Recently in TV Category

We seem to be going through a significant period of remakes at the moment. Actually, that's a little unfair as television has always remade successful programmes. How many Agatha Christies or Robin Hoods have we had over the years? And when isn't there another Austen, Dickens or Hardy production on the cards?

But recently we've had a remake of Survivors for which the jury's still out in my view, and now we hear that The Day of the Triffids is also being remade.

I've not seen the original version of Terry Nation's Survivors, but I'm told that it's broadly the same story as the remake. But Survivors is obviously already following in the footsteps of 28 Days/Weeks Later and even Dead Set. A plague/virus/flu has spread and there are few humans left.

The Day of the Triffids, based on the novel by John Wyndham, the story has already been made into an enjoyable TV series as well as a good radio dramatisation. There's also a film version that I've not seen from the early sixties. I suppose I'm a little concerned that it's being made by Power, who's recent Crusoe leaves a little to be desired, and their Flood was simply appalling. Still we'll wait and see.

I suppose the timing is what's a little off, with this version coming so soon after Survivors. Perhaps some rights were about to expire?

Mind you, another curious remake perhaps coming soon is a BBC/Showtime reimagining of Camelot. Isn't there already a Camelot series running on the BBC? Ah, but this is a contemporary retelling - so it'll be a bit different.

But the remake I'm really looking forward to seeing is the ITV remake of The Prisoner with Sir Ian McKellan. I've only just discovered there's a blog covering its production, which has now nearly finished.

It's due sometime in 2009 and I for one can't wait.

For whatever reason, I've recently ended up on a few PR companies' lists for "Bloggers'" events. I've been invited to a few film screenings here and there - although I've not been able to make disappointing number of them. That's more the shame because screenings tend to take place in and around the West End, and that's where I work.

Then, recently, I was invited to the launch of an interesting new 3 handset which I wrote about here.

Then last week, I got an invitation to a bloggers' screening of the new 24: Redemption two hour TV-movie. The screening was to take place the following Thursday.

Er - hang on. It was going to be shown on Sky One on Monday and it had aired on Fox in the US on Sunday.

Ah. But this was to be the DVD release which was an extended cut, and would feature a trailer for series/day 7 coming in the New Year.

So should I just watch the Sky One showing on Monday, or wait until Thursday to see it in a nice screening room?

Decisions, decisions.

Because I was a little slow in replying my place wasn't secured until the last minute, but circumstances meant that I hadn't had a chance to watch my Sky+ recording anyway. So I headed off to Soho House to watch the screening.

Recent series of 24 have swung wildly between good, and very bad. The most recent series - season/day 6 - began well although it was clear that by the time they'd let off a nuke, they were going to struggle. And the plot involving Jack's own dad trying to kill him was dreadful. The writers looked like they'd struggled for ideas - seemingly repeating storylines that had appeared in previous series.

When the writers' strike go under way in autumn 2007, it knocked production of 24 completely out, and the producers and network decided to skip a year and return in 2009. Early story ideas were going to see Jack Bauer in Africa, and these have ended up being used in this film. In the meantime, behind the scenes Joel Surnow, one of the series' creators was kicked off the show, and we began to wonder whether the over-reliance on torture ("It doesn't work" said Leonardo DiCaprio's character to Russell Crowe's in the recent Body of Lies).

And so to Redemption which takes place in the fictional Sangala in Africa. Jack is holed up in an American sponsored school for local African kids run by the Irish (!) Benton (Robert Carlyle). We're told that Jack and Benton know one another from the special forces, but it's unclear why and how and they might have met.

Across the border from Sangala, a vicious warlord is rounding up kids so that they can be armed and sent into battle - effectively as cannon fodder. In perhaps the film's best scenes, you find kids holding AK47s quite chilling.

The real time concept is kept and we're told that the action takes place between 3pm and 5pm. Meanwhile in Washington, the new president is being inaugurated seemingly without a great deal of help from the outgoing Powers Boothe. 24 of course gave us a black president, and now that we have Obama in reality, they're giving us a female president in the shape of Cherry Jones. We also meet her son, and his friend. But the Washington aspect of the story is really all set-up for the forthcoming series 7.

Back in Africa, the rebels still need more kids despite the fact that they have no time to train them as their attack on the country is imminent. And guess which school's kids is in the firing line. Fortunately there's a hidden cellar where they can hide out - along with the cowardly UN guy who, of course, is French.

Can Jack save the kids with Benton despite the US government having a warrant for his arrest? What do you think?

The build up is quite nice and measured. Despite the short running time, it doesn't run at the same lunatic pace as many episodes of 24 can do. Quite why the rebels would get so worried about Bauer is a little unclear (he kills someone's brother, so there has to be revenge). But in an attack on the school, the soldiers are still after a dozen kids, even when about a dozen adults have been killed in the attack. It doesn't seem worth it!

What was a bit disappointing was the terribly clunky product placement. Seemingly US network Nextel is available in fictional African countries - the phones are held up to the camera just a little bit too long to make sure we can see. And when the US president conducts video chats on three monitor set-ups, he or she sees a massive Cisco screensaver whenever they switch off the video conferencing system. It's a bit clunky.

We also saw a 15 minute preview of day 7 - essentially the first fifteen minutes of the first episode. It begins with a terrific stunt involving the kidnapping of someone. Then we cut to Jack Bauer who's giving testimony about his torture. It seems that all that shooting people in the legs to get information is finally catching up with him.

It's no surprise to learn that Tony Almeida is back - Carlos Bernard's name is in the credits. Yes - I know we thought he was dead. But could he really be working for the other side? We'll have to wait until next year to find out...

This morning, the BBC Trust rejected plans for a local BBC video news service.

Concurrently, Ofcom published the results of its Market Impact Assessment and concluded that the plans would have had a significant negative impact on commercial news providers.

The BBC proposal would have seen it producing more localised news which would be delivered on demand either via fixed or mobile internet. The BBC's aim was to provide another layer of depth to its current local and regional services which often stretch significantly. For example, if you sit in North Norfolk, the local news will also cover goings on in Watford.

Most commercial news providers were utterly opposed to the plans for understandable reasons. Local newspapers have suffered enormously as they've seen their advertising revenues fall. Traditionally much of their cash came from classified ads, and lucrative property and jobs ads. Yet all of these have - to one extent or another - moved over to the internet. As a result, they have less money to invest in news gathering and we're seeing redundancies, and closures. The one thing they have going for them is their ultra-local news. And they didn't want to see the BBC getting their hands on that.

Meanwhile, local commercial radio operators were similarly opposed to the BBC's plans. As well as their on-air local news provision, the more forward thinking operators have been investing in online local news provision as the newspaper groups have. They want their sites to become the local news portals for a given region. If successful, they're in a strong place to develop new online revenues (seemingly the only area of the UK media landscape that is showing growth).

They make good points, and I think the BBC Trust and Ofcom are probably right. But I think we also need to think forward a little. As newspapers suffer, so their newsrooms are shrinking. Fewer reporters mean that news is harder to come by. As Nick Davies pointed out in his excellent book Flat Earth News, with a retrenchment in journalists, comes a retrenchment in journalism. No longer does either a local newspaper or local news agency have a regular person sitting in the local courts or council chambers all the time.

And we're seeing some local radio news operations being cut back - either by creating news "hubs" for a group of local services, or by even removing the one advantage local radio stations have over other broadcasters, and removing local news at certain times of the day altogether.

Can we really get all our local news online? I'm not sure we can.

If there aren't any decent primary news gatherers - i.e. local news reporters on the ground - then everybody will be republishing the same Press Association copy. And that's not enough. Like elsewhere in an open society, competition is important for news providers too.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, but as budgets are squeezed, plurality of news providers remains important. If we all rely on one source - something that we're getting closer and closer to - then we become less open. Without the concern that your competitor is going to scoop you, a reporter isn't as incentivised to work harder and dig deeper. Who's going to look hard into more difficult stories?

Perhaps beyond that danger is nobody at all covering the news. Local newspapers will have closed down. Local radio will cover things at a very superficial level perhaps having one or two people in the newsroom (including the newsreader). And local television won't really exist and the likes of ITV offers the same "local" news for everyone between Carlisle and Newcastle.

As ever, these are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

The BBC Trust reported today on lots of things. Of most interest to the press was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco. But frankly, that's so dull now, I can't be bothered to get into it at all. Tomorrow's papers will be all over it.

Of far more interest, in the same report, is the response to Jonathan Ross' interview with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Undoubtedly Ross was crass, and like "complainant 1" in the report, it wasn't the languarge per se that I found troubling, but the context. Ross was like some juvenile schoolboy, and you got the feeling the Paltrow was just being professional in agreeing to everything and going along with Ross.

Maybe she did find it funny, but I don't agree. And it was seeing this particular episode that meant that I wasn't surprised by Ross' later antics with Brand.

