May 2008 Archives
...or product placement/licence agreements.
In my review of Iron Man yesterday, I neglected to mention the crass product placement throughout the film. We saw an LG phone used on more than one occasion, with the US network, Verizon, getting an on-screen namecheck too. Then there was Audi. One scene of Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) driving his R8 was shot in such a manner that it actually felt like a car commercial. And in another scene, it was an Audi 4x4 that a family felt threatened in.
But the crassest piece of product placement came when Tony Stark returned to the US from his confinement in Afghanistan and announced that he wanted an "American cheesburger." Shortly thereafter, one his mandarins hands Stark a prominently labelled Burger King paper bag from which emerges a burger of some nature. Again the Burger King branding is clear for all to see.
This week, there was an attack in the press aimed at Burger King for another movie tie-in with Indiana Jones. Burger King are giving away toys to people who buy meals. These toys are aimed at the under 12s, a market that Burger King had promised not to target. I have some sympathies because although the latest instalment in the Indy franchise is a 12A, the movie undoubtedly targets kids, even if its star is of pensionable age.
But the use of fast food is the least of my real concerns for the new Indy film. Surely the licencing agreement that just goes too far is the National Lottery Indy scratchcard. Featuring Harrison Ford in full Indy regalia on the front, and being advertised by an abysmal national TV and cinema commercial (which notably doesn't feature Harrison Ford or any clips from the film, this is an appalling piece of advertising on every level.
Yes, many Indy fans probably are of a similar age to myself, having been a teenager or younger when Raiders first came out and well over the minimum age to be allowed to gamble, but given the full array of Indy toy merchandise to be seen, it's clear that children are still fans of the series. If the screening I went to see the film is anything to go by, they're still the main target market for the film's distributors.
The advertising code prohibits the targeting gambling advertising to children. Section 11.10.2 reads:
(a) Advertisements for gambling must not exploit the susceptibilities, aspirations, credulity, inexperience or lack of knowledge of children, young persons or other vulnerable persons.
(b) Advertisements for gambling must not be likely to be of particular appeal to children or young persons, especially by reflecting or being associated with youth culture.
(c) No child or young person may be included in a gambling advertisement. No-one who is, or seems to be, under 25 years old may be featured gambling or playing a significant role. No-one may behave in an adolescent, juvenile or loutish way.
So the National Lottery must consider that Indiana Jones is not "of particular appeal to children or young persons"? At least that's my reading of the code. Maybe the National Lottery/Camelot has some kind of internal documentation to prove that this is the case, but I find it very disturbing that an action hero that appeals to children is being used to promote gambling.
Of course, lottery outlets don't allow the sale of lottery tickets or scratchcards to under 16s, but then we all know that kids don't find ways of getting hold of alcohol or cigarettes either...
Personally I think that both the National Lottery and Paramount are culpable in a licencing deal too far.
So finally, after months, and years even of sale process, Virgin Radio, my employer, is being sold. The purchaser is TIML Golden Square Ltd, which is a subsidiary of Times of India Media Group. One era ends, and another begins!
More from The Times here. Also, the BBC (carefully saying that the sale is "reported" The BBC updated their report, satisfied that a sale has been agreed!), the Telegraph, and perhaps most fully, the FT.
In exactly 265 days, analogue TV in the US will be switched off, and everyone will need to switch to digital TV. That is, the whole country is switching over on a single day. All 300m or so of the population. One day.
Does that really seem like a smart idea? I don't think so, as I've said before.
This week, Nielsen Media Research reported that 25m US homes have at least one TV that will currently not be ready for use next February when the switchover's due to take place. What's more, ten million of those homes are not ready at all. In other words, as things stand, they'll simply lose all their TV services completely.
It's no joke if 15 million people suddenly have reduced access to TV - that's a lot of people not watching the networks, and advertisers not being able to reach them as easily. The other 10 million are an even scarier story.
Seemingly, this survey "is one of the first in-depth assessments of the nation’s readiness for the digital TV transition." I find it astonishing that it's down to a private company like Nielsen and not the US government, to carry out this kind of work. How successful are politicians going to be in the next polls is they've managed to deprive millions of Americans of their TV services? I'm guessing that they're not going to be altogether happy.
And of course it's the minorities that are going to lose out - African-Americans and Hispanics in this instance. It's always going to be the poorer people who are going to lose out.
Since January coupons have been made available for US residents to claim to put towards a converter box (think Freeview box in the UK). But there are only a limited number of these being made available. When they run out, they run out. Currently that's likely to happen in August. And of course most of the information being made available is on the web. But the poorer you are, the less likely you are to have web access.
The coupons have a $40 value, and at the moment, there are no boxes on the market that are priced as low as this. So poor consumers (and we're in the thrall of a credit crunch of course) have to spend real money. They're more likely to be putting it towards rising food or gas prices than their TV, assuming of course, that they even understand what's going to happen.
At the start of the year, Robert X Cringely made his annual predictions, and making a disaster out of this transition was one of them. As the switchover day approaches, I can't help but agree with him more and more.
I hope everyone at Digital UK is watching the US market very carefully. We can learn from the mistakes of others...
By the way, if anyone can point me to Nielsen's full report, I'd be interested to see it.
In a turn up for the books, I've now seen two of the summer's blockbusters, and you know what, Iron Man's not too bad at all (this week's major title is Sex and the City, and having not seen a single episode of the TV series, I'm certainly not bothered about the film). Iron Man came out a few weeks ago now, but I've only just got around to seeing it, and I really was pleasantly surprised.
I suppose the best thing about it is Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark, a brilliant engineer and head of Stark Industries. We see him captured by an outfit in Afghanistan who aren't the Taliban, and aren't Al Qaeda. But they're a bit like both, except they're armed to the teeth and are going around killing villagers in Afghanistan for no discernible reason. Downey plays the character in a relaxed manner, and he just does what he wants.
Anyway, before you know it, Stark's modelled himself on MacGyver, and has built a flying rocket man. Back in the US he develops it and is a changed man. Unfortunately for him, his business partner is an evil Jeff Bridges. We're tipped off pretty early that he's evil because he's bald and has a beard. Stark's aided and abetted by Gwyneth Paltrow who plays his long suffering PA.
The plots implausible, but the action sequences are good, and the big set pieces largely don't go over the top. There's no unnecessarily enormous SF spectaculars that just bore the audience (cf. the third X-Men film), and what there is feels pretty visceral, aside from some slightly dubious flying sequences.
