Month: August 2008

  • The Wire Sans Commercials

    I’ve just been watching an excellent episode of Dexter on the FX channel – at a slight delay via my Sky+. I let the playback run at the end and up popped a couple of things of interest. First, I see that Generation Kill is coming to FX in the UK soon which has got…

  • Gustav Coverage

    I don’t mean to underplay the potentially serious nature of Hurricane Gustav when it hits the US coastline, probably tomorrow. But Bush and Cheney not going to the Republican convention this week, answers a lot of the questions that Carl Hiaasen raises in his column this week. It’s a good get out. Bush gets criticised…

  • Convention Season

    In the US it’s convention season. That is to say that the Democrats and Republicans are holding their quadrennial events. In the UK we have party conferences, but really the two cannot be compared. In the UK we have access to all this malarkey on BBC Parliament which nightly shows two hours of live coverage…

  • England Match Not On Terrestrial?

    Well – as things stand, England’s World Cup qualifying games against Croatia and Andora will not have so much as highlights coverage on either BBC or ITV according to a piece in The Times. It comes down to the fact that while England’s home games were sold to ITV as part of a larger deal…

  • White Goods Via The Internet

    At work a few weeks ago, we had a nice chap come in to talk to us about the consumer behaviour at the moment, in light of the credit crunch and a falling housing market as people tightened their belts. It was all a little gloomy if you work for a company who depends on…

  • Olympic Golds and Looking Forward To 2012

    This morning saw three more British golds, particularly a pair in the sprints at the Velodrome with Victoria Pendleton and Chris Hoy winning. But I’m now beginning to get concerned about the logisitics of 2012. No, I’m not thinking about how we can possibly top the Chinese opening ceremony, it’s more to do with the…

  • Old Virgin Radio TV Ads 3

    Here are a batch more of Virgin Radio ads from the archives – being put up here in advance of the station’s rebrand in the UK. The first one features Beau the dog as he goes about his day. Realistic typing I think you’ll agree. I think this compilation of three ads from 2005 is…

  • Old Virgin Radio TV Ads 2

    Here’s an ad that I’m 99.999% certain that you haven’t seen. It’s a Russ and Jono ad for Virgin Radio that was never actually aired. This is a rough cut without final graphics or sound, but it still gives you a good idea of what they were trying to do.

  • The Launch of DAB Digital Radio

    Today there are over seven million DAB digital radios in use in the UK, although it’s future still has a few question marks hanging over it rightly or wrongly. But it’s fascinating to go back and see how the system was first launched. So amongst some of the videos I’ve recently been going through at…

  • Old Virgin Radio TV Ads

    In the run-up to Virgin Radio rebranding as… – well, we’ll have to wait and see what precisely it becomes – I’ve been digging through the vaults to see what old TV ads I could find. Here’s the first second ad which ran sometime after the launch of FM in 1995 featuring Russ and Jono.…

  • Spooks: Code 9

    So what is there to make of the latest Spooks spin-off Spooks: Code 9? The series is set in the a near future of 2013 after some kind of nuclear device has gone off in London. MI5 seems to have been decimated and now relies on pretty young twenty-somethings to join their ranks, recruiting from…

  • Olympics on Digital TV

    Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they’d show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal. Now coverage might be “limited” to the…