Tag: TV
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No Sense of an Ending
Warning: This piece contains spoilers for the 2014 series Amber, 2014 series The Missing and 2018 series Kiri. There has been a trend in recent years for drama series to give is slightly more nuanced endings than we have sometimes expected. Perhaps all the questions haven’t been answered. Perhaps its unclear by the end, which…
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2018 Media Predictions
It’s that time of year when, because not a lot else is going on, and pages need to be filled, everyone is busily predicting what might happen in 2018. So here are my bold and not so bold predictions in the coming year across the media industry. A streamer will win some Premier League rights.…
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Programmes I Know I Should Have Seen But Haven’t – Stuck in Draft #6
Here’s a slightly enlarged piece I wrote back in 2015 or so, but never got around to finishing. So I’ve had a bit more of a bash at it, but still feel it makes the grade as part of my Stuck in Draft series. In David Lodge’s Changing Places, the English faculty play a game…
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The Olympics: Celebrating Success or Jingoism? – Stuck in Draft #2
I wrote this over a year ago, and never quite got around to publishing it. Hence it now forms part of my Stuck in Draft series. And so another Olympics have concluded and from where I sit it has been a success. Let me clarify that a little. Team GB has undoubtedly been successful. But…
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Premier League TV Rights – 2019-2022
The new Premier League TV rights auction for the UK has just got under way, with bids due in at the end of January, and the results announced in early February. Such are the scale of these rights now, that the announcement tends to be made to accommodate the stock market. If a PLC is…
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TV News Channels – Political Pawns
In the last few days, both Sky News and CNN have become tangentially embroiled in ongoing media takeovers. In both cases, there could be an impact on their longterm futures to a greater or lesser extent. In the UK, 21st Century Fox is trying to takeover complete ownership of BSkyB. In a response to the…
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Diversity in Media – Measuring Social Class
On Sunday I wrote a piece on Ofcom’s Diversity in Television report, and in particular, noted my disappointment that it didn’t measure social class. The feedback I got can basically be summed up with the question: “Yes, but how do you measure class?” So I thought it was worth exploring the issue a bit further.…
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Diversity in UK Media – Ofcom’s Report Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Last week Ofcom published the first in what it says will be a regular series of reports into diversity and equal opportunities in television. It focuses on the biggest UK television broadcasters: BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky and Viacom (owner of Channel 5 amongst others). Diversity remains a key concern in the media industry, from…
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Free to Air Cricket
Today brings some interesting news, with the ECB actually allowing some free-to-air cricket on TV screens in the future. The BBC has done a deal to see the return of cricket to its channels for the first time since 1999. You will recall that in 1998, Channel 4 secured the rights to most international cricket,…
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Sky Sports Revamp
Sky Sports is reportedly getting a bit of a makeover, losing the numbered channels currently known as Sky Sports 1-5, and instead gaining sports-specific channels. Currently the channels are roughly being used as follows: Sky Sports 1 – Football Sky Sports 2 – Cricket, Rugby, Football Sky Sports 3 – Football, Tennis Sky Sports 4…
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What Should a Kids’ TV Channel Show When Kids Should Really Have Gone to Bed?
If your child likes watching CBeebies or CBBC in the UK, then you will know that both channels have cut-off times. At 7pm, the broadcast spectrum used by CBeebies is re-purposed as BBC Four, while CBBC’s spectrum will soon become a BBC Scotland TV channel. Either way, there’s nothing to watch on the broadcast stream…
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Daytime TV Killed the British Bank Holiday
What do the following film genres mean to you? War films James Bond Carry On films To me they all scream Bank Holiday TV. You may have had plans to go out somewhere, but an annoying drizzle meant that you’d rather stay at home and see what’s on the box. But in fact, that’d be…
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The Nightly Show
Before ITV launched The Nightly Show into the 10:00pm weekday slot I said that we should avoid comparisons with US late evening talk shows since contrary to popular belief, it’s not trying to be one, and we should hold off looking at the ratings until it had settled into something a bit firmer. This kind…