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The Future of Kids Television
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…
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Hollywood Reporter on YouTube
A fascinating piece on copyright issues in The Hollywood Reporter (via TV Squad) following on from Newsnight the other day. There are a couple of questions I’ve got after reading this piece: First, YouTube’s 10-minute clip limit and tiny video window cater to clip culture, not pirates. Well yes, but it may be a tiny…
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Who Moved My Blackberry
Martin Lukes is the creation of Lucy Kellaway, and has been a regular feature of the FT for years. He’s the ahead of a-b global (I’ve left out the fancy characters), and what we’ve got here is a year in his turbulent life as he goes through his highs and lows via his email. If…
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All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye
I’d not read any Christopher Brookmyre before, although he seems to be getting something of a push from his publisher at the moment, with reissued covers for his novels, and a new hardback also out. I’ve read comparisons of him with Carl Hiaasen, but on this reading, I wouldn’t place him quite on that level…
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A For Andromeda
I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages. A For Andromeda was famously first a BBC science fiction series from 1961 starring Julie Christie. Sadly, as is the way of these things, barely any footage remains of the original seven part series, with the exception of a recently recovered copy of part six. Those…
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Newsreaders as Editors
As you may or may not know, a US TV presenter (journalist?), Katie Couric, is takeover the anchor job on the CBS Evening News in September. This is seen as something of a big thing in the states, since she’s a woman, and they’ve not actually had a solo female network news anchor in the…
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Entourage in the UK
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…
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Abridged Audiobooks
Audiobooks seem like they’re the new drug that newspapers are using to give brief boosts to their ABCs. In particular the Times stable is using them quite a bit. Chocolat was in last week’s Sunday Times, today sees Captain Corelli’s Mandolin in The Times, while tomorrow the Sunday Times has a “unique” version of Eats,…
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Newsnight on YouTube
A very interesting comment piece by Daniel Pearl, deputy editor of Newsnight on what I consider to be the fatal flaw with the business model of sites like YouTube.
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The Tour De France and World Cup Final
I’ve spent the last few days in France going to a work thing before travelling on to watch the Tour De France with Saturday’s time trial in Rennes. I travelled via Paris, and got a TGV from Montparnasse station. Here’s something I didn’t know about TGVs. I thought that their layout was pretty much the…
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ID Cards ID Cards ID Cards
Today’s Guardian has an impassioned piece by Henry Porter on why ID Cards are such a bad idea and are part of a fundamental change in our relationship with the State. Read it. The Sunday Times had a big report at the weekend about how internally, nobody at Whitehall believes the system will work. “I…
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Crap Telly
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…
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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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