As a piece of cinema it's pretty good. And it's really worth staying through all the credits right until the very end where there's a great coda, which sets up the sequel very nicely indeed.
Just one thing to note. This film's a 12A, which the BBFC defines thus:
Suitable for 12 years and over. No-one younger than 12 may see a ‘12A’ film in a cinema unless accompanied by an adult. No-one younger than 12 may rent or buy a ‘12’ rated video or DVD. Responsibility for allowing under-12s to view lies with the accompanying or supervising adult.
Now that doesn't stop children younger than 12 going in, but it's down to parents to determine whether their kids are mature enough for the film. I wouldn't pretend that this is easy unless you pre-screen the film yourself. But you should be aware. The film is not going to be PG rated. Iron Man has a nasty opening sequence which sees soldiers shot, there's a torture scene, Robert Downey Jr's character is shown to be something of a playboy and all told there are more than a few scenes that younger children will find scary.
I know this because the lady in front of me had brought her kids along, the oldest who must have around 12 or 13, and the youngest being 5 or 6. Unsurprisingly the youngest girl was pretty scared on multiple occasions and her mum had to take her out of the cinema several times. This film is simply not suitable for such children and she really shouldn't have taken her youngest to this title.
Recount is a star-studded new HBO film that aired in the US on Sunday evening, based around the farcical procedings in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election.
It's easily the best drama I've seen this year.
The cast is phenomenal: Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klein, Al Gore's former Chief of Staff, and the lead Democrat during the procedings that took in hanging chad(s), complicated and ridiculous issues of Florida State election law, and an unprecedented set of findings from the Supreme Court. Then there's Denis Leary as Michael Whouley as Gore's Chief Field Operative, Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies, the lead Democrat lawyer.
Two British actors play the initial key figures with John Hurt giving another fine performance as Warren Christopher, while Tom Wilkinson gives us a wonderfully scary James Baker who runs the Republican camp.
In 2000, in Britain we sat back and watched agog, as the machinations of the world's only superpower unravelled in a painful, and at times complex manner. This film does a wonderful job of taking us through the steps that history took. This is not always easy stuff to follow, and the script has to be quite expository at times for us to understand what's going on.
The nature of making a film about recent history is that everyone will find it easy to criticise, with undoubtedly invented dialogue, simplifications and characters being given dramatic impetus for the sake of a drama where perhaps there was none initially. Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, gives us most of these examples.
But to my mind, they don't really matter, because while some individuals may object to their portrayal, the overall tone is right, and we really shouldn't forget what a fiasco the whole situation was. Actually "fiasco" isn't nearly a strong enough term. There was utter incompetence at play, with thousands of voters denied the right to vote due to Katherine Harris's uselessness (she had a company
If I did have a criticism, it's that sometimes the brilliant minds at work here are only portrayed as realising what their next step was after the previous one had played out. That provides the viewer with a dynamic - they've lost. But hang on! What if... They back up and running! You feel that perhaps, like a good chess player, the personnel involved were surely thinking several steps in advance.
That said, events did play out in that manner. The film makes great use of archival footage as the world watched on while recounts were stopped, started, stopped and postponed.
What I really liked was the clear and concise manner that Florida's punchcard voting system was explained, with great photography/graphics.
Finally, I've got to say a word about Laura Dern who plays Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State. Her performance is wonderful, and brings home Harris' love of herself, and the delight with which she finds herself in the spotlight of both America and the world. If you don't follow US politics that closely, a glance through her Wikipedia entry is enlightening. Believe it or not, the events of that election did not end her political ambitions! Dern's performance is undoubtedly award winning.
This is as good a poltiical film as I've seen for a long time - easily up there with the best episodes of the West Wing. Director Jay Roach, who's better known for the Austin Powers films and Meet the Fockers, makes the two hours duration pass very quickly. I don't know which UK broadcaster if any, has the rights to this, but if you like politics, you need to watch this film.
I must admit that I had to go away and double check that title. Perhaps, in the fullness of time it'll come as second nature, but it's unnecessarily complicated it for you ask me.
Anyway Indy's back, and it's been a while. We first meet him having been kidnapped and brought to that secret warehouse we saw at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark all those years ago. Time has moved on to 1957, and the enemy now is Commie rather than Nazi. This particular gang of Soviet citizens are led by the rather wonderful Cate Blanchett playing Irina Spalko in a severe cropped haircut and carrying a sabre. Some might suggest that she has a dominatrix look about her.
Indy soon escapes, and there's a chilling sequence in which he realises that he's in the middle of the desert at the scene of an imminent nuclear test. Things have rather moved on from the fear of Nazis.
The reds under the bed theme is nicely played out as the FBI becomes suspicious of him, despite his impeccable record suggesting otherwise.
And so we're led on a journey around Latin America, as the chase gets underway looking for the secret kingdom of the title. There's a gaggle of British character actors en route including an entertaining if slightly underwritten Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent filling in for the late Denholm Elliot (who's character still gets a knowing nod via a university statue), and a great mad turn from John Hurt. We also get to re-meet Raiders' Marion (Karen Allen) and are introduced to Shia LaBeouf's Mutt, who's obviously been lined up to continue the franchise into the 60s should Lucas and Spielberg decide to continue.
The story's tosh of course, but then they always have been. This time, perhaps, it's a little more tosh than usual, but you put that to one side and get on with the action.
There's been a certain amount of criticism of this film which is as much as anything due to the high standards of those that came before it, the affection that many of us hold the originals - in particular Raiders (although I still love the opening of Temple of Doom - I suspect I'm alone in that) - and the knowledge of what we've seen since then.
While I don't think that any of the films that have tried to carry the mantle of Indy have done so in the intervening years, I think that perhaps this film could have been a little rawer. There is still plentiful CGI, not that there ever wasn't lots of special effects in Indy films. I could have perhaps done with a swifter denouement that wasn't quite as "showy-offy".
But I still really enjoyed the film. The pace was good at the start and the end - perhaps only slipping in the middle. The film still felt true to the spirit of the originals. The John Williams music was all present and correct, and the stunts felt pretty real, although I'd have liked to have seen less CGI employed in the clifftop chase sequence. Yet this film is so superior to many of effects-laden tentpole blockbusters that have filled the cinemas in most of the recent summers.
