).

In the interview Logan gave Grade a really robust grilling and covered pretty much all the ITV issues of the day. I'd say that he gave a fairly full and frank account of himself. It's all well worth a listen.

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The other great piece of audio is a recording of Tim Robbins keynote speech from the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas on Monday. Robbins being Robbins he didn't bother sticking to the topic he was supposed to be talking about, but instead gets into the moral turpitude of much of the media today. It's actually a very funny speech.

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(It's a bit lo-fi I'm afraid, but then it was obviously recorded on a dictaphone or something. There's another version here (via Graham Linehan) in case the one above breaks).

Finally, not a piece of audio, but an interesting piece from The Guardian about Global Radio's recent announcement that Heart and Galaxy will be networking much more in the future. Broadly speaking, they're going to maximise the amount of networking they can do under the recent changes to the rules regarding local programming announced by Ofcom. It's fair to say that we expect to see much more of this in the future.

[NB. Some readers, especially those who see this blog's RSS feed, may have seen an "early version" of this entry a day or so ago. This subsequently disappeared while I sorted a couple of technical issues out. These have been resolved now.]

Two stories have tickled me today from Broadcast magazine ("The Voice of British Broadcasting" - but mostly TV. Radio's on p14 folks!):

Ian Wright has "quit" as a BBC pundit. He's claiming that the BBC's coverage of football is too stuffy. And he feels as though he's the "comedy jester" of the team. In response, the BBC said "we wish Ian Wright all the best in his career with TalkSport" which is rather dry... I rather suspect that the reason that Wright is "quitting" is because his BBC gig has basically ended now that the BBC has no live football to broadcast. Yes, there's Euro 2008 coming up, but Wright's TalkSport gig might have precluded him from taking part in that anyway. So all in all, a little disingenuous?

The other utterly bizarre news is that those doyens of daytime television, Richard and Judy, who had previously announced the end of their spell with Channel 4, are now moving to... wait for it... UKTV!

Really?

Yup. They'll be on an as yet unannounced new UKTV channel and will be appearing on a daily chat show from later this year and all of next year. Quite what this channel is, remains unclear. You'd expect it to appear on Freeview as well as Sky and cable, but there's not really an obvious channel choice. UKTV currently only has Dave as a 24 hour channel having bumped UKTV History into a daytime only slot.

It's possible that they could remove UKTV History from Freeview altogether, but given that there's surely some significant investment being put into Richard and Judy, they'd probably want to get an early evening repeat of the show on air, so unless they can grab some extra capacity from another channel, I don't know what they're planning to do. All will undoubtedly be revealed.

I absolutely love this new Banksy image on the side of a building around the back of the Rathbone Place Post Office sorting office.

There were plenty of other onlookers since the painting appeared over the weekend.

More photos via Flickr.

There's been an awful lot of fuss in the last few weeks about "net neutrality" in the UK.

The supposed reason for this is the immediate success of the BBC iPlayer which is eating up bandwidth like it's going out of fashion. As the iPlayer arrives on the Nintendo Wii, the BBC announces that 42 million programmes have been downloaded in the iPlayer's first three months. And given that the top programme to make it into the top twenty fell right at the end of the period measured, it's fair to say that iPlayer is very much still in the ascendant.

The net result of this is that ISPs are beginning to call on the BBC to give them cash to offset the additional costs that the ISPs are facing. In particular, Tiscali and Virgin Media have been particularly outspoken.

Do they have a point? I don't think they have actually.

The problem is that many ISPs' business models are just completely broken. Tiscali's broadband offering, for example, starts at just £6.49. This includes "unlimited downloads" (although their fair usage policy explains that they traffic shape the bandwidth of P2P users during peak times).

The problem is that ISPs such as Tiscali generally rely on BT Wholesale for their ADSL connections. So, unless they actually fit kit in BT exchanges, they have to pay a metered rate to BT Wholesale for the bandwidth their customers use.