Do I want him to continue to be irreverand? Absolutely. But I don't want to be squirming in discomfort when I watch his show.

So John Sergeant has quit Strictly. Don't say that I don't cover the important issues of the day. What's that about Congo or pirates off Somalia?

What I still find perplexing is the lack of openness in whole TV voting world even post the telephone voting scandals we've had over the last eighteen months or so. We regularly hear that more young vote in Big Brother than General Elections, yet unlike a General Election, where the full results are published, we never get that information in TV contests. Instead, we're just told who wins or loses.

In Strictly's case, the judges count for half the votes, and viewers the other half. Of the eight couples dancing, according to the judges John and Kristina came bottom with 1 point, while Rachel and Vincent came top with 8 points.

Suppose the perverse British public essentially voted in the exact opposite manner putting John top and Rachel bottom - both would end up with 9 points (as would everyone else).

But we never actually get to see the final numbers of voters to allow us to determine what the overall results are. All we know are the bottom two couples. So maybe John has been squeezing through by the skin of his teeth, or perhaps he's been "walzting" through unimpeded such has been the strength of his fanbase. Who knows?

Producers are obviously loathe to publish the numbers because it might influence how people vote next time. But that's precisely why we need to see it.

And thet gets me on to multiple votes. There are no obvious limitations for the number of votes any particular line can make. Why not? OK - a family sitting down in a household may all hold separate opinions and want to each vote (thus cancelling out one anothers' votes - but hey...). But a limit of four or five votes per phone line would be easy to implement.

Interestingly, the US version of the show adopts a percentage format that means that a very low scoring couple is at an extreme disadvantage however popular they are. This is much better than the British system where even a big points gap might only mean you're one point worse off than the couple immediately ahead of you.

Anyway, it's all moot now, and frankly I don't even care about it that much. It's an entertainment show and not a dance competition. Although quite why the Beeb hasn't quietly reinstated a regular version of Come Dancing in Strictly's off-season, I'm really not sure. It'd surely be popular early on a Sunday evening. And I'm sure Anton would be happy to present...

There's a new series of The IT Crowd starting this week on Channel 4. Hurrah!

In the last series, one of the episodes opened with Roy and Moss sitting down to watch a DVD. We then saw a brilliant mock DVD piracy advert to warn viewers of how bad the criminals you're supporting are if you buy pirate DVDs.

We all hate these things - and they only ever show up on legal DVDs.

Anyway, I grabbed the video and put it on YouTube. It's 45 seconds long, and it's been there since September last year. Of course it's not mine, and there are loads of other versions of it online as well. Writer Graham Linehan obviously touched a nerve.

So how amusing today to get the following email:

Dear adambowie00,

Your video "Video Piracy" is still available because Channel 4 does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as Channel 4 has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page.

As I've said, before, I'm happy that Channel 4 has an enlightened attitude to using YouTube like this.

But I can't be the only person to see the irony of the situation here...

BTW - I do of course own a copy of the boxset of Series 1 and Series 2 of The IT Crowd which are authored brilliantly! I would still advocate that an elightened attitude leads to more revenues in the long term.

These are interesting times for Kanagroo - the BBC Worldwide/ITV/C4 joint venture that, simply put, is supposed to do for commercial (and commercially sold) TV, what the iPlayer does for the BBC.

Last week Ashley Highfield quite the consortium after four months, having moved across from the BBC mothership to take charge. And a long piece in today's MediaGuardian suggests that the project has been ridden with internal politics.

It's also true that the venture has been knocked off its timetable by a Competition Commission investigation which attempts to identify whether the consortium would be monopolistic.

The problem with all of this is that it feels a little like the record companies all over again. I suppose the organisations are at least talking, and know that they have to do something and make some money. But exactly how and what seems to be the question.

In the meantime, iTunes steals a march on video as it has done with music. With its technology being locked to a single, fantastically popular, device line for music, it now has a say so over everything the music industry tries to do. They have to accept Apple's pricing or not be on the platform. They've lost control. Other players have attempted to use Microsoft's format which works with a wide range of non-Apple devices, but they have small market share and are clunky in their usability (see James' piece on his attempts to load some video on a WMV player recently).

The various MP3 offerings might be able to take this on, but they tend to be hampered by not having full offerings - the majors are missing from eMusic, Play.com's MP3 service offers only a subset of what's available on CDs without all the majors on board, and Amazon's MP3 service simply hasn't turned up so far this year despite promises to the contrary.

So iTunes has the whip hand.

And now the same is happening with TV. If you want to go out and download a film or TV show, you really only have one choice - iTunes. Certainly all the broadcasters offer their own services to a lesser or greater extent. But they're messy - usually streamed - and the user experience is not nice. Only the iPlayer can really compete - and it was actually a latecomer to the market with most of the other broadcasters long having since put their offerings live. The iPlayer has been well marketed - with catch-up reminders accompanying every trail on-air as well as bespoke trails for the service.

There's nowhere else to go. It's not even as though iTunes is actually that good for film and TV. The TV is largely US fare with a limited amount of British TV. That's one of the reasons the Competition Commission got involved of course - one gets the impression that ITV and C4 are holding their programming back to a certain extent. And films are slow to arrive on the platform, often only being available to buy in the first instance, with less profitable rentals coming later (This is unlike Blockbuster, who needs to recoup the cost of each DVD - so multiple rentals on release make sense, as well as offering the copies for sale. Apple on the other hand, does not need to "recoup" a download's cost, so it prefers to "sell" at a higher price rather than "rent" a digital download).

For a strong and healthy marketplace, we need more than one major operator, which is why it's important that Kangaroo gets off the ground. Of course, ir's important that programming is not limited to one supplier - I want to able to choose buy the new Indy film (or not) in HMV, Zavvi, Sainsburys or ASDA. But delays in getting the project off the ground just makes Apple stronger. As it did for music, it has already positioned itself in a good place for portable video with DRM attached (and that, sadly, is going to be necessary in the short-term). That's not to say that other deals can't be done - the Sony PSP is an obvious route to market as well as Windows Media video devices. Deals with mobile phone operators would be good, although the manufacturers and networks tend to want you to use their own offerings rather than those of third-parites. But don't mess around - and get cracking!

We do now hear that a trial will launch in January following an alpha next month. This is ahead of possible approval from the Competition Commission in late January next year or early February. The sooner the better...

I never know quite what to make of Children in Need. Simplistically it's simply a fund-raiser to help children in variety of ways shapes and forms. And nobody can argue with that.

But there are the other elements of it, that I always find uncomfortable. It's notable that Channel 4 always gives its comedy programmes a week off when Children in Need is on. This time around it ran Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Then there are the big cheques from large corporations - supermarkets and the like - that all have the companies names on them. With the cancellation of the Jonathan Ross show, bands and artists with their Christmas releases out, have nothing much beyond GMTV or This Morning to appear from. So Children in Need this year gets a big name line-up. They're all doing it for the kids you understand, and not to remind people who only buy one new CD a year that their new albums are in shops now.

Certainly the various soaps compete to outdo one another with either musical numbers or bizarre crossovers with other shows. And then there's the regular news readers song and dance number. They're harmless enough.

But we get West End musicals that helpfully all advertise their availability (do theatre audiences get short-changed on Children in Need night, or do they all hop on limo-bikes to W12?).

I know I always sound like I'm some kind of anti-charity person, and Children in Need is in no way as bad as Comic Relief in the way that commercial sponsors get thirty seconds on the BBC (that truly is outrageous, and I really hope it changes next time around), but I still get a little uncomfortable at the commercial aspects.

CNN's Election Night "hologram" was truly the most pointless graphical mechanism I've ever seen on any type of broadcast.

I say get Max Headroom as a pundit for 2012.

As America votes, there were a couple of fascinating films on TV recently which had well-timed screenings.

On Friday there was a cracking film on BBC Four which isn't available to watch on the iPlayer, so I can only recommend picking up the DVD instead. CSNY Deja Vu followed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on tour across the US in 2006. This documentary which appeared to have pretty full access and was made by an ABC journalist, showed that many people thought that when a band in its sixties tours so many years after it had originally been behind the protest movement, it might have mellowed. Those people were wrong as became clear when they begin a song with the lyrics "Let's impeach the president..." I hold not particular candle for their music, but their beliefs are heartfelt, even if some of the disagreeing crowd had the perfectly valid opinion that if they were paying $200 for a ticket, they shouldn't be preached to. But CSNY always preached, so more fool them.

And speaking of DVDs, if you missed Recount on More4 a month or so ago, and the Channel 4 screening on Saturday night, then you'll have to wait until January to buy the DVD of that excellent film (or import the US edition). I trust that this evening's procedings will be completed somewhat more speedily. If the polls are anything to go by, that's the case.