So in the end, is it as good as Raiders? No. Does it matter that Harrison Ford is at a pensionable age? Not really in fact, and you can completely buy his action sequences. But the film is as good as the other two in the series. It's had love and affection placed on it. Lucas has not been allowed to sully his own previous reputation as he managed with the Star Wars prequels. It'll be really interesting to see if anything this coming summer matches or beats it (and from the trailer, that won't be Hancock).
Right - I'm off to rewatch Raiders on DVD...
...But before I go, I couldn't help but notice the three minute BBC Radio 1 ad that was shown ahead of Indy. That must have been a cheap use of my licence fee! It was very good, and it was to promote the variety of music Radio 1 plays post 7pm, but I'm not sure that with audiences at a record high, the BBC needs to be spending quite so much advertising the second most popular station in the country. Perhaps Radio 3 could do with the promotion? Probably not in the most expensive cinema ad-reel of the summer though...
Here's a bit of an oddity. Heartbeat Detector is a French film focussing on the headquarters of the French division of a German company. We follow Simon, a psychologist employed by the firm. He's recently overseen the downsizing of the company - it's into fuel in some way, but we never hear a great deal more about it - and has now been told to investigate the CEO who's number two thinks is having a breakdown.
What follows is a strange and disturbing journey as we learn more about the CEO's life, what's really going on, and learn more about Simon too who's got some pretty strange behaviours and compulsions of his own. At a certain point, the film takes a different direction, although I suspect that you're supposed to have read the runes and seen this telegraphed in advance (Top tip: for once, don't read Philip French in advance).
The film is very leisurely, with long takes often with fixed cameras that barely seem to react even if characters walk "off stage". At times this can be intensely frustrating as seemingly little is happening. There's also an extended scene featuring two songs that, quite frankly, I found utterly interminable. Interesting though the story is, it really didn't need to take two hours and twenty minutes to get to the end.
Simon, is an a very odd character, but then so are both his girlfriends. He seems to be going through some serious difficulties of his own, most strangely in the aftermath of some very strange kind of company retreat which ends in a fairly riotous rave. Is this really what French company away weekends are like?
I could believe the male domination of the company though. I once attended a conference at a hotel in France which was being shared with a Peugeot conference. I didn't see a single woman amongst the very smartly turned out French managers.
If you've read that this film is in some way a French Michael Clayton, then think again. It's not. It's also not really very satisfying in the end, and you're left a little uncertain why you've made the journey.
If you woke up yesterday morning to learn that the audience for Wednesday night's Champions' League Final in Moscow peaked at a very creditable 14.6m, then you're using overnights. These are the figures that broadcasters and others get the next day to record how many people saw a programme on TV last night.
They're produced by BARB, they're the product of approximately 5,100 homes around the UK which have special boxes attached to their TVs. The box records the channels you watch, and a remote control device is used to record when you're actually in the room, and how many of you are watching a particular programme. So if you invited ten of your closest friends over to watch the game, then you can tell the machine accordingly.
But the problem is that we live in a short-term world, and overnights aren't the full picture. The Mediaguardian story I linked to above, for example, includes a note that The Apprentice over on BBC1 only attracted 5m viewers, down from the previous week's 6.7m. That's not surprising as it was an attractive match (unless, like me, you went out instead). And those topline numbers will now probably be the only ones anybody quotes. But there's a problem.
Loads of people will have recorded this week's Apprentice. Overnights don't include recorded programming, which tends to only get counted in the "consolidated" data which is released a week or so later.
Ordinarily, there'd also be a weekend repeat on BBC2, but since this is likely to be the episode missed by more people than any other, it's getting a 10pm repeat on Sunday night! These numbers also need to be added in.
Finally, there are all those people who'll have watched the episode via the iPlayer. As I write, it's the single most popular programme on the iPlayer, and I think it's safe to assume many people spent yesterday lunchtime catching up with it.
But since even trade magazine Broadcast only reports overnights these days, that final figure will only be available to those with subscriptions to BARB data, and it won't be published in all the daily papers.
To be fair, the Champions' League Final tickets will also massively under-represent the true audience. Pubs will have done great trade on Wednesday night, and this "out of home" viewing will not have been included in the overall figures.
At the Radio 3.0 conference today in London, outgoing GCap chairman Richard Eyre called for the BBC to privatise Radios 1 and 2.
Eyre, stressing that he was speaking in a personal capacity, said it was no longer appropriate that the BBC should spend nearly £100m a year on the two mainstream national stations - which he estimated could be sold for £1bn - when the licence fee was under pressure and its public service rivals were calling for a share of its income.
"If GCap is worth £375m then Radio 1 and Radio 2 must be worth a billion," Eyre said.
Well that's fine. But as I've said before, such a move would be disastrous for the rest of the commercial radio industry. Between them, the two stations currently command a 27.1% market share of all radio listening, compared with all commercial radio having 41.1%.
Now while those two stations would undoubtedly lose some audience with the introduction of adverts, the fact of the matter is that they have by far the best spectrum in the country for popular music radio. No other groups could compete. ILR's would lose cash.
Look at radio revenues over the last five years - they're basically static, sitting around the £600m mark.
Source: RAB
Into that mix add two stations that would command overnight 40% of all commercial radio listening and you can see where the money's going to go.
Of course no commercial operator could afford to fund the stations to the extent that the BBC does, so expect the less popular and more expensive areas to immediately be dumped. These cost a lot but don't really pull the audiences in as Chris Moyles, Jonathan Ross and Terry Wogan do. They'd keep they're jobs.
It'd be great if you're the company that bid for them, but otherwise, your company would be screwed. It'd be utterly monopolistic.
And any hope for re-booting DAB, launching C4 Radio or similar would be immediately scuppered.
Finally, you'd be disenfranchising the 12 million or so BBC Radio 1 and 2 listeners who don't listen to any other BBC radio services.
The FX channel has rather smartly just started showing the very excellent Colbert Report. It'd be great if they showed it at 9.00pm just after More 4 has shown its sister The Daily Show. But anything's better than nothing. This week, both shows are off, but we get repeats, which are welcome since in this instance I can't have seen whichever edition of The Colbert Report they play.
Towards the end, Colbert has an interview with Canadian songstress Feist, who ends the show with a song.
Suddenly I remember that she's due to be playing a concert in London very soon, and I seem to remember that tickets were still available at Stargreen (an old ticket agency in Argyle Street that I walk past daily). I hop over to Feist's site and note that the concert's at the Royal Albert Hall. I head straight over to that site, where I find that tickets are available - in the Grand Tier (essentially the boxes).