Yet Tiscali's agreesive pricing means that they feel they have to market their product on an unlimited basis.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that as people begin to want to download more data, the ISPs' profit margins are going to get squeezed. And it doesn't help that they're all in an ultra competitive marketplace where additional services including phone and television services are bundled together at a single price.

Here's a simple analogy. I decide to open an "eat as much as you like" buffet for which I'm going to charge diners £10 a plate. Overheads aside, some diners will eat less than a tenner's worth of food and I make money, while some greedy bastards will eat more and I'll lose money. I have to pitch the price right so that I get many more of the former than the latter.

But if everyone become's very greedy - we do live in an obese society - and I begin to see diminishing profits what do I do?

I can either up the cost of my buffet, or I can move to a more usual business plan and charge on a per meal basis. I particularly need to take into account how much my supplier charges me for food - and they almost certainly don't do that on an "unlimited" basis.

ISPs need to bite the bullet if they're not making enough cash. They need to either charge consumers more for unlimited data, or move to a per GB charge. They could, of course, drop access to high bandwidth sites like YouTube or the BBC. But I'm guessing that few consumers would take up such cheap internet (in)access.

I suspect that if my ISP moved to a per GB charge, that would lead to increased costs for me, although I should say that I've used the same ISP for coming on for 15 years now, and although I pay over the odds, I generally believe you get the service you pay for.

If a business plan is unsustainable, then change the business plan.

Otherwise you begin to sound like ITV moaning about how it can't afford its public service broadcasting obligations yet remaining quite happy to receive its spectrum free of charge (there was a very funny letter in The Guardian on Saturday from Five pointing out all its PSB efforts, and how it was quite happy to continue doing them: "don't charge us for our spectrum" was what I took from it).

This is just too brilliant. Just when you think that ITV has done something interesting and innovative - showing US series Pushing Daisies in a primetime slot (albeit Saturday night at 9pm) - they do something so boneheaded, you just can't believe it.

ITV has spent a fortune promoting this series - I've seen copious trailers on all the ITV television channels. There were posters and press ads for it, and I even saw it advertised in the cinema. And they sent out a lovely tray of grass with some daisies growing to my place of work.

Starring Anna Friel, and directed by Barry Sonnenfield, this had everything going for it. In the event, it's got some very respectable numbers (5.7m which is an awful lot better than Media Guardian would have you believe), and some reasonably good critical response.

Personally, I saw the first episode, er, some time ago, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't interested enough to continue to, er, "catch" future episodes. But it's reasonably popular stateside and has been renewed for a second season.

So what has ITV decided to do? Well like many US series, the writers' strike meant a much shortened first series resulted in just nine episodes. Yet ITV has scheduled Pushing Daisies for a slot where there's only room for eight episodes to run.

Honestly. It's true!

After episode one on Saturday just gone, next Saturday sees episode 3.

Euro 2008, a little known football tournament that had dates set in stone, oooh, years ago is shortly upon us. And seemingly there's no other way that ITV could squeeze an extra hour into its schedule between now and then. They apparently can't run episode 2 in another slot (surely nobody would miss Rock Rivals - last week gaining just 2.2m viewers). They apparently can't run it on ITV2, or ITV3, or ITV4. They don't seem to be able to run it online either.

Nope - viewers just aren't going to see it.

That'd all be fine if Pushing Daisies was a procedural with a fresh story each week. But this has a continuing storyline!

This, coming from the channel that's only now having second thoughts about the sense in cancelling popular drama Foyle's War, because they just have so many popular dramas at the moment - like The Palace!

Really dismal.

[UPDATE] An ITV spokesman has said it will be shown "at a later date."

You really couldn't make this up.

[UPDATE 2] This is currently the top story in the entertainment section of the BBC News website!

But it's OK, because ITV will show the second episode will "be shown at some point because the series will be repeated".

