Gardam backs Ofcom's big idea It seems that Ofcom knows what the fundamental problems are in British broadcasting - which is promising in itself - but is virtually admitting that it has no power to force Channel 4 to become...
Posts from September 2004
Admission of defeat
You're wrong on Iraq! And there's no wood in the cooker! I quit!
"Paul slept on it last night but, when he woke up this morning and discovered there was no wood in the Aga, he decided enough was enough." DELETE---Reality TV gets heavyweight as Paul Daniels storms out of The Farm due...
Tonight with Graham Norton
'Touchy-feely' Panorama derided This proposal to make Panorama "touchy-feely" (oh how I hate that expression but it sums everything up neatly) encapsulates everything there is to know about today's BBC scheduling and channel strategy. It's the same philosophy that schedules...
And now the weather with...
bbc.co.uk/weather: Today's Broadcasting Team Thanks to the power of the web, you can now schedule your weather viewing and listening on the basis of who is presenting. Now when is the wonderful Dan "And that's the weather (point) for now...
What's the point?
There have been rumours circulating on various TV-related forums such as Digital Spy that the BBC were on the verge of introducing animated on-screen "Coming Next" captions that appear whilst a programme is showing (which have also been described as...
Who is 30 tomorrow then?
Media Guardian: Fax of life "Imagine the hull of a ship," he says. "And the pages are like barnacles. The more barnacles build up, the slower the ship goes." The editor of Ceefax explains why there are often empty pages...
The Tower Market
The Times: NTL plans sale of its TV towers to help clear debt The old IBA transmitters look like they're on the market again following a decision by NTL to sell its network of transmission towers. Recently the ex-BBC towers,...
Dumb, dumber, and dumberer
ITV dumb to do Dumb Foreigners It's ITV doing what it likes to do best, that is to commission mindless clip shows that show people being attacked by bears or stung by bees. Ho ho ho, how amusing. But what...
Slowly but surely...
Ofcom: 55 % of UK households receive digital television ..we're becoming a digital TV Britain....
Science at a snail's pace
Reaching middle age, Horizon appears to have slowed down The current season of Horizon marks the 40th anniversary of what we must still, I imagine, regard as the BBC's flagship science and technology series. But what a shadow of its...
No subscription required
Dyke 'promoted Freeview to save licence fee' With hindsight it seems fairly obvious that Greg Dyke's Freeview scheme was a way of ensuring that the BBC cannot be funded via the smartcard route in the future by ensuring that there...
A small sacrifice
Panorama scheduling is terrible, says Dimbleby Here is a key situation whereby there is a direct conflict between "BBC the public service broadcaster" and "BBC the broadcaster that wants to grab as many viewers as possible in order to justify...
This time, it's real. Why?
Big Brother in 'torture' row - MediaGuardian For the presumably small number of people who haven't made the connection already, the spectacle of reality television getting more and more horrendous - as is happening not only in Germany but arguably...
Seedy, Cynical, Harmful to society. But it's worse in Germany.
MediaGuardian.co.uk : German Big Brother attacked over nipple piercing When John Humphries' speech to the 2004 Edinburgh International Television Festival spoke about how low TV has got in the UK, it probably didn't go down very well with those particular...
Discussion point
Sky viewers to miss out on ITV3 Contradiction of the week (so far, anyway) comes courtesy of ITV in its bid to get ITV3 a slot on SkyDigital. It is widely known that Sky tried to keep ITV3 off Freeview...
The words you're putting in my mouth are making me sick
I'm rather bemused with the habit the BBC, ITV and others have developed of "loading" phone or internet poll questions. Instead of asking for straight yes or no reponses to yes or no questions, you get: Was 70s TV better...
MediaBlog Atom Feed
If the terms RSS, Atom, XML, syndication or aggregator don't mean anything to you, it might be worth skipping to the next post or reading BBC News's article, The really simple future of the web. If they do and you...
Community For Breakfast
Community Channel: New Freeview Breakfast slot for Charity TV One of the oddities of the Freeview lineup has been the Community Channel - a channel dedicated to inspiring people to do more with their lives, partially funded by the Home...
