Category: TV

Just a note to say that Entourage is starting on ITV2 (not ITV4 as I at first thought) on September 10. They’ve got some kind of viral/microsite up live now. Not sure about the VIP access bit. But it looks like they’re going to seriously promote this show one way or another.

Don’t you absolutely despair of our major commercial television broadcaster when you read a headline like this: ITV turns to phone-in competitions to beat ad slup It turns out that those trivially easy competitions on This Morning earn £9m a year, while ITV Play is expected to bring in £20m this year. This is all…

Channel 4 had one of those interminable list programmes on the other night. In this instance, it was the 50 films you should see before you die. The final list is here with Apocalypse Now coming out on top. In this case, the list was put together by a panel, and it was all to…

According to last week’s Broadcast, ITV wants to substantially reduce its children’s programming from the current eight hours a week to as little as two hours a week – an hour each on Saturday and Sunday. The reason is simply that ITV isn’t competing in the teatime market at the moment with Deal or No…

The best US comedy around is finally about to appear on British TV screens. It seems that ITV4 is finally going to be showing Entourage in September, if a one-liner buried in today’s Observer TV supplement is to be believed. Now well into its third season on US cable outlet HBO, it’s much more than…

Dear god, we’re really into silly season on TV now aren’t we? If Big Brother’s not your thing (and it’s really not), then this week we have BBC1’s only Fools on Horses (it’s for chariddee) and Love Island (carefully losing last year’s “celebrity” since, well, they’re not). By my reckoning, I’m left with Britain’s First…

The Observer is reporting that talks are afoot to bring Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander to British audiences in a series of English language adaptations of the books. I’m looking forward to the BBC Scotland co-production of Return of the Dancing Master as a one-off film. Wht the piece fails to mention is that Swedish TV…

Channel 4 has, as promised, launched as a streaming service on the web. It seems to be a simplish process of just registering online, clicking the authorisation email (they might want to mention that, as I couldn’t get the service to work initially), and you’re away. Surely, the thing is using IP address ranges to…

I know it really shouldn’t annoy, but some of the internal logic of some current ads defies belief. For example there’s a PC World ad at the moment featuring a young woman being shown around a branch by an exuberant salesman who’s explaining some of their great summer deals. First she’s shown an external hard…

I notice that ITV has commissioned it’s own version of the BBC2 (and now BBC1) hit genealogy programme, Who Do You Think You Are? The BBC version is produced by Wall to Wall Television. So who has ITV got to put together it’s show, provisionally titled Get A Proper Job? Wall to Wall Television is…

Is this a sign of things to come? I was watching the early evening ITV News from ITN and they’d put together a report on Aaron Spelling, the TV producer extraordinaire who made so many hits in the 70s and 80s. They came to Starsky & Hutch, but the clip they showed had obviously come…

The one thing that’s really annoying me during the current World Cup finals on ITV and BBC1 is that other channels are still launching some good quality programming in the middle of the tournament – programming that I’m going to miss because I’m watching the football. A few examples. On Monday, Channel 4 launched a…