Oh well - the hits keep rolling for ITV don't they? This comes the morning after The Fixer bowed out with half the ratings of Waking the Dead over on BBC1. (Although I will say that I rather liked The Fixer even if it was a little dark and bleak. You'd never have expected ITV to make such a series. It's still probably not the Spooks-like entertainment ITV were hoping Kudos would give them.)

Sadly, Harry Hill's TV Burp finished its run last weekend, so he's not going to get to comment on the new series of Born Survivor with Bear Grylls!

Now regular readers may recall that in the past I've been a little cynical about the absolute reality of everything Bear did in the last series. Then came the revelations that Bear was heading back to various lodges and the like between shooting sections, so the survival aspects weren't quite as represented.

Bear has taken all of this to heart. He's got a blog where he's been much more forthcoming about how the shows work. Indeed, he's gone out of his way to highlight the crew!

A few weeks ago we got a one-off on his madcap scheme to paraglide over Mount Everest - in the event they didn't fly over the mountain, but instead took off near the mountain and tried to get to a higher altitude. Unfortunately the measurement gear failed, and although it looked a bit like he'd done it, we couldn't be sure.

But back to Born Survivor (also known as Man vs. Wild on Discovery in the US). The show begins with a disclaimer explaining that situations are sometimes set-up and that this is risky stuff, so don't come complaining to Channel 4 if your loved-one dies trying some of the techniques in the wild. This disclaimer even gets repeated after one of the ad breaks.

Next, Bear tells us that he's with a crew - not just a cameramen. We don't see them aside from a very deliberate hand in shot when Bear's given a video camera to carry up a tree when he's hunting for grapes. This seems to answer a particular concern of mine in the previous series when Bear "needed" to jump from tree to tree, and yet sometimes was videoing himself, camera in hand, and at other times didn't have the camera with him (when shot from below).

At another point in this episode set in the Sahara, Bear jumps into some quicksand to demonstrate how to escape. He again points out that this has been set-up for the purposes of demostration. He also meets a cobra, and then quickly points out that it has been brought in from nearby. Is there a snake wrangler just off screen?

As Bear crosses the desert, we get lots of helicopter shots, and we're told that two crew members have been evacuated due to sunstroke. In other words - he's not pretending to really be all alone out there.

Fair play to him for answering the critics - myself included - and addressing some of the issues from the first series. In some respects he's gone too far the other way. He tells us about how they brought the snake with them, while Planet Earth doesn't let on when it's shooting close-ups of animals in zoos to run alongside the wild footage.

It's also nice to see some of the survival techniques failing. At one point he tries to start a friction fire, rubbing a stick into some wood very hard to light kindling for a campfire. It doesn't work and just expends lots of his energy - he uses a knife and flint instead. Then at another point he tries to get water from a dried river bed. Again, it's not altogether successful, basically wetting his lips. Indeed, my only real criticism of this show is that he never really gets enough water to survive. His single litre water can is not going to keep him going for several days.

All the usual revolting elements of Born Survivor are present and correct: he needlessly parachutes into the desert when you just know the crew landed in the helicopter; he pees onto his ripped t-shirt and then ties it around his head to keep him cool; he eats various insects and small animals he finds in the desert - chopping off their heads before swallowing. And next week's part two seems to include a truly revolting gutting of a large animal (a horse or cow?).

Roll on next week!

This is incredible.

It's staggering.

Adidas has somehow won a ruling at the European Court of Justice that says it owns stripes.

"Adidas can prevent other companies using two stripes on the shoulders of their shirts, even though Adidas branding has three stripes."

I really can't believe this. Seemingly Adidas owns the rights to stripes. If I want to design a shirt and put some stripes on the shoulders, I have to get Adidas' permission?

If I was putting an Adidas logo on the shirt then fair enough, but just the stripe motif?

I believe that the ancient Gauls used to wear stripes in times gone by. These days, they'd have to get permission from Adidas first.

