Month: April 2007
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Daily Why?
We live in a (for the most part) democratic society, and one of the consequences is that we have a wide-ranging press publishing the full spectrum of opinion. As you might sometimes guess, I tend to lean a little left of centre in most areas, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t in some small…
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Poor F1 Coverage
So thick and fast after the Boat Race came ITV’s coverage of the Malaysian Grand Prix this morning. Now I make no secret of my disinterest in the engineering competition sport. There’s little to no overtaking, and new rules are introduced and dropped on a whim. This season there seems to be something about different…
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Brits on US TV
So now we know why British actors are doing so well on US television at the moment. We’re cheap, and we can take the piss out of ourselves.
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Sunshine (Part Two)
I must return to Sunshine, which is now finally in cinemas. First off, a bit of background. Back in May 2005, I accompanied a colleague at work on set-visit to 3 Mills Studios over in the East End to see the filming of this Danny Boyle science fiction epic. Now I’ve never been on a…
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The Steep Approach to Garbadale
The Steep Approach to Garbadale is Iain Bank’s first non-SF novel in quite a few years – indeed Dead Air was published back in 2002. I’d say that the novel it’s most like is The Crow Road which is probably my favourite Banks novel to date. In place of The Crow Road’s Prentice, we have…
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Ubuntu
My laptop has had a hidden “service” partition on it since I’ve had it, so in a fit of tidying up files, instead of handing the space over to Windows, I decided to chuck Ubuntu on it. It’s been ages since I had a play around with Linux, so I thought it was worth a…
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Boat Race
An article in this week’s Broadcast (behind a paywall I’m afraid) explained the broadcast complexities with covering something like the annual Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race. It takes 38 cameras, two helicopters and and goodness knows how many other people to cover it. Last year there was an issue with open microphones when ITV cut…
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Horizon
So Horizon’s been back for a new series on BBC Two for the last few weeks, and I’m sorry to report that things really haven’t got any better. It seems that you’re just not allowed to do serious science on television any more. I’m not saying it’s terrible, but it just seems to be covering…
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Stolen Biscuits
Do you know the story of the “stolen” biscuits? Two strangers sitting somewhere in public – perhaps at a train station café. One dips into the other’s biscuits. Insensed, the other person does the terribly British thing of not saying anything but pointedly helping themselves to “their” biscuits. This continues for several minutes until the…
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Dumbing Down the Beeb?
I’m a bit late with this one, but it’s still worth commenting on. Last weekend, The Observer had a story entitled Official: BBC Is Too Upmarket. The report details how Director General, Mark Thompson, has ordered a large review entitled Household Value to determine who uses what BBC services. Although in its early stages, it…
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Michael Dibdin RIP
It’s very sad to hear that Michael Dibdin has died. He was a really fine author and I’ve absolutely loved his Aurelio Zen series of novels. More obituaries at the BBC and the Daily Telegraph. A final Zen novel, End Games, is due in July. [UPDATE] The Guardian’s own obit, and In Praise of… Aurelio…
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UGC
Sadly, not the late, and quite probably unlamented cinema chain (not that Cineworld is a whole lot better with useless security guards supposedly checking that I did video-phone films, and too few people manning the ticket desk at the weekend), but that ultimate flavour-of-the-nanosecond buzzword “user generated content.” Today we learnt that LBC is rebranding…