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Media Guardian: Emily Bell on Public Service Broadcasting It’s not often I agree with the views of Guardian Unlimited Editor In Chief, Emily Bell, however today I found myself nodding…

Top of the Pops axed by BBC1 The mysterious thing about this change is that Top of the Pops is now going to incorporate elements of Top of the Pops…

Howard Goodall’s 20th Century Greats In what is evidently going to be a cracking good four-part series on 20th century composers who will be remembered in the future much as…

R.I.P. Changing Rooms Finally – the show which spawned a thousand clones, and enticed broadcasters to fill endless hours showing viewers how to wreck their living room, has ended. As…

Bectu threatens Ofcom with legal action over ITV ITV may have thought that it can sidestep most (or indeed all) of its remaining obligations with Ofcom in charge of regulation,…

TV auction channel shuts up shop With Ofcom – and the ITC before it – often accused of having no teeth, it came as some of a surprise when they…

Sharp rise for on-demand Before I got married, I was an avid Radio 4 listener. I picked up the Radio 4 bug at university during the Gulf War, and I…

ITV delays decision on satellite switch Publically BSkyB are making a great effort to keep ITV from following the BBC’s example and going free-to-air, since if ITV were to do…

TV licence to increase to £126.50 Well, up goes the licence fee, to help provide, “a strong and distinctive schedule of high quality programmes” according to Tessa Jowell. Considering the…

Media Guardian: Freeview ‘to overtake Sky Digital in 2005’ Daily Telegraph: Sky leaps as subscribers gather for Christmas The industry believes that Sky will be overtaken by Freeview as the…

Media Guardian: New TV channel offers home to classic variety acts A TV station with Joe Pasquale? Bobby Davro? Brian Conley? Jethro? It’s like 1980s Saturday night television all over…

C4 and Five abandon merger plans It was pretty obvious that this proposed marriage of convenience would end in tears long before the couple would ever get near an altar,…

We later discovered that the ITC had found something in their investigation which BSkyB didn’t want made public Of course, if Greg himself never found out what (unless he’s holding…

Say hello to The Office of the Adjudicator, created by Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading, and funded entirely by ITV plc, with the sole purpose of acting on…

Media Guardian: C4 could be part-funded by license fee Media Guardian: Ofcom reveals vision for new ‘public service publisher’ So on one hand, Channel 4 could be so desperate for…

Inquiry into BBC One programming The first sentence of this BBC News article summarises the level of anxiety that faces both the BBC and its governors: “BBC governors have ordered…

ITV3, which has been the centre of a lot of heated discussion between Sky and ITV will now launch at the official launch time of 9pm tonight, Monday November 1st…

Hello, and welcome to the latest updates to Electromusications. As you may know, if you subscribe to some of the mailing lists about broadcasting history, television presentation and related topics,…

Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief, BBC Four If you, like me, are of the opinion that the only documentaries that make it on to TV these days are those…

BBC reality show turns children into matchmakers Recently it was stated by BBC bosses that the intention was to move away from “reality TV” towards programming that reflected real life…

BBC News: Legendary radio DJ John Peel dies Goodbye John Peel – without doubt one of the greatest broadcasters of our time.

BBC News: Sky launches ‘freesat’ digital TV Media Guardian: ‘Sky in a box’ targets Freeview In its relentless push to make us give them a sizable amount of cash each…

Best Of British Light Music (5 CD set) One of the best things about growing up in Somerset in the 70s was being able to watch the incredible Westward Television…

Media Guardian: ITV tightens grip on GMTV The concept of a seperate franchise owning the 6-9:25am slot on Channel 3 is one wedded in history – a time when television…

BBC digital channels ‘poor value for money’ Evidently I am one of not very many people, as the channel I watch most of all is BBC Four, criticised today in…

Former DG… blames ‘dumb’ programmes on women execs Much as one can admire Alasdair Milne (left, in a photo from some time ago) as a programme-maker (eg Tonight in the…

Children’s TV is more than kids’ play ITV may soon decide to sell its childrens’ programming slot to Nickelodeon, since for various reasons it cannot fully exploit the commercial possibilties…

BBC News: Walking into the sunset Michael Fish says goodbye on his final forecast. The weather just won’t be the same.

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…

"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…

‘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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Ofcom: 55 % of UK households receive digital television ..we’re becoming a digital TV Britain.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…