Month: February 2011

  • Mrs Brown’s Boys – How Does A Programme Like This Get Commissioned?

    Comedy can be a very personal thing. You find Big Momma’s House funny. I disassociate myself from you completely. But there are degrees. I find Catherine Tate personable, but her show was full of overlong sketches that were the same joke week in week out. Little Brtiain became very lazy, again suffering from the same…

  • If In Doubt Call It “Real”

    A couple of years ago, I wrote about the lazy trope that had invaded television titling meaning that seemingly every factual programme was titled “The Real…”. Since I wrote that piece, we’ve also had: Battle of Britain: The Real Story Britain’s Real Monarch Real Wolf Kids Real Crime Real Housewives of New Jersey Real Rescues…

  • The Business of Football

    I’m still coming down from an excpetional Wednesday night that saw Arsenal overcome a 1-0 defecit to win beat Barcelona, easily the best team in the world, 2-1. As I sit there dreaming about how Arsenal might maintain that lead in the much tougher return fixture in the Nou Camp a fortnight from now, I’ve…

  • Searching Myself

    That sounds quite philosophical doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Earlier today, I just wanted to check whether I’d previously commented on something in Twitter. All I needed to do was doublecheck my Twitter feed and I’d be away. Except that it would have been about a year ago. And Twitter’s river of tweets doesn’t really…

  • Prime Suspect – US Style

    If you live in Scotland, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the US version of Cracker – aka Fitz (probably when the rest of the country was watching something STV thought Scottish audiences wouldn’t like – Downton Abbey for example). While the original featured Robbie Coltrane as the overweight chainsmoking Fitz, in the US…

  • I’ll Have A “P” Please Bob

    You might be seeing the image above – or an inverted version – quite a bit on TV in the coming months. Ofcom has announced that it’s to be shown when a programme has accepted product placement. You’ll get at least three seconds of it at the start and end of the programme, as well…

  • Things To Catch On iPlayer Before They Drop Off

    A couple of entertaining programmes to catch up on before the dreaded seven day iPlayer window closes! Paul Jackson* was for a long time an ITV entertainment executive in a variety of roles across a number of companies. And he’s also a dab hand at making radio programmes. A few years ago he made an…

  • WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy

    Here’s a timely book. I received my copy of this book on Friday – 4th February. The introduction, penned by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, is dated 1st February! I know publishing speeds have moved on quite a lot, but it’s still pretty remarkable. The Guardian was serialising parts of this book last week. Whoever is…

  • RAJAR – Q4 2010

    It’s that time of year again. The latest RAJAR’s are out. It’s fair to say that there are few interesting things that come out of it. Overall radio listening remains firm, although there’s a 0.9% decline in listening hours, although listening is actually up 5.9% year on year, so this isn’t a significant change. The…

  • BBC Radio Musical Chairs

    A bit of switching and changing today at BBC Radio, with Jo Whiley moving over from Radio 1 to Radio 2, while Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie move on to 6 Music. They’re the big stories, but as the graphic above demonstrates (Disclaimer: as I read it from the press releases), there’s an overall shuffling…