The Archers

I have a fond childhood memory where I’m sitting in my grandparents living room on a Sunday - watching television sitting in front of my grandads chair while he pokes the TV with a big stick to change the channel - his remote control.

Then the clock would turn and he would dissapear into the kitchen and the radio would sound “Dum di dum di dum di dum dum di dum di dum dum” and the Archers would start.

A while later he would come out of the kitchen with something really nice to eat, kick me out of his chair and change the channel with his big stick.

I’ve never liked The Archers, I tried listening to it but it always bored me silly. Silly in much the same way that I can’t stand Coronation Street or Eastenders.

I’ve never lived in the country and I’ve never much liked the country either - I suffer from Hayfever and am allergic to animal hair - so listening to a programme full of people speaking with stereotypical farmer type accents talking about things that either don’t concern me or I can’t be arsed with.

So when I saw the Archers podcast in the top five on iTunes podcast list - I was struck with two emotions - fondess for the memory of my grandad on one hand and complete indiference for the dull nonsense that the programme actually is.

So I downloaded it - listened to the theme tune and skipped to the next song in my podcast.

But I still want to say thanks for the Archers as a podcast and I love the fact that such a stalwart of ‘old BBC’ is in the top five podcasts on iTunes - just goes to show Podcasting really is the fourth media.

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Where are the British shows?

DoctorVee had yet another interesting post, the last non-F1 post about television - specifically the new channels that are popping up and leaving every couple of days.

ABC1 has left and in its place we have DAVE (UKTVG2) and Virgin1 (FTN on steroids). The point Duncan made was that, although its nice to have these new high profile channels - why are they much of the same.

Dave is basically BBC TWO 2 - or what BBC THREE should really be - the best of the best BBC blokes content. It has everything from Top Gear to QI with a bit of Question of Sport (unfortunately) and Who’s line is it anyway.

UKTVG2 was by far one of my most favourite digital channels and Dave is an extension of that - apart from Question of Bollocks the channel is as good if not better than before.

But it IS just a repeats channel - it shows things that have been on before - I personally love this as I enjoy watching my favourite shows again - but it isn’t contributing to the British Media Industry in terms of new productions and commissions.

So Virgin1 - new channel from a major company, the owner of the UKs main Cable Television network and other major TV channels showing US imports (Living, Bravo) and part owner of the UKTV Channels (including Dave).

I had high hopes that a Channel with that calibre and with such a British Brand behind it - might contribute to British production levels - but no.

It’s full of American imports - its a Sky One clone - it’s basically what Sky Two would be with a bigger budget and more of an independent emphasis (not just a throw off channel for Sky One).

Which brings me to Sky One - I don’t expect much from Sky - it’s a multinational company that has always positioned itself as the place for big American shows - but they could do better.

They are making an effort but the UK shows they commission tend to be in the realm of reality television - which isn’t really contributing to the whole - drama/comedy/creative production industry is it.

I don’t expect anything to be done - we have the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 for commissioning and spending on original British drama, comedy and scripted shows - but it doesn’t change the fact that it would be good for Britain if channels broadcasting in Britain spent money on British talent and productions.

Sky have done it before - things like Mile High and Time Gentlemen Please have both come from Sky One originally - why can’t that carry on - why can’t it happen all the time.

If Sky or Virgin spent some of the money they would have given to American production companies on new British productions - say four big shows a season - then that would make the world of difference.

Of all the British networks there seems to be no more than about 8 or 9 shows per season (autumn, winter, summer, spring) that are worth their salt.

We’re a creative nation - we should be doing better than this.

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Not to adblock?

Every time I read the comments under a story, Digg post or forum thread that has even a small mention of adverts on web pages there is always at least one, but often MANY MORE, posts from people saying “I never see adverts” or “I use AdBlock so it doesn’t bother me” or annoyingly “what ads?”.

I can sympaphise with people that block ads, some websites go well over the top with the flashy, noisy, introcive banners and other sites aren’t using particularly trustworthy ad servers - so you could end up with all sorts of crap loaded on to your computer if you’re not careful.