A heavy cold means that going out to an election party is out the question, so I shall be taking in supplies this evening and settling back in the sofa with a remote switching between the BBC, Sky, CNN, even Fox, and possibly CNBC if they're carrying NBC programming through the night. Sadly there's no way to watch the Daily Show/Colbert Report show until tomorrow when the result will be known.

I'll write more about this perhaps at a later date, but it suitably scary and a thoroughly enjoyable piece of drama. Obviously influenced heavily in style by 28 Days Later, but still excellent. How many times did I find myself saying "If only... If only..."?

I see that it got a very strong audience of 1.19m. But I do wonder about the sense of E4 not to run a trailer for part 2 or let the audience know that Dead Set is airing every night this week.

The Spooks-like lack of credits, and the disappearance of the E4 DOG were ordained by the producers. So it's quite possible that the no-trailer idea was also theirs. But still...

E4 scheduled Dead Set in a one hour ten minute slot. I somehow suspect that it'd actually comfortably fit into an hour slot, but they were packing their biggest show of the night with ads. C4 and its spin-off channels are making a habit of the "long" hour. The Neil Morrissey vehicle tonight is scheduled to run 1:05, as is Desperate Housewives tomorrow. This is a show that happily fits in a one hour slot in the US, so as I've said before, we see more ads on these shows that US viewers do.

Far too much has been written about Kerry Katona and her behaviour on This Morning a couple of days ago. I can't be bothered to go into it, and if she is ill, I'm not about to link to YouTube clips of her being ill on national television. That's despite whatever I might think about someone who lives their life in Heat and Zoo magazines. If you feel that your interviewee is not fully with it, curtail the interview and either go to a pre-recorded piece or a commercial break. Don't dwell on it.

But I think some of the post-rationalisation has been interesting. First of all we had Philip Schofield defending himself and ITV on Chris Moyles because she'd actually arrived at the studio really late.

I don't doubt that Schofield is an honourable man, but I find ITV claiming to care about Katona's welfare somewhat questionable when my weekly ITV.com email dropped in my inbox today:

"Watch Kerry Katona on This Morning..." said the subject line.

"Watch Kerry's dramatic interview.

"Kerry Katona caused a stir on This Morning this week.

"Did you see the controversial interview? Watch it and see what all the fuss was about."

For which read: it's not fair that YouTube gets all the traffic. We want some of that action.

That's clearly the most important thing happening on ITV this week, because it's the only headline story on the email.

I expect that even now, executives are eagerly poring over their analytic programs seeing what kind of uplift the Katona footage has had.

It's been an interesting week or so for Digital Terrestrial Television in the UK - or Freeview as it's better known.

SDN has somehow been able to squeeze a little extra space out of the platform and put another channel up for auction, and it was won by Discovery.

Before everyone gets too excited thinking "Woo-hoo - Discovery Channel's coming to Freeview," I should point out that it will be a new, so far un-named channel, that will be coming Freeview's way. Expect to see repeats of programmes previously shown (and reshown) on their main brand services.

It was illuminating to read that only one third of Discovery's revenues actually come from advertising. Allowing for some sponsorship cash, some DVD sales etc., and some digital media revenue, that still means that upwards of half their revenues come from subscriptions. Perhaps somewhere in the 70p to £1.00 of your monthly Sky or Virgin Media subscription (I'm guessing). That's not revenue that anyone will give up lightly.

But the bigger Freeview news is the Ofcom announcement that HD is ready to roll on the platform. It looks quite exciting - there'll be a BBC HD channel, an ITV one and a C4/S4C one (depending on whether or not you live in Wales). This essentially means that all those people with HD Ready TV sets who don't currently subscribe to Sky HD or watch movies or play games on their Blu-Ray/PS3/Xbox 360 consoles, might actually have something to watch.

[An aside - it's somehow very funny to hear about people who have a Sky HD or Blu-Ray player and then hook it up to their TV with a SCART cable, and then perhaps extol the virtues of high definition!]

Interestingly, the commercial broadcasters are looking at subcontracting space on their HD channels in off-peak hours. Channel 4/S4C will either offer an "on-demand" service overnight, or sub-let their capacity, while ITV will simulcast between 1800 and 2300, but may also offer "on-demand" services or sub-let its off-peak capacity.

This whole endeavour will require new boxes for everyone who wants to receive the channels to allow for the MPEG-4 and DVB-T2 standards. And I'd guess that it'd be in most people's interests to heavily promote PVR devices rather than simple £20 decoders. If ITV and C4 are going to sublet capacity then viewers will need to be able to record their services. So I'd look out for a "Freeview+ HD" badge on any box I'd buy.

I'm interested in the idea of "On Demand" though. Sky has something called Sky Anytime TV which has never worked on my Sky+ box, but records and saves choice Sky programming for me to watch "On Demand". I'd imagine that it's this kind of thing that ITV and C4 are thinking about. I may not have realised that I wanted to watch Jamie Oliver last night, but C4 knows better and has recorded an overnight version of the show for me to watch at my leisure on an "un-used" part of the hard-disk on my PVR (it doesn't record the peak-hours version because I'm more likely to be using my PVR to watch/record other channels). These on-demand services needn't be HD either. Ofcom was happy in its invitation to apply, to consider multiple SD services to be offered in off-peak hours.

I just hope that sub-letting capacity isn't a backdoor into offering premium rate programming on a subscription or pay-per-view basis.

The other interesting aspect of this is that the new technology that'll need to be employed for HD is exactly that which Sky was wanting to put through with its "Picnic" proposal. To re-cap: it wanted to replace its three current free-to-air Freeview services (Sky Three, Sky News and Sky Sports News), with four premium channels (e.g. Sky One, Sky Sports and Sky Movies - yes I know that's only three). Sky got in quite a bitter row with Ofcom over who was prevaricating and who was providing what information.

With the technology that Sky wanted to implement likely to be built into all Freeview boxes post about 2010, perhaps they'll renew their interest in the scheme? Of course their capacity is not enough to provide HD programming, but they could undoubtedly broaden their offering to Freeview households. While I appreciate the news and sports news channels, I get the feeling that Sky isn't really trying with Freeview. Sky Three is an afterthought that is only very occasionally used well. It's true that you can watch repeats of superior acquired programming like Deadwood on the channel, but with a 0.6% share in September compared to 1.0% for Sky One, you know it could do a lot better. Don't forget - Sky One is not available to Virgin Media or Freeview customers after all!

The one thing that still concerns me about this move to HD is what impact it's going to have on channels that are already being broadcast in that space. To make it clear, Multiplex B - the spectrum being handed over for HD use - currently carries all the BBC radio services, BBC Four/Cbeebies (time sharing), BBC Parliament and the BBC interactive channels (two full service channels, plus the news on-demand channels).

All this has to be packed into Multiplex 1 (currently used by BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three/CBBC, BBC News, and by regional radio services in Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland), and Multiplex 2 (currently used by ITV1, C4, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, C4+1, More4, E4, and a radio service). Anybody who watched the coverage of Arsenal on ITV4 the other night will realise that the bandwidth on this multiplex is not spread evenly, and some channels have very poor resolution - especially if you put them up on your brand new 37" HD ready TV. Multiplex 1 is on 16QAM and will move to 64QAM which does allow more capacity - but I'm worried about the quality of the shifted channels, and those already on Multiplex 1, and especially, Multiplex 2.

Ofcom, with its original findings, presented this very simplistic diagram of what would happen:

But I remain concerned that quality is going deteriorate following this shift.

London is perhaps going to get these new Freeview services ahead of much of the country following an announcement from Ofcom consulting over whether a pilot scheme should be held here. But this looks like utilising additional spectrum which means that even if it works fine, we won't know how things will work out when we're limited to the six DTT multiplexes currently in existance.

Of course, post analogue switch-off, there'll be plenty more spectrum around, but Ofcom looks to be trying to make as much cash from that as possible and not simply handing it over for more Freeview services - HD or otherwise.

While many papers like the Daily Mail are getting rid of their TV critics, despite the fact that vast parts of their paper revolves around the medium, others provide a fuller service, but I begin to wonder why they bother.

My paper of choice is The Guardian. And they employ one of the finest television critics writing today in Nancy Banks Smith. They also have the excellent Screen Burn with Charlie Brooker.

But then they insist on employing Sam Wollaston as well.

Why should writing about TV be seen as some kind of way to get into comedy writing? We're talking about the medium that is foremost in most people's minds. They spend many precious hours in front of their television, and by and large take it seriously. They care about what they watch - be it Emmerdale or University Challenge. Certainly, people want entertainment, but if they think a programme is rubbish, they don't watch it.

That's why I want to read a critic who can inform as well as occasionally entertain me.

The Guardian also employs Peter Bradshaw as its film critic. Now he may be sneeringly supercilious, seemingly hating most films that he watches. But he does care about them, and even if he only gives Burn After Reading two stars out of five, he at least believes in it, and it's because he takes the medium seriously.