Ah, but there's a problem. Tomorrow night is the Champions' League Final night with Chelsea meeting Man Utd in Moscow. Surely I'm going to watch that?
Well the problem is that I'm still hoping for some kind of UEFA ruling that makes the fixture null and void and awards the cup to Barcelona. Yup - I'm a sore loser.
So I book tickets.
After a decent warm up from New Zealand's Lawrence Arabia, Feist comes on and appears initially in silhouette.
She spartan set includes a pair of what I can only describe as puppeteers who hand animate backgrounds to many of the songs.
Feist plays about 90 minutes in total, and it's absolutely wonderful. She's obviously enjoying herself in the palatial surroundings, although at times I feel that perhaps the pretty full audience could show their appreciation a little more - the Royal Albert Hall doesn't always feel as full as it is.
But the songs are great and they keep coming, with the audience singing along to 1-2-3-4.
By the end, I'm reminded of the last time I was in this venue to see another Canadian band, the Cowboy Junkies. A great evening.
There are more photos here.
I noted recently that NBC had bought Merlin, a new series commissioned by the BBC and produced by Shine for broadcasting this autumn. At the time, I hypothesised that this was probably the first British series since The Avengers that had been bought by a major US network for its primetime schedule.
Well, Power begs to differ. The company is producing Crusoe, a retelling of Daniel Defoe's classic novel, which will be broadcast this autumn on NBC.
According to the Mediaguardian article: "Power, the show's UK producer, claims this is the first time a US network has directly commissioned a British supplier for nearly 40 years."
I'm not entirely sure that this is true. The series that again's being compared here is The Avengers, yet that was commissioned by UK TV company ABC for the ITV network. The Emma Peel episodes were still commissioned by the UK, with onward sales to the US ABC network. While those sales undoubtedly facilitated things like the switch to colour 35mm, that's not the same as a direct commission which is what Power has had.
Crusoe is being shot in London, South Africa and the Seychelles. Power obviously has some strong connections with South Africa, with much of the recent (awful) miniseries/film Flood having been shot there despite near enough the whole story being set in London. Still Power was also behind Casanova, so they don't just make dodgy mini-series.
Isn't TV great at the moment? We're nearly into summer, and Euro 2008 will overtake BBC1 and ITV1, but the sounds of cupboards being scraped are already being heard.
Starting last Sunday, and continuing for the next three weeks, is a new run of everyone's favourite - Ultimate Force with Ross Kemp. I say "new", but I don't really mean it. These are the last three episodes of the fourth series that ITV1 wimped out of showing back in 2006. The credits reveal that they were made in 2005, and yet only now, three years later, are these episodes finally making it to air. Fear not, I didn't watch two hours of this nonsense, but sped through it at 48x speed, laughing at an Afghanistan-set episode which was obviously shot somewhere in Wales where eighties episodes of Doctor Who and Blake's Seven were made.
Of course die hard fans will already have the DVDs which were released some time ago, or watched them on ITV4. It's very odd that they're only now showing up on ITV1. I believe there are some odd TV accountancy rules which mean that the cost isn't born by the channel until the show has aired. Mind you, the last three episodes of the Royal Navy set drama Making Waves have never been shown!
I wonder if Kemp is a little embarrassed by all of this now. He recently made Ross Kemp in Afghanistan for Sky One, and it wasn't actually that bad. I'm sure lots of running around without helmets or much protective gear in dodgy ITV dramas that are basically made for export, is now not as smart as it might once have seemed.
Over on Channel 4 tonight, here is what they're showing during peaktime:
20.00 How to Look Good Naked
21.00 Gordon Ramsay's F Word
22.00 The World's Smallest Man and Me
If that's not a schedule to make your mouth water and wish that the licence fee was top-sliced for the benefit of Channel 4, then what is?
How to Look Good Naked: "Will an entire orhcestra be prepared to bare all?" Not before the watershed it won't. And in any case this is simply worthless television. Bizarrely, this is the show which'll have a special edition made for the Edinburgh TV Festival later this summer.
Gordon Ramsay's F Word: You don't hear much about Gordon Ramsay these days do you?
Sorry - you hear about him ALL THE TIME. He's never off the telly. When he's not making Kitchen Nightmares, he's making the US version of Kitchen Nightmares (which in no way is faked in way at all). Or he's making Hell's Kitchen in the US. Or he's writing a book. Or he's running a marathon. Or, very occassionally one assumes, he's actually working in one of his many hotels (Wikipedia has quite a list).
The World's Smallest Man and Me: It has one of those descriptions-as-titles to ensure that even the most stupid person understands from the outset what the show is about. On that basis alone I couldn't ever bring myself to watch it. But then, even worse, it's presented by the moronic Mark Dolan. Now to be fair, I know only a single fact about Dolan, and for all I know he's witty and the very personification of charm itself. But that single fact I know is that he presents easily the worst programme on British television - something that makes The Word look like The Ascent of Man. I am of course talking about Balls of Steel. And for that, there's no forgiveness.
What's wrong with Balls of Steel, an "hilarious" hidden camera show made by that stable of fine television, Objective Productions? Well what's right? ITV1 showed An Audience Without Jeremy Beadle on Friday night as a tribute to the man. What came through from that is the lack of malace Beadle showed to people who were set-up on his programmes. That's simply not the case with Balls of Steel whose producers simply mock those people who are set-up on the show. Half an hour of the testcard would be preferable. And Channel 4 would be more honest if they got people to phone up on premium rate phone numbers and then simply had the public chat to one another.
I've not got a great deal of time for famed scientologist, and sometime movies star Tom Cruise, but when these muppets squirted him with water at a film premiere, brandishing the Channel 4 name, I think he was entirely right to be upset. If the film company had withdrawn press credentials from Channel 4 for other programmes, then this show would have swiftly disappeared.
I can only imagine the amount persuasion it takes for the production team to get victims to sign release forms to air the footage. I'm staggered that Channel 4 persist with this rubbish. And they want some of the BBC licence fee to support this crap?
So yes, I don't care how "Louise Theroux" your new Channel 4 series is Dolan, you're forever stained in my eyes from three series of this.
