Recently in TV Category

Further proof that BBC Four is the best channel in the UK comes through a series of excellent programmes that have been on-air this week:

- Storyville had YouTube Hero: The Winnebego Man starting briefly with the stories on people who made it "big" on YouTube, but highlighting the story of Jack Rebney who shot to fame via an outtakes tape from an "industrial film" (i.e. corporate film) detailing the features of said range of camper vans. It's really worth watching.

- Upgrade Me with Simon Armitage is a timely repeat of a documentary from a year ago in which the poet and gadget fan examines why we feel the need to upgrade all the time. It's not a perfect film, but I found it worthwhile after my little piece the other day, and coming on the day that Apple releases its new range of music products (of which more anon).

- I'll happily watch just about anything on climbing or mountaineering. At the weekend we had the excellent Great Climb on BBC Two Scotland (watchable via Sky) and BBC HD. Watch the sequence about 23 minutes in. And then BBC Four tonight had The Eiger: Wall of Death.

- More or Less is back on Radio 4. If you're not already, you should be subscribing to their podcast.

- I enjoyed Legacy on Radio 7 but must admit that I've not played the accompanying game yet. It's getting a repeat on BBC Radio Scotland very shortly so hopefully episode 1 will be back online to listen to via iPlayer.

- It wasn't the greatest MacTaggart lecture ever, but I think Mark Thompson had some relevant points to make about Sky's investment in UK production.

- I was a little underwhelmed by Apple's announcement today. My favourite iPod is the Classic. It's the only one with enough capacity for my needs, yet Steve Jobs seemingly neglected to mention it despite saying the entire range was getting an overhaul. If it gets discontinued, then I'll have to look for a new portable music manufacturer. I'm not at all sure about the new look Nano which seems to be a step back to the horrible looking third generation device and not actually usable in the hand. The Touch is fine (although Apple still seems to limit FM radio to the Nano), and the Shuffle becomes usable again (if mostly pointless without a screen). But Apple has again concentrated only on the US with Apple TV. Not only does $99 = £99 in Apple world, but there's no TV programming available. Now if they'd got iPlayer, 4OD, ITVplayer, Sky Player and LoveFilm on the device, they'd have people falling over themselves to buy one. Internet on the TV is the future of TV - not 3D. But Apple has missed in a trick in beating Canvas to the punch. If I was Sony, Samsung, LG or Panasonic, I'd be rushing to get my £99 device into the marketplace which does all these things even if it's just these things. The jury's out on iTunes 10 because while it's a sophisticated piece of software, changing icons isn't the same as a ground up rewrite which I believe this software is in dire need of.

Tomorrow BBC2 is showing a couple of classic films during the daytime. At 11.00am there's Holiday from 1938 with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. And then at 12.30 is 1940's His Girl Friday.

This is a film that I've mentioned before as it's one of my favourites of all time.

But Wikipedia noted a couple of things that I hadn't come across - the radio adaptions. Nine months after its January 1940 release, it was adapted by the Lux Radio Theater - the subject of a recent Radio 4 Archive on 4 programme. That adaption featured Claudette Colbert, Fred Macmurray and Jack Carson in the main roles.

Six months later, however, it was again adapted by the rival Screen Guild Theater, this time with Grant and Russell in the main roles.

Happily the Internet Archive has both versions available to download! Of course, these radio versions do lose quite a lot of the original panache of the film, and in the Screen Guild Theater version, lose over two thirds of the running time (even with the famous rapid-fire dialogue, that's a lot of missing action).

Lux Radio Theater version.

The Screen Guild Theater version.

Anyway, if you've never seen this film, set your Sky+, Freeview+, V+ or other PVR.

The other day I tried to assuage fears that every decent US TV series was going to disappear from free to air screens following Sky's deal with HBO for the next five years.

Today, I'm not so sure. Seemingly Sky is attempting to do similar deals with Showtime and AMC. That would be a disappointing state of affairs if it happened. And I speak as someone who already subscribes to Sky.

What does concern me more is the way Sky plans on packaging these programmes. It seems they want to put together a "premium package" to gain new subscribers. But I think that really means they want to charge me more than I currently pay. I don't buy their movie packages as I basically don't watch them enough to make them valuable. Indeed the onset of cheap films, and services like Lovefilm or even iTunes, means that movies is not the premium offering it once was.

I think Sky might be trying to put together a "Sky Premium US TV" channel which could run interruption free as Sky Movies do, but will cost more. I moaned when Sky put The Pacific onto their movie channels, and they did the same with the Clone Wars cartoon series.

If Sky does tie up these deals, as well as causing problems for the BBC to an extent (although they have to cut back on imports), C4/E4/More4 and Richard Desmond's channels, they must surely bring closer the day when they have to have their distribution and channel businesses broken up.

And perhaps it's about time Sky actually went out and made some British TV series. Yes they make an annual Terry Pratchett mini-series, the odd marquee offering at Christmas with appropriate big names, and a few comedy offerings. But drama has been really lacking. They burnt off Strike Back, their SAS series from Kudos, over three weeks by running double episodes, but aside from the forthcoming Thorne adaptions based on the Mark Billington novels, there's not a great deal going on (Update: They've reordered Strike Back for ten more episodes. How about running it over ten weeks Sky?). Let's face it, Sky's most talked about series in the last year has been Pineapple Dance Studios, and that doesn't quite fit the picture they're painting.

Sky has completed a £150m deal for exclusive rights to all HBO's back catalogue and future programming for the next five years. There's a certain irony that over the years various Sky One channel controllers have claimed that they're going to make Sky One the UK's version of HBO. I've pooh-poohed that in the past, but I suppose this is one way that Sky can become HBO - buy everything they make!

Cue lots of howling and anguish as viewers (on Media Guardian at least) who are used to seeing their favourite HBO shows on other channels potentially disappearing from their screens. While there are implications for stations like Channel 4, which has done well from True Blood and Curb Your Enthusiasm, many of those HBO shows air on another Murdoch owned channel in the UK - FX [Update: FX retains the rights to True Blood as well as the very funny Eastbound & Down].

In reality, as some sager Guardian commenters have mentioned, the reality is that Sky has done a deal for a great quantity of quality back catalogue programming for their on-demand service. I'm not sure if another UK broadcaster already had dibs on Treme - the New Orleans set David Simon series that has just finished its first series in the US. There's no mention of that in the coverage or the Sky press release. So I suspect that another broadcaster has already done the deal in the UK for that [Update: Nope. Sky has got the rights to Treme according to Broadcast (via The Medium Is Not Enough)]. Instead, most of the coverage is about another forthcoming HBO biggie - Boardwalk Empire - which comes from Martin Scorcese and does look good.

The other really interesting show that Sky's got its hands on is Game of Thrones based on the popular (although unread by me) George RR Martin fantasy novels. That series has a largely British cast and is being shot in Northern Ireland.

In all the shock and distain about the way this deal has been done, and what it means to everyone, it's worth pointing out that not every single one of your favourite US shows is actually from HBO.

HBO does have:
Treme (the new yet-to-air-in-the-UK series from David "The Wire" Simon)
True Blood
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Boardwalk Empire (the new Scorcese series that's eagerly awaited)
Eastbound & Down
Bored to Death (has this found a UK home previously)
Entourage
Hung
The Pacific (which Sky showed on a movie channel)
Luck
Game of Thrones (eagerly awaited by fans of novels, and currently shooting in Northern Ireland)

And of course, there's there full back-catalogue.

But plenty of other notable shows on other premium or semi-premium US channels. They're commonly misconceived to be "HBO" shows when they're not. The following lists are in no way comprehensive.

