Category Archives: Media

I’ve said before that I think Harry Hill’s TV Burp is just about the only thing worth watching on ITV these days. Do you watch it? Only wondering, you see, because it seems that the advertising agencies of the nation can’t think anyone does. Over the weekend the ad-break for TV Burp consisted entirely of promotions for other ITV programmes; plenty of Dancing On Ice and Jane Austen, even Elton John’s Birthday Party FFS, but nothing about soap powder or even tea bags. I find it bizarre; when even the lamest programme at any hour on Ftn seems able to fill its breaks with proper adverts I can’t figure out why the best programme on the most popular commercial channel can’t pay its way. Whether it is down to ITV, the advertising agencies, or the lumpen skulls of the great British public I cannot tell.

Presumably Harry Hill has hitherto been subsidised by other areas of ITV’s programming, such as the profits from ITV Play; in which case I think I have found the only reason to lament the station’s demise following the recent scandals over faked phone-ins on TV. If the removal of the channel does coincide with TV Burp’s demise then I may have to rethink my attitude to crap like The Mint.

It is a strange business this whole palaver over the phone-in competitions. I don’t actually see much of a problem with the ITV Play / Quiz Call type of phone-in; calling in for such shows seems such a transparent waste of money that with perhaps a tweak or two I don’t see why they can’t continue to offer a service to those people with more money than sense who really should know better but apparently don’t. On the other hand the Richard & Judy / Saturday Kitchen type incidents, where people were asked to phone in for quizzes they had no chance of winning, is a different matter altogether; words fail, although a word called “fraud” will probably do.

The Blue Peter incident, I think, is especially telling. In that instance, when faced with a technical fault on the competition’s phone lines, the producer continued to allow calls to be accepted and charged for and roped in a child who was on a studio visit to pretend to phone in and so “win” the prize, maintaining the appearance of a genuine phone-in. Astonishing behaviour indeed; you or I, if put in the producer’s shoes, would no doubt just apologise for the fault and cancel the phone-in. That the real life TV producers didn’t do this, and that they seemingly didn’t consider there to be anything wrong and/or illegal in taking the action they took, I think shows how so much of television is artifice in the first place; that producers and programme makers so routinely twist and bend the dull truth into a convenient and palatable reality that it didn’t occur to them that they were overstepping the line on this occasion.

But I think the real shocker here is that this is not the first of Blue Peter’s deceptions. On a news story last week it was revealed that in the ‘sixties the original pet dog Petra died after a few days and was secretly replaced with another puppy without informing the viewers. This came as a body blow to me. I remember that when Petra (or should that be the replacement Petra) died Blue Peter informed viewers that they could send off for a free colour photograph of the dog, and for some reason my parents insisted I write in. Eventually we received our photo, only it was in black and white, not colour, and with a note attached apologising and explaining that they had run out of colour prints. Run out? How odd it seems in this day and age; when digital photos can be printed on demand it sounds a poor excuse to say you just “ran out” of colour photos. But even at the time; what happened to the original colour negative? Did someone stand on it? Did they just print a load off and chuck the negative in the bin? Surely they could have gone down to SupaSnaps and got a few more printed off, even in the ‘seventies? But apparently not.

Anyway, I can now clearly see that the upshot of the whole tawdry affair is that I ended up with a substandard photo of an impostor I didn’t even care for in the first place. I liked Shep.

Antony Worrall Thompson today hit out at those who have recently questioned the integrity of his ITV1 programme Saturday Cooks Live, and its spin offs, Daily Cooks and Christmas Cooks, following the criticism that for a show that pretends to be about promoting innovative and inventive culinary ideas, being sponsored by McCain Oven Chips makes it look a little bit silly.

Speaking from his home in Oxfordshire, Worrall Thompson retorted

We have nothing to apologise for. McCain insist on using only the finest quality Maris Piper potatoes in their Oven Chips. They are low in salt, sugar and saturated fat – a boon in these health conscious times – and are the perfect accompaniment to Chicken Dippers and Pizza Fingers. Or why not try them in a sliced pain rustique along with just a light sprinkling of Cayman Island sea salt and a splash of 15-year-old balsamico di Modena?

Once we had stopped our tape recorder, Mr Worrall Thompson continued

What the fuck was that all about, eh? Why is it always me you get stuck into? You never go after Gordon Ramsay do you? Oh no, because he’s a “real chef”, while I’m just a “celebrity chef”. Oh really. For Christ’s sake he’s on telly more often than I am! You’ve not had a pop at him for advertising Thresher have you? No, it’s always Wozzer that gets it in the neck. I mean; Thresher, for fucks sake. Talk about falling between two stools, stuck in no-man’s land between Oddbins and Bargain Booze, with Tesco doing the same only better and cheaper and open 24 hours a day. “Wines you can swear by”. Oh that’s clever isn’t it? Well I can swear too. Damn right I can. Cockflaps! There you go, that’s a swear word I’ve just invented. Cockflaps! It’s pathetic. I know the media are always going to be more interested in megastars like that blogger Guido Fawkes or whatever his name is, but on the quiet lesser celebrities like Gordon Ramsay are just as big hypocrites but get a free pass from you lot because they’re not as famous. I tell you, he gets away with murder.