But there is another side to this as well. I don’t normally contribute to threads about adverts on websites because my point of view seems to be the polar opposite of many others.

If you read some of these threads you get the feeling that they think everything should be free, there should be no adverts and they shouldn’t have to do anything to get what they want.

Content isn’t free though - ok it might appear to come online for nothing - this blog for instance doesn’t cost you a sausage and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to pay to read my ramblings - but it still costs me to host it, the domain name costs money and although I do it for passion - it still costs time to produce.

The same applies to other sites, especially newspapers and magazines where the content is written by professional writers who need to be paid, has heavy bandwidth that costs a small fortune and often includes images that have rights costs associated with them.

With this in mind I posted this simple comment to a thread on a message board about adverts on a popular magazine website recently “I don’t mean to sound harsh or anything but don’t you feel guilty about using adblock?”

My argument FOR leaving AdBlock off is a simple one - its the ads that cover the costs of running the website - it’s been made fairly clear that people aren’t prepared to pay for content online so the advertising model has been flourishing as a way of covering the costs of paying journalists, bandwidth bills etc.

At the moment not enough people use adblock for it to matter but if it does spread and nobody is seeing ads - do you think content on sites like topgear.com or guardian.co.uk will stay free for long?

I personally make a point of looking at ads on a site and if it interests me - clicking on the ad - after all - if I’ve enjoyed the content provided by that site - for free - then I think I owe them a little of my time in return.

If a website doesn’t get enough money to cover costs it will be forced to drop staff or cut services - nobody wants to see that from a site they enjoy.

Also - with advertising revenue and sales dropping through the floor in the traditional newspaper business - online revenue is going to become ever more important - that means showing adverts.

Good quality content doesn’t come cheap. Top writers charge a lot of money for their words, great photographers go to great legnths to get the photo and expect to be rewarded - musicians deserve some reward for their craft, talent and art - and so do film makers.

If everybody had the same attitude as some on forums, comments etc then nothing would get made. I do think we pay too much for some content - £15 for a DVD when it first comes out is rediculous - especially as the creatives behind the film see very little of the profit made in the end - Music is even more of a telling tale with most of the money going to the labels.

But we’re starting to break free from that now - musicians are releasing their own music and getting more of the final profit - indie films are becomming more popular and finding wider markets and soon we’ll see authors doing much the same.

Back to websites - A question I was wondering was “would you pay a monthly subscription for your favourite website in order to have the adverts turned off?”

For example - its very likely that people outside the UK are going to start seeing adverts across bbc.co.uk soon - the idea being that with half of the sites users coming from outside the UK, or people that don’t pay the licence fee that covers the sites costs - those people should contribute something.

Would you pay a monthly subscription of, say $5 to be able to view everything on bbc.co.uk without adverts?

Another question I was thinking about was “If a way was found for sites to be able to block access to anyone with AdBlock enabled - would you disable adblock to view the site or stop using it completely?”

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Watching the Rugger

I’m not much of a sports fan and if you ever see me in person you’ll guess that straight away - but I do enjoy watching rugby every now and then - partly because I played it a little while at school but mainly because it IS fun to watch.

Unlike football which is just a bunch of blokes running up and down a field chasing after a bit of of circular leather.

With rugby something is happening most of the time and, although the game is more violent than football, it’s still a considerable amount more civilised.

In fact how does the quote go “football is a gentleman’s sport played by thugs whereas rugby is a thugs sport played by gentlemen”.

And I think this comes in no small part with thanks to the brilliant rugby referees who aren’t as far up their own arses as most football refs.

In fact, and I’m worried about posting this link in case you think this blog is a Clarkson love-fest - but he has said just the right thing again.

He says of rugby referes “instead of wading into the melee and showering the participants with red cards, simply asks everyone to calm down, pauses while the more badly injured have their noses and ears sewn back on, and then restarts the game.”