Showtime has:
Californication
Dexter
Nurse Jackie
The Tudors
Weeds
United States of Tara
The L Word

Starz (now run by ex-HBO president Chris Albrecht) has:
Spartacus: Blood and Sand (I did say "notable", and not "good")
Pillars of the Earth (not actually commissioned by them though)
Camelot (forthcoming reimagining of Arthurian legend)
Torchwood (co-production with the BBC of course)

AMC has:
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Rubicon (forthcoming spy series)
The Walking Dead (based on the zombie comics)
The Prisoner (made with ITV)

TNT has:
Leverage
Southland (picked up from NBC and now running on More4)
The Closer

USA Network has:
White Collar
Burn Notice
Covert Affairs (new spy series that's not at all like Alias, oh no)
Psych

FX has:
Justified (Just finished on Five USA last night and I've not seen the last episode yet. It's a fantastic series)
Rescue Me (also excellent)
Nip/Tuck
Sons of Anarchy

DirecTV has:
Friday Night Lights (in co-production deal with NBC)
Damages (picked up from FX)

And this list doesn't include the major networks, or channels like SyFy (sic). I wouldn't claim for a second that every one of these shows is as good as the best of what HBO does. But it's a good mix, and there are some absolute gems in there. And HBO has nothing to do with them.

What should we make of Identity, ITV1's big new police thriller series?

It stars another refugee from The Wire, Aidan Gillen, as well as Keeley Hawes who's fresh from finishing Ashes to Ashes. The series is set in the plush offices of Scotland Yard's Identity unit. Hawes' DSI Martha Lawrence has had to take on troubled and somewhat renegade DI Bloom. Well he is Oirish don't you know?

The stylised trailers didn't make it completely clear whether or not this was an ongoing series, or a weekly procedural with a story arc. Of course it was the latter. I guess I'm just used to expecting longer form stories these days.

The first episode revolved around someone who looked a bit like Peter Crouch's younger brother who was making life hell for various people by stealing their identities, running up huge debts and generally sending them to the brink. A criminal mastermind, he was somewhat disappointing when we caught up with him - as surely we would.

Back at base, there's a multi-ethnic set of team members, many of whom explain their jobs to one another. I know that the viewers need this kind of exposition, especially so in first episodes, but it still feels terribly clunky.

I was hoping that we'd get a bit more about the rights and wrongs of the data mining the department seem capable of - digging out details of what you bought with your Nectar card, and where you went on your Oyster card. But the best we got was one character saying that they were a bit uncomfortable using all this data, but then sifting through it anyway, and another saying that if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear, and broadly speaking, leaving it at that. Perhaps this is an area the series will get into a bit more later on.

Holly AIrd plays the team's computer person, positioned behind computer monitors, being stuck with slightly more exposition than I'd have liked, and generally not explaining how she found out certain pieces of information. Although entertainingly, she seemed to use some specialist police system at one point, when a quick Google search would have sufficed.

The identity theft team are obviously well paid, because they walk around, not in cheap suits, but some very smart gear. Hawes was wearing a fetching short length trench coat affair, while Gillen was wearing a v-neck jumper and t-shirt combo that Joachim Loew would be proud of, supplemented by a smart leather jacket.

Even the school in which a crucial chase takes place, has buildings the like of which few other schools will be getting anytime soon. This was not a chase through some Portakabins.

But all said and done, it was a nicely made piece, and even though we probably had one too many helicopter shots of London (and inevitably the Gherkin as it's a statutory requirement to include it any drama set in the capital), I'll still be tuning in next week.

Stage 1 of the Tour de France had finished in a series of crashes, and Rafa had wrapped up another Wimbledon title. What else was there in the way of sport to watch on television?

I strayed over to ESPN America, where usually I'd find something like live baseball at this time of year. But it's Independence Day in the US, so there was something slightly different: Nathan's International Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Yes - ESPN America was bringing LIVE coverage of a bunch of men eating a disgusting amount of food. I'm no spring chicken, and I've heard about these kinds of contests before, but is that really what gets broadcast on a major sports network on July 4? I found it gross, and actually quite sickening to watch. I stumbled across it somewhere towards to the end of the broadcast with what I imagine were the finalists stuffing food down their gullets while trying not to throw it back up. In front of each of them was a referee with the unenviable task of counting how many hot dogs (and buns!) each competitor was eating.

And lest you think otherwise, there was an enormous crowd at the location - Coney Island.

I tuned away to another channel.

But then I tuned back.

I've no doubt this "harmless" event has been going on for years without problem. But when the eventual winner was interviewed he seemed to be downing some kind of pink medicine - no doubt to keep his guts from spewing right back up.

I later spotted this story in my RSS reader - a former competitor who is no longer aligned with "Major League Eating" (I am not kidding), had tried to storm the stage and compete unofficially.

I notice their website has this warning:

All applicants must be 18 years of age or older and fully acknowledge and understand the inherent dangers and risks associated with participating in an eating contest.

Utterly vile.

Today, had he lived, would have been Alan Turing's 98th birthday.

Last night at the BFI Southbank, there was a great double bill featuring the excellent TV version of Hugh Whitmore's play about Turing - Breaking the Code. Regular readers will perhaps recall that I saw a theatrical production of this play back in November. But although I'd seen this version before, I was happy to see it afresh and on a big screen.

The cast is powerful led by Derek Jacobi as Turing, but ably supported by Prunella Scales as his mother Sara, and Amanda Root as Pat Green. Alun Armstrong plays the police inspector who feels that it's his duty to investigate Turing's admissions of homosexuality, which leads to an inevitable sad ending. And Harold Pinter has a terrific cameo as a slightly disturbing mandarin for one of the intelligence agencies worried about how Turing lived his life and the authorities concerns about his vetting and the possibility of blackmail.

Sadly, I don't believe this production is available on DVD.

Next up was a 1992 edition of Horizon produced by Christopher Sykes. It's remarkable how even a documentary made in the 90s still feels like something from a distant age now. The programme was largely based around Andrew Hodge's excellent biography of Turing, as Whitmore's play is. But it was made at the right time, with many of Turing's contemporaries from the war and post-war still alive to tell us about Turing.

Unususally for Horizon, this edition of the series really was much more about the man than the science. Although we had his ideas laid out for us, the casual viewer might still be hard pushed to explainn exactly what he did during the war and post-war period apart from "work on" things.

It was good to see that a slightly uncomfortable NFT2 was packed out last night for this presentation.

(Amusingly, at the end of the Horizon credits, we saw a few frames of the original slide that followed at the end asking us to send cheques for £2 to a Broadcast Services address if we wanted a booklet on that series' Horizon episodes. I'm pretty sure that somewhere buried away, I have that booklet).

A few things that caught my eye this week:

By far the best World Cup package surrounding the games must have been the package that aired after the Italy v Paraguay game. It was all about the footballers of Robben Island.

While they were locked up by the apartheid regime, football was one of the few outlets that prisoners had, although they were heavily punished before they were allowed to play. It's really worth a few minutes of your time to watch before expiring from the iPlayer on Monday evening.

Later this evening, there's a South African made docudrama based around the same story.

The President of France and his lovely wife were in London today visiting Broadcasting House to celebrate the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle speaking to France from the BBC after the country had been occupied. Those speeches effectively brought about the French resistance. Newsnight produced a marvellous piece detailing the full story.

There are plenty of good football podcasts out there: Danny Baker's going great guns in South Africa, while Alan Davies is back in the UK essentially shifting the emphasis of his Arsenal podcast onto the national team. For more serious fare there's the Guardian's World Cup Daily which is nice and pithy, while I also like ITV's football podcast mostly presented by Ned Boulting. And finally the iTunes chart topping Baddiel and Skinner are out in South Africa with daily podcasts for my employer which are well worth a listen.

The major football podcast I've not listened to is the BBC's World Cup Daily which is made up of highlights of the previous 24 hours. Interestingly, the BBC has turned Five Live Sports Extra into a rolling repeat of this service when it's not broadcasting other sporting coverage (we've had Ascot this week, there are some rugby tests, and Wimbledon starts on Monday). Ordinarily, during "dead air" it just runs a generic loop highlighting upcoming coverage. It's now a bit more like those loops you find under the red button on TV.