Wollaston on the other hand, reviews an episode of Timewatch, largely concerned about how attractive he finds the presenter.

Phwoar, new TV history totty. She looks like a cross between Boticelli's Venus and Meryl Streep's French Lieutenant's Woman. And she's brainy as hell and writes books.

Yes - I know he's saying it for effect. But over time, you wonder if that's really not all he's thinking about. Was the show any good? Is it worth me watching on the iPlayer?

He then goes on to discuss a programme on Ian Fleming, largely on the basis of how attractive he finds Joanna Lumley. Only a review of the US edition of Wife Swap do we learn anything vaguely interesting - basically that they make stuff up for it and reshoot scenes.

That's not enough. Tell me about the programmes please. And if you can't do it seriously, then maybe I should be looking elsewhere for my television criticism.

Now let me chase down a copy of Clive James on Television.

[UPDATE]

Oh dear. Today's Wollaston column is arguably even worse than yesterday's. Shark sex "looks wrong" to him. This is then followed by lots of guffaw guffaw writing about animals having sex. How amusing thirteen-year-old Guardian readers must find it all.

Later on he moves on to The Sarah Silverman Programme. This has apparantly leapt ahead of Fonejacker as the funniest thing currently on television. Now Silverman is funny - although that's probably debateable if you were in the audience at Hammersmith the other night when you got 45 full minutes of comedy for your £50.

But even the idea that Fonejacker was ever the funniest thing is utterly bizarre. It's a rehashing of the decades old art of phone pranking better practioned in the medium of audio by such people as Victor Lewis Smith, The Jerky Boys and even Jon Culshaw as "The Doctor" on Dead Ringers.

With Wollaston at The Guardian and Kathryn Flett at The Observer, it feels like a horrible pincer movement's happening.

[I must admit that this is a revised version of some comments I already posted on a Guardian blog]

Peter Kay is someone I've observed more from afar than anything. I've never watched Phoenix Nights (shoot me now), and I've only caught bits of his various live routines. I enjoyed the Amarillo video enough, but I really wasn't sure what I was going to make of his one-off X-Factor take-off on Channel 4 last night.

Overall, I was disappointed - it just wasn't funny enough.

The programme was brilliantly close to the real thing. And that, for me, was its problem. The original is already a pastiche of itself with over-hyped editing, long pauses, whooping audience, over the top comments and so on.

I'm sure that they've simply employed many of the staff who usually work on these shows to get the look exactly right - from the stage set to the choreography and the editing.

But that makes taking the mickey out of it very hard to do.

The main problem was with the players. While the "contestants" were all comedy actors including Kay himself as "Gerladine", the show was held together by presenters, judges and "celebrities" who were all playing themselves and had to read lines that had been written for them. And they just weren't good enough. While those shows are scripted anyway, they're not expecting to be getting laughs. In this instance, they were - it's a Peter Kay comedy after all.

I think it would have been funnier if Kay had perhaps played more characters himself - perhaps all the contestants. Or if he'd had comedians taking the place of the presenter and judges. Instead, we had Cat Deeley, who is a perfectly fine presenter, but who wasn't funny delivering her lines.

And I'd have liked a little more subtlety in some of the gags. There were some nice jokes about how little of the price of the phone vote went to charity. But once we'd seen it several times onscreen, we didn't need Deeley telling voicing the joke as well. Just leave it for those who read it to get it.

Also, it was very odd scheduling to put it up against the Strictly Come Dancing results show. Undoubtedly it would be most appreciated by people who love the shows it's mimicing.

While there were some entertaining set pieces like the two women from 2 Up 2 Down being winched into the air to retrieve balloons and cats in a truly tasteless piece of choreography, and one of them falling out of their chair only to not be rescued by Rick Astley until he realised that his line in the song was imminent and he had to drop her.

But overall, I thought the gags wore thin, and I didn't bother with the second half.

Finally, given that this wasn't live, there were a few bits that perhaps should have been bleeped for a pre-watershed show. "Dr" Fox mouthed an expletive in close-up that definitely shouldn't have been left in, and a blowjob gag really isn't suitable that early on. A week or so ago, Bruno Tonioli made a tasteless gag that got him a swift look from Bruce on Strictly Come Dancing. Not clever, but it was live. I'm no prude, but rules are rules and ours are pretty good. So either it should have been edited or gone out a bit later. And I hear that the language was "fruitier" later on. Again, you can curse and swear as much as you like post watershed, but not in a programme that partially airs before the watershed. I really dislike the idea that a show that straddles the watershed should be acceptable viewing for kids earlier on, but not later on. This show is bound to have had a decent sized audience of kids, so it's a bit schizophrenic to have the final part essentially unsuitable for kids (I know we could get into a massive conversation about whether shows aimed at kids like, say, Skins, are really suitable, but that's for another time). Be one thing or another - not both.

These seem to be popular, so I might attempt one a week or so as the mood takes me. Best viewed large (or even original).

Think of them as an ongoing comment on the state of British TV.

Here's me defacing a copy of this week's Radio Times showing today's TV. It's part of a very irregular series.

Best viewed large.

Word magazine's website has a great list of things that people find annoying - or the dumbest things in entertainment. It's a great list, and you can't help but nod as contributors add more and more.

Someone halfway down the list mentions half-hour TV programmes that throw-forward to the second 15 minutes just before the ad-break, then re-cap the first 15 minutes when they return from the break before summarising what's going to happen next.

This doesn't happen on just commercial TV either. BBC programmes have annoying habit of doing precisely the same thing, even though there's not really a break in the programme except to trail the next section. Perhaps they do it because at some point the show will appear on UKTV Homes Style + 1, and then it'll need it because the average viewer of that channel only watches 6 minutes a year, so needs to understand what's happening in that 6 minutes.

Anyway, it's become obvious that these things are terribly easy and formulaic to make. Let's use Highland Emergency as an example. This is a Granada produced programme for Five. I've seen several episodes because I have a bizarre fascination for all things set in the Highlands of Scotland.

The show basically follows Scottish emergency services to various accidents and emergencies. In particular, they especially love helicopter emergencies.

The show opens with a brisk run-through of the exciting accidents and emergencies we're going to see in this week's episode as a teaser. Then we get the well produced opening credits with lots of helicopters and dangling winchmen.

Next we're introduced to the crew of a particular helicopter - let's say it's a Royal Navy crew. They're called to Ben Nevis or somewhere where a climber has been injured. The voiceover tells us that the person almost certainly needs immediate medical care, and that it's a thirty minute flight to Ben Nevis. We see a graphic of a map indicating where on the Ben the injured party is lying. The crew search for and find the missing person. But it's too dangerous to land, so someone will be winched down, although crosswinds make this treachourous...

CUT TO: A quick graphic that has a helicopter and the word emergency.

VOICEOVER: Meanwhile in Lossiemouth...

The action could just stay with the injured party on Ben Nevis, but no. In case we get bored, it instead shows us a different crew, somewhere else, who have to rescue someone who's torn a ligament on a remote Scottish island.

The injured person is on a beach. We're anxiously told that the crew refer to tide times. The tide's coming in. It really is urgent!

Then we arrive on the beach, and there's no sign of the incoming tide. Not only that, but local doctors/paramedics are on the scene. There was little danger of anyone being washed out to sea. The tide's still so far out that the helicopter can happily land on the beach, but before they load up...

We get a preview of what happens next. We see clips we've already seen of the helicopter over Ben Nevis, swiftly followed by clips we've just seen of a helicopter landing on a beach. And because there's no hope of stretching these two cases out through another 15 minute (well 10 minutes once you remove ads) segment, we're told of a third case in Aviemore of someone who's, er, twisted an ankle on a ski-run.

After the break, we get more generic graphics of helicopters and the word "emergency." Then we return to Ben Nevis, with another resumé of the previous action, before we see that, yes, the climber was successfully hauled into the chopper. This is intercut with a few interviews of the crew basically telling us what we've just seen with our own eyes, and what a voiceover person has just told us.

The now familiar graphic of helicopter alongside the word emergency allows us to cut to the new story featuring a doctor who looks after injuries on a ski-run. Who'd have thought? A teenager has twisted an ankle. It hurts, and she's cold. She's brought back to some kind of hut where she looks sulky like any teenager - albeit one in pain. But before anything else happens...

We cut back to the person on the beach who's very unlikely to drown. They're loaded aboard the helicopter and returned to Aberdeen hospital where they're treated.

One more look at the graphic and we're back to Aviemore, where stroppy (but in pain) teenager is loaded into another ambulance and sent off to hospital.

A final graphical interlude and we see clips from all the incidents we've just seen, this time with some kind of special effect applied to the footage - perhaps they're now in black and white. The voiceover tells us that each person went to hospital and what they were treated for. They all lived.

Finally we get a sneak look at next week's programme in which some climbers are in trouble on a mountain, someone's hurt at a ski-resort and someone has a threatening condition on a remote Scottish island.