And makes the most brilliant comment about football referees I’ve ever read - much better than “where’s your glasses ref” or “the referees a wanker” that you get on football terraces.

Clarkson says in his Sunday Times Column: “Compare this attitude with the homosexual nonsense we see in football. Flick someone’s earlobe in a game of football and some jumped-up little gnome, sweating like a rapist, will mince over and order you off the pitch.”

I just loved the idea of football refs as jumped-up little gnomes. He also describes them as hiding “behind meaningless day jobs in PC World, emerging only on a Saturday like a troop of SuperNazis with their too-tight Hitler Youth shorts and their silly whistles.”

The only thing I know is - I’m watching the rugby this Saturday and, yes I hope England win, but if they don’t I’ll still be celebrating.

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Clarkson is top wit, Dave!

At the start of the year I wrote a blog post called “The Big Guns” - the goal of the post was to try and find the one person in a series of areas of expertise that I would most like to have write for my dream magazine.

The list I came up with (so far) included:

Stephen Fry on EVERYTHING because he is GOD!
Charlie Brooker on TV
Jeremy Clarkson on Cars
Mark Kermode on Film
Jeremy Paxman on News
Marcus Brigstocke on Society
Bill Thompson on New Media
David Attenborough on Animals
Boris Johnson on Classical History
Dick Strawbridge on Scrap Heap Goodness
Dan Cruickshank on Buildings and their History.

Anyway - a similar list has been created to mark the launch of the new digital television channel - Dave!

Forget the list - that is the most inspired name in the history of television - I love the fact that I can now say “my favourite channel is Dave”, “I’m in love with Dave” or “yeah I sit in my pants and watch Dave all the time”

It isn’t really a new channel though - it’s basically UKTV G2 renamed, rebadged and redesigned but it is SUCH an inspired decision.

Dave is a brilliant name for a channel that shows things like A Question Of Sport, Car Duels, Little Britain, Never Mind The Buzzcocks, QI, Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival, Street Cred Sudoku, The Fast Show, The Catherine Tate Show, The Mighty Boosh, They Think It’s All Over, Top Gear, Totally Viral and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps.

That crop of shows and the people that present them just scream “mate down the pub”, it’s capturing its audience and shoving the right name in their face.

In fact a comment on the Metro website story about the top ten wits says it all.

My mate Dave is much wittier than any of these. Man, he said something really funny yesterday. Cant remember it now - but it was really funny.

Here are the top ten wits according to the 2000 or so people polled by Dave.

1. Oscar Wilde
2. Spike Milligan
3. Stephen Fry
4. Jeremy Clarkson
5. Sir Winston Churchill
6. Paul Merton
7. Noel Coward
8. Shakespeare
9. Brian Clough
10. Liam Gallagher

According to the Metro - more than half of the people surveyed thought men wittier than women as they are better at delivering one liners - women tended to be more sarcastic apparently.

Steven North, the head of the new TV channel Dave, said: “Witty banter is an everyday staple of life in Britain that is undoubtedly essential in helping us deal with all the ups and downs.”

To right - I like Steve - good bloke.

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Old Time Radio

I was having a discussion with my boss the other day and he was telling me about Old Time Radio or radio shows that have entered the public domain, mainly due to American Radio Networks not registering copyright in the 1950s/60s.

When I got back from the pub I decided to have a look and see if I could actually find any for download online - I found a couple of really good sites with a massive collection of OTR shows - and some brilliant SciFi.

These shows are from the heyday of American Radio - in the bit before television took over and a big radio drama could attract many millions of listeners for each show.

There are also several well known British shows available through the OTR networks as well - this is a brilliant way to take a step back in time, enjoy some brilliantly produced audio productions and learn a little about our media heritage at the same time.

When you add the OTD sites to the British Library and its goal of adding out of print books, newspaper articles and pamphlets to their website for people to read, Google and their book scanning goals and the BBC Archive and you’ve got a great set of resources for 1) going back in time and looking at media history, 2) getting some fab free content and 3) researching modern history.