Media Guardian is today reporting that Sky Sports News is coming off the Freeview platform. Up until now, Sky had effectively been using the channel as something to promote their premium sports services. That's really why they never showed any action in full-screen.

But now they're pulling the service. I think they'll get some very annoyed customers. There will be Sky Sports subscribers who watch the service on second TV sets in other rooms, but aren't likely to subscribe to Sky Multiroom (Sky's default way to get Average Revenue Per User - ARPU - up).

And of course lots of people enjoyed Jeff Stelling and co. doing Soccer Saturday. This will just drive those people to Final Score on the BBC's red button.

What I really can't see is lots of people taking out full subscriptions to make up for the loss of service.

Sky's replacement service is atrocious. The risible Sky 3 is getting a "+1" channel. Sky 3 doesn't even really act as a driver to Sky 1, its programming is so dated and poor.

So what are Sky's long term plans? Well we know that BT Vision and Virgin Media will be pushing their deals for sport this autumn in a big way following Ofcom's statement on Pay TV made back in March.

Sky is still upset about that, although it has since done a deal with Virgin Media that included acquiring Virgin Media's wholly owned channels as well as giving full access to Sky's TV services including red button functionality to Virgin Media subscribers.

Sky could relaunch its Picnic plans that Ofcom previously put a stop to. Indeed I'd suggest that this is highly likely. This is simply an interim step because Sky doesn't have any hardware in place to allow Freeview viewers to subscribe to encrypted premium Sky Sports and Movies channels. And there's probably some ongoing discussion about Sky News. Adam Boulton aside, the channel had a reasonable election and I'd imagine garnered a fair few viewers via Freeview. Does Sky now want to ditch those viewers?

Sky faces some interesting challenges. Although a Conservative government might have seemed favourable, it's not clear how the coalition will effect things. An investigation into the separation of channel delivery and programming can't be a long way off. And of course we know that News Corporation is trying to take full ownership of BSkyB.

But the threat that Sky really faces is on demand. Satellite is great for some things - not least high bandwidth to deliver a multiplicity of HD TV channels. But it can't do on demand, which is the way the TV market is going. They're fighting Canvas tooth and nail for no other reason than it hurts Sky's business model. If I can buy programmes direct from the studios that make them, do I really need to subscribe to Sky One?

In the meantime hardware manufacturers just work around these issues. Sony's recent Bravia sets are all internet enabled, and take a lead from their games consoles in providing direct access via the internet to free and subscription television services. And this autumn Google will launch Google TV that'll again be included in some TVs as well as third party boxes.

A single platform in the shape of something like Canvas makes life easy for programme suppliers and viewers, and it's full steam ahead on that. But whatever Sky's views on that, the flood is coming. That will hurt some parts of Sky's business.

When Sky launched, and for much of its existance, it's been sport and films that have been of pre-eminant importance. I'd argue that films are far less important now. There are lots of convenient and inexpensive ways to watch films from buying DVDs and Blu-Rays to services like Lovefilm. Why would I need to subscribe to a film channel?

Sport is not in that position - and hence it becomes even more important to Sky.

Imported US drama series can be watched in large chunks on DVD boxsets. Or they can be bought on iTunes. A subscription to Sky One is no longer needed to keep up with House.

How successful might Picnic be? Well - somehow - TopUp TV still survives. ITV is mulling over the idea of taking ITV2, 3 and 4 behind a paywall. That would leave Freeview a bit barren - a couple of Five TV channels, Dave and of course the BBC. But if Sky buys Five too...

This is going to be an interesting to watch play out.

I know that a million and one other people have already talked about ITV's nightmare last night (yes - I'm conveniently overlooking Robert Green's one), but it really is worth saying a little more.

ITV1's HD channel managed to miss Gerard's 4th minute goal by playing a sponsorship credit for Hyundai (not an advert), followed by a few moments of blackness before we returned to a celebrating England team.

What has been less-reported is that apart from a period during the first path, following the mix-up, ITV1 HD dropped back to an SD picture. Was this something they could have fixed at half-time? Perhaps, but they didn't. The whole of the second half was also broadcast in SD.

Every time the BBC goes to a major sporting event, the Daily Mail loves to give the BBC a kicking about the number of staff they're sending, but I think that a belt and braces approach to technicalities is the right one to avoid technical mishaps on this scale.

ITV, of course, memorably missed a goal last year in an FA Cup fixture between Everton and Liverpool, when a scheduled ad-break started during extra-time. Again a goal was missed. At that time, Michael Grade personally apologised.

Last night, Adrian Chiles, in his first big ITV outing mumbled something about an "interruption" that we may have suffered, while the commentary team were left out in the cold and either not told anything or not saying anything.

A mistake is a mistake, but this is really bad news for ITV. World Cups come around every four years, and ITV always makes a play to get two of the three group games it shares with the BBC because that gives them some guaranteed advertising income. Those spots were sold long ago.

Indeed Hyundai, one of ITV's match sponsors, won't be happy either, as they've been drawn into something that wasn't of their making. What's more advertisers like Sony, Samsung and the big TV retailers won't be happy. They've been busily persuading us to upgrade to HD for the World Cup and many will have. An irate editor of the Jewish Chronicle was in the same situation as my good friend James Cridland in buying a new Freeview HD box to watch the World Cup fixtures in HD.

In 2008 during the Germany v Turkey Euro 2008 semi-final in Basel, lightning at the broadcast centre in Vienna caused coverage to cease on several occasions during the game. That was at least, a large scale technical problem (one that shouldn't have happened as I understand it, with fail-safes failing), with some clever workarounds being quickly found by utilising a Swiss feed and rebroadcasting that on another satellite channel. This was different, and no other country had the same problems.

Perhaps, like Robert Green, it was World Cup nerves. A few weeks ago, there was a massive drop in the New York Stock Exchange - something that still hasn't been fully explained. One excuse laid on it was "fat finger" syndrome. In other words, someone pressed the wrong button. I suspect that this was what happened at ITV.

This is a late heads up to look out for Justified on Five USA. Sorry - we're three episodes in - but you can still start watching!

The next showing of episode 3 is on Saturday at 9pm on Five USA, and you really should be watching. The good news is that you can still catch up with the first couple of episodes on Demand Five. Episodes are also available to buy on iTunes.

If you're like me, then you might remember Maximum Bob. It was set in Florida and starred Beau Bridges as a "strange" judge. It got cancelled after 7 episodes back in 1998. It hasn't been released on DVD.

Then there was Karen Sisco. This was a spin-off, of sorts, of the fine feature film Out of Sight, which is still probably the best thing that Jennifer Lopez has ever done. In the TV series, the wonderful Carla Gugino played Karen Sisco, a US Marshall in Florida. The series was cancelled after 10 episodes in 2004. It hasn't been released on DVD.

And now we have Justified starring Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, a US Marshall who's been moved from Florida to his home state of Kentucky. He's not happy about this. But he dresses a bit like a cowboy, and has a mean shot.

The good news is that Justified has not been cancelled - indeed FX in the US has just renewed the series for a second season! (At some point, somebody can explain to me why the UK FX channel keeps missing out on the great shows commissioned by its US parent company. I know it's really the production companies' distributors who get to flog the show, but still...).

What do Maximum Bob and Karen Sisco share with Justified?

Elmore Leonard.

At 84, he's still going strong and still writing books as he has done since the fifties.

And just like those cancelled series before, Justified has the same tone of voice as Elmore Leonard's books. The recent third episode, Fixer - which can easily be watched as a standalone episode - has precisely those values. The two bad guys are brilliantly funny. If you liked Jackie Brown or Get Shorty, then you'll recognise it.

I must admit that I've been slow getting onto Leonard. To make amends, I went to Waterstones last night and picked up Pronto. This is the first of two novels and a short story that the Raylan Givens character appears in. Although according to a piece written a couple of months ago around the launch of Justified on FX, Leonard is considering another story.

