Category: TV

There have been a couple of pieces recently wondering about why we’re losing TV critics in our national newspapers. Ray Snoddy in Marketing magazine wrote about it last week following the ditching of daily TV reviews by the Daily Telegraph. He noted that the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have also ditched them.…

In exactly 265 days, analogue TV in the US will be switched off, and everyone will need to switch to digital TV. That is, the whole country is switching over on a single day. All 300m or so of the population. One day. Does that really seem like a smart idea? I don’t think so,…

If you woke up yesterday morning to learn that the audience for Wednesday night’s Champions’ League Final in Moscow peaked at a very creditable 14.6m, then you’re using overnights. These are the figures that broadcasters and others get the next day to record how many people saw a programme on TV last night. They’re produced…

I noted recently that NBC had bought Merlin, a new series commissioned by the BBC and produced by Shine for broadcasting this autumn. At the time, I hypothesised that this was probably the first British series since The Avengers that had been bought by a major US network for its primetime schedule. Well, Power begs…

Isn’t TV great at the moment? We’re nearly into summer, and Euro 2008 will overtake BBC1 and ITV1, but the sounds of cupboards being scraped are already being heard. Starting last Sunday, and continuing for the next three weeks, is a new run of everyone’s favourite – Ultimate Force with Ross Kemp. I say “new”,…

It’s obviously too complicated a story for me to comprehend, but some recent scheduling decisions really don’t make a great deal of sense to me. First of all there’s Saturday nights. No, I’m not talking about Pushing Daisies on ITV1, although that really did make no sense. I’m more interested in the general start and…

[Now updated a bit] Are we all excited by Freesat which launches today? Actually it’s a good time for it to come onstream. OK, so the website (as linked to by the BBC Press Office) doesn’t work, but it can’t all be smooth. Onboard from day one are all the BBC channels, all the ITV…

So following the story that emerged a couple of weeks ago about Richard and Judy defecting to UKTV for their next chatshow, the question was which channel would they end up on. Well today we learn that it is UKTV Gold that’s going to get the “Dave” treatment. Dave, you’ll recall, was previously called UKTV…

There’s a fun “debate” over at The Guardian about whether or not Pulling is actually better than the much feted Gavin & Stacey. I like them both. I missed out on Gavin & Stacey initially, for the most part because it’s on the demented BBC Three which, as you probably know, I’m a massive fan…