Repeat times 13.

Of course there's a little more to it than that. The producers tie together stories that happen at night with others than take place around the same time. The implication is always that these things are happening simultaneously, when you know perfectly well that they were probably months apart, that's why it looks like summer in once case, but another takes place in snow covered peaks (Yes - I know that snow covers some peaks pretty much all year round). The same goes for episodes set in poor weather and so on.

Now I'm not knocking these series too much, but they really don't add much to the sum of human knowledge, and the A to B to C editing-by-rote is just a bit sad. There's a really good series to be made with these emergency services, but a Five budget for the 7.30pm slot (up against the soaps), is never going to be enough.

Fringe is Sky's big new import, and one of the first US shows of the new season to get the full order of shows commissioned.

But it's basically The X-Files isn't it? Were it not for a bit of Googling, I'd have even thought that it was shot in Vancouver like early series of that show were. In fact it's set in Boston and shot in New York. Make of that what you will. Personally I kind of like shows being shot in the cities they pretend to be set in. Sitcoms are about the only real exception to this.

So we have Anna Torv (an Aussie) as FBI Agent Olivia Durham, who's got involved in some kind of weirdness involving events that together make up The Pattern. So we have an ultra-conspiracy at the heart of the show. This being a J J Abrams show, that's not surprising. But it's also a little concerning. The X-Files ultimately got caught up too much in its own mythology. Abram's previous series, Alias, was sillier, but by the end, the story arcs made little to no sense - especially to the casual action/adventure viewer. And Lost cannot possibly answer all the questions its set itself.

I really hope that this time, the writers have a big whiteboard or book or something where they note down all the conspiracy and unexplained elements, and then tick them off as they're answered. It's too been too much of a problem in recent years that the nature of US TV commissioning allied to ongoing stories has led to too much dissatisfaction overall.

I quite like the inclusion of an enormous corporate entity rather than just government at the heart of the matter. So we have Massive Dynamic (of course it has a web presence!) at the heart of things. And given the way that big business has finagled its way into things like defence, that seems a good route to travel and explore.

The worst part of Fringe is surely that of Dr Walter Bishop, who is played as an archetypal mad professor. Indeed, he'd put Back to the Future's Dr Emmet Brown in the shade on the scale of madness in mad professors. The character needs reigning in if he's not to become incredibly dull. This job falls to his son, Peter Bishop played by Joshua Jackson - Pacey from Dawson's Creek. He's a grizzled character who has his own issues - i.e. backstory, that'll be later explained - involving Mafia. We meet him in Iraq.

Incidentally, in Fringe, we always know where we are, because massive 3D lettering appears "welded" into the landscape to let us know. It's a stylish gimic that reminds you of the letter-zooming that used to happen in Alias. The only problem is that the device is massively over-used. Once we've seen Harvard once, we know where we are for the rest of that episode, and we don't need to see it again. That said, I was interested enough in discovering how it was done to find VideoCopilot.net which is a fantastic resource teaching you how to use things like Adobe After Effects and various 3D packages. Indeed the site's tutor, Andrew Kramer, worked on Fringe's opening credits, so this is top-level stuff.

At least Fringe gives a new role to Lance Reddick - Lt. Cedric Daniels from The Wire.

Meanwhile, Five has bought the UK rights to another intriguing show also starring an Australian in the lead - Simon Baker. The Mentalist is not some kind of outrageous slur on the handicapped (although a country which happily uses the word "retard" to describe people without approbation is to be questioned), but a series about a reformed psychic performer. This comes from the hand of Bruno Heller who most recently was responsible for the HBO/BBC production of Rome. It has X-Files connections too in that regular X-Files director, David Nutter (how could you ever forget his name) has directed the first two episodes. But it really shares a pedigree with CBS's Numb3rs, the series that features a maths genius solving pretty much all the FBI's crimes on the West Coast.

Baker plays Patrick Jane, a man who used to pose as a psychic and appear on show similar to ones that fill up all too many hours on Living TV. Then one day, a serial killer (who's still at large) murders members of his family, and he changes tack. He's now admitted that he's not a psychic but a mentalist, and he's using those skills to help solve crimes.

Like Monk before him, he's really just a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes who used amazing feats of observation to deduce truths. It's not played for laughs as much as Monk is, but it quite happily fits into a procedural mix. Robin Tunney (from series 1 of Prison Break) plays Watson to Baker's Holmes, but aside from worrying that there won't be enough mentalist tricks to employ to keep the stories flowing is my only real concern. That and the fact that we're not totally let-in on some of the tricks Jane is employing. It'll be interesting to see this show develop, assuming its ratings hold up and it's not cancelled.

A cracking article from New York magazine on product placement and it's implications. Well worth a read.

Sunday night in the US saw the Emmy Awards - theoretically, the most important American TV awards. Now their credibility is obviously nil since the best TV series to emerge from the US (and arguably the English speaking world) has had precisely two nominations in five years and no awards. That's The Wire. It's got a black cast and is set in Baltimore. Emmy voters are white and live in LA.

But the big winner at the weekend was another HBO show that I've been looking forward to - John Adams. It's a seven part drama that aired in 90 minute ad-free chunks on HBO earlier this year. It won a grand total of 13 awards including one for Paul Giamatti who plays Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of America.

So I've been looking forward to it, and next weekend it starts on UK TV. Now whereabouts in the schedule do you think this 7-part epic is going to play?

Well it's not on BBC1 or ITV1 - certainly. Nor Five... BBC2 would work, but nope. Channel 4 would be a good fit, but nope.

You're getting warm.

BBC Four? It'd work nicely there. But no.

Instead it's on More 4.

Now that's a good fit. More 4 shows some challenging and interesting programming. In particular they bring us the nightly delight that is The Daily Show (Incidentally, did they give last Friday's episode with the Tony Blair interview much cross promotion on C4? I don't really watch much C4 these days so don't know).

If I tell you it's on at the weekend, when do you think you can catch it? 9pm or 10pm on Saturday or Sunday nights? Well Saturday night has "The 30 Greatest Political Comedies" - a list show presented by no less than Michael Howard (who I saw in the street in Golden Square the other day oddly enough) and Charles Kennedy. Not quite BBC Parliament's coverage of the Labour and Tory conventions is it? That's followed by a recording of the previous evening's US Presidential Debate.

Earlier in the evening there's a double bill of Property Ladder - and we're all thinking about moving just now aren't we? So there's no space on Saturday night in the schedule clearly.

What about Sunday? Well there's a repeat of a Jamie Oliver programme, then a repeat of a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme, followed by repeats of two Gordon Ramsay programmes. Clearly everyone's cooking on Sunday nights.

So when can this 13-time Emmy Award winning mini-series air? It cost over $100m to make afterall.

5.30pm on Saturday. That's when.

Now on the one-hand, you could argue that it's good counter-programming to things like Merlin or X-Factor that are on BBC1 and ITV1 at the same time. But it just feels completely hidden, and it's a real shame. Surely there must have been some kind of primetime slot for the programme?

It reminds me of another cracking HBO show that was thoroughly hidden away in the schedule by Channel 4 years ago - From The Earth To The Moon. Produced by Tom Hanks no less, this dramatised the Apollo space race and was made at great expense. It was shown on Saturday lunchtimes or thereabouts here, and consequently most people will have seen it in repeats on something like FX or on DVD.

While I'm highlighting shows that you really should see, More 4 has another Emmy Award winning one-off next week that is airing in primetime, and is absolutely unmissable. Next Friday they're showing Recount, which tells the story of the Florida part of the 2000 Presidential Election. You know, the one that Al Gore should have won.

The scene early on shows us mostly clearly what "hanging-chads" really were and it's a masterly dramatisation of an important, but fairly dry subject. It'd be easy to have made it uninteresting, but a cast that incldues Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and a wonderful Laura Dern, makes this an exceptional film. It's followed by the intriguing sounding Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

[UPDATE] I've just listened to the most recent Guardian Mediatalk podcast and More4 controller Hamish Mykura talks up his channel's showing of John Adams (and Recount) with great proudness. What a shame he's scheduling it at teatime on Saturdays.

Hole in the Wall is BBC One's new Saturday teatime game show. Imported from Japan, it involves two teams of celebrities dressed in lycra space suits and crash helmets trying to form shapes to fit through the holes in a polystyrene wall that heads towards them.

If they don't make the correct shape, then end up in a small pool behind them. It's very silly and is taking the world by storm.

You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for a week or so here.

Anyway, one of the rounds is a "question" in which the team playing must select one of the two answers and stand behind that answer to go through a hidden door. The wrong door is solid and means that you'll end up in the drink.

This week's question was a maths problem, and you can see it below.

Anyone who's studied GCSE or O Level maths should also see the problem. The answer's neither 11 nor 12. It's 38.