In the meantime, in the UK we've got another 10 episodes of Justified to look forward to.

Thanks to my friend Chloe for pointing me in Justified's direction!

I'm absolutely appalled.

Really, really, appalled.

If I was Steven Moffat, I would be wanting words with Jay Hunt, the Controller of BBC One.

I've just watched this week's episode of Doctor Who - Time of Angels. It's a follow-up to an episode written by Moffat in the last full series, Blink, featuring once again, the Weeping Angels.

But if you saw the episode last night (and not in HD or in Scotland), you'll have seen the most crass, the most misplaced, and most ludicrous on-screen graphic, utterly ruining the climactic scene of that epsiode.

It utterly ruined the episode, because you were immediately removed from the peril that Moffat and his team had placed the Doctor and his companions. The tension had been carefully built up all episode and in a traditional Who moment, the final scene of the episode saw everyone literally with their backs against the wall.

At this moment, we got the following appear on screen.

A still really doesn't do it justice as it was an animated Graham Norton that appeared.

These things are called In-Programme Pointers are simply the latest, and by far the worst imports from America.

We've had DOGs (Digital On Screen Graphics) which sadly mean that I'm in no rush to switch to HD, as they mess up the nice clean image on those channels. Then there is the credit shrinking. No longer do we get even a couple of seconds at the end of programme before the credits shrink to an illegible size and we get video and a voiceover telling us what's coming up lest we rush to remote control.

But backing up into the programme itself - especially, but not solely - a drama series, is just about the worst crime you can commit. Perhaps we'll next see two programmes running at the same time - that should remove any chance to channel hop.

The garish yellow nature of the In-Programme Pointer means that we have to notice it. It's animated so that even if we'd somehow missed the yellow sign, which in this instance was impossible since the drama was set in dark caves, the movement of the cartoon representation grabs our attention.

The very purpose of the device is to yank us out of the carefully created world we've been in with the programme, and beaten around the head to implore us to stay with the channel.

Here's my promise. I will not watch ANY PROGRAMME that's promoted this way. At all. Even if it's really good.

Even if the BBC bought Tremé, the new David Simon programme, and then promoted it using In-Programme Pointers, then I wouldn't watch it.

Interestingly, HBO doesn't use these devices. HBO produces shows with long credit sequences and then leaves the credits unmollested at the end.

Television isn't just a commodity, it's an art-form.

And in case you think - well Doctor Who - that's just for kids. Just wait to see this kind of vandalism taking place during big 9pm Sunday night flagship dramas.

Stop this now.

You can see the clip on YouTube here, and there are vociferous discussions going on here and here (to name but two). Charlie Brooker pretty much sums it up here.

[UPDATE] The BBC has "apologised" for last night's incursion. But before the nation lets out a sigh of relief, read a little closer what the nameless BBC spokesperson said:

"We apologise for the timing of Saturday night's trail."

So they admit that it was at possibly the worst moment in the entire episode that they could have place the trail, but significantly don't apologise for actually running the trail during the programme itself.

In other words, I fear that we're only going to see more of these intrusions.

My challenge to the BBC is to present some research that shows that more viewers like than dislike these intrusions.

[UPDATE 2]

This is the response sent to me, and no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of others:

Thank you for your e-mail.

BBC Complaints

I'll take that to mean that we shan't be seeing any more of these graphics in Doctor Who or any other drama series in the near future on the BBC.

My promise still holds: If I see an In-Programme Pointer in any programme, I will not watch the promoted programme at all.

Sky is trumpeting the fact that last weekend's fixture between Man Utd and Blackburn Rovers (a 0-0 "thriller") was watched by 200,000 viewers. A remarkable achievement based on average of 133 people per pub in the 1500 or so pubs that have the 3D TVs so far. These are obviously all pretty large pubs!

But is 3D really the future for TV?

Well it won't surprise regular readers when I say, no, it's not.

At last week's Sony Radio Academy Award nominations, Sony was trumpeting its forthcoming 3D TVs, and in one corner of the room they had a prototype on display playing a BluRay montage of football and nature films.

First things first. The technical quality is excellent, and the technology works as well as any I've seen. Unlike my cinema experiences until now, the TV (LCD backlit I assume) is perfectly bright enough, although I should point out that I was watching in a darkened club environment. You have to put glasses on of course, but as I say, it was a perfectly enjoyable experience.

So why my negativity?

Well it was the football that did it for me. In the average televised football match as we're used to seeing them, the vast majority of shots are from one or two cameras placed in a gantry high(ish) above the halfway line. The majority of the action is observed from these views. While other cameras are employed to focus on individual players, and often a Steadicam on the touchline, most of the additional cameras are only really employed for showing replays.

And therein lies the problem. The viewer doesn't get much of a sense of depth perspective in 3D from that high gantry camera. Therefore, to make you feel more immersed in the game, matches in 3D have to be much more reliant on touchline cameras from the lower angles that allow you to fully perceive the 3D effect. While that might work from a technical and experiential perspective, it doesn't make for great football coverage. The high camera position allows you to get a good impression of where on the pitch players are, pick up on moves and off the ball runs, and generally be tactically much more astute. Coincidentally, seats near these camera positions tend to be the most expensive in the ground.

So while we all might enjoy seeing the odd game in 3D, it's offering broadly inferior camera angles for actual enjoyment of the game and the ability to see what's happening.

That's my view anyway.

The lady from Sky was a little coy about how much these TVs are going to cost when they're on sale in the summer. What I do know is that you won't be watching the World Cup on one - in the UK anyway. The BBC and ITV hold the rights to the competition, and only Sky has, or is likely to have, a 3D channel. It's possible that some cinemas will be holding screenings in the same way that certain Six Nations Rugby Union games were screened in 3D.

Instead, viewers would do better to connect their 23m HD TVs to an actual HD source - something that's a little easier now that consumers can start to buy Freeview HD boxes (as well as Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat).

Disclaimer: As mentioned above, I saw the Sony 3D TV at the nominations announcement for the Sony Radio Academy Awards last week where I was an invited guest on behalf of my employer. These views are mine and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

There's only one episode of Party to go, but listen in to part three before Wednesday.

I'll always listen or watch any programme based on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and this week that meant listening to Archive on 4: Sculptress of Sound - The Lost World of Delia Derbyshire. In some respects it's always Derbyshire who's the focus of these kinds of documentaries. But I really don't care and just love to bask in the sounds.

I'm something of a sucker for maps of every kind, so I've listened to the first three episodes of a ten part series that ran everyday last week and continues this week: On the Map.

The first episode is no longer on iPlayer, and there are only a few hours to listen to the second, but curiously the first episode featured Bill Drummond, once of The KLF (no - I still don't believe he really set fire to a million pounds). He's always been fascinated by maps and currently he's walking the London Cake Circle - a circle he's drawn on a map. He bakes a cake and then finds a home somewhere on the circle where he can deliver it!

What was really interesting about this episode was the detail of people who've worked for the Ordnance Survey and left their marks on maps. A good example is below.

If you look just above the word Blackgang and below Blackgang Chime, you'll see the word "Bill" inscribed into the cliff detail. That's the name of the man who first created that part of the map for Ordnance Survey.

Seemingly there are other examples which can be found if you spend time looking for them! (Of course Slartibartfast did the same thing in Norway). Other episodes I've heard so far consider the A-Z, maps used for driving like various AA maps, as well as the curse of the satnav.

As for TV - Sunday's are just too good at the moment. Currently BBC2 has the killer combination of Tropic of Cancer followed by Wonders of the Solar System on Sunday nights. And yesterday also saw the latest in Paul Merton's ongoing series about early cinema (with a repeat of his early Hitchcock programme also on over the weekend).

