meish dot org: life, unfolding

1. Vicky Christina Barcelona (Woody Allen makes not entirely irritating film shocker)
2. Robots (VO artiste who’s who)
3. Eagle Eye (Shia Le Boeuf and Billy-Ray Thornton in risible action thriller. Not dis-similar to The Net, or Phone Booth)
4. Body of Lies (Lots of mumbling, plus bad facial hair (Di Caprio) and bad accents (Crowe))
5. Dangerous Liasons (Wigs and social complexities)
6. W (Truth is stranger than fiction, plus special bonus appearance by Noah Wylie)
7. The Secret Life of Bees (Almost exactly what you would expect)
8. A Bunch of Amateurs (Horrible ensemble Brit Com starring a plank of wood as Burt Reynolds)
9. Ballet Shoes (sweet BBC seasonal adaptation of Noel Streatfield book)
10. Burn After Reading (Engaging Coen brothers caper)
11. Rachel Getting Married (AKA is this film STILL on?)
12. The Sea Inside (Javier Bardem, mumbling hotly)
13. Primary Colors (electioneering fascination)

Telly, and other things:

1. QI XL (3 episodes)
2. Dexter s1 e1-4
3. The Wire s1 e1-3
4. Greys Anatomy (1 episode)
5. Gossip Girl (2 episodes)
6. Flight of the Conchords (s1)

Things I opted not to watch:

1. High School Musical 3: Senior Year

PLUS! Bonus tip for international air travel:
You must never, ever look at yourself in the bathroom mirror at 40,000 feet, after 6+ hours in the air. There’s something about the combination of lighting, dehydration, stress, fatigue and having to stand 6″ from your bedraggled reflection that will make you feel even worse than you look (as if that were possible).

This is absolutely delightful.

(Slideshow of this set on Flickr)

(More context and reflection here)

The end.

In The West Wing, whenever President Bartlet was ready to move on to another issue or topic of conversation, he’d say “what’s next?” It was a signal that he was done, and keen for something else.

We’ve coincidentally just finished watching The West Wing, as it happens. In mid-September, with the US election getting (even more) interesting and the weather getting more rubbish, we decided it was time to experience the Wing cycle anew. Our aim was to go through all seven seasons in quick order, culminating with the big Santos/Vinick election battle and subsequent transition just in time for the real-life election in early November.

Alas, my travels in early October put paid to that hope, and we were a couple of weeks over – we finished last night at about 10pm, with a belly full of Thai and a small lump in our throats. Not through emotion – let’s be honest, the series sort of lost its way after Soorkin wandered off, and the plotlines tended towards the mawkish and/or dull especially in the latter seasons – but that twinge of sadness that comes with the passing of something you’ve put a lot of effort into.

So what’s next?
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…the BBC starts saving money by using stock library shots which date back to the time of the last recession in the early 1990s.

How do we know?

In the evening news report today (Sunday 19th October), there was a report about the credit crunch and its ongoing affect on mortgage-payers, leading to lots of people not being able to pay, and losing their homes, and as a result the government is proposing a package of help measures for those facing repossession.

Over the report narration, a selection of stock footage of homes up for sale was shown, which I captured (sorry for terrible quality of image):

These, presumably, came from the BBC stock footage library and were classified “recession” “property” “mortgage” or similar.

The thing is, while the footage used in the bottom shot is relatively recent, the footage in the top shot dates back to sometime before May 1990. At least.

You can tell by the use of the 01 dialling code on the estate agents’ boards. The dialling code changed in early May 1990 to 0181 (outer) and 0171 (inner), before changing again in 2000 to 020 + 8 digits.

At no point in the news report did the journalist refer to the last recession, or any historical context.

So either this is a researcher slip-up, or it’s a confirmation from the BBC that they regard the current housing situation as, in fact, indistinguishable from the last big property crash of the early nineties – or alternatively, they’ve run out of money to commission new stock shots, and so are recycling old footage wherever possible.

Now that’s a news story in itself.

Last 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 where “prankster” registers in the general field of japes and subterfuge, which in turn got us talking about whether there was, in fact, a continuum of such things, into which all of the various shades of japery, trickery and subterfuge might appear.

And you know, there is. And here’s how the categories break out, with a full explanation of each, and examples, after the jump.

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Challenged 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 of G2 – I got further with King Williams College Quiz than in previous years (i.e. managed to answer a whole 23 questions), and the general quiz of the year kept me guessing for at least a few pots of tea. But since I’ve been up in Scotland for a few days, I’ve also been reading The Oban Times (which is handy for broader local news as well as the cult-reading that is D Morisson’s weekly roundup of Scalpay news) as well as Round And About Mull, the monthly island paper, for local perspective (i.e. in order to understand the contexts of what many local conversations are about).

In addition, I flicked through the Birmingham Airport free magazine (called Destinations, I think) and had a saunter through both The Herald and The Daily Record in the BA lounge this afternoon, though I don’t think we can really count that as reading. Oh, and I read an article about the Isle of Mull Weavers at Ardalanish, which featured in Country Life of all things, which my mum had borrowed from a friend. I swear I didn’t read anything else in there, though.