It is believed that McCain fought off stiff competition from both Bachelor’s Super Noodles and Campbell’s Meatballs for the deal to sponsor Saturday Cooks Live. Rumours that Bernard Matthews was interested in using the sponsorship to relaunch their Turkey Twizzler brand could not be confirmed. We did try to contact them but their phone line was continually engaged and does not accept BT RingBack.

This is the second sponsorship row ITV has been involved with in recent weeks. Their genealogy programme “You Don’t Know You’re Born” was criticised as being little more than a piss-poor rip off of the rival BBC show “Who Do You Think You Are?” and simply a sorry excuse to publicise Genes Reunited, the programme’s sponsor and a division of Friends Reunited which ITV recently bought for £120m. On that occasion ITV defended itself robustly, stating that before the show was broadcast their lawyers had assured them that the format, credits and music for the show, while being almost identical to the BBC version, where technically different enough to be “just this side of legal”, so that although it was “as plain as day” what they were up to, the chance of being sued for a copyright infringement was “really quite slim”.

A few months ago I wrote about the “pull economy”, or more specifically about Lulu; a self-publishing website where you are able to upload your novel or whatever to their server, and if (perhaps a big “if”) someone wants to purchase a copy it can be printed off on demand and shipped out to your Mum, or whoever has actually stumped up the hard cash for the book.

Fine for self-publishing I thought, but I went on to wonder if

it could also show the way forward for more general book publishing in the future. For as long as people like me enjoy browsing in bookshops then I imagine there will always be a need for long print runs in order to fill up all those shelves in the stores; but on the face of it I can see no reason why a company like Amazon will in future need to hold any stock at all if technology is able to allow each book to be printed on demand as and when a customer orders it. In addition, theoretically no book need ever be out of print again, indeed the very term “out of print” could become an anachronism; just so long as they are held on file somewhere ready to be printed then all books, no matter how old or obscure, could be available whenever a potential customer wants to buy a copy.

Well, yesterday I read an article in The Economist concerning the future of Amazon.com. What do you know but towards the end of the article it states that

Amazon subsidiary, BookSurge, is busy courting publishers to have their works scanned into digital files. Modern printing techniques allow books to be printed relatively cheaply on demand, “whether it’s one copy or one thousand”, Greg Greeley, head of media products at Amazon, said when BookSurge was acquired last April.

On-demand printing is particularly suited to lower-volume books and those that would ordinarily be “out of print”. Amazon already sells print-on-demand books, although that is “invisible” to consumers, Mr Bezos (Amazon’s CEO) has said, because they look exactly like any other books.

That’ll be me then; speculating and dreaming of a bold and exiting future, while unwittingly already being way behind the curve. There’s clearly a reason why I’m not in business.

PostScript: Yes, I know, I know. I will try to stop writing posts concerning week old Economist articles; but if you ever wanted this blog to be innovative and topical then I’m sure you would have abandoned me long ago. I hope the fact that you’re still here means that you know what you’re getting.

So, are we all geared up for the stunning denouement to the latest series of Doctor Who tonight?
Yes, hide behind your sofa; the pulse is racing, heart pounding as we head towards the final episode and something we long feared comes to pass, a terrifying and frightening possibility – something we hoped would and could never happen – becomes a horrific reality, somehow crossing from another dimension into our own.

No, not the Daleks and the Cybermen joining forces – together at last – but the return of Mickey, AKA Noel Clarke once more hawking his questionable acting talents around national television; first witnessed in the later series of Auf Wiedesehen Pet (now there was proof of the law of diminishing returns) and now in far far too many episodes of the new Doctor Who.

To think I wasted good energy cheering when he was apparently stranded for eternity in a parallel universe a couple of episodes back. Never mind; let’s get on with it. Do your worst.

A relieved cheer went up over the Quinn household last night as Syed was finally fired from The Apprentice. A few weeks ago I said I expected Sharon and Tuan to be the next ones to be sacked and expressed the concern that Syed would win the thing; in the event I was spot on about the first two but by last week I had changed my mind about Syed. We never saw his redemption as predicted by Heat magazine’s Mark Frith, but up against Ruth and Tuan in last week’s boardroom I thought I could see the writing on the wall. Syed could survive against a nonentity like Taun, but head to head against someone of Ruth’s calibre and I couldn’t see him staying, and that is how events turned out.