And OK. I'm still persevering with FlashForward, if only because it's fun working out which British actors will attempt an American accent and which will stick with a British one. And Ricky Jay had a short but noticeable cameo. But I'm not sure for how long. Fewer flashbacks please

Today comes news that the BBC has had to delay its mobile phone applications until the BBC Trust has taken a close look at what it's doing. That obviously includes iPhone apps, but other operating systems are available, and the BBC was developing for them too.

The announcement that the BBC was developing applications came in February when Eric Huggers, the BBC's Director of Future Media & Technology, made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The first application for BBC News had been expected next month.

A lot of newspapers in particular had been enormously unhappy at the move. In particular the Newspaper Publishers' Association (who don't seem to have a website of their own), had complained to the BBC Trust.

Well it has come to pass that despite the fact that most mobile applications - and almost certainly the BBC's News app - are just fancy front ends to news stories already available in browsers, everyone was kicking up a fuss.

Also complaining were third-party developers who'd made available a range of applications - many of which were paid for - which directly used BBC news stories and streams.

In Media Guardian's podcast a couple of weeks ago, Emily Bell and Matt Wells got particularly upset at the prospect of a BBC News application. While admitting that they were in competition with the BBC with their own Guardian app which is paid for (and very good it is too), I'm not sure that I agree that this stacks up. Why shouldn't the BBC be able to put an application "wrapper" around something you can already see on mobile phones.

To some extent many applications are pointless wrappers of web editorial. Taken to a logical extreme, we're all going to end up with mobile devices with hundreds of applications each working with a single website, a bit like you might have a long list of bookmarks in your browser.

Certainly you can do some clever stuff with applications - perhaps using location based information to provide relevant data, as well as the push side of things (As an aside, the BBC Breaking News Twitter feed is one of the few I let send me a direct text to my mobile because unlike most organisations, they use it fairly sparingly. Sky News' Twitter account "breaks" just about every story that comes down the wires, and as such is less useful. The Guardian's Twitter news feed similarly pumps out too many stories a day.).

The BBC has for years made a mobile version of its news website available to mobile devices. Should this be allowed?

There are always going to be applications that simply use the RSS feeds of sites like BBC News to power them, and there's little that can be done to stop their creation. Indeed, if you look beyond the iPhone platform, anyone can write anything they like for platforms like Android and there's very little anyone can do to stop them.

It's an artificial distinction. And those kinds of distinctions just don't work on the web.

From a user's point of view, a delay in making available a BBC iPlayer application is not a good thing. Consumers are expecting and even demanding that programmes are made available via mobile devices. Whether or not the mobile networks can cope with widescale video and audio streaming usage like this is a separate - but important - question.

In the end, it was probably foollish to believe that the BBC Trust wouldn't need to put its oar in before these applications saw the light of day, but its viewers and listeners who will lose out. The idea that mobile is an area the BBC shouldn't be in will be utterly absurd in even 12 months' time. That's if it isn't already.

These are my own views, and they do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, not that we're really in the mobile news application game.

Sky Arts has recently been running a pretty large-scale advertising campaign for The Book Show presented by - as all literary shows seemingly have to be by law - Mariella Frostrup.

That's fine. Sky Arts is a decent enough channel, even if you know it really exists so that Murdoch can argue for the closure of the BBC because the commercial sector broadcasts the arts - classical music and opera for example.

And I do sometimes watch The Book Show, especially when it goes daily during the Hay Festival of which Sky Arts is a sponsor.

But look closely at the books in the photo that Mariella is leaning against in the ad.

Even allowing for imperfections in the poster, those books do look pretty beaten up. And it's not surprising, as they're really not that new.

The top book appears to be a copy of Piers Morgan's diaries which while populist, isn't perhaps a true reflection of the programme. It was published five years ago.

Underneath that is a hardback copy of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. While that would be a book that they'd cover on the programme, and is a good target market for London commuters, it is a book that came out in 1999 - over ten years ago. Isn't there something a bit more contemporary? No wonder these books are a bit beaten up.

The final identifiable book on the pile is a real oddity. It's The Silence of the Lambs - Red Dragon which is in fact two books in the Hannibal Lector series. Again - a massively popular series of novels, and titles from which would undoubtedly get coverage on The Book Show if they were published today. Except that this particular unusual edition which combines two of Thomas Harris' novels, was published in 1991 - 19 years ago. And those curious editions of books that have two titles in one tend to appear in discount bookshops or come from book clubs.

I suppose the main thing is that it's odd that nothing particularly contemporary is included in the stack of books. Perhaps a Stieg Larsson novel, or a Stephen King title? Ian McEwan, Alice Sebold or even Stephanie Meyer for all I care. Just current.

Instead it feels like the photographer and assistants at the shoot for the ad suddenly realised that they were going to need some books. So they rooted around in the corner of the studio and found a couple of books propping up a table or something and thought, "They'll do - nobody will see them anyway." Except that photo was then blown up and put on massive tube posters...

In some ways, HBO has never been away, but I think it's fair to say that it's on a bit of a roll at the moment.

At the weekend, HBO started its massive new mini-series, The Pacific, coming from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, which acts as a sequel of sorts to Band of Brothers. This time, a similar style of story telling is employed in the Pacific theatre of operations. In the UK, this will start at Easter on Sky Movies. Sadly, as most of us don't subscribe to Sky Movies (fewer, for example, than Sky Sports), that won't be where I for one watch it. I'm surprised that Sky's done this, but then despite what it's said in the past Sky One has wandered away from a quality channel and more towards a combination of Living and Five as I've argued before.

The channel has a decent range of network US offerings, supplemented by gameshows and reality shows, with a very occasional drama here and there. I'm not sure what's happened to the previously announced Strike Force, but recent reports suggest that the channel is looking for at least one drama to run for 13 episodes.

I suppose that's what makes it all the more curious that something like The Pacific has been placed on Sky Movies.

I suppose I should give Sky One some kind of credit for making Pineapple Dance Studios. Although I'm not sure what credit, and they're making a star out of Louis. Or at least Harry Hill (continuing with ITV and not Sky) is anyway. As for A League of Their Own... Well the less said the better... You just can't get enough James Corden can you?

(Incidentally, Sky One's website won't display TV listings in Chrome. Clever move guys.)

But back to HBO. They also have forthcoming new series of True Blood, Big Love and especially Treme. Then there are comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm, Eastbound and Down, Bored to Death, Entourage, How To Make It In America and the forthcoming Funny Or Die Presents (OK - Hung is a comedy too).

Now some of those probably aren't familiar. Bored to Death was a well received comedy from last year, but I'm not aware of any UK network showing it. Of course, we now know that the BBC is barely allowed to buy any imported television, so which network is picking this up in the UK?

I'll let UK channels off buying How To Make It In America, since it's only just really started airing. But Treme? Come on!

Treme, is the new series from David Simon - creator of The Wire, which is one of the best series ever made in many people's eyes. So surely everyone is dying to get their hands on Treme?

I may have missed the report, but considering it starts in just a few weeks on HBO, I'm amazed that it's not getting enormous coverage. Could it be because, you know, worthy and all that, but these dramas are slightly difficult?

Remember that after FX, Channel 4 got their hands on Generation Kill and it went out pretty late at night. Let's face it - these programmes are great, but they don't get great ratings. Most people will see them in boxset form, when someone else says that - yes a series set in the aftermath of Katrina New Orleans doesn't sound like a great deal of fun but it's really worth persevering with.

That's why it makes me angry that people who know little to nothing about the TV industry make unjustified complaints about who can buy what. Chances of ITV buying Treme? 0. Maybe C4/More4 will pick it up. But otherwise, unless the BBC is allowed to (perhaps by letting Sci Fi take up the slack on Heroes or something), then it'll only go to a satellite channel that won't be free to air on Freeview. And therefore most people will have to go the boxset route.

There is, of course, the "other" route. But we don't like to talk about it...

I know that the easy answers are that:

1. the show runs for at least three hours and viewers would get bored, or
2. we can't trust celebrities not to swear

and there's a suspcision that

3. but then the after-parties wouldn't start until post 11pm and that would be terrible.