I came late to it, but I really enjoyed the first series of Gavin and Stacey. So when the second series started on BBC Three a few weeks ago, I started watching it.

As a rule, I can't stand BBC Three. But, with both Gavin and Stacey, and Pulling, it actually has a couple of good sitcoms, so 9pm on a Sunday night is a must Sky+ hour (there's the under-rated, and very under-watched He Kills Coppers on ITV1 at the same time).

But BBC Three seems to go out of its way to annoy me. First there's the redesign - they decided that a pink logo would be appropriate. So, permanently, in the top-left hand corner of the screen there's a glowing electric-pink logo, a bit like the "red lamp" that appears in the corner of a video camera to remind you that you're recording. Except that if I'm recording a video, that's useful. A pink BBC Three logo is about as useful as an anvil on my head.

You try and blank it out - perhaps actually going as far as sticking gaffer tape to the screen, and get on with the comedy of Gavin and Stacey. The epsiode ends, and the gentle humour turns a little towards pathos as it becomes clear that Gavin hasn't been giving Stacey enough time, and she's lonely. She wants to return to Wales. It's an emotional moment. Writers (and co-stars) Ruth Jones and James Corden probably spent some time over the script. They wanted the audience to react emotionally. Are Gavin and Stacey going to split up?

So what better moment for the pink logo to suddenly introduce another element and inform us that Pulling is on next.

No kidding?

You ran a trailer for it right before the start of this programme. The appearance of the words on the screen is obviously meant to make us notice them. If I'm reading the words on the screen, I'm not listening to the words that the characters are saying - or at least I'm not giving their words my full attention.

Some "branding" moron in a marketing department somewhere has decided that telling me what's on next is much more important than me finishing watching what's currently on.

Seconds later, the programme fades to black, the theme music starts and the credits begin to roll.

This is BBC Three of course, so the credits can't last much longer than 15 seconds anyway, but within a second of them starting, the credits shrink to an illegible size rendering them completely useless, and a caption informs us again that Pulling is on next.

I !@$%ing know!

You've already ruined the end of this programme telling me once.

And just in case I'm illiterate, a voiceover comes on and tells me the great news.

At this point, despite actually wanting to watch Pulling, I'm just about ready to switch over to any TV channel aside from BBC Three.

Seriously.

Living 2, UK Drama +1, Fashion TV or even S4C2 (which isn't even broadcasting) are all going to be slightly less annoying.

I know the arguments. BBC Three is aimed at 15 year olds with the attention span of a gnat on speed. If they let up for more than 1 second, their viewers will be too busy updating their Facebook status and IM-ing all their friends, and generally not watching television. Or else they might start watching the second half of Casualty 1907 or Extreme Skinny Celebrities 3 on Virgin 1 (no - I didn't just make that up).

And it's not just BBC Three that does this. BBC Two is doing it as well.

So, should you be a channel controller, please note: if you treat me like a moron, and irritate me to the point that I find myself writing 700 words about what you're doing, then I'm not going to watch your programmes. That'd be the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve isn't it?

So I thought that I'd head down to see the Olympic Torch Relay - the multi-country tour of the Olympic torch as it wends it way towards Beijing for this summer's Olympic Games.

It was obvious from the outset that following recent increased violence inside Tibet, that this was also going to be used to make a political point with demonstrators making themselves (rightly) heard all along the route. I thought that the nascent photojournalist in me might be able to catch some of the sights and sounds of this.

I must admit that personally I'm not sure that the Olympic Games are the right vehicle for making political protests, at least in as far as I don't think we should be boycotting them. I'm somehow hopeful that some of the concessions that the Chinese government is going to have to make will extend beyond the games this summer.

That said, the Free Tibet campaign has every right to make itself heard. And I'm in no way condoning the Olympic organisation itself which seems to be beset by greed and corruption. Things are probably cleaner than they once were, but until it's a fully democratic organisation itself (giving the UK, for example, the right to pick its own representatives) then it has to remain questionable. I've always said that I think that sporting fiefdoms like the Olympics or FIFA, are the last "acceptable" faces of dictatorship.

