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Month: April 2006

  • Upgrading to MT3.2

    Well I had a very scary experience over the last 24 hours. No, not going through the pain that is watching Arsenal scrape through a very tricky tie to go through to the Champions’ League Final in Paris on May 17 (any offers of tickets most welcome). I went through an upgrade process to get…

  • Poor TV Reviews

    Maybe I’m just getting grumpier in my old age, but is The Guardian’s TV reviewer, Sam Wollaston, getting worse. Read today’s review. Now I didn’t see any of the reviewed programmes – wild horses couldn’t make me watch something called “Extraordinary People: Identical Quads”. Similarly anything called “The Real…” immediately drops off my radar as…

  • Waterstone to Buy Back Waterstone’s?

    First off, I must admit that I don’t think I’d ever before noticed the apostraphe in Waterstone’s name. I certainly don’t believe I used it before. My mistake. Anyhow, Tim Waterstone has launched a bid to buy back the book chain from parent company HMV. HMV, of course, had been thinking about a buyout of…

  • Various TV Musings

    It was very strange to see the credits at the end of Sharpe last night. This quintissentially ITV show (that I only ever caught up with on DVD) has returned for one-off seven or eight years after it last graced our screens. It’s a sign of the times that whereas before Sharpe was always made…

  • ITV Play

    So ITV Play has launched today, and you can watch it online! Seemingly, there’s no end to these channels, and I’d expect that at least one other channel on Freeview is likely to convert fully to this format – FTN is practically there already with only four hours a day of non-quiz programming. Even repeats…

  • Never Let Me Go

    First of all, it’s probably worth pointing out that this book is Science Fiction. It’s not immediately obvious from the cover that it is, but publishers are nervous of “condemning” a novel by a mainstream author into the ghetto that is genre fiction. The story is narrated by Kathy from some time in the future,…

  • Scary Scary Scary

    Very scary.

  • Premiership Football Rights

    As we get closer and closer to the next TV deal for football, it’s interesting to read this story from today’s Times about the price that ITV or the BBC would have to pay should they bid for one of the six packages that have to be offered seperately. Of those six packages, no single…

  • Mark Burnett

    Mark Burnett is a man who not many will have heard of in the UK, unless they follow the TV industry that is. He’s the producer of such US hits as Survivor and The Apprentice (Broadcast also lists The Contender as a US “hit”. It was made in the US, but with the best will…

  • Law

    It’s good to know that two legal actions have been rightly defeated: 1) The Mazher Mahmood action has been dropped, although I note that no-one’s particularly interested in actually publishing the pictures. In a discussion on Friday’s Channel 4 News, the camera quickly cut away when Gorgeous George held up an A4 picture of Mahmood.…

  • Don’t You Have Time to Think?

    I can’t remember precisely how I first came across Richard Feynman, but I’m pretty sure it was reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman. Later, I’d see one of the best hours of Horizon ever made in Christopher Sykes’ The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. But aside from a couple of other documentaries, and famously his…

  • Thank You For Smoking

    Thank You For Smoking is the film that Lord of War probably wanted to be. That is to say, we’re supposed to empathise with the lead character despite him having a, frankly, despicable job. And you know, you do. But let’s step back a second. Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, one of the most prominant…