Week by week Syed revealed himself to be an empty vessel. His main talent, as far as I could discern, was an incompetence verging on the illegal; by not collecting the right keys when letting a flat, to claiming a car would increase in value when selling to a customer, to forgetting to write the contestant’s names on the backs of raffle tickets he had sold and then considering not entering those tickets into the draw when he realised his mistake (or rather when Ruth pointed it out to him). The only thing that Syed could say in his favour was that he was a good salesman, but even there I found him unconvincing and amateurish; only his ludicrous self-confidence helped him out, forcing him to keep going well past the point where I would have thrown in the towel, and so enabling him to get sales more by persistence and the law of averages than by genuine ability. Such perseverance is valuable, but I think it can only get you so far.

But enough about Syed; I imagine that, beyond a brief stint on the Z-list celebrity circuit we have seen the last of him and we can allow him to get down to honing his “genius”, as he intoned straight faced on last nights “The Apprentice: You’re Fired”. Two weeks left to go on The Apprentice then, and if there is any justice it will be Paul and Ruth in the final. Michelle seems like a little girl, out of her depth and lucky to be there largely by dint of having ended up on the winning side a good few times. Ansell is a bit of a wild card; he quietly gets on with things and doesn’t do much wrong so it depends upon how he does in his interview, but for me the Tulip and the Badger are the standout candidates.

When I first wrote about The Apprentice I was pretty scathing about the lot of them, damning them all and tarring each contestant with the same “business idiot” brush. Now, however, I have a lot more time and respect for Ansell, Ruth and Paul and I would be happy if any of them won, although by rights I think it should be Ruth. So The Apprentice has also been a valuable lesson for me in looking beneath the obvious, beyond my own prejudices and in judging each person as an individual. It has also boosted my readership considerably (although I doubt it will last), thanks to this link and to the numerous people searching Google for “syed apprentice” who have come this way. This post should keep that hit counter ticking along nicely thank you very much; sorry to anyone who feels I have wasted their time.

I don’t, if I’m being honest, usually if ever watch BBC1′s offering New Tricks of a Monday night, but readjusting to British Summer Time following a weekend away in New York it was the perfect brainless nonsense to ignore while I tried to work out what time it was in the Big Apple and therefore if I was justified in feeling as tired as I did.

It wasn’t great, but it was at least an improvement on what I’d seen of American telly (24 hour news whingeing about gas prices for 24 hours) and the unwatchable BBC America (can you believe four hours of back to back Cash In The Attic interspersed with adverts for Footballers Wive$ on Saturday evening as we were getting ready to go out?).

Yes, New Tricks seemed the perfect sort of rubbish to switch your brain off to, only I couldn’t relax because I was transfixed by Dennis Waterman’s lower face. Even when he wasn’t on screen all I could think of was the way he seemed to be struggling around his mouth furniture, as he had apparently transmogrified in front of my eyes into the vicar from Dick Emery.

In fact, with this in mind, perhaps New Teeth would be a more apt title for this series?

PostScript: You will be as disappointed as me to learn that, according to the New Tricks website

The theme tune, sung by Dennis Waterman, is not commercially available, and there are no plans for it to be released.

This is upsetting. If Dennis Waterman is still so deluded, post Little Britain, that he has talents as a singer, then the least he can do is to release the song as a single and test himself in the marketplace. Perhaps he fears the customer is a little more discerning in 2006 compared with his glory days of the ‘Eighties.

PostPostScript: My foreign jaunt explains in part my failure to cover the continuing tale of Charles Clarke, but only so far, as there seems little point in me engaging in a bit of belated “me too” blogging when I have nothing to add except the obvious and many others have said all that needs to be said on the matter(s). No, this is the place for irrelevant twaddle about actors’ false teeth. Next week, when Tony Blair is arrested for a public order offence and put on an ASBO I will probably be talking about Jonathan Ross’s haircut. Stay tuned.

Jimmy McGovern was interviewed in last weekend’s Knowledge section of The Times, where he discussed his forthcoming drama series The Street which starts this Thursday.

The idea for The Street has been percolating inside McGovern’s head for years, loosely based on the street where he grew up in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the fifth of nine children of a betting shop manager and did not speak properly until he was 8, and then with a stutter.

All the writers are Scousers but McGovern did not want the dramas to be filmed in Liverpool, so tired is he of Liverpudlians complaining that they are portrayed in a bad light, so it was made in Manchester. McGovern believes it’s a “f***ing shame” that people here are so sensitive. “I’m sick of it. Every Cracker I’ve done has been based in Manchester. I’ve filled Manchester full of psychopaths, but no one there complains.”

Which I suppose could suggest a couple of things. Perhaps it is evidence that there is something in the claim that many Liverpudlians exhibit a chippy siege mentality, a persecution complex of the sort that Boris Johnson (or was it Simon Heffer?) was referring to in that infamous Spectator editorial that followed Ken Bigley’s murder.

Alternatively, it could show that Mancunians are a more dour and depressive lot, that they are just more grimly accepting of the fact that theirs is a city riddled with sickos and psychos and that they simply get on with it.

Or it could illustrate a combinations of both of these points, or none of the above, or something else entirely. I dunno.