But as things stand we're in the worst possible place.

The awards begin in the Royal Opera House at 7pm from what I can tell. Yet the television broadcast begins at 9pm.

In last night's TV broadcast we had some pretty significant awards cut from coverage, including Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, Editing, Cinematography and Sound.

Seriously - those are really important awards. What's more, until we saw the brief catch-up at the end of the programme, we didn't really know the extent to which The Hurt Locker had cleaned up. That would have made it less suspenseful when the film won Best Film.

But what really doesn't work in the socially-connected age that we live in, is that knowledge of who's won comes out as soon as the award is made. Sites are blogging the results, live. Twitter and Facebook are full of the results. The news sites tell you who's won. It's pointless. If I so much as strayed online, or onto a news channel, it'd have been a "spoiler."

If even the BRITS are carried live these days, why can't something like the BAFTAs?

I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. Unlike previous years, there were no embarrassing technical glitches that I could see. It does seem a shame that some of our best acting talent can't give life to a couple of sentences without sounding like robots. I suppose at least Mickey Rourke was honest in this, but Rupert Everett and a couple of the others were appalling. And I think that if the BBC is losing Jonathan Ross elsewhere in the schedule, now would be a good time to give him a rest from the BAFTAs too.

Anyway, even though I'm about the last person in the world still not to have seen Avatar, I'm rather glad that The Hurt Locker won so much as it was excellent.

I love Charlie Brooker's Newswipe.

It's simply one of the best things on TV anywhere.

Anyway - this week they covered the ongoing Iraq Inquiry, and in particular coverage of Blair's appearance at the Inquiry.

Except, the programme couldn't show any of the the Inquiry. This is because television programmes can't show clips of Parliamentary procedings and I assume that this Inquiry, which was announced by the Prime Minister last year is considered to fall within that arena (NB A tweet from Matt Wells says that the contract to take pictures eplicitly prohibits satirical television. I'd add that Brooker uses most of his footage without permission - hence the credits throughout).

I talked about this a little last year, in relation to Have I Got News For You. Those rules say:

no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire

It's worth noting that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart did show Blair's appearance at the Inquiry. And in a satirical manner - the segment was entitled "Faulty Powers" (see what they did there?). And that show was then broadcast on More4. The Daily Show took their footage from CSPAN who evidently rebroadcast it in the US.

Indeed, the programme has only just dropped off the 4OD player - otherwise you could watch it right now.

Yes - that was probably an editing oversight on C4/More4's part. But it just shows that we're still ridiculously prevented from showing footage in a free manner.

Anyway - go and watch this week's programme, if only because it has another one of those mini-documentaries from Adam Curtis.

Oh - and if you want to search for Blair featuring in The Daily Show's coverage, it's the Feb 1 2010 edition you need to find on the internet. To be honest, it's not actually that good.

I stayed up late last night to watch the Superbowl. I like American Football, and once you get over the inordinate number of breaks in play it's a fine sport. I suggest that you either diligently us your PVR in live pause mode, or do as I did last night and decide that it was the perfect time to install Windows 7 on my netbook (it went fine on my Samsung N110 thanks for asking).

But there are a few other differences. The actual game seems to be very low down the order of importance surrounding the whole thing. It's all about the specially made ads (somewhat disappointing by all accounts this year, although the Dave/Oprah/Jay promo was funny), or the half-time show (The Who playing a poor medley of CSI theme tunes. I think I'll stick to CDs thanks).

One thing I can never get over is how unexcited the commentators seem to be. I know they're professionals and they have to bring that special gravitas to the event, but a bit more life in their voices wouldn't go amiss. Sometimes Motty might be a little over the top, and Sky will make a deathly-dull game sound more exciting than everyone watching knows it is, but at least they try to convey some of the excitement. Even the sound mix seems to minimise the crowd noise. Of course the fans don't tend to songs, and it being the Superbowl, actual honest to goodness fans are few and far between since the world and their mum has bought tickets. And they're not cheap.

But the real difference comes at the end. For a country who presents sport with enormous professionalism, the scenes at the end of a regular season game are frankly chaotic. This is only increased in the Superbowl where there are already several hundred player, coaches, officials, journalists, cameramen, photographers and others prowling the touchlines.

At the final whistle all hell lets loose. Everyone brings their families on too.

Yet it's at the presentation that things really change. With the FA Cup or the Champions' League, journalists are kept in roped areas. A stand might be built, or the steps are ascended at Wembley. And then the players go up to collect the trophy. You know - the guys who've been running around and entertaining us for the last couple of hours, plus all those weeks and months leading up to the final. The team Captain receives the trophy and raises it aloft. Then the rest of the players will get a go, and among them, the manager will bashfully accept it too.

At the Superbowl, a small podium is built in the middle of the pitch. The trophy is brought out to the middle of the pitch and players try to touch it as it goes by. Just as well, as for the time being, this is the closest most of them will get to it.

Then the trophy is presented... to the team's owner. Yes the "franchisee" is the person who accepts it. Yes - he pays the bills, and without him or her, there'd be no team, but it wasn't him (let's face it, it is a "him") running around out there. Next the head coach of the team - the manager figure - gets his turn. Finally, the MVP (Most Valuable Player) gets a turn. And that's it.

And all around, everyone's wearing slightly tacky T-shirts or baseball caps proclaiming the winners (another box, should the other team have won, is quietly boxed up and recycled or sent to Africa for charity), while the local newspaper distributes copies proclaiming the winners.

As I say. I like American Football, and enjoy the spectacle and the occasion. Perhaps the charm of it is the lack professionalism at the end. The memorable images tend to be grabbed from the midst of a scrum of cameramen with the camera pointing upwards. But it could be better done.

This afternoon, I'll be watching Arsenal v Man Utd in 3D.

No - I'm not going to one of Sky's un-named pubs which will be showing the game in 3D - instead I'll be in the ground.

But with Avatar number one at the box office, and large numbers of exhibitors at the recent CES trade show showing off 3D TVs, the question must surely be when will 3D arrive and not if. Or is it?

When I was little, in my grandparents house I found and old box of photos from the turn of the last century. Obviously they were black and white, but they were stereoscopic images. Alongside the collection of photos was a viewer. You the photos in the viewer and one eye saw each photo - together giving the impression of 3D.

That's still how it works today. With polarised lenses and the like in cinemas, or even using different colour lenses to display or remove information as in the old red/blue cardboard glasses.

The first time I remember television trying to do 3D was sometime around 1982. ITV was showing a series of films on Sunday afternoons - if my memory serves me - which largely dated from the 50s when one of the earlier 3D crazes had begun. You got your glasses with the TV Times and could watch the films in glorious 3D.

Not in our house you couldn't. For starters, the edition of the TV Times that gave out the glasses was hard to get hold of, and then there was the small matter of our TV being black and white. I remember tuning in one afternoon to see what I was missing and realising that it was a dull western with a blurry image.

At the cinemas around the same time I could have watched Jaws 3-D or Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. I remember phoning up my local ABC (now a Tesco) to check that they gave out 3D glasses for the latter. But I didn't go. It's probably as well - the film's awful (that's why you've not heard of it) and the 3D was equally awful.

3D never died of course. It carried on improving, although seemingly largely limited to theme parks (e.g. Pirates 3D starring Leslie Nielsen) or IMAX films.

But now we're in a new 3D age, where the technology has matured so far, that any certainly just about any animated film - and quite a few horror films - simply have to be made in 3D.

Nope - I still haven't seen Avatar. Just that preview I described back in August. Indeed my 3D film going experience in its current incarnation is limited to that short, Coraline and Beowulf.

Those latter two films are set in slightly dark worlds which is just as well because the main issue I have with 3D is that it's actually too dark. At the Avatar preview I saw, the vivid colours of the world Cameron has built were a bit "muddy" for me. Taking my glasses off, revealed how much light was missing.

