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TV Tonight
The Guardian’s blog has one of those impossible discussions at the moment about how terrible TV is these days. In terms of quanity there’s undoubtedly more dross to be found. But I can remember when we only had four channels – or even three – and there was still rubbish. But it was dull rubbish…
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Product Placement
Mark Kermode of Five Live and The Culture Show has a great rant about Sex and the City, exposing it for the product placement-fest that it is. And product placement is only growing in films. It’s long been accepted in the Bond films, but since The Matrix every blockbuster has done a mobile phone deal,…
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Are You Paying PPL?
Great story about a craftsman who just likes to listen to the radio while he works.
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Cliq
UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards “connected” radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model. Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28…
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The Death of TV Reviewers
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.…
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The Incredible Hulk
Back in 2003 one of my favourite directors, Ang Lee, gave us Hulk, a film that I never saw. It’s not that I don’t like superhero films – I’ve probably seen most of them. But I’d heard so much negative press about it that I just couldn’t bring myself to see it. Anyway, it didn’t…
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Dave’s Success
As the sale of Virgin Radio nears completion, thoughts turn to the rebranding exercise to be carried out by Albion. One of the most obvious, and spectacularly successful media rebrands of recent years was that of UK TV G2 into Dave which took place back in October 2007. I wrote a piece on Dave’s success…
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Anybody Fancy An Ice Cream?
It’s June and a nice day. Who wouldn’t fancy an ice cream?
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Science on TV
Another old favourite. There’s good news that the BBC is going to produce a new popular science show for BBC1 provisionally titled “What? Where? Why?” to replace the late, and sometimes lamented, Tomorrow’s World. Science has been critically missing from our screens for too long now. We certainly get plenty of natural history, but that’s…
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Privatising Radio 1 and Radio 2… Again
I know I keep returning to this having written about it back in February when Peter Bazalgette raised the idea, and again following the Radio 3.0 conference a couple of weeks ago when GCap’s outgoing chairman Richard Eyre also raised the issue in a personal capacity. So it was interesting yesterday that Enders Analysis who…
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Something to Watch on iTunes
If you were a UK resident and rushed out and bought an Apple TV device after they were announced in autumn 2006, you’d have been sorely disappointed when you got home and plugged it in. Certainly you could listen to you iTunes library through your TV, as well as any video podcasts you subscribed to.…
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More on the Virgin Radio Sale And Other Radio News
A couple of people have asked me why I haven’t blogged more on the sale of Virgin Radio to TIML that was announced on Friday evening. The problem is that you have to tread very carefully when blogging about your employer. So I’m not going to say a great deal more, but as ever, what…
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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