I also dipped into Utopian Dreams by Tobias Jones, which I’d heard snatches of when serialised on Radio 4, but found a copy of at my mum’s house. But managed not to touch the book I took up with me for holiday reading (A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon) until the train/plane today, because I was so busy. Busy relaxing, of course…

What I watched
Not a right lot. This is basically because my mum doesn’t have a television. However, in the few days I was in Shropshire at the end of last week, I saw The History Boys on the BBC, and the news. On DVD, I watched a couple of episodes of Coast 2 with my mum (showing her how to watch DVDs on new laptop) and after dinner with some friends on the Ross of Mull, An Inconvenient Truth, which I’d somehow managed to miss. And on New Year’s Day, when particularly hungover, I took the laptop back to bed and watched Dara O’Briain’s live solo standup gig via the streaming version of iPlayer. And let me tell you, for that alone, I *heart* the BBC.

I singularly failed to watch either of the DVDs I carried around with me because they’d just arrived from Lovefilm before I set off on my travels – The Magicians and The Lives of Others. Maybe this weekend – could make for a slightly random double bill…

What I listened to
Being in a rather (how can I put this politely?) radio-wave-light area, radio didn’t feature too hugely in my daily audio diet, but I did manage to receive Radio 4 (sort of) when driving across the island yesterday, and used the BBC’s Listen Again to catch up on news from R4.

Musically-speaking, I listened (with my dad) to some Peter Skellern, a lot of Bach, some Ella Fitzgerald and a bunch of 1950s Trinidadian London Calypso and (with my mum) to Julie Fowlis’ excellent Cuilidh album, plus Kate Rusby’s Awkward Annie, among others. On my ipod, I continued to plough my way through the This American Life archives (from about 1999), mainly. I didn’t listen to much music via ipod, really, which is odd for me.

What I surfed
Given that I’ve been away, a lot of my normal surfing patterns were disrupted, and so any surfing fell into two distinct classes: Maintenance (which included Gmail, Twitter, Netvibes and Flickr) and Random Weird Shit (which included ebay searching for sonic mouse deterrents for a friend of mum’s, Nestoria property porn and the official rules of shinty). When I could (and it wasn’t often) I used my phone to keep up with twitter and gmail. I used the web to create, though – both within flickr and for the local community on Mull following the annual Hogmanay Shinty on the beach shenanigans.

….and finally, though this wasn’t in the original meme: What I played
I can’t let an opportunity go by without mentioning Peggle (and specifically, Peggle for iPod) which kept my thumbs occupied for much of the journeying. I also played a lot of cards: Shithead, mostly.

I know I’m supposed to tag someone with this meme, though I don’t want anyone to feel under pressure, especially this early in the year. So, um, feel free to share what you’ve been consuming (if you want), Caroline, Tom, Gordon, Cliff and Wendy. Or don’t. It’s all gravy.

1. Nearly 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.

2. Her reasoning was this:
   • Five items is too short: it feels like there’s not enough content there, or not enough diversity in the items.
   • Ten items is too many to digest in a short time. People don’t have time to go through ten things, mostly.
   • Six feels too arbitary. Like, why six? Did they just run over? It’s like having eleven, or one hundred and two.
   • In the same way, nine feels lacking somewhat. Couldn’t you think of another?
   • Eight is difficult to read. People don’t like the word, for some reason, and besides, it means you can’t used the word “great” afterwards, because it sounds daft.
   • Seven is a natural, friendly number. People are used to sevens, because we work in them all the time – weeks, and so on. You can click through seven items easily.

   So since seven was the magic number, lots of galleries, lists and content was produced which conformed to or was jimmied into a septimal configuration.

3. I’m not sure that this theory necessarily holds water, especially as the appetite for snack-sized, easily-digestible and mildly stimulating content – the web equivalent of those energy bars you can buy at corner shops to give you easy, bland sustenance on-the-go – has grown rapidly in the age of linkbaiting.

   I’ve noticed – as I’m sure you have – the growing trend for listification of web content. Every day on del.icio.us, digg or any of the clones, there’s link after link to web content and blog articles of information which has been sorted into a list order and given a listy headline in order to catch people’s eye.

   • 34 WordPress templates you won’t have seen.
   • 10 reasons to give up chewing tobacco.
   • 8 people you haven’t heard of.

   My favourite so far has been “137 ways to make your life simpler” which I thought was sort of funny, because surely having the lowest possible number of things to do would improve the simplicity of your life?

4. But what decides the number of items in the list? If the number isn’t scientifically or traditionally standardised – 7 days of the week, 24 hours in the day – or enforced by a limited supply of resources – 12 places where you can buy a trilby on a Wednesday, 8 airlines with a shonky safety record, 39,450 people called Algenon – then it seems that the number of items is instead dictated by either
   a) how many items the author could think of or be bothered to find
   b) a nice round or impressive-sounding number (see (1) above)

5. I have another theory about numbers, which is that everyone has numbers which they return to again and again. Not in a 23 sort of way, but because they are familiar in some way. This is often revealed when people exaggerate – I’ve only seen that film, like, fifty-eight times; there were about eighty-seven thousand people on Oxford Street this afternoon….

