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Free To Air Listed Events Review
The DCMS has for the last couple of months been conducting a review into the listed events – those events that must be covered live on free-to-air television – Group A Events. That’s event like the Olympics, the World Cup and so on. It also includes events to which highlights must be made available on…
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iPhone Fun And Games
I’m not quite sure I understand all the annoyance at the moment over the new iPhone. As I see it, things go like this: * November 2007 – Apple and O2 release the iPhone in the UK and sell 18 month contracts. * July 2008 – Apple and O2 release the 3G version of the…
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ITV Multichannels Going Subscription Only?
According to a report in Media Guardian, ITV has been considering taking its channels from free to view to subscription only. The reasoning is that despite losing out in terms of viewers and their associated advertising revenue, there’d be enough gains to be made in getting a small share of the Sky revenue to make…
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Deja Vu
I know Channel 4 is strapped for cash, but this is ridiculous. On Sunday 24th May at 18:20 – a week ago – C4 showed Night at the Museum, the comedy film starring Ben Stiller. This was the film’s terrestrial premiere, and was timed for the weekend of the opening of the sequel Night at…
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Dreadful Dreadful Television
The most recent issue of The Word magazine, and most recent edition of their podcast both discuss “Monkey Tennis” – the phenomenon best illustrated by the Alan Partridge clip where he desperately attempts to win a commission from a BBC controller: Jump to 4:55 for the really good stuff – although it’s all excellent. In…
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Fun Bits Of Audio
Here are a couple of nice pieces of audio from recent programmes. The first comes courtesy of Axegrinder at Press Gazette, and considers what those scary Yorkshire folk have been up to: Bearing in mind that BBC Radio Five Live is shortly to move to Manchester, not with entirely unanimous support of everyone who works…
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Some Recent Music
I’ve seen some great concerts recently which were all very different, but all worth mentioning here. 15 May saw Icelandic “Music Through Unconventional Means” which featured the Southbank’s artist in residence, Shlomo, who’s a beatboxer, performing with one of my favourite groups, Amiina, and another Icelandic performer, Valgeir Sigurdsson. The first half of the concert…
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Guardian’s Listings Get Worse
What has The Guardian done to its daily listings this week? They’ve got substantially worse – especially for radio. To give you an idea what I’m talking about, here’s an example of last Thursday’s radio page: And here’s the equivalent page today: The more observant may notice that it’s now only half a page. We’ve…
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CCTV Is Everywhere
Last night BBC Two aired the first in a three part series – Who’s Watching You. It examines the surveillance state that we’ve been walking headlong into over the last few years. Despite a very annoying production technique of sending everything in and out of focus like a small child was operating the camera, it…
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How You Can Use Parliamentary TV Coverage…
…or not. I’d completely forgotten this, but then I saw last week’s edition of Have I Got News For You presented this week by Alexander Armstrong. The MPs’ expenses scandal is the gift that keeps on giving as far as satirical programmes go, but when illustrating the resignation of the Speaker, Armstrong pointed out that…
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Nokia’s Ovi Store
Now I’ve genuinely been looking forward to a decent competitor to Apple’s iTunes App store, so today’s launch of the Ovi store by Nokia has been something to look forward to. Sadly, all is not that great with it. Early in the day there were issues of too many people hitting the servers too frequently.…
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Radio Head
I’d completely missed the fact that this book existed until I saw a reference to a Daily Mail extract via a friend’s blog (obviously I wouldn’t ordinarily link to a Daily Mail extract – it’s not as though I was surfing the site or something). Written by John Osborne – no, not our John Osborne…
Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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