Month: July 2006
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A For Andromeda
I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages. A For Andromeda was famously first a BBC science fiction series from 1961 starring Julie Christie. Sadly, as is the way of these things, barely any footage remains of the original seven part series, with the exception of a recently recovered copy of part six. Those…
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Newsreaders as Editors
As you may or may not know, a US TV presenter (journalist?), Katie Couric, is takeover the anchor job on the CBS Evening News in September. This is seen as something of a big thing in the states, since she’s a woman, and they’ve not actually had a solo female network news anchor in the…
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Entourage in the UK
The best US comedy around is finally about to appear on British TV screens. It seems that ITV4 is finally going to be showing Entourage in September, if a one-liner buried in today’s Observer TV supplement is to be believed. Now well into its third season on US cable outlet HBO, it’s much more than…
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Abridged Audiobooks
Audiobooks seem like they’re the new drug that newspapers are using to give brief boosts to their ABCs. In particular the Times stable is using them quite a bit. Chocolat was in last week’s Sunday Times, today sees Captain Corelli’s Mandolin in The Times, while tomorrow the Sunday Times has a “unique” version of Eats,…
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Newsnight on YouTube
A very interesting comment piece by Daniel Pearl, deputy editor of Newsnight on what I consider to be the fatal flaw with the business model of sites like YouTube.
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The Tour De France and World Cup Final
I’ve spent the last few days in France going to a work thing before travelling on to watch the Tour De France with Saturday’s time trial in Rennes. I travelled via Paris, and got a TGV from Montparnasse station. Here’s something I didn’t know about TGVs. I thought that their layout was pretty much the…
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ID Cards ID Cards ID Cards
Today’s Guardian has an impassioned piece by Henry Porter on why ID Cards are such a bad idea and are part of a fundamental change in our relationship with the State. Read it. The Sunday Times had a big report at the weekend about how internally, nobody at Whitehall believes the system will work. “I…
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Crap Telly
Dear god, we’re really into silly season on TV now aren’t we? If Big Brother’s not your thing (and it’s really not), then this week we have BBC1’s only Fools on Horses (it’s for chariddee) and Love Island (carefully losing last year’s “celebrity” since, well, they’re not). By my reckoning, I’m left with Britain’s First…
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Le Tour 2006
Not everything is going completely wrong in sport this summer, well not quite all anyway. England maybe out of the World Cup, but Andy Murray’s still in Wimbledon, and the 2006 edition of Le Tour has started. OK, not everything’s beautiful in the world of cycling with a massive fallout from an ongoing to Spanish…
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A British Wallander
The Observer is reporting that talks are afoot to bring Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander to British audiences in a series of English language adaptations of the books. I’m looking forward to the BBC Scotland co-production of Return of the Dancing Master as a one-off film. Wht the piece fails to mention is that Swedish TV…
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Channel 4 Online
Channel 4 has, as promised, launched as a streaming service on the web. It seems to be a simplish process of just registering online, clicking the authorisation email (they might want to mention that, as I couldn’t get the service to work initially), and you’re away. Surely, the thing is using IP address ranges to…
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Hard Rock Cafe Party
A busy afternoon of not winning any Arqiva Radio Awards and then heading on to a party at the Hard Rock Café where a few bands were playing. I got to see Bonnie Tyler and the Fun Loivin’ Criminals. Somewhere around I have a copy of Holding Out For Hero on 7″ – I remember…