Meanwhile, on Friday, ITV1 is showing Brtiain's Best 2008, presented by Piers Morgan, who ITV has suddenly decided is some kind of talent. I'm not quite sure what he's actually good at doing. I understand his books are mildly entertaining, but I'm not about to rush out and buy one. And there was that series he presented on BBC1, YOu Can't Fire Me, I'm Famous. But ITV has rushed to grab him because of Britain's Got Talent - Opportunity Knocks for the new millennium. I'm not entirely sure what he, or indeed any of the judges, have got to give them the experience to judge talent. Simon Cowell has obviously worked in music for a long time, and Amanda Holden is an actress, but Morgan is journalist. So to my mind, his views are as relevant as, well, mine. Which is to say, yours as well. It's not even as though he's witty - from the little I've seen of the programme, he's just a bit sleazy if the contestant is female, young and attractive (all virtues he doesn't have). Still - good luck with him ITV!
With Ofcom's review underway, and with the usual calls for the BBC's cash to be spread a bit thinner, with "top-slicing" and the like, commentators are often keen for the UK to adopt a model similar to public television in the US. There, cash is raised by subscribers pledging money directly. Relatively little state and federal funding is actually received by broadcasters - something in the region of $500m or so for radio and television. So pledge drives are required to get viewers and listeners to support stations, and corporate sponsors are sought out to provide cash.
That's the future some would like to see the BBC have. But in retaliation I'd say look at the dismal state of US broadcast news. ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their nightly news programmes at 6.30pm and that's it for most of the country. The programmes are relatively parochial, because the networks have cut back on their overseas bureaux. There was even talk recently about third placed (in news terms) CBS doing a deal with CNN to buy in their news, thus ending a news provider that famously once had Edward R Murrow broadcasting from the London rooftops during the Blitz.
There's no word yet whether or not this will come to pass, but that does bring us to the US cable news channels. You've got CNN (CNN International, the service we get to see on this side of the pond, is a different beast), Fox News and MSNBC. Again, these services tend to concentrate on domestic news to a large extent, and are made up of a series of personality-led programmes (see the current fight between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News's Bill O'Reilly). While I'm sure Murdoch would love the ratings that Fox News brings in the US in place of the rather more restrained and truly balanced Sky News, brings, I'm not sure that this would help us in our understanding of events around the world.
PBS, of course, has The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer - a significantly more measured and reliable news programme. But this programme is struggling because it's lost one of its major corporate sponsors, and is unable to make up the shortfall of cash.
"Not only are corporations cutting back on all forms of advertising during the current economic slowdown, but public television’s model - soliciting long-term commitments - is also increasingly out of step with the changing needs of corporations, which no longer sponsor public television programs for purely philanthropic reasons."
No wonder so Americans are finding themselves left with, well, the BBC on either BBC America where a US-oriented service has recently launched, or on PBS (although that's not without it's problems).
Is that really a future that we want in the UK?
It's obviously too complicated a story for me to comprehend, but some recent scheduling decisions really don't make a great deal of sense to me.
First of all there's Saturday nights. No, I'm not talking about Pushing Daisies on ITV1, although that really did make no sense. I'm more interested in the general start and end times of the various primetime BBC1 (and ITV1) shows. Broadly speaking the Saturday night schedule for BBC1 at the moment looks something like this:
The Kids Are Alll Right
Doctor Who
I'd Do Anything
The National Lottery - 1 vs 100
Casualty
Love Soup
The start times for Doctor Who for the seven episodes we've seen so far this series have been, in order:
18:20
18:45
18:20
18:20
18:20
18:45
19:00
Next week, there's a week off to make room for the Eurovision Song Contest. Now, does that make any sense to you? The knock on effect is felt for all these programmes. Check out the start times for all 12 episodes of Love Soup:
21:00
21:30
21:30
21:05
21:05
21:20
21:40
21:45
21:45
21:45
22:10
22:25
You really do need to pay attention, or have Sky+, to keep tabs on that show. It really can't have helped the ratings especially.
Now I always thought that the schedules were largely dictated by the press times of the listings magazines. Furthermore, the BBC got a slight lead on ITV, as the commercial operator had to set start times a little earlier for the benefit of its advertisers. I'm not sure the latter part of that's true any longer, but the Radio Times et al still need to go to press something like 8 days before the first Saturday of the week.
And it's undoubtedly true that the BBC's done its best to ensure that I'd Do Anything does not overlap Britain's Got Talent on ITV to too large an extent (although it's happy to let it over-run a little in the hope of damaging its competitor).
But while I don't believe that schedules should be so set in stone that they can't make allowances for big sporting events or other one-offs such as this week's Eurovision, some semblance of normalcy can't do too much harm surely? There's a bit of a debate over at MediaGuardian about the shifting forward by 24 hours of The Apprentice next week due to an England friendly in the regular Wednesday night slot. But shifting one episode for one week is perfectly acceptable. It's the regular moving around that I dislike.
The other strange scheduling decision is that of what's shown at 10.00pm on Tuesdays on BBC2. For the last few weeks it's been Later... with Jools Holland Live! Instead of the usual hour long programme, for this series they've made it shorter and broadcast it live at 10.00pm on Tuesdays. Then, if you prefer the longer version, you can still find it on Friday's after Newsnight Review where it always used to sit.
My question is simple: which one of those should I be watching? On the one hand, I can see a shorter version of the show on Tuesday squeezed in between programmes on abortion and Newsnight. Or I can watch a neater edited version, with more actual music on a Friday. In fact, given that the music performances are the reason people tune in (it can't be for Holland's ingratiating interviews), then the Tuesday edition is a waste of time. I suppose it fills a half-hour slot that otherwise would go begging, but that's not reason enough. And even more so, it's to get Later's ratings up. As an aside, it's worth listening to this podcast with Mark Cooper of the BBC talking about music television on the Beeb.
And now it seems that this pattern is to be repeated with the programme that will share the time period throughout the year - The Culture Show. There'll be a foreshortened Tuesday show, and then a longer version in the late night Friday slot. In this instance, that'll simply mean pieces that we didn't see on Tuesday only making it to air on Friday. On that basis, why would I bother with the Tuesday show aside from it being on a little earlier? There just doesn't seem to be any logic. Now I will admit that the Saturday 7.00pm-ish slot on BBC2 (with a same night repeat later on) was pretty poor scheduling. But this again feels like it's in the wrong place in the schedules, and makes little to no sense.
