Category: Media

It’s the award season again, so I’ll stick my neck out and have a shot at Oscar predictions based on winners so far, and who I think the Academy will pick as their winners. Note that this does NOT take into account who should actually win. That’d never do. The weekend saw The BAFTAS and…

Francis Wheen seems to be attached to the proposed high-brow tabloid that is in the early stages of being launched. He’s certainly a credible addition to the venture, but you do have to ask the question – is there room for a new paper? I can quite easily buy the argument that some of our…

I’ve double-checked my calendar, and it’s definitely not August, so quite why this weekend saw a plethora of stupid media stories I don’t know. First of all The Observer had a story suggesting that as a way of moving people over to digital, first BBC2 and then BBC1 would be switched off to encourage digital…

What a profoundly stupid idea this is! That’s probably a little extreme and unfair, but nonetheless, this’ll be dead in the water in no time – of that I’m sure. The idea is that subsribers can pay 7.99 a month to get a handful of additional channels. The website lists the 10 channels included in…

So let me be clear about this. I can pay a significant amount of money to see a bunch of adverts that were aired free to air to most of America last weekend. Why? The only one worth watching is surely this one.

Surely not! Just suppose Have I Got News was on air at the moment.

It concerns me that terrestrial commercial television broadcasters in the UK are trying to reduce their PSB remits. Charles Allen is interviewed in Media Guardian today, on the morning that ITV plc is born. “Allen wants the PSB review to contribute to a new definition of ITV’s public service role, which he believes should take…

Greg Dyke gave a relatively spirited interview on the Today Programme this morning, I managed to time it so that I was going into a tunnel on a train, but of course the website has the full audio. It looks like we’re going to have to wait for his full and measured rebuttal of the…

The DCMS have an initiative aimed at gaining responses to how the BBC’s Charter Review should procede. There’s a website as part of this, and they say that they’ll publish all the responses they get online. I shall certainly be participating and answering their eight questions. There’s an accompanying document available too (PDF).

The new Eddie Izzard DVD/Video is out now, and is of course mostly notable for the fact that I’m in the audience! I’m told by friends who were there with me, that if you know where to look you can see us. Of course we were sitting in the middle of the fourth row right…

Last night BSkyB named their new CEO – James Murdoch. Wow. What a coincidence. You mean the same James Murdoch who’s son of the Chairman Rupert Murdoch? That’d be the one. Howls of outrage – and rightly so – since BSkyB is only 35% owned by Murdoch. The rest of the shareholding is held by…

A couple of pieces in today’s Guardian about some recent examples of pointless and utterly malicious BBC bashing. First a piece by Joe Conason contrasting Charles Moore’s Beebwatch with the American right’s anti “liberal” bias. Then there’s a corker of a leader in response to Gerald Kaufman’s self-serving Early Day Motion. Before the Hutton Inquiry…

Finally, Channel 4 have announced their new channel plan, using the space they have sitting on the Freeview platform (as well as securing cable and satellite coverage). With a working title of More 4 it’ll be aimed at 30+ year olds, carrying all the property and wife-swap type programming which Channel 4 currently fills its…