There's something called Order of Operations in maths and it means that you calculate things like multiplications and division first - particularly when there's no more information to help you decide which order to do things.

So, in effect, this sum is the same as saying:

(3 x 12) + (8 / 4) = 36 + 2 = 38

You can't just read it from left to right as the producers (and indeed the contestants did). It's just wrong.

If it was worth it, I'd have complained to someone at the BBC. But it's not, although arguably the points different might have meant the other team won, and their (undisclosed) charity might have missed out on £10,000.

It's just a shame that the solitary question in the entire show was, er, wrong.

You know how I love watching Bear Grylls' programmes - particularly since he had to tone down what he was claiming in his second series of Born Survivor.

Back in May, when Ray Mears was promoting his latest series - set in the Australian outback - he laughed off Grylls. Now Grylls is conceding defeat in the battle of TV survivalists. Grylls has a new series of Born Survivor starting on Discovery next week and C4 in October.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a Children in Need or Comic Relief stand-off: first person to Uluru or the North Pole is the winner. Something like that.

I never knew that it had been given the working title "Picnic", but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice.

Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services - Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three - off the Freeview platform, and use the space to put four or so new subscription channels on in its place. It would use a higher spec of encoding that would mean consumers needed new boxes to both decode this, and to provide a slot for their subscription smart cards.

Ofcom wasn't too happy and the whole thing disappeared deep into Ofcom's Southwark Bridge offices for further consultation. Sky was an original partner of Freeview, and suddently DTT wouldn't quite be so free.

The cynic in me thought that this was a chance to get back at Setanta who was soon to be launching with Premier League football. And due to their tie-up with Top-Up TV, they'd be on Freeview, unlike Sky.

At Sky News, they were a bit unhappy as not only were they off Virgin Media (and still are, I believe), but now they were coming off Freeview.

Ofcom has quite forceably responded to Sky's press statements regarding the suspension of development work on Picnic. In particular they highlight a tardiness on Sky's part to get responses to them on deadline and in full detail.

So a questionmark must hang over how serious a proposition this ever was. On the one hand, the venture had employed as many as 70 people (doing what, exactly, beyond technical work and responding to Ofcom, is a little unclear)., but the original hope had been to put something in place in time for the start of the last football season. The idea was surely to confuse a marketplace that Setanta was then entering into.

I suspect that Sky is now not so fussed about Setanta. They've certaininly come out well following last week's debacle. As yesterday's Observer noted, they've made Rupert Murdoch look like the good guy.

It'll be interesting yet to read what Ofcom has to say, but adopting MPEG 4 still feels like something to do further down the line, when Freeview HD starts. Still, it'll be worth watching what happens to this most popular of digital television formats.

According to Media Guardian, Setanta is broadcasting free-to-air highlights of Croatia v England later this evening on its own channel!

This is very odd. They're reported to have turned down an offer of £500,000 from ITV. And now, at the very last minute, they offer these free highlights.

The story on Media Guardian was published just before 6.00pm this evening, and I can't see many outlets* advertising that fact now. So basically aside from a few people reading various forums and websites, nobody will know.

And I think it's fair to assume that we'll be bombarded by ads for subscriptions. Still, something is better than nothing, although I can see that something being the goals on the respective Ten O'Clock newses.

[*UPDATE] Well my employer's mentioning it in the 7.00pm news in fact!

"We always intended to make highlights available, and were disappointed that we were unable to reach agreement with any of the terrestrial broadcasters," said the Setanta director of sport, Trevor East.

Hmmm.

[UPDATE 2] Roger Mosey talks about both the Setanta situation and Paralympics coverage over at the BBC Sport blog.

OK - it's a well known fact to people who read this blog or sit near me at work that I hate all reality shows.

That said, there are a couple I watch despite myself. The Apprentice is getting close to boring me as they choose a nice cross section of generally inept people, but I'm still bearing with it. Then there's Strictly Come Dancing and most recently Maestro.

It's those latter two I'm going to talk about here - if only to question myself.

Maestro has busily been taking a group of "celebrities" and teaching them how to conduct an orchestra. At the end of each week one or more of them is eliminated. The contestants are scored by judges, and because that's far too straightforward, the BBC Concert Orchestra votes to decide which of the bottom two stay in the competition. I suppose we should count our lucky stars that the public largely aren't involved. At least they weren't until last night.

It's been an unusual show in the sense that particularly in the first programme, I felt as though I was actually learning about something hadn't previously really understood - a conductor is doing somewhat more than just waving a baton in time with the music. But by the second week, the show had changed tack, and although we weren't quite "following their journeys", we had less time to learn about the intricacies of what's involved, and more time just watching the contestants perform.

In the final, as I mentioned, suddenly we were presented with an audience vote to determine the winner. The real problem with this isn't that I might be overcharged in a rigged phone-vote; the problem is that I don't have the skills to be able to determine which is the better performance. Many's the time during the series that I thought I'd just seen a good performance, only to be corrected by the judges who said that they were smiling too much or bouncing around or whatever.

In point of fact, this series would have worked just as well without famous people at all. Ideally all the contestants should have had similar musical training/backgrounds. As it was, Sue Perkins who won, can play the piano to a significant level. That's got to help.

Moving onto my other guilty pleasure - Strictly Come Dancing. Again the viewing public is being asked to judge something they're really not able to. Most of us can't dance, and while we might know what we enjoy when we see it, don't understand the technicalities of it.

But more to the point, it's the dancing that we enjoy. The format is accessible and there's plenty of concession for the new viewer about what we should be seeing in a particular dance.

OK - so we'll leave Strictly alone. But then last Saturday saw the second edition of the Eurovision Dance Competition, and in a tweaked format, we suddenly had to have an amateur (who was in most cases a celebrity of some sort in their home country). Why did we need this?

Someone who stars in The Bill in the UK is unknown throughout most of the rest of Europe, so that's only a sop to the UK audience. If we appreciate good dancing, why don't we just have professional dancers representing us?

Frankly, the BBC should simply bring back Come Dancing. The old format would need a tweak, but I'm sure it could work. There's just no need to have the public vote at every moment, and for actors, singers, sportsmen and women et al taking part. The change would be refreshing!

Here's a stat for you:

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics on US television: 3,600 (2,900 of which was live)

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Paralympics on US television: 1.5 (0 of which is live)

That's right. Of all the US TV channels, there is a single 90 minute highlights in the middle of next month. That's it.

The BBC, incidentally, is showing 5-6 hours live a day (albeit on digital) alongside a nightly one hour highlights package on BBC2, with more live action at the weekend.

In the 2012 London Paralympics, I think it's a fair assumption that the US team will probably include a significant number of athletes who are ex-military and have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I've just had a scary thought.

Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they've declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio rights were sold separately and the match will be on BBC Radio Five Live (I don't think that Talksport is also covering it, but I'm happy to be corrected).

The radio rights are obviously significantly cheaper than television rights. But what's to stop Setanta buying up those rights as well? Is there any reason they could buy them and not use them? Or perhaps just put the "radio" out on their own subscription TV channel to show that they're using them.

That'd incur even more wrath of the fans, but they could do it. Of course we might see the return of the old Talksport trick of reporting what's going on from a television.

Just a thought!

So if you don't have Setanta, and can't make it to a pub that's showing Setanta, the only coverage you're going to have of England's World Cup qualifiers against Andorra on Saturday, and Croatia next week is going to be goal clips on the news. There is, of course, radio coverage too.

Media Guardian reports this morning that Setanta still hasn't sold terrestrial highlights of the games to either ITV or the BBC. They're fulminating that the offers they're getting don't exceed what the stations paid for Champions' League qualifiers. Last week BBC Three showed Arsenal's game against FC Twente (effectively a dead rubber since Arsenal were a comfortable 2-0 from the first leg, and they won on the night 4-0 to go through 6-0 overall), while ITV had the more attractive proposition of Liverpool's must-win game against Standard Liege which ended with a last minute extra-time goal. But these were live games and thus more valuable.

I would have previously said that Setanta will come to a last minute deal to sell on terrestrial coverage, but with the bigger of the two games being next Wednesday's Croatia fixture, I'm not so sure. Setanta desperately need those subscribers - it's never clear how many they really have, and what price they're paying. So I don't think that this time we're going to see the games on terrestrial.

I would hope that the FA are a little embarrassed about this. They've just entered into a big new deal with ITV and Setanta, and yet here are one of their partners effectively denying much of the football viewing public the chance to see even highlights. Of course Setanta are perfectly within their rights to do what they like, but I think using phrases like "emotional blackmail" makes it obvious that we're not going to see any capitulation from them.

A sorry state of affairs for the national game...