The OTR and BBC Archive stuff are also brilliant ways to hear the evolution of the English language and accents over the last half century or so.

The OTR stuff is primarily up as mp3s as well so you could probably produce some pretty good podcasts using the content - won’t cost anything either.

Check out:
OTR.com
OTR.net
BBC Archive
British Library

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Peggy is Scotty

Sometimes you read things and have to make a double take and then read the whole thing again - then you still have no idea what its all about and need to go and find somewhere else on the web saying the same thing.

Thats just happened to me - apparently Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg, is to play Scotty in the new Star Trek film set to start filming next month and be released on Christmas Day 2008 - huh?

I know I’ve been out of it for a while - a little pre-occupied with the exploits of Aunty Beeb but surely the announcement of a new Star Trek movie wouldn’t pass me buy completely? Well it looks like it has.

Star Trek 11 is set to be produced by JJ Abrams and was announced in April 2006 - god I’m well out of it when it comes to American Sci-Fi!

It looks like its going to be based on the ‘original’ Star Trek from the 60s and not the Next Generation as it features Kirk, Spock, Bones and abviously Scotty.

Kirk isn’t confirmed but the latest rumour has Chris Pine playing the legendary Starfleet Captain. Um… Chris who? Apparently he has something to do with Lynsey Lohan - or at least one of her films which doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

Other casting news will see two actors playing Spock - the real Spock, Leonard Nimoy will play an older version of the Vulcan and the brilliant Zachary Quinto, Sylar in Heroes, will play the younger Spock.

I’m excited and pretty impressed that the producers, with the promise of a budget in excess of $100 million have resisted the urge to go for a big name like Matt Damon for the main role.

The original Star Trek didn’t go for the big names (probably because it couldn’t afford them) but instead went with actors that ‘fit’ the part - and now this seems to be doing the same thing.

Although I’m not 100% sure about Pegg as Scotty - surely it should got to a Scot? What about David Tennant or even the increasingly brilliant James McAvoy - he could do the straight role but add elements of comic tragedy as well. I imagine Pegg would be the opposite - Comic drama with elements of tragedy - but I might be wrong.

More on Chris Pine from the Guardian.

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Top Gear is back

Sorry posting has been a bit thin on the ground recently - three reasons for this 1) Mad busy at work with the Jersey Marathon (thousands of photos and HOURS of video to sort through) 2) Top Gear is back and I’ve been hitting the Final Gear Forums pretty hard and 3) I’ve been trying to write my own theme for Up Your Ego from scratch after not finding a theme that did exactly what I want.

Well I’m more or less finished with 1 and 2 will be on going for the next nine weeks (what’s left of the Top Gear run) which just leaves 3 - I’ve made a start on photoshop mocks but haven’t started writing the code yet.

So lets go back to two - Top Gear being back and me hitting the forums - I’m a big Top Gear fan, as are many other people, and usually I wouldn’t bother you with it as it isn’t really new media related but this year it is.

As well as the 60 minutes of television every week and a magazine every month - this series the topgear.com website is going to be posting a mass of related media.

Content that would normally be available from the BBC site related to a show but this time is going on the related commercial offering instead.

There are weekly blog posts from one or more of the stars of the show - Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Andy Wilman - they did ask the Stig but he just sent a blank page.

There are also video clips from the main show - these come in the form of extended versions of the news segment (normally relatively restrained if slightly ranty - well in the extended version we get it in its raw, sweary splendour.

There are also preview clips for the next episode and a lot more beside. BBC Worldwide recently committed a big chunck of money to investment in New Media products and it looks like topgear.com is getting some of that money.

Now all it needs to do is move away from the BBC standards of Real and Windows Media and develop a flash based video player (where you can order clips, create a playlist and share embed links) and it will be spot on.

In fact the BBC are already starting to introduce elements of this sort of feature on bbc.co.uk. Most recently with the new Nature portal - that combines a Google type map with flash based video, tagging and other web2 goodness.