Orange has announced its LiveRadio - effectively an Orange branded Wi-Fi radio. You pair it up with your wireless router and away you go listening to internet radio from around the globe.
So far, so normal. You can buy a cheaper device elsewhere. But the Orange LiveRadio does allow you to purchase music from the Orange music store (I assume music that's played on specific Orange music streams). And the inclusion of downloading podcasts to the radio is nice.
But £99.99 is too high. Seemingly Orange has sold 10,000 of these devices in France (where at 129 Euros at the current exchange rate, the price is actually slightly higher than it is in the UK!), so perhaps it'll do well, but I think these things need to come down to less than fifty quid before they really hit the mainstream.
I do however note that very nearly the first thing you read on the LiveRadio purchase page is a note to say that the radio is unsuitable for people who have a 2 GB cap on their monthly downloads. And it further tells customers that they should switch off their radio when it's not in use to prevent consumers contravening fair usage policies.
Who would have a 2 GB cap on their downloads? Well, if you're on a free Orange broadband package, you might. Orange's basic plan these days has a 6 GB cap on it, but that's a paid-for plan. When they originally offered free broadband to their mobile customers, there was a 2 GB cap.
And I find it plainly bizarre that something using as little bandwidth as internet radio could leave me liable to contravene any ISP's fair usage policies. I'm a heavy radio listener, and playing around with a 32k mp3 stream of Virgin Radio in Winamp, I can see that I'd be using 14 MB an hour. So listening at work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for a 4 week month would result in me using 2.2GB a month. And if I upped that to the 128k stream (8.9 GB a month on the same basis), I can see that I'd be in serious trouble if I was even on Orange broadband's most basic paid-for service...
Must go out and get the new Flight of the Conchords album.
Last night I was flicking around the outer reaches of Sky, and came upon CCTV just as the top of the hour was approaching. So I decided to see how the awful Chinese earthquake was being reported in south western China on the English language version of the Chinese state TV service.
Well of course it was the main story, but what was really interesting were the pictures, or lack of them. Unlike the BBC or Sky, who seemed to have a reasonable quantity of imagery of collapsed buildings as well as stills of people being pulled from the rubble, CCTV mainly had images from other cities that had felt the force, but where buildings hadn't fallen, and where the worst damage was limited to cracks in those buildings' infrastructure.
Certainly they had people from the Chinese seismelogical organisations explaining the quake, and an interview with the Chinese premier explaining how help would be on its way. But little in the way of "action" footage.
It can't really be embarrassing for the Chinese government to admit that a major earthquake can cause large amounts of damage can it?
Meanwhile over on the BBC's dot.life blog, Rory Cellan-Jones blogged about Robert Scoble being one of the first to share reports about the earthquake, as he used Twitter to pass on links and other people's "twits" to his gargantuan following on that service.
The tenet of the piece is that Twitter is becoming a news source. But I'm not sure I agree with this. As I said, when the UK had our insiginificant little earthquake a couple of months ago at 1am in the morning, I Twittered it, and read other people's Twitters prior to Five Live, Sky News and BBC News 24 beginning to report it. But does that really mean that Twitter's a news source? I'm not so sure. I still want verified information.
Twitter can be a way to pass on news stories, but it's limited to where the technology is available, and the use to which it's made locally. For example, I suspect that if something big happened in Brazil, it'd be Orkut I'd look towards. But as ringsting-iom wrote in his comment on the BBC blog, the mobile networks went down very quickly, so getting Twitters out isn't easy.
And I don't recall a similar Twitter explosion following the cyclone that hit Burma where of course the military junta keep everyone under very close scrutiny (and are now causing the unnecessary deaths of thousands of its citizens by being very suspicious about all the aid being offered to them).
First hand citizen journalism will continue to play an important role in what gets reported, but it's not the same as a properly resourced news organisation with the facilities to check and double check what's happening - not what I think might be happening.
I'll once again preface this piece by saying that these are my personal views and don't represent those of my employer.
I wrote a week or so ago about the poor showing of commercial radio compared to BBC radio in the recent RAJAR results for Q1 2008. What we saw was commercial radio fall to a low share of hours while the BBC continued to rise.
And I mentioned at the time that all radio hours are holding up, but does that really show the whole story? I hope nobody minds too much, but I need to dispel a common myth. Commercial radio will often gloss over the "all adult" numbers and point to 15-44 year olds where commercial radio has been traditionally stronger.
But what's been going on there? Well here's the chart for overall listening among this audience:
The audience is holding fairly firm, although there has been slippage. But let's look a bit closer and compare commercial share with BBC share in this market:
This is one scary chart. Commercial radio is still leading the BBC, but it's obvious that the gap has closed considerably in recent years and we're now down to 51% plays 47%. At the current rate, the BBC is going to overtake commercial in the coming year.
So why is that? Well let's look at the commercial sector a little more closely:
This is even scarier. It's clear that the losses are coming from local commercial radio. National commercial radio hasn't done too badly - helped by national brands coming on-board largely via digital radio. But those small gains don't make up for the losses sustained by local commercial radio.
So why is this?
If there was a simple answer, I'm sure they'd all be doing it. But I'll return to investing in the product. That can be the only way to regain some of those audiences. Is that going to be achieved by networking? I'll let you decide that.
But let's return to something I glossed over a little earlier on - that overall decline in 15-44 listening. It's modest, but is it a sign of things to come? Am I just painting a picture of gloom? Well here's a chart that's a little better to look at - 15-24 listening:
Overall - a flat picture of listening hours. So they've not all gone to last.fm then! Phew.
Commercial radio's lead over the BBC is a bit better than among 15-44s, although there is a little recent dip that commercial radio could do without. But the next generation is still there to be won.
The one disappointment remains the continued slippage in local commercial radio. It's still significant, and again is only partially made up for by national brands.
So some scary charts, but ones that need to be faced up to. Some remedial action is needed, and it can't all be the BBC's fault.
Here's a complete non-story: Madonna swore twice during her post watershed performance that was broadcast live on BBC Three and Radio 1 as part of the station's Big Weekend in Maidstone.
So there were swear words in programme that featured a warning, and viewers got an apology anyway. Anyway, she's edging 50, and has to do anything she can to stay "cool" doesn't she?
Personally I think the real story was probably Madge asking the assembled Radio 1 listeners whether they were high. That seems to have drawn no press condemnation at all!