But anyway, on to today's events. It was snowy day in London with a few centimetres of snow having fallen across the capital. The streets were clear though, and I decided to head to Chinatown to begin with. As I approached from Covent Garden, it became obvious that there were an awful lot of police on the streets. They were mostly good natured, but as I entered the heart of Chinatown, I had to pass a bag search. On the radio I had heard that a protester had tried to snatch the flame from a Blue Peter presenter who was running with it, and others had tried to put the flame out with a fire extinguisher.

I stood on the corner of Gerrard Street, where the largely Chinese crowd were entertained by dragon dancing and inflatable Fuwa - the five characters who are the official Beijing mascots.

The spectators were largely jovial, and many were carrying dual-language banners and signs wishing all the best for the games in the summer. As I say, this was in the heart of Chinatown, and if anywhere was going to give the games a good reception, it was here.

Finally the police activity notably increased and the torch arrived. Through most of London, there'd been a convoy of vehicles leading the way, including double-decker buses and police vehicles. But in the narrow confines of Chinatown, it was just a police escort and the runners themselves.

I don't know who was carrying the torch as they arrived [UPDATE: I believe that this was actually the Chinese ambassador, who had been scheduled to run with the torch elsewhere but changed at the last minute]. He was flanked by Chinese securitymen in tracksuits, who were themselves flanked by more police in luminous jackets. Finally, there was a further layer of police dressed in black outside them.

Add to that the crowds, and you've got an enormous mass of people surrounding the flame. Seeing the flame itself was not easy and I'm 6'2"!

The runner handed over to the next runner in the relay - seemingly another athlete of Chinese origin, and she ran the length of Gerrard Street. There was not a lot to do now the procession had passed, and I began to drift on with the crowds around me.

Then a middle-aged man started shouting, "China out" quite loudly and repeatedly. This raised the hackles of several Chinese men standing nearby, but he wasn't to be dissuaded. So they had a loud and very confrontational shouting match which very nearly came to blows. The language used wasn't especially suitable for the young children who were also out in the cold to see the torch relay.

Ironically, there were now no police around to wade into the crowd and calm down the passions - they'd all moved on to protect the torch as it continued its journey. Finally common sense prevailed and nobody came to any blows.

I moved on to Trafalgar Square, where the Free Tibet protesters were really out in force. I didn't see the torch pass through as the crowds were too deep but we got an explosion of blue paper alongside a trumpet voluntary. I saw plenty more Tibetan flags, and you might almost think that the police had decided to keep things moving faster than they might otherwise have done.

Next it was down to Embankment. The torch had headed off to Downing Street where it was going to remain for a while. I walked to Waterloo Bridge expecting the torch to arrive by river. If it did arrive that way, I completely missed it. There was plenty of evidence of police out in force on the water, and large crowds had gathered in front of the Royal Festival Hall, but they had other entertainment to keep their minds off the snow that had now begun to come down again.

I waited on the bridge where the convoy of supporting vehicles had gathered. A Chinese camera crew interviewed one of the relay's forthcoming runners - a fencer I believe. Then some people had their photos taken with another sportsman I didn't recognise. I'm not sure they knew who he was either.

Again there were many Free Tibet protesters on top of the bridge, and the whole relay was now becoming a 31 mile rolling "Free Tibet" protest.

When the torch finally arrived, it was hard to make it out with the sheer number of police and security men protecting it. It seems somehow pointless getting people to come out to see something and then surround it by dozens of running men (my mind kept drifting back to that Clint Eastwood film In The Line of Fire, where Clint played a secret service man who's job was to run alongside the Presidential cavalcade). In London, the relay runners were regularly replaced, but I'm not sure that the police had much let-up. Still, it'll have been good practice for anyone running the London Marathon next weekend.