   I frequently drift back to 87, probably because I lived in a house with that number. Do you have a number like that?

   I’m not suggesting that the number of items in a list are always dictated by a number feeling particularly “right” to the author, but I do think that some numbers feel innately more familiar and pleasing than others, and this tends to be different for each person, with some golden/divine exceptions.

6. Then, of course, there are the omnipresent list programmes which no Saturday night schedule (or repeat-heavy sister-channel) is complete without. Though they may have their roots in the chart countdowns familiar to anyone who’s ever tuned in to their local station at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, finger hovering above the pause button on the tape recorder, such formats have spread like Santa-Ana inspired wildfire over the last decade to every corner of the schedules on radio and TV. Especially TV.

   In fact, you can barely switch on the box of an evening without witnessing a parade of talking heads mithering about why they hate/love [delete as applicable] some item or person or event which has haplessly made it into the countdown.

7. There’s no subject which cannot be listified. Years, events, jokes, music videos, people, places…the list of potential list subjects is, with no irony whatsoever, endless.
8. I want to make a list programme called “100 Greatest Numbers Of All Time”, which would go something like this:
   • First up, at number 100, we’ve got….100! Here’s an interview with Nick Heyward from famed Eighties one-hit wonders Haircut 100 about why this number rocks so hard.
   • Next up, in 99th place, it’s….99! Nena of Eurovision red balloon fame explains the lure of the nines, while Mr Whippy is in the studio to help us understand how the famous icecream snack got its name
   • At 98, it’s…..98! Here’s Stuart Maconie (or is it the other one? Collins?) on why 98 is brilliant.
   • Coming up after the break, we’ll hear from the Fahrenheit regulation board about why you should care about 97, plus The Alarm on why 68 Guns are better than 67. And much more! Don’t touch that dial!

   And so on, all the way down to three (amigos, stooges, blind mice, men in a boat, and someone from De La Soul talking about why it’s the magic number), two (some tango dancers, a couple of twins and an afternoon tea waiter) and, finally, one (Bono, obviously, plus someone from the Marley clan if they’re available).

   Ideally, I’d throw in a few red herrings, for variety. At number 20, we’d have the number 101, for example. Just to keep things interesting, you understand.

   And why not? My list, my decision about what goes where.

9. List-format shows are lazy programme-making, just as, in much the same way, web content in list form can be lazy content-creation. Pick a number. Pick a subject. Collect resources (links, talking heads, examples, etc). Lather, rinse, repeat.

   If there isn’t a good reason for content being in a list format – to make it easier to digest or understand, or to show hierarchical importance, or to explore a finite number of resources – and the list format is just being used in order to create catchy headlines which are digg-friendly, then ultimately, you’re not helping content become better understood or enjoyed. Which is a shame.

   Having said that, if you’re stuck for some content for your site or TV schedule, look no further than this handy list-o-matic generator, which will give you and unlimited* number of digg-friendly headline ideas for content. Delicious linkbait, guaranteed to have the crowds tuning in/clicking in droves**

   
   

   

    

   Try again if you’re not satisfied. And if you get anything particularly good, copy and paste it as a comment….

10. A numbered list makes any content seem more authoritative, even when it isn’t – as if there’s design in the ordering of things, when (mostly) there is none. Fact.

That being said, I make lists all the time. I’m not saying they’re bad, just that there’s a lot of tosh about.

* not mathematically true
** unenforceable by law

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, as with all pleasant things, after the initial hook, I want to gorge myself on it until I can’t take any more or the supply runs out, whichever comes first. And, thanks to DVD sales and various other marvellous technologies, it’s now possible to do exactly that.

However, it’s not quite that straightforward.

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A 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 concept
b) keep the basic format, but substitute the focal aspect

Hey presto, new programmes! You’ve already got the sets, too (not that anyone uses sets anymore…), not to mention the ‘talent’.

Like a monkey with a typewriter, simply hit the big shiny button below and – hey presto – eventually you might find the highly derivative televisual concept the world’s been waiting for!

Your show pitch concept will appear in the box beneath. Simply copy, paste, get a prime-time slot scheduled and await your inevitable promotion. (NB: may not work in non-Firefox browsers)
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Attention 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 programming which has proved so successful in the past (if the broadcast schedules are anything to go by), and turned it into a simple formula:

Proper Noun (Possessive) + Superlative + Plural Noun

Simply hit the link below and – hey presto – highly derivative televisual concepts a-go-go! Your show title will appear in the box beneath. Simply copy, paste, find some “edgy” music for the titles, get a voice-over from Ross Kemp and you’re sorted.

 

Try again if you’re not satisfied. Or, maybe try commissioning something good, for a change?