Overall, it was a pretty flat set - a couple of tracks from the new album and absolutely nothing older than music. When she started strumming Satisfaction on an electric guitar it was just terminally embarrassing. As Lisa Verrico, from The Times said, it was like "an embarrassing auntie desperately trying to be hip."
Incidentally, is it me, or is the Mail's recently revamped online offering a little off-message compared to the printed edition? Here's their shocked report of the short set replete with perhaps less than family friendly photos. And here's a photo of actress Natasha Richardson, along with a helpfully zoomed-in photo to illustrate the story.
Taking advantage of the fine weather, I hit the nearby countryside this afternoon (sadly, in a moment of poor planning, sans camera) and found myself following a section of the London Loop. I must say that I think I may attempt the full walk over the course of the next few months - it's always dangerous to set self-imposed deadlines.
Anyway more of that anon, if and when I start doing full sections. But the walk did afford me the opportunity to catch up with a lot of listening. There is, of course, a certain school of thought that says that it's terribly anti-social to go walking whilst listening to an mp3 player, but there's such a lot of great radio out there, that my commute doesn't afford me enough time to get through it all.
A lot of these were recommended by one of my new favourite sites - Speechification - which describes itself as "A blog of Radio 4. Not about Radio 4 but of it." Every week, they highlight a few hidden gems that you may have missed.
So today I was listening to Robbie Williams and Jon Ronson Journey to the Other Side (Still available to listen again until this Tuesday on the BBC Player, or the Speechification link is here). Robbie Williams comes out as likeable, but a bit gullible. And of course, if you haven't read it, you really need to read Jon Ronson's book Them.
Speechification also recommend Stephen Fry's recent speech on the future of public service broadcasting. I watched this on BBC Parliament on Saturday night (albeit with a sound issue part-way through, where Fry seemed to start all over again). I find it generally quite hard to disagree with Fry, and in this case, he's pretty much on the money all the way through. It's also worth watching, listening to or reading David Attenborough's contribution last week.
Then there's The Reunion featuring cast and crew from Withnail and I. Speechification wasn't the only place I'd heard this recommended - I think it was Mark Ellen on the very fine Word Magazine podcast who also mentioned it. It's a great piece of radio, and I don't know how it is that I haven't previously listened to The Reunion before. Now I must admit that this film would be one of mine if we were playing a variant on that appears in one of David Lodge's university-set novels where characters in an English department name famous novels they've never read. Yes, I've never seen Withnail and I, even though it's regularly showing in HMV sales for about two quid. I may well chase it down this week and make good on the hole in my cultural knowledge.
And there's plenty more to listen to over there...
PS Has someone at Deutsche Grammophon, the massive classical music label, really forgotten to renew their website registration? It seems so.
Well here's a turn-up for the books - the first series of Ed Reardon's Week looks as though it's finally coming out on CD. You can put your cash back in your wallet, as it's not due to hit become available until September if the listings on Amazon or the BBC Shop are anything to go by.
So four years on, and after a couple of false starts, fans of the series might be able to get hold of legal copies.
[Now updated a bit]
Are we all excited by Freesat which launches today?
Actually it's a good time for it to come onstream. OK, so the website (as linked to by the BBC Press Office) doesn't work, but it can't all be smooth.
Onboard from day one are all the BBC channels, all the ITV channels and all the Channel 4 offerings. There's no mention of Five's digital output, which is odd as I thought that these channels were broadcast unencrypted on Sky Digital. But then Five's not part of Kangaroo either...
Much more interesting is the various channel's HD offerings. Naturally BBC HD is there, but the soon to launch ITV HD will be "launching exclusively on Freesat." Does that mean that ITV is deliberately withholding the channel from SkyHD and Virgin Media HD customers? If so, that seems like a strange attitude.
In fact initially ITV HD will be availble as a red-button service - a logo will appear when a programme is available in HD. I assume that this is due to the regionality of ITV meaning that having more than a dozen simulcasts is a mighty expensive issue. BBC HD doesn't have this issue as it's a separately programmed channel - effectively an HD version of BBC1/2 with repeats to fill the empty slots.
I assume that Freesat will have its own EPG, separate from that of Sky Digital, but it still seems a little odd that there's not a spot of SkyHD for ITV HD. Perhaps it'll be for a limited time?
We're told that by the end of the year there'll be upwards of 200 channels broadcasting on the platform, which means either that there'll be an awful lot of shopping channels, or some channels that currently get some subscription revenue from Sky or Virgin Media, are going to be completely free-to-air.
I've already speculated that UK TV Gold, in whatever guise it comes in when it relaunches, is a sure thing for being completely free-to-air - that's been the major part of the success of Dave. But could channels like National Geographic or Discover go down this route? We'll have to wait and see.
Sky has been doing very well lately, with continued growth despite some serious digital challengers in Freeview and, to an extent, Virgin Media.
But Sky HD is in fewer than half a million homes. This chart suggests that a free-to-air HD offering could be successful.
Source: BSkyB plc
The biggest concern that Sky must have is churn of current subscribers. With the credit crunch likely to make people reappraise their bills, and with a relatively inexpensive box available which won't even mean a new dish installation, downgrading to a free offering could be quite attractive for a lot of people.
In the short term, the channel list is a little sparten with no UKTV channels, no Discovery channels, no EMAP or MTV music channels and of course, no Sky channels. The news offering is a little light just now - you'd expect CNN to be there for example. Sky News is probably politically a no-no for BSkyB.
What's most exciting is that the spec of Freesat means that the return path for interactive services is via an ethernet connection. Sky boxes use an internal modem and the phone line for interactive gaming, shopping and paying for films or sports events. Ethernet seems a very 21st and sensible solution. And most excitingly, it opens the door for the iPlayer to be available via the service.
Once there are a few more channels on board, Freesat is going to be a very compelling offering.
Lots of today's RAJAR press coverage focuses on the "battle" between Radio 1's Chris Moyles (34) and Radio 2's Terry Wogan (69). There are charts like the one below, a version of which appeared in today's Times.
It all looks pretty close between the two breakfast DJs.
But is that chart completely fair? Chris Moyles is seemingly getting very close to catching Wogan. I'm sure it's a great story for BBC PR to be talking about. But it's not really comparing like with like.
The numbers being talked about are weekly "reach" figures - the number of different people, in the course of a week, who listen for at least 5 minutes to a particular show. But while Terry Wogan's show runs for two hours daily from 7.30 - 9.30am, Chris Moyles' show runs for three and a half hours from 6.30 - 10.00am. If you have a longer show, you have more opportunity to generate a higher reach figure.
