Month: January 2006
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Who Do You Think You Are?
What a terrific programme Who Do You Think You Are? really is. This evening’s programme with Stephen Fry was qutie moving.
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Le Tour in London
News just in (sorry, I can’t bring myself to say “Breaking News”… damn): London has been confirmed as hosting the start of Le Tour next year. Ken Livingstone has been working hard for a while to get the start of the Tour, which hasn’t been in Britain since it came through Kent in 1994. There’d…
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The Myth of Mobile Television
This last week or so has seen the results of two separate trials of consumer reaction to getting mobile television services to watch on their phone. Arqiva (formerly NTL Broadcast) has just released the findings of its experiment in Oxford with Nokia which saw 375 O2 users receiving 16 digital television channels. This trial used…
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Whale Watching in London
Well Sky News broke the story when they went live to their Skycopter (i.e. a helicopter) sometime around midday today. A whale was in the River Thames in central London. After some initial confusion about the species, it was eventually confirmed to be a northern bottle nosed whale. So come lunchtime, I just had to…
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Government Defeated in Lords Over ID Card
Great news.
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Most Overused Phrases in Media #1
“Henman Crashes Out”. Does he ever get ‘knocked out’, ‘beaten’ or ‘defeated’? No. He ‘crashes out’. Indeed most tennis players ‘crash out’. A Google search of “tennis” and “crashes out” reveals around 46,000 mentions. Who says sports journalism is cliched?
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DAB “worse than old FM”
I know some people see this as old news, and it’s certainly true that it’s nothing new, but it’s still the case that DAB isn’t exactly everything that it could be. This report is from today’s Telegraph. I have less issue with the BBC than some of the local commercial multiplexes, which is why it’s…
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Operation Ore and the Ruth Kelly Scandal
The guns are really out for Ruth Kelly at the moment. We’re into the second week of a scandal that threatens her job as Education Minister with plenty of people and papers awaiting the claiming of her scalp. Here’s the big spread in today’s (well yesterday’s now) Observer detailing her week and the developments. But…
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DVDs in Papers
Well Rupert Murdoch might be fed up with them, but this weekend, free DVDs in newspapers were back with a vengence. Yesterday, The Guardian had the not bad Let Him Have It starring Christopher Eccleston, while the Independent and its Sunday sister was on a mission to get its readers to appreciate world cinema by…
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Google Video
This is a video that we’re quite pleased with and are launching virally to promote Christian O’Connell’s new breakfast show starting in a week or so. Google Video’s slowly improving so we’ve put it up there, and I can eat into my own bandwidth by embedding it here. (I didn’t either ask the questions or…
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Music Industry Eating Itself
The next time record companies are bemoaning the fact that piracy is killing the industry, blah, blah, blah… just think about this: “record firms are vying to get ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ housemate Chantelle to record the song that she pretended had been a hit when she had to fool other contestants into thinking she was…
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Lost on C4
Hot on the heals of last night’s big audiences for the end of the first series, we now hear that C4 are going to start the second series “in the spring”. This is a smart move for them. I was amazed that they held off for as long as they did in the first place,…