Last night I was sitting at home tinkering with this blog (it will have its five-year overhaul soon), when my brother called me to say that there was someone from Virgin Radio on Dragons' Den. I flipped on the TV and saw that the person being called "Christian" was Robin Banks, a DJ who used to work here and who I know a little. He's since spent quite a lot of time at Kiss 100, and more recently joined Leicester Sound. You might also know his voice if you ever watch Mythbusters in the UK as he re-voices them in an English accent.

I rewound the Sky+ as I'd been recording the show anyway and watched the full segment. Rachel and Christian were pitching for cash for their business - the Tiny Box Company.

The editing of Dragons' Den has to be good to keep us in suspense, although it has to be said that as last contestants on, the chances were that they'd do a deal. One of the problems with the format is that sometimes it's just a little too formulaic.

Their business was for the manufacture of recycled cardboard gift boxes - the sort of item you might get jewellry packaged in. From an external point of view, on several levels the company seemed to be a bit of a non-starter. The idea was unpatentable - indeed there must be hundreds or even thousands of packaging companies. They hadn't sold all that many, although they had a couple of decent clients. So it was surprising that in relatively short time, three of the dragons had dropped out.

Then something strange happened. I'd have expected that, however well the pair came across, the last two dragons would surely give them short shrift. But Theo wanted to know about their backgrounds. Christian said he'd worked in radio... on-air. He namechecked Kiss and Virgin, and talked about broadcasting in general. But then he'd gone into rehab after which he'd met his business partner. Rachel had a good business background but some kind of illness had struck her causing the loss of both her job and home.

Theo announced that he thought that there might have been some kind of broadcasting background to Christian. How? Theo doesn't strike me as someone who listens to a lot of Kiss, although his kids might. Maybe he used to listen to the Robin Banks evening show on Virgin? But even then, it might have been hard to tie together a familiar radio voice with a face in a different environment.

Could the producers have suggested that asking about the entrepreneaurs' backgrounds would be an "interesting" thing to do? In this case, it livened up an otherwise so-so pitch, and in the end, both Theo and Peter pitched in together for £60,000 to back the firm.

It made me think. I know that television is an artifice, and on something like Dragons' Den, producers will see fit to ensure that a few mad inventions are put in front of the dragons as well as more investable business enterprises. But are the dragons being fed details? Unless they've got an uncanny ability to dig into people (and they are shrood investors so they weren't bprn yesterday), they do seem to have an unerring ability to find out the more interesting backgrounds.

How many times have you seen a pitch going seemingly quite well before a leftfield question - something that might not otherwise be asked - knock the pitch off-course. Perhaps there are hidden debts, or some kind of technical issue. On other occassions they'll suddenly probe deeply about forthcoming orders, and a contestant will eventually admit that - yes - they have had conversations with Tesco, suddenly making them very investible.

I suppose that I'd naiively expected that the nature of the "Den" with strict rules about not contacting dragons in advance, and the nature of filming meaning that many more ideas passed through the den than made it to air, might mean that the series was slightly more honest.

But in this instance, I think it's pretty clear that the dragons were "directed" a little. I wish Christian/Robin and Rachel all the best with their business, but I'm just left a little

I've just been watching an excellent episode of Dexter on the FX channel - at a slight delay via my Sky+. I let the playback run at the end and up popped a couple of things of interest.

First, I see that Generation Kill is coming to FX in the UK soon which has got to be a good move (Indeed FX seems to show just about all my favourite current US TV shows at the moment).

But then they ran a promo for The Wire. Now I've not really blogged about it here, but it really is everything everyone says, and I really enjoyed the fifth season on the media. Anyway, the promo consisted of David Simon the show's creator, giving answers to Charlie Brooker in an interview evidently conducted somewhere like the NFT BFI London. A good idea, since Brooker is a notable fan of the show and made a pretty good behind the scenes programme for FX a year or so ago.

On screen during this promo we first see on screen and then hear Simon say: "I can't watch a storytelling medium that breaks every 13 minutes to sell you soap and iPods and cars." He says that he can't watch network television, and he uses the analogy of breaking up a story around the campfire to pause and introduce his sponsors.

What Simon's getting at is the fact that HBO shows its programmes uninterrupted and without ads or on-screen distractions like BUGs and other logos. That's fine, but over here it's on FX, and they do take commercials since they're not a premium cable channel like HBO which relys on significant subscription levels. So it's utterly bizarre that FX should use that particular statement in this promo.

The one coda I should make is that for various reasons, I've caught up with The Wire on DVD, and so just maybe, FX run the show ad free. The fact that it's scheduled for about an hour and ten minutes tomorrow night when the show runs about 56 minutes tends to suggest that like all the rest of their programming, they do run ads in The Wire, but having not seen the programme on the channel, I can't be 100% certain. Still curious.

I did love the story in the promo about Obama saying that The Wire was his favourite show and that he loved Omar the most - the murdering thief Omar, that is.

In the US it's convention season. That is to say that the Democrats and Republicans are holding their quadrennial events. In the UK we have party conferences, but really the two cannot be compared.

In the UK we have access to all this malarkey on BBC Parliament which nightly shows two hours of live coverage between 2am and 4am each evening (and then repeats it at 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am... 6pm, 8pm, 10pm and 12am - so you should be able to catch it). Happily, that means that the conventions' coverage runs between 9pm and 11pm EST - right in the middle of primetime.

But what a curious affair these conventions are. So far I've watched the first night's coverage and bits of the second where Hillary came on and spoke for Obama.

In the US, all the networks cover these events, but while the word "convention" might suggest some sort of meeting, the outcome of which is possibly not completely known, the reality is that these events are choreographed to within an inch of their lives.

It seems to go something like this:

- Off-stage band plays music while convention goers chat amongst themselves or bop around like they're really enjoying themselves.

- Somebody comes out and reads a speech from the autocue quite badly. The speech basically says that Barack Obama is brilliant.

- Another musical interlude to allow networks to run some ads and then some kind of analysis of what they've just heard. But BBC Parliament is showing the unadulterated CSPAN coverage which is unsullied by punditry.

- Someone quite dull comes on and gives a speech. Nobody's interested and you realise that the networks (all of whom are carrying this live along with the cable news operations) are still in pundit mode and aren't interested. They might have cut from their studio at the edge of the arena to someone 10 or 15m further into the arena for their take. The audience isn't really interested and the mics clearly pick up lots of background chatter.

- Someone vaguely interesting introduced someone slightly more interesting. But first we have to watch a professionally put together five minute video.

- More interesting person - e.g. Edward Kennedy - comes out and is given applause that's carefully timed so that the event runs smoothly. Audience members carefully hold up Placard A from their Placard Packs that all read "Kennedy" just so everyone knows.

- Speech is finished and more applause is received, perhaps with family in tow.

- Muzak begins again as we reach commercial/punditry time and the chatter begins.

- Repeat from the top.

Nobody says anything interesting. The convention - at least this public face of it - is simply there to give an hour of free coverage. Compare and contrast with the annual British party conferences where occasionally a dissenting voice is heard (OK - they're rare) and where speeches are only ever scheduled during the daytime, because you're lucky if BBC2 actually shows it live - let alone BBC1 or ITV1 in the evening.

Ted Koppel gave a cracking report on it all for BBC News America which you can watch here. Well worth your time.

Well - I better get back to last night's coverage as the third night starts in a little over two hours' time.

Or maybe I should just break out my Tanner '88 DVDs again.

Well - as things stand, England's World Cup qualifying games against Croatia and Andora will not have so much as highlights coverage on either BBC or ITV according to a piece in The Times.

It comes down to the fact that while England's home games were sold to ITV as part of a larger deal that ITV and Setanta signed with the FA which included coverage of FA Cup fixtures, away fixtures are sold by the various overseas rights holders. In this instance, Setanta purchased the majority of those rights last year following the draw for the qualification groups for the 2010 World Cup. In reality, they were probably bundled together by a rights organisation and sold on behalf of the Croatian, Andorran and other football associations.

Anyway, Setanta paid top dollar for those fixtures and they're now in a position where they want to use them as a big driver for subscriptions. Arguably, this is Setanta's make or break season. With those rights, the FA rights previously mentioned, and their Premier League rights, Setanta needs to reach a critical mass of subscribers.

There was talk about Setanta being sold - perhaps to BT or ESPN. But the market isn't right for that, and with a recent rise from £9.99 to £12.99 a month for the Setanta package, they need to start earning some of the money that they've paid out.

So the question is this: can they hold ITV or the BBC to ransom to pay something for highlights. Or do they consider it worthwhile to keep the price out of reach and try to gain subscribers. England's been looking a little lacklustre of late - friendlies are not being sold out. Would you pay £30 to see England play Kazakhstan for goodness' sake?

But on the other hand it's embarrassing for the FA to see the majority of the interested population only able to catch goals from news highlights. I suspect that a deal will be done at the eleventh hour, but you can't be too certain.