Aside from the quite scary events in Chinatown when it felt as though it might kick off at any minute, the day was interesting - if cold. I suspect that much of the rest of the route is going to see similar protests. I notice that the torch is due to pass through San Francisco, a notably liberal city. That'll be worth looking out for.

(More photos here if you're interested.)

So today, Ofcom has announced that it's planning a reorganisation of Freeview to allow one of the current six multiplexes to be made available for high definition services. New Freeview boxes will come onstream, and improved compression rates will to allow these new services to squeeze into the space. At the same time services currently sitting on the multiplex ear-marked for HD will move across to other multiplexes.

Ofcom's put together this lovely chart to explain the changes:

The space will become available by the BBC and NGW upgrading their multiplexes to use 64QAM instead of the current 16QAM. 64QAM allows for higher compression rates, although there have been questions asked (and these are mentioned in the Ofcom document) about the relative robustness of 64QAM compared to 16QAM. Ofcom believes that these issues have been resolved in later generations of Freeview devices.

Although overall, it's probably in the interests of consumers that some HD channels are available via Freeview (and thus don't require subscriptions to either Sky or Virgin cable), we must be concerned about any degradation in picture quality of the current channels.

A case in point was Tuesday night when ITV1 was showing Roma v Manchester United in the Champions' League. The picture quality was absolutely fine. But then switch over to Schalke v Barcelona on ITV4 and it's immediately clear that the picture is more "blocky." That's simply because ITV4 has greater compression than ITV1 (and as such, isn't directly related to whether the multiplex uses 16QAM or 64QAM - more how much bandwidth is given over to the channel). Both channels are on the same multiplex (Mux 2), which already uses 64QAM.

It's also worth noting that the HD services will be using the progressive rather than interlaced format ("p" rather than "i"). Sky HD, largely uses 1080i. There is ongoing debate into what's better, although Blu-Ray discs, I understand, tend to use 1080p.

I'm sure that we'll hear plenty more about all of this. Separately, it's going to be interesting to hear what Ofcom's verdict is on Sky's proposals to use the capacity is currently has on Mux C for Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three, and move to a subscription model using new compression techniques (as are being proposed for HD - they'll use DVB-T2 MPEG-4) to get more than three channels in.

On a broader scale, Ofcom hasn't explicitly talked about moving Freeview over to the MPEG-4 standard, although I can easily forsee this in the future, and the HD "back-door" route to get kit into homes is a good one.

Very interesting news from the US where NBC has just announced its schedule for the next year from the autumn (fall) through to next summer. Most interesting for Brits to note is that Merlin, a series being made by Shine for the BBC, and starring Anthony Head, is going to air on Sunday nights from January 2009.

By my reckoning this might actually be the first British drama series to end up on one of the big US networks since The Avengers finished in 1969. I'm happy to be corrected on this, but I can't think of another.

Of course with upcoming negotiations with US actors' unions, NBC might be wisely ensuring that they've got at least some drama available in the event of a strike.

Here's a cracking little film made for Current.TV about the rights of people to take photos or video in public places.

(Link via 2point8)

Amateur Photographer magazine has recently been carrying a series of stories about photographers stopped on the streets because they were considered "suspicious." They even went as far as republishing the cover they produced at the outbreak of WWII (at a time, remember, when the UK was under serious threat of invasion) highlighting the fact that you were still allowed to take photos.

Then there's the recently launched Met Police campaign asking people to look out for suspicious photographers.

If you've got a camera, you might be a terrorist in the eyes of the Metropolitan Police.

Remember, if you're in a public place, you're allowed to take pictures of whoever or whatever you want. That's why a private business or individual can perfectly legally put up a CCTV camera pointing into the street. They've not asked your permission. You don't have to ask theirs.

The BBC has a list of ten stories that could be April Fools but aren't.

For some reason, the fact that Lily Allen has been recommissioned by BBC Three doesn't make the list - and it's not an April Fool!