And I should point out that I've seen all these films in state of the art surroundings.

Have I got especially sensitive eyes? I don't know. I have 20:20 vision; not wearing contacts or glasses. But it's clear to me that the picture is inferior even if we do get an extra dimension.

I'm fussy about things like visuals and sounds. I was once the only person in a packed cinema who bothered to complain that the film was being screened in the wrong ratio. Yesterday, nobody apart from me seemed to mind that the film was being shown in mono when it had clearly been mastered in Dolby Digital (or other) and the cinema was equipped with as much.

So to me, 3D films are inferior because they're dark. And watching a film like that is a bit like watching a film on a sunny day in your living room with the light reflecting from your TV. You can watch a film like that, but don't expect me not to draw the curtains.

Sky and TV manufacturers are now all racing to build 3D sets. They think that we'll all want them in our homes. But I'm really not so sure.

Where do we stand in home entertainment? Well HD Ready TV sets are everywhere, although the technology moves apace and LED is to an extent replacing Plasma and LCD. And there'll no doubt be OLED at some point too. But most of what people are watching on these TVs is not HD.

Sky's current TV campaign is trying to drive that home. At best these TVs are being used to play PS3 or Xbox360 games in HD, and perhaps the odd Blu-Ray film. But only a relatively small number of people have HD either through Sky, Virgin Media or Freesat.

Freeview HD is due to launch any day now as the first Humax box becomes available, with the half the population being theoretically able to watch the World Cup in HD this summer. But there's still quite a job to get people to actually hook up an HD source to their HD sets (and speaking personally - I'm not prepared to pay a premium for it).

Sound is also vital. People are less willing to install full home cinema sound kit into their rooms, leaving the irony of them having some fantastic pictures on their new super-slim sets, but awful sound. Sets that slim simply can't put out good quality sound.

Buying a cheap receiver and plugging a few inexpensive speakers into it can make a colossal difference. But most consumers aren't aware of that.

So now it's onto 3D. I think the first question that needs to be asked is whether everyone is prepared to upgrade their sets again so soon? I'm not sure they are. HD Ready sets have only truly been mainstream for the last couple of years. And most have probably got another five or more years in them.

Then the next question to ask is whether you're prepared to wear a special set of glasses at home to watch TV? I really doubt it.

3D has a wow-factor, but imagine the scene at home. You've found the remote, but not the glasses. Or you've got two pairs but not a third for the other family member. Sure they can go out and get more, but those ones your cinema sold you for 80p won't work on your TV set.

There's also the small matter that a single format hasn't yet been determined for the home market.

I think that like the "fads" for 3D in the fifties and eighties, we're going through another one now. With computer animation it's actually somewhat easier to make a film in 3D so there's a certain "why not" attached to doing so. You just have to render the "other eye". And of course, they earn you more in revenue. But it's a craze. And I think I'll take a pass. There will be some excellent photos of people in pubs watching the Arsenal game though!

I don't blame a presenter trying to maximise their value, but if reports are true, then Harry Hill is shortly going to be signing a deal with Sky One and leaving ITV.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

In March last year they were after Harry again, as well as Gavin and Stacey. That didn't work out. But they're having another bash. You just know that this is a bad idea. I won't repeat arguments I've already made.

Of course, with Hill's contract at an end, his management company, Avalon, will be doing their best. But this would undoubtedly be a bad move. And I speak as someone who subscribes to Sky One.

Have you seen the new Bill Bailey show on Sky One? I have. It has Joe Swash in it. Yes him.

I like Bill Bailey. And we know he, like Rory McGrath, is a keen birder. But this programme is awful. One epsiode was enough for me.

On TV Burp, Harry makes fun of lots of ITV shows, and belittles some of the really awful ones. But he quite likes the soaps really. How can you work for a network, most of who's home-grown programming deserves the Harry Hill trademark sideways turn towards the camera?

Moreover, the next time someone at Sky is claiming that Sky One is the new HBO, remember that HBO has not become what it is today by "poaching" big shows from the major networks.

How about actually developing and creating your own comedies? I know that's not easy, but it puts you on a much sounder footing in the long term.

The big news today is that Jonathan Ross has quit his job at the BBC. Although he'll be staying on for specials and on presentational duty at things like the BAFTAs and Comic Relief, he'll be leaving his Friday Night Show, Film 2010 and Saturday morning Radio 2 show.

Leaving aside the whys and wherefores of his decision - and seemingly it was his decision - what does that mean for TV and radio?

Fortuitously, Graham Norton has just signed a new deal with the BBC, so I think we can expect to see his current Monday night show swiftly moving into the Friday night slot. Indeed having both shows on BBC1 felt like one too many shows. Yes, I know that in the US, we'd get five nights a week of this kind of fare, with NBC letting Jay Leno creep into primetime this season. But that's not really the role of BBC1.

Ross himself might end up doing his show on ITV1 - although Paul O'Grady is just about to fill that mantle. That's not to say that betwen themselves, Ross and O'Grady couldn't each do 13 week runs throughout the year. You'd anticipate that their shows would fit into Saturday nights, currently chock-filled with X-Factor, Dancing on Ice, Britain's Got Talent, I'm A Celebrity, Ant and Dec and so on (and we must remember that Big Brother's up for grabs at some point later this year too).

But I think this does leave BBC1 with the opportunity to launch a new, less comedic and more serious interview show. I was no real fan of Parkinson, but once he sailed off into the sunset, UK TV was deprived of any even vaguely serious interview shows. And with both Ross and Norton on their books, there wasn't really room for a new chat show. The last real attempt to start a new show was the desperately awful "Davina" McCall show in 2006, something everybody is still trying to forget. I'd suggest going a bit upmarket from that and getting someone who can interview well and get more from a guest.

Getting guests really shouldn't be a major issue. With only Ross or Norton to go on currently in prime time, the earlier teatime and lunchtime shows do surprisingly well with the calibre of their guests - however embarrassing it must be for your publicist to get you onto Loose Women.

So I'd suggest looking beyond the "usual suspects", and not to model the show on American chat shows (as nearly every show is) which - with the exception of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and to an extent Craig Ferguson) are pretty awful. Yes - even Letterman.

Film 2010 is another interesting position to fill. The obvious person is Mark Kermode. BBC2 really hasn't found a home for The Culture Show, and this might be a good opportunity to use one of its better strands. It'd be nice for the programme to grow some legs and not rely on the somewhat dull star interviews conducted in Park Lane hotel suites. Another option would be Andrew Collins.

The radio position is really interesting. For a while, Saturday mornings were a real battleground. There was Adam & Joe on 6 Music, Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, Danny Baker on Five Live, and our own Frank Skinner on Absolute Radio. Now the first two have both, or will shortly, be stopping. So who fills that slot on Radio 2 from later in the year?

Matt Wells suggested Liza Tarbuck earlier today. She's been filling in for Ross in that slot, and she adds a much needed female voice to the Radio 2 roster. Remember that Radio 2 has no female presenters in primetime during the week, with Sarah Kennedy and Janice Long filling the early breakfast and overnight slots respectively. Even weekends are really limited to Zoe Ball at Saturday breakfast and Elaine Paige for Sunday lunchtimes. So Tarbuck would be a welcome fulltime addition.

Would Ross want to do any more radio work? I don't know. I think he enjoys the medium, and I remember him from his time at Virgin Radio back in 1998/9 when he first presented a radio show nationally (in particular I recall that when he sat in for Chris Evans at breakfast his was one of the funniest ever radio shows I've heard). More to the point, could anybody in radio afford him? Might there be a syndicated show in there somewhere? Or would he cause too much stress for compliance people?

Time will tell.

[More Jonathan Ross photos from his time at Virgin Radio in 1998 and 1999 can be seen here]

Disclaimer: As ever, these are personal opinions and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer. I have absolutely no knowledge of any discussions he may have had or be having with anybody in radio or elsewhere.