So what is there to make of the latest Spooks spin-off Spooks: Code 9? The series is set in the a near future of 2013 after some kind of nuclear device has gone off in London. MI5 seems to have been decimated and now relies on pretty young twenty-somethings to join their ranks, recruiting from all walks of life (seemingly, this hadn't previously been very necessary). The rest of the authorities all seem to have a much broader age range, so quite why our frontline terrorist defence department is led by a bunch of kids who have no experience at all is not clear.

Amongst their number is a mathematician (who by the end of the first had done very little in the way of actual mathematics), a junior doctor (seemingly, a country wracked with radiation poisoning wouldn't be in need of every doctor they could get their hands on, and instead would be happy to let them join the security services), an ex-con (he's black, but I'm sure that's just accidental), and a handful of others. And for the most part they're all terribly well spoken and very pretty. Oh, and they're all hiding something - MI5's screening is not as good as it once was obviously.

This motley band is put in charge of things like ensuring that Manchester is safe for a visit by the PM. When they say that they can't guarantee his safety, officialdom don't seem that concerned and say that they just have to do it anyway.

We're told that the north of England is full of refugees from the south, and to paint that picture we see various shelters making the whole thing look a little like US series Dark Angel, although with obviously less money spent on it. The cheapness of the production means that there are lots of extreme close-ups so that expensive wide-shots don't bother the production too much.

But that's nothing compared to the appalling script which is full of cliché after cliché. When they're looking for someone who might have uploaded some video to a university computer system they quickly catch sight of someone who was shockingly using a wifi enabled laptop in university grounds. This solitary person turns out to be the terrorist they're searching for. How lucky! Surely every university in the country is packed to the gunnels with students using wifi with their laptops? As a plot development, it was worse than something from a US daytime soap. I've not seen the kids spy show MI High (like this and the original Spooks, also made by Kudos), but it can't be as bad.

Overall it was thoroughly disappointing. There are some interesting darker areas that the series goes into: an ID card society is well and truly under-way, and torture seemingly works as an interrogation method (handily, having been interrogated and giving up some true information, the suspect committed suicide rather than, say, giving false information out and then committing suicide while they followed up a false lead).

There's an ongoing dark conspiracy that's obviously set to run throughout the series, but this was just lazy drama really. Spooks is pretty light and fluffy anyway (go back to one of the BBC's seminal Le Carré series from the eighties for a proper spy drama), so I'm not sure what was to be gained by producing something even lighter and fluffier. On the other hand, something like the US series Burn Notice (not noticeably showing on any UK channel) at least attempts something a little interesting with the spy genre.

Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they'd show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal.

Now coverage might be "limited" to the BBC, but because of digital television, just about anything you want to watch is available to see. On satellite and cable, the BBC is offering six different streams of video (in addition to whatever their main services are showing), and there are a choice of three streams on Freeview. So we can all hit that red button and watch pretty much what we like.

But while it's great, there are a few issues that need to be overcome that are brought about largely because the Olympics are taking place in Beijing and therefore many events will be taking place in the small hours of the morning and through into the daytime. Primetime coverage will largely be highlights of what took place earlier that day.

And this means that digital video recorders come into their own if you want to watch full coverage of an event that took place earlier that day. But if you have Sky+ then that's not going to help you. Because you enter the Open TV environment of interactive red-button technology, you're not able to record video. As a result, you can't set a Sky+ device to record in advance a sub-channel like those Olympic video channels.

Remote Record is another excellent Sky feature, but even there we have problems. It certainly isn't a workaround for recording an interactive channel, but if I look at Saturday the BBC simply shows a programme called Olympics 2008 from 1.55am to 6.00am, followed by Olympic Breakfast from 6.00am to 11.00am, further followed by Olympics 2008, and so on. That doesn't help me record individual sports, yet the BBC has already decided the broad running order if you look at the detail they display on their site. So it's either record five hours at a time of BBC1, or watch live.

While Freeview might have fewer streams (although the temporary closure of BBC Parliament does mean three streams rather than two), you can at least choose programmes to record in advance on a Freeview digital video recorder - something Sky+ is unable to cope with. And that's one area where a Freeview digital video recorder can trump Sky+.

You've really got to try this out - it's ace! It might be common knowledge in some circles but it was news to me, and I love it.

You know how it is. It's late evening and BBC1 has a film you've already seen or don't want to see again. BBC2 is running News 24, but you've already seen Newsnight and so have no real need to watch it. ITV1 has Bingo Live of which the less said the better. Channel 4 may well be showing B*g B*****r - I don't know, we're in a 13 week period when I feel duty bound to avoid the "4" button on my remote (or 104 on Sky). And Five is in that period between their decent programming ending and the start of their baseball coverage. Multi-channel's obviously not worth a dime, so what to watch?

Well thanks to some information from Steve Roberts, one of the people who works on the Doctor Who Restoration Team and contributes to their excellent forum, you can watch the test card any time you like!

Specifically, it's the widescreen Test Card W (yes - it really does have its own Wikipedia page). And most importantly, you need a Freeview box. But you've got to try this right now - it's wonderful!

1. Tune to the BBCi channel (currently ch. 105)
2. When the BBCi background appears, press Yellow (within 30 secs)
3. Tune away to a different channel
4. Tune back to the BBCi channel (currently ch. 105)
5. When the BBCi background appears, press Green (within 30 secs)
The word 'Secret' will appear in the top right hand corner [Note: I didn't get this I jumped straight to the status page]
6. Wait until the status page appears
7. Enter 3, 3, 5, 8, 2, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue
(note "33582" spells out the word "DELTA" on a mobile phone keypad)
8. Wait approximately 30 seconds [Note: this was instantaneous on my box]
Test card will appear

And it works. You're now watching something significantly better than most fare on television most of the time.

Indeed why not put on some test card music or listen to the radio - it's much better.

For the most part Hulu is pretty useless for UK residents since it's geo-locked to the US. We can't watch re-runs of NBC, Fox and Comedy Central shows.

But there does seem to be an exception - Dr Horrible is available on Hulu and doesn't seem to be restricted to the US which is just as well because it's not available through the UK iTunes store so this is about the only legal way to see it. It's thoroughly good fun coming from Joss (Buffy, Firefly) Whedon.

[UPDATE] Oh well - it was good while it lasted. It's no longer available in the UK.

So Channel 4 has managed to get itself into a bit of a mess with its longest running series - Countdown. Just before the weekend, Des O'Connor announced that he was retiring from the show. And this was followed quickly by Carol Vorderman announcing that she too was leaving.

Over the weekend it became clear that Vorderman, who's been there since the start, was being asked to take an enormous pay cut as the overall budget of the show was dramatically reduced. It's safe to imagine that Vorderman was on a decent wage having spent so long with the show, but didn't fancy a salary reduced to perhaps as little as 10% of what she was previously earning.

"Executives at the broadcaster are said to be bemused by the publicity surrounding Vorderman - who has claimed she was told to take a 90% pay cut to stay on the show.

"Channel 4 insiders questioning how much sympathy daytime viewers would have over her salary, which sources have put at £1.2m for 40 days' filming a year. Previous reports put her salary between £900,000 and £1m a year."

This must be hard given that Firstplus, the debt consolidation firm for which she was the public face (and faced a sustained campaign against her working for the secured debt business) has now stopped seeking new business.

Still at least she can fall back on the sales of some of the products she markets like Eat Yourself Clever (A 28-day Plan to Help You Lose Weight, Improve Brain Power and Boost Wellbeing), Detox For Life (also available as a DVD) and her many Sudoku games.

It was entirely natural, I guess, that when the initial wave of the sudoku craze swept the UK, Vorderman should get involved in this number-based game. Of course there's precisely no mathematics involved, but including numbers is close enough for any self-respecting marketeer.

Which brings me to a neat little sub-story emerging from Channel 4's press office in the aftermath:

"Among the plans to shore up Britain's favourite afternoon parlour game, Channel 4 sources have suggested they will launch a nationwide search for Britain's "brainiest maths graduate" to replace Vorderman."

Can we please just get one thing straight - having Britain's "brainiest maths graduate" is not really going to be a great deal of use of Countdown. The numbers game on the programme is simply a mental arithmetic game which, while undoubtedly involving a certain degree of skill, does not remotely require a top maths graduate. Indeed most maths graduates (and I include myself) would tell you that they probably stopped doing mental arithmetic of this type in primary school. Adding, subracting, multiplying and dividing are the foundations of arithmetic, but they have little to do with what graduates will have been doing for the past three or more years at university. Playing the numbers game on Countdown requires little knowledge of pure mathematics, applied mathematics, algebra, analysis, probability, cryptography, topology, number theory, logic, set theory, cosmology, stochastic modeling, wave theory, statistics or optimisation amongst many many other aspects of undergraduate mathematics.

I think this goes someway to explaining why so many people have so little understanding of maths and the sciences in general, a malaise not helped by the lack of coverage on television of these subjects - watching Numb3rs on ITV3 doesn't reall