Month: January 2014

  • Blockbusters and Sleepless In Hollywood

    If it feels to you, as it does to me, that there are an ever greater number of superhero and other franchise films clogging up cinemas, then you’d be right. And these two books explain pretty well between them what’s happening in Hollywood and beyond. Indeed, it’s the “beyond” that is really driving this. Blockbusters…

  • Why DAB Radio in the UK Isn’t Broken and Doesn’t Need Fixing

    A bold title, I think. But read on for the reason. There’s a Techradar piece – Why DAB in the the UK is broken, and how to fix it – that recently got a certain amount of traction and lots of retweeting amongst radio types. But it really needs some robust countering. I half expected…

  • LBC Going National

    The news today that LBC is going to be broadcast nationally from next month is really good for lots of reasons. Here are just a few: – It’s good for LBC. The station must be a reasonably expensive service to run since speech is always more expensive to do well than music. And a greater…

  • Things I Can Live Without in 2014

    Life’s too short. So in 2014 I will mostly* be living without the following: Awards Ceremonies I exclude any awards that I might be nominated for- unlikely though that is. What I means is Oscars, Brits, Grammys, Comedy Awards, Television Awards etc. The only one I’ll miss is perhaps the BAFTAs although the fact that…

  • Twitter Notifications

    [Note: I’m on the Twitter beta programme, so this may be a beta-only problem.] A recent update to the Twitter app (I’m using the Android version) has resulted in the most pointlessly annoying thing Twitter has done in a long time. Twitter is trying to be smart, and is pro-actively sending notifications to tell me…

  • Links Worth Reading

    The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating and frankly depressing story about how US radio stations are playing the hits more to battle against the likes of Spotify and iTunes Radio. Because if there’s one thing I can find easily without listening to the radio, it’s the biggest hit songs. The piece ends with this…

  • Possible Sale of Channel 5

    In recent days it has been fairly widely reported that Richard Desmond, owner of Channel 5, Express Newspapers and other more “specialist” TV services, is looking to sell Channel 5. Desmond bought Channel 5 for a knockdown price of £103.5m in 2008, and he’s run it pretty shrewdly, keeping costs down and turning a profit.…

  • Logo Lolly

    “Logo Lolly” is, or was, the practice of paying radio news reporters a bonus if they managed to get their radio microphone muffs (ie. covers) or collars into shot on the TV news. I’ve heard of at least two places where this certainly used to be the case. You’d get more money if you made…

  • American Hustle

    The new David O Russell film, American Hustle is immensely enjoyable. We’re dropped in at the deep end, with some kind of con or undercover operation going on. And not going well. But we get quickly get into flashback as our narrator and main character Irving Rosenfield (Christian Bale), sets out in a life –…

  • Aldwych on Exposure

    I’m continuing to play around with the best way of displaying photos online, and a new kid on the block is Exposure. They use high resolution photos that fully utilise screen real estate to make pleasingly simple photo layouts. Interestingly, although they’re free for your first three sets of photos, you need to pay after…

  • Is There Room for Horror on UK TV?

    I mentioned that I’d enjoyed Mark Gatiss’ version of The Tractate Middoth over Christmas. And although that is certainly more of a ghost story than a horror story, it made me wonder why we don’t get more horror series on British television. Series like American Horror Story, and arguably The Walking Dead, prove that there’s…

  • Radio and TV Favourites

    I think my favourite TV programmes over the Christmas and New Year period were a series of films that I didn’t spot at all when I was going through the Radio Times. Endeavour: Everest was a series of three films made by Leo Dickinson shot in and around Mount Everest between 1976 and 1991. They…