Category
Television
The drug of the nation?
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02.06.08Game for a laugh (or something darker): deceit in popular cultureLast night, out for dinner with a group of friends in celebration of one of our number's birthday, I mentioned that I had noticed that in an awful lot of articles lamenting the lately departed entertainer and king of trivia and video clips, Jeremy Beadle, he was referred to as a "Prankster". In fact, a casual search on the interwebs shows that he's been referred to as such online on no fewer than 464,000 occasions, and that his name occurs in nearly a fifth of all search results for "prankster". This is surely the only proof required. This got me thinking about ...
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01.03.08My Week In MediaChallenged by m'colleague Neil to reveal what I've been consuming, media-wise this week, I am delighted to flash my digital hem, as it were, particularly because it affords me the parallel opportunity to apologise for being AWOL since before Christmas. I've been away, you see, and as a result, my media consumption for the past week has been a bit different in many ways to what I might otherwise have consumed. What I read Despite not being in the office (or perhaps because of it), I've enjoyed reading the paper: The Guardian, of course and particularly enjoyed the NYE quiz special edition ...
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11.09.07Ten Reasons Why Numerical Lists Are The New BlackNearly a decade ago, when I worked in the editorial department of a major ISP, one of the homepage editors had a theory that while lists were always a good thing, there was a magic list number - a sort of divine proportion, if you like - which was the perfect length for any list of items, where perfection is measured in people's enacted interest which is proxied by the action of following a link trail. This number, I can reveal, is seven. Her reasoning was this: Five items is too short: it feels like there's not enough content there, or not enough ...
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08.21.07Media consumption: little & often or feast & famine?I recently came to the realisation that I'm a media-glutton. I'm impatient at the best of times, and this unfortunate characteristic seems to come into sharp focus when it comes to watching TV series. The way the TV companies want you to watch a normal 24-episode series goes something like this: ...with all episodes being watched at regular intervals, neatly scheduled into a particular programme slot. Real "appointment to view" TV stuff. But unfortunately (for them), my inate media consumption burnrate urge looks more like this ...watching the first few episodes as intended and then gorging myself on the subsequent ones. In fact, ...
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07.22.07Overheard in a Soho coffee shop, soonA few months ago, I made a televisual gold programme name generator which TV commissioning Editors (especially those from BBC3/Channel five/Sky three/ITV3) could use to create titles for their summer season of programming. Now that the all-important autumn season is swift approaching, it's time to plunge once again into the bottom of the programming barrel and see which tired old formats can be recycled with a new twist for the gaping sofa-dwelling hoardes. After whole nanoseconds of analysis, I've discovered that the secret to this type of television planning is as follows:a) find an established programme conceptb) keep the basic format, but ...
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05.03.07Televisual Gold, GuaranteedAttention TV commissioning Editors (especially those from BBC3/Channel five/Sky three/ITV3): the summer's on its way, and before you know it, it'll be sunny and warm and that means that commissioning new and interesting programming for the autumn season is just going to get in the way of long liquid lunches and hanging around with your sleeves rolled up in Soho Square. But fear not! I have the answer to your problem, in the form of this handy mix'n'match show title generator. Using literally minutes of brainpower, combined with a lifetime of passive couch-potato activity, I've distilled the essence of winning ...
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04.02.07Too close for comfortWhen The Office appeared on our screens a few years ago, I barely watched it. This is because despite there being some very perceptive - and no doubt funny - writing, Ricky Gervais makes me want to grind my teeth into sand but also, and probably more significantly it was, in some ways, too close for comfort. The thing is, anyone having worked in an office environment, whether large or small, can identify with and recognise the reality in many of the situations it depicts - team bonding training days, bosses who want to be liked and feared at the same ...
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08.20.04A Pregnant PauseTight shot on David's astonished face? Understatment, I think. Apparently in Moonlighting fanfic-land, Maddy and David have put the detecting lark on one side in order to concentrate on having babies. David: A baby?…….whoa! Maddie: Yeah, whoa! David: Best whoa I’ve had all day. C’mere. They kiss sweetly, then just sit, holding each other.
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08.20.04CampaignCampaign to bring Moonlighting out on DVD. Just in case you wanted it.
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03.25.04The Boy Whose Skin Fell OffChronicle of a Death Foretold. The child of the title is Jonny Kennedy, a jaunty Geordie who suffers from a rare genetic deformity that causes skin cells constantly to shed. He was born with one leg raw; over 36 years, in which the condition also prevented puberty occurring, his scalp was a thick cap of scabs, his hands and feet were useless stubs of skin and his stunted body was enclosed in a suit of dressings. In September 2002, the bloody battle for Jonny's epidermis climaxed in terminal cancer and he was given a year to live. The Boy Whose Skin Fell ...
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