Actually Nature of Britain really is a stunning site, a real example of some of the ground breaking, forward thinking work the BBC New Media and BBC2.0 teams are getting up to - I’ll write a post on this site later.

In the meantime check out Nature of Britain >

So my review of episode one of Top Gear series 10 (this was my first reaction as posted to finalgear.com within a few hours of the show finishing - I was working at the time sorting though thousands of photos of marathon runners and eating a very nice three cheese pizza.

Really incredible episode .

I know I’ve said in the past that I only really like the mucking about and not so much the car stuff but after re-watching series 9 - I now admit I was wrong - Top Gear lost a bit of its soul in the last series - this episode saw it come flooding back.

A real gem of an episode in what looks set to be a perfectly balanced series featuring a great group of guys with a geniune love of cars, each other and have a laugh.

Top notch and beautifuly shot - as always.

And here is the comment I sent to Top Gear supreme, Andy Wilman, in response to his blog post about the future of Top Gear - he ponders on whether to chase ratings and go for the quirky challenges or stay true to their petrol head roots and settle on fewer ratings but feel better about the content.

I think you had the right mix in Series 7 and 8 - a bit of cocking about in ever few episodes and then good, funny films featuring cars - mixed with a few reviews of over the top, outlandish cars very few people could ever afford.

I don’t drive - never saw the point when everywhere I need to be can be walked to (I live in Jersey, Channel Islands - although we have thousands of supercars you can only do 40 anywhere), I’m not a big car person - never found them interested - but Top Gear draws me in by immersing me in the friendship of the three lads and teaches me something about cars at the same time.

I think, over the last few years of watching the show I’ve developed a ‘respect’ for cars and people that find them sexy - and thats down to TG.

I even get the mag now.

What do you think of Top Gear and the new series? Should they go for ratings and give it big on the challenges or concentrate on car based stuff but get fewer ratings?

So far it looks like they’ve gone for a middle ground - some episodes will be challenge based and others will be car based but even the challenges are very car based and with a sort of point.

Also they seem to have done well with ratings too - getting 6 million with the first airing on Sunday and 2.5 million with the repeat on Wednesday - down from the average 8 million last series but that was a blip anyway due to Hammonds crash - so a good half way all around.

Here’s my ratings round up for Top Gear on Sunday:

Top Gear - 6 million and 23.3% share.

Same time on BBC One - Antiques Roadshow 5.7 million and 22% share

Same time on ITV1 - Rugby World Cup - 4.8 million and 19.3% share

Same time on Channel 4 - Wife Swap - 1.9 million and 7.3% share

Same time on Channel 5 - End of For a few dollars more - 1.6 million and 6.6% share

Highest viewing figures of the night - XFactor (ITV1) 7.4 million and 31.6% share.

Second highest Strictly Come Dancing (BBC One) 6.8 million and 29.3% share.

Third highest was the 19:30 news on BBC One (6.4 million - 26.6% share).

Fourth was a tie between BBC News at 10, Michael Palin’s New Europe and Top Gear with 6 million and 23.3% share.

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Kerplunk to go to Five

One of the closest things Britain has to the American news megastar - the god awful Natasha Kerplunk - is to leave the BBC for Five after five years terrorising the BBC.

Finally we can put an end to stories like “There was a lightblub blown in the TV Centre Newsroom for six months - it couldn’t be fixed until Natasha Kaplinsky was available to cut the ribbon that opened the ladder.”

The sharp faced news personality, who seemed to manage to get her mug everywhere, all the time - is to head to Five in 2008 where she will front their main news programme - and in turn probably be EVERYWHERE across five, five life and five US.

In a statement, Kaplinsky said: “After five incredibly rewarding years at the BBC, I found the chance to work with the team at Five too exciting to pass up. Chris Shaw has an unrivalled track record in reinventing television news and I already know how talented Jay Hunt and David Kermode are, having worked with them at the BBC. Five has changed the face of news before, and now they’re going to do it again. I can’t wait to be a part of it.”

She will be replacing Kirsty Young who left Five News to join … the BBC!

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