Month: May 2006
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Silence of the Grave
This is the book for which Indriðason won the CWA Gold Dagger award last year. I enjoyed the first book in the series, Tainted Blood (or previously, Jar City), and the return of police detective Erlendur is welcome. As before, he’s struggling with his private life. He lives alone, but his dug-addicted daughter has miscarried…
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“Bogus” Therapies
I’m really glad these doctors have come out to speak up against the pointless waste of the NHS spending on “alternative” medicines that offer absolutely no proof of actually working.
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Pet Shop Boys – Fundamentalism
I know just about every magazine or newspaper has already given the new Pet Shop Boys album, Fundamentalism, 4 or 5 stars (out of five), but it really is that good. I am a bit of a long time Pet Shop Boys fan and this album really is the best since Behaviour with some great…
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LA Stories
Listeners to The Geoff Show may have heard ITV’s Head of Entertainment recently fielding programme suggestions from listeners. He was very good, and a scarily high proportion of ideas had already either been pitched or even produced. Anyway, Jackson is no Johnny come lately to the broadcasting game, and he’s just presented the first pair…
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Doonesbury
How long has Doonesbury been in the Independent on Sunday? It always seemed a little weird that The Observer didn’t carry it – and now I know why. (Although I think it was probably more a case of nobody else taking it, and IoS deciding that they would).
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HD Launches
A good piece on Mediaguardian about HD, with Sky’s service launching today, and material already being available to some Telewest customers. I tend to think that it won’t take off quite as quickly as some would hope, since we’ve alredy got more definition with PAL, compared to the US NTSC format. We’ve also had widescreen…
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Sell of Radio 1 and Radio 2
A report from the European Media Forum is reported to suggest that BBC Radios 1 and 2 should be sold off. They’d raise £500m and since this would “re-balance the radio market and level the competitive playing field between commercial broadcasters.” I beg to differ. What’d actually happen is that vast parts of commercial radio…
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Digilogic PVR
I’ve been meaning for ages to mention the Digilogic PVR that I got from Argos a while back – the FVRT95 (incidentally it’s identical to the T90, but that’s Argos code). For under £100 you’ve got an 80 GB single-tuner PVR which’ll record around 40 hours of television. As it came supplied it could timer…
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Eurovision
I’m loving the Lithuania entry. Broadly speaking, the entire song’s lyrics were: “We are the winners… of Eurovision” and “Vote for the winners” I think there were a few boos in the audience in Athens though. I guess that some people take the competition a bit more seriously than I do. [UPDATE] Oh look. The…
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Avoiding Channel Four For The Next Three Months
If the ad on the back page of today’s Guardian is anything to go by, it looks like I’m going to be avoiding Channel 4 even more than usual for the next three months. Meanwhile on the other side, ITV are somehow stretching out a celebrity football match into a week long event. So I’ll…
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Bugger
What a shame.
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The Omen
This remake of The Omen is very interesting. It’s quite a while since I first saw the original Omen from 1976 which came, I guess, as something as a riposte to 1974’s The Exorcist. This version has been described as a re-imagining, but I’d say that it’s more of a shot-for-shot remake, with David Seltzer…