It's an old radio trick to bump up listening figures by extending a show since ordinarily journalists and others will just compare the overall figures with one another without regard to a show's a length. Indeed, if you're being really unscupulous, you might compare your new longer show's figures with your previous shorter show's numbers. Unless you're doing something really wrong, you should see a nice increase!
But occassionally it does cause difficulties. If you look at the reporting of the London breakfast show marketplace, you'll see that Capital 95.8 is crowing because Johnny & Denise is the biggest commercial breakfast show with 943,000 listeners. But Johnny & Denise run from 6.00 - 10.00am, whereas Jamie Theakston & Harriet Scott on Heart only run 6.00 - 9.00am. If you compare the audiences for those shorter hours, then Jamie & Harriet get 893,000 listeners, while Neil Fox over on Magic gets 831,000 (his show ordinarily runs 5.30 - 9.00am), and Johnny & Denise get "just" 829,000 listeners. That 9.00 - 10.00am hour is pretty big, and if your DJs are willing to work it, then you get quite a bump in your overall figures.
Depending on how you cut the cake, you get different results.
So what would the chart look like if we compare like with like hours for Wogan and Moyles, using Wogan's more restricted 7.30 - 9.30am hours? Something like this:
OK - it's a little hard to see without rescaling the charts a bit (something I currently can't do with Google Spreadsheets), but instead of a difference of 380,000 between the two in the most recent results, the "fair" difference is actually 1.02 million which is still quite considerable.
So always be a little aware about what's being compared and between who.
As ever when talking about radio, these are my own opinions and do not represent those of my employer.
In radio stations up and down the country, radio station bosses have been examining their RAJAR results last night and first thing this morning.
Media Guardian has plenty of detail about the overall results. And you can get the raw figures direct from RAJAR.
But there's an interesting blog piece my Media Guardian radio correspondent John Plunkett highlighting the least positive aspect of today's results: the continued growth of BBC radio at the expense of commercial radio.
Now you might say that as someone who works in commercial radio, I would say that this is a negative. As an intelligent reader of this blog, it's quite likely that you listen to lots of BBC radio. And you wouldn't be alone - I do too. And everytime the future of the BBC is threatened, I worry about the future of the whole UK broadcasting environment. The USA is not a model I want to follow.
But with this RAJAR, the BBC's share of radio listening has grown from 55.4% to 56.8%, while commercial radio's share has fallen from 42.4% to 41.1% (Note for the curious: the "missing" 2% or so, is to stations that aren't on RAJAR including web and international listening).
Now those might seem quite small percentage changes, but actually 1% of radio listening is 100,000 hours per week - a not inconsiderate amount. And more to the point the BBC's share is now higher than it has been since the advent of commercial radio (and RAJAR). And that's despite many additional commercial stations having launched throughout the duration of this chart.
The problem is that the BBC is just too successful. And it's in that environment that the likes of Peter Bazalgette is again suggesting that Radios 1 and 2 are privatised.
Now I've argued before that that would be catastrophic for commercial radio, with those two services taking the lion's share of revenues.
One thing is clear: depite more calls on leisure time than ever before, radio listening is not decreasing overall. All radio listening increased by 1.5% quarter on quarter - surely a testament to the medium.
But whose fault is it that the BBC is "too good"? Have commercial operators done less than their level best in recent years? Has the BBC's guaranteed income meant that it's been able to sign all the top talent, leaving the bare bones for commercial radio? Is it because the BBC is able to cross-promote its radio services on television to a far greater extent than a commercial operator is able to (having to pay for advertising airtime)? Or has commercial radio simply not invested in their product enough, perhaps having to worry more about servicing the needs of their shareholders rather than those of their listeners?
While I'm sure that champagne corks are popping up the road at Broadcasting House, the political ramifications of a completely dominant BBC are also likely to be carefully examined.
Unlike television, the playing field isn't level. The BBC has the lion's share of the most attractive spectrum with four national networks on FM compared to a single national commercial network in Classic FM. But commercial radio would never be able to support such institutions as Radios 3 and 4 (Channel 4 Radio, if and when it finally launches will surely be closer in tone to Five Live without the sport, and not Radio 4 as is widely perceived). But there are commercial alternatives to Radios 1 and 2. Your local commercial pop station probably shares a considerable amount of the Radio 1 playlist, and Radio 2's audience has certainly decreased in age over recent years (Q4 2007's RAJAR shows that the average age of a Radio 2 was 53, in Q4 1996 it was 59 - and that downward pattern has been consistent), as specialist music gets pushed to the outer reaches of the schedule (following the sad death of Humphrey Lyttleton, will any jazz be returning to Radio 2?).
If and when there's a full replacement to analogue radio in one or more digital formats, then commercial radio will have a more level playing field. And it's encouraging that a further half a million DAB radios were sold in the first quarter of 2008 taking the market total to 7 million. At the same time, 18% of all radio listening is now digital (whether via DAB, digital television or the internet). But we're a way off a full digital future at the moment with continued uncertainty about which digital path should be taken. And the funding inequity is always likley to be in place, especially in a marketplace where advertising expenditure is threatened by both a recession and the growth of the internet.
Leaving aside digital for the moment, the only other direct way that commercial radio will be able to compete is "networking" - sharing programming across many stations in a group or groups. Ofcom has recently relaxed the rules on networking and already Global Radio and GCap Radio have announced plans to network parts of their main daytime output - much off-peak programming is already networked. While that might be a profitable short-term solution, followed to a logical conclusion there is the danger of depriving local communities of local programming. And let's not forget that localness is all but gone from television already.
Networking also reduces the entry points for new talent into the industry. Remember that most of our top DJs actually started in local commercial radio. If there are no slots left to try new people, then we reduce the opportunities for discovering future talent. But go away and read Matt Deegan on this subject.
Overall, it's important that the BBC does do the sort of things that commercial radio can never do. That doesn't mean not producing services that are attractive to 15-44s, but to do this intelligently, and always remembering that "crushing" the opposition is not likely to help anybody's cause. Commercial radio doesn't deserve special priviliges - commercial radio companies are in the business to make money after all. But state funded services mortally wounding these business is not smart either.
As ever, the views here do not necessarily reflecft those of my employer.
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