Category: TV

Interesting news from ITV. They’ve cancelled all their premium rate phonelines until a few review by Deloitte has been conducted. This affects all their channels and in effect suspends ITV Play until the review is complete. ITV is “in conversation” with GMTV, who love their terribly hard competitions. What does this mean for Cheggers’ future?…

Sky’s done some very annoying things over the past few weeks, not least announcing that they want to pull off Freeview and the stupid war they’re having with Virgin Media over their basic channels. At least they’ve got something right. They’ve just released Remote Record via your PC. Bizarrely both texting them, and implementing a…

I don’t know how long ITV’s been doing this, since some of the only programmes I’ve seen on ITV recently didn’t even have any adverts – Al Murray’s Happy Hour. But watching a recording of Instinct from earlier in the week, it seems that ITV’s running trails within the adverts rather than bookending them before…

So I’m sitting here watching Born Survivor: Bear Grylls. “Bear” (is that really his name?) is some kind of born explorer who’s essentially a more gung-ho version of Ray Mears, except he’s ex-SAS. In this first episode of a new series he begins by leaping out of a helicopter in just a pair of trousers…

Well according to 24, I’ve got the same printer as the White House! It does print lovely photos, and I highly recommend it, but I’d have thought that big offices would be more likely to have lasers rather than inkjets…

First Sky announces on Virgin Media’s launch day that they’re pulling off Freeview and encrypting their channels with their own box to serve premium content. Now we learn that Virgin Media cable customers were shown this advert over the weekend. It suggests that Virgin Media (or “ntl:Virgin” as the ad would have it) is “doubting”…

Hurrah! Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe is back, and the first episode featured Ian Rowland, the acknowledged master of cold reading. He was part of a sequence that tore into one of the most exploitative programmes currently being made – Psychic Private Eyes – in which vulnerable people are told complete bollocks by so-called psychics who are…

This morning’s Guardian had a fantastically ascerbic column from Emily Bell about Quiz TV programmes, and in particular the appalling ITV Play channel and programme block that runs through the night. I’ll just give you a flavour of it by reproducing the last paragraph: Michael Grade, the incoming executive chairman, should be judged on how…

Channel 4 was created in the 1981 Broadcasting Act. Its programming remit, which has remained largely unchanged, was cemented in the 1990 Broadcasting Act, with the station required: [to] contain a suitable proportion of matter calculated to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for by Channel 3 and that innovation and experiment in…

I’ve got an apology to make. I may have lead readers of this blog in the past to believe that Channel 4 has “dumbed down” with vacuous programming filling up most of primetime after the worthy stuff has gone out against the soaps. (Take a bow “The Search”, the latest feeble attempt to mimic the…

OK – I know that it was a light-hearted piece about a proposed “merger” with France back in the fifties, but I did laugh when a clip showed a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo was shown, and the po-faced phrase “Reconstruction” appeared on the screen to prove we weren’t watching actual footage of the…

In Ofcom’s latest Broadcast Bulletin (pdf), ITV Play is found to be in breach for the first time for one of their games. In one of their “tower games” callers were invited to identify “things you might find in a woman’s handbag.” The sample answer was “mobile phone.” Correct answers (well answers that received prizes)…