Month: January 2007

  • A Hypothetical YouTube Case

    YouTube, it’s reported, is working on an advertising revenue sharing mechanism that rewards creativity and generates cold hard cash for people who include advertising in their videos. The offer applies only to people who own the full copyright of the videos that they are uploading to the YouTube website. Right. But surely they’re not suggesting…

  • Quiz TV

    This morning’s Guardian had a fantastically ascerbic column from Emily Bell about Quiz TV programmes, and in particular the appalling ITV Play channel and programme block that runs through the night. I’ll just give you a flavour of it by reproducing the last paragraph: Michael Grade, the incoming executive chairman, should be judged on how…

  • TV On The Internet

    As this week’s BBC >Click show gets excited by the growth of TV torrenting, legal alternatives are finally presenting themselves. The BBC is all ready to roll (I was a beta-tester back in 2005, although somehow failed to blog about it), but is having to go through a public value test. Ofcom last week published…

  • Ryszard Kapuscinski

    Sad to hear that veteran Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski died last week. I first came across him when I started reading Granta many years ago. To be honest I was intrigued by a magazine that came in a paperback book format. But two writers from those early editions really stood out for me: James Fenton’s…

  • Multiple DVDs

    I really am getting fed up with DVDs being constantly re-released in Directors’ Cuts or whatever, with additional extras all the time. Case in point is Alexander, the Oliver Stone film. Now I didn’t think it was all that bad – certainly better than most gave it credit for. It came out a double-disc DVD…

  • Back To Square One

    If it weren’t for the fact that I’m going to be at the match, I’d be tuning in to BBC Radio Five Live Sports Extra this Sunday to hear an alternate version of the commentary. As this piece explains, back in 1927 from the first radio commentaries, each week’s Radio Times would publish a chart…

  • Channel 4 and the Celebrity Big Brother Dabacle

    Channel 4 was created in the 1981 Broadcasting Act. Its programming remit, which has remained largely unchanged, was cemented in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, with the station required: [to] contain a suitable proportion of matter calculated to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for by Channel 3 and that innovation and experiment in…

  • Hot Fuzz

    Hot Fuzz is the new Simon Pegg/Nick Frost/Edgar Wright film. You know? The people who brought you Shaun of the Dead, and more importantly, Spaced. This time around we have Simon Pegg’s diligent Sgt. Angel being transferred from the Met, where he’s showng everyone else up with his tremendous drive and arrest rates, to rural…

  • Channel 4 Not Dumbing Down

    I’ve got an apology to make. I may have lead readers of this blog in the past to believe that Channel 4 has “dumbed down” with vacuous programming filling up most of primetime after the worthy stuff has gone out against the soaps. (Take a bow “The Search”, the latest feeble attempt to mimic the…

  • Threat Level By Email System Unsafe?

    I mentioned the other day that MI5 is now offering to send out threat levels via email. What I hadn’t realised until helpfully pointed out by Spy Blog, was the terribly unsafe system they were using. The BBC has the full story.

  • Reconstruction of Waterloo

    OK – I know that it was a light-hearted piece about a proposed “merger” with France back in the fifties, but I did laugh when a clip showed a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo was shown, and the po-faced phrase “Reconstruction” appeared on the screen to prove we weren’t watching actual footage of the…

  • Radio Comedy

    Today’s Media Guardian leads off on a big piece about the state of play of radio comedy in this country at the moment. The piece is titled “Why Radio Comey Is a Joke”, although all it seems to do is question whether quite as many radio series are making it through to TV as they…