Is stripping a good idea?

I mean the television scheduling practice of course. Tonight on ITV1, the first episode of a new series of Above Suspicion is starting. It's a three-parter really, with episodes each night from Monday to Wednesday. Over on BBC2, they're beginning a run of Nurse Jackie, the dark comedy from US cable network Showtime (also home of series like Weeds, Dexter and Californication) starring Edie Falco of Sopranos fame. That's also airing nightly at 10pm Monday to Friday for the first week. From next Monday it drops back to a weekly series, but given that there are only 12 episodes in total, that's half the series gone in 8 days.

Are these good scheduling ideas?

In recent times, ITV1 has shown Collision over five nights, following the lead of BBC1 which has shown series like Criminal Justice, Five Days and Torchwood in a similarly stripped manner.

Obviously some soaps air daily, with shows like Emmerdale, Hollyoaks, Neighbours and Home and Away showing at the same time and place each weeknight. But they're different. It's a rare soap that you can't easily miss a few episodes of and happily pick up with the minimum of fuss.

But I'm not sure that even a multi-layered whodunnit (or whydunnit) works that well. While the TV station certainly makes the series an "event", can we all ensure that we'll be available to watch five nights of the week? Most people, even in these recessionary times, have other things to do at least once a week.

Of course with PVRs we can record epsiodes we miss, and do the "box-set" style catchup thing at the weekend. Indeed Sky Two recently re-aired the last complete series of 24 and Lost over single days in such a "boxset" manner. But those were stunts - with few viewers likely to be watching 24 solidly for 24 hours. Both series had previously aired (multiple times) in a weekly format.

One busy weekend might mean, if you were worried about continuity, that you could end up with six episodes of Nurse Jackie to catch up on. Not having seen Nurse Jackie, I don't know, but I'd have thought that a comedy would do better spread out over several weeks from the start.

We all remember the way BBC2 has treated excellent comedies like Seinfeld and Larry Sanders in the past, and more recently Arrested Development. I suppose we should thank our lucky stars that it's not going out in the post-Newsnight slot.

Perhaps BBC2 is just worried that they've got another Defying Gravity on their hands? This space-set soap, a Canadian-US-BBC co-production got canned in the States, and even BBC2 had to quietly bump it into late night where it was scheduled so erratically that at one point a new episode was showing late at night on BBC2 clashing with a previously episode being signed over on BBC1. And I see that Heroes is back on BBC2 next Saturday - so far without any publicity at all. It seems to be airing a triple episode at least in the first week. That does mean that we'll catch up with America pretty quickly if that continues, but on the other hand you wonder how much belief schedulers have in the series.

Sometimes, less is more...

Here's a strange thing: I just spent this evening watching ITV. At least, I spent 9pm to 11.45pm watching the channel. And it's not even a Champions' League Night.

Now you do need to understand that I don't watch any of the soaps - especially not Coronation Street. I gave up on The Bill when that turned into a soap many years ago. And I especially don't watch Britain's Got I'm A Celebrity X-Factor. So even though ITV's not had a bad year in terms of audience figures, in spite of the recession, I've not been an enormous part of it.

Football aside, I struggle to think of any drama series worth watching: The Fixer perhaps (although I doubt it'll be coming back), or the odd episode of Law & Order: UK. But not a great deal else. Although it makes the odd decent two-parter even if I do wonder why they don't think about making longer running decent dramas.

That's what made this evening on ITV1 so different*. At 9pm we finally got to see An Englishman In New York, the sequel to Thames Television's 1975 film of The Naked Civil Servant. That film had been utterly ground-breaking - something that almost nobody else could have made at the time. Certainly not the BBC, although perhaps Channel 4 might have tackled it had it been in existance.

It's rightly regarded as one of ITV's most powerful dramas, and yet the fact that this sequel is even appearing on the network becomes noteworthy.

In fact this film was made nearly 18 months ago, and the strange accounting techniques used in TV drama mean that it doesn't get paid for until it airs. ITV tends to quietly pump out a few quality offerings around this time of year when most advertising budgets (with the exception of plentiful furniture companies' sales) are extinguished and thus it can later point to them when it's making some kind of public service case.

The sequel was a slightly forlorn look at Crisp's life in New York as he at first enjoyed the freedom to express himself that he was now able to achieve (something that wasn't the case in Britain). But over time, he became an ever more inward and even sorry figure. Hurt's performance was powerful and you believed that this was an old man who, as he said, was required to stay with the body that he'd long ago divorced. The 70s and 80s New York setting felt real and this was a quality, well-scripted production.

After the news, it was the final episode in the final series of The South Bank Show with Melvyn Bragg. For this swansong, the programme featured the RSC who'd they'd first featured in the second episode. Watching this made me realise that I probably haven't spent enough time with the programme in recent years.

In a Guardian piece today Mark Lawson (who once claimed to have seen every "SBS" episode made) drew our attention to Bragg's closing words:

"The brave work is continuing," he notes, "keeping this now well-established British institution full of new life as it moves into the future."

I wonder if that's relevant to British broadcasting as a whole rather than The South Bank Show alone?

What tonight gave us was a glimpse of commercial television back in the eighties or even the seventies. ITV still thought of itself as a public service broadcaster that just happened to have "a licence to print money" as Lew Grade put it. Of course Bragg himself became rich from his shares in LWT (along with many of his contempories), but still The South Bank Show continued.

It seems that its end came when its budget was squeezed. It's obvious, even with a trip to the Ukraine in this edition, that it was already being made quite cheaply with a director who also did much of the filming. So perhaps it's time to take one last look back at tonight's page in the Christmas Radio Times to realise that even in 2009 it was still possible.

--

* Unless you live in Scotland and don't have access to Sky or Virgin Media. There STV thought that viewers would prefer to see a documentary on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in place of An Englishman In New York. I don't doubt that Conan Doyle is worthy of such a documentary, but in place of this? That's STV being cheap and nothing more. It's good to learn that even STV is beginning to learn the error of its ways following some disastrous viewing figures - especially on Sunday nights when the rest of the ITV network is performing just fine. I love the expression "shortbread TV".

On the way home last night I found a discarded copy the Daily Telegraph that contained this utterly pointless article about the upcoming Christmas television schedule.

The early schedules are out now, and that means that some of the tabloids will be rushing out early versions of their Christmas TV guides before we head off out in a few days and dutifully pick up our rather-more-comprehensive Christmas editions of the Radio Times - other listings magazines are available.

But at the Telegraph that's not an option. Instead of getting excited about when Doctor Who is airing, or what films are getting premieres, the Telegraph gets some work experience to tot up how many hours of programmes have "(R)" next to their names.

"600 hours of TV repeats to be shown over Christmas" is the headline.

Re-runs will include classic episodes of Dad's Army, Top Gear and Morecambe & Wise as well as family favourites such as the Men Behaving Badly and The Two Ronnies.

MPs have criticised broadcasters saying that audiences are entitled to variety, instead of old films like Romancing the Stone, Mary Poppins and The Snowman.

Clearly families will be gutted to have watch such fare. Everybody hates Morecambe & Wise and The Snowman don't they?

And why do MPs lend credence to this garbage? If there's one thing we all know about MPs is that they simply don't have time to watch television. They're far too busy! What on earth do they know about what television?

Someone's worked out that the BBC is showing 270 hours of repeats, with the BBC Two Christmas Day schedule filled with such shocking films as White Christmas and Kiss Me Kate.

Why is John Whittingdale quoted as saying "Certainly during peak time viewing, people are entitled to new programmes. The BBC in particular should not be relying on old shows considering they receive £3.6billion in licence fees" when, umm, it is filling peak time with new programmes.

Meanwhile Don Foster says, "As channels dish out yet more of the same old Christmas fare, it's not surprising that viewers are turned off by Christmas TV.

"With fewer new children's programmes being made, surely the broadcasters could