Posted by: RFM on: November 12, 2009
“The BBC would say, ‘You should get Professor Suchabody on talking about the environment’ and we would go, ‘F**k off, he can have the Ten O’Clock News’. Do the Two Fat Ladies say,’And if you want to have a low-fat version of this recipe you can use single cream’? They never do. They go, ‘Pile [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 26, 2009
It’s the new benchmark for unwatchable TV, and – as Brooker points out – it counts as a NEWS programme (produced by Sky News, natch) for Five.
In short: this is quite a stupid programme. It's hosted by Messenger, Ian Wright and Kate “The Apprentice” Walsh. Inoffensive in isolation, once combined they demonstrate the sort of [...]
Posted by: RFM on: June 15, 2009
Media Guardian carries the news that Primeval has been dropped by ITV. As a cheap substitute for Doctor Who, Primeval did its best to capture that Saturday evening family audience, but with half the original cast missing and an obviously slashed special effects budget, the last series struggled.
It still managed over 5 million viewers, but [...]
Posted by: RFM on: June 15, 2009
Peter Sissons, 66, is retiring from the BBC. Before leaving, he has a(nother) go at the trend towards eye candy young and good looking news presenters. Sissons quits with a final swipe at ‘pretty’ presenters – The Independent.
He also attacked what he called “wannabe” presenters with no frontline reporting experience. “The world is stuffed with [...]
Posted by: RFM on: April 7, 2009
Victoria Derbyshire’s phone-in on 5 Live (hopefully that’s a link to the listen-again version) this morning included an interesting discussion of the recent EastEnders plotline about Danielle/Amy and Ronnie Mitchell, and Danielle’s attempts to let Ronnie know that she was the baby she’d given up for adoption sixteen years ago.
One thing soaps can do well [...]
Posted by: RFM on: April 2, 2009
Gareth McLean, writing in (on?) The Guardian’s TV blog asks whether TV drama is too metropolitan and middle class?. Snip:
In farming out drama money to the nations and regions, is the BBC, under misguided pressure from Ofcom, doing anything more than ticking boxes to fulfil regional quotas?
Just as the BBC is (or at least appears [...]
Posted by: RFM on: March 3, 2009
Via BoingBoing, the latest in a long line of predictions of the death of TV, this one from Paul Graham: Why TV Lost.
When I was a student, I worked as an iMac demonstrator in PC World for a while, and the manager would bore me with his opinions about the future of computers: convergence, he [...]
Posted by: RFM on: February 25, 2009
Here’s a potentially huge story:
via ITV proposes merger with Channel 4 and Five to create broadcasting giant.
ITV are about to announce really bad results. Channel 4 is struggling. Five is more or less where it was 10 years ago, with a tiny audience share, but the average person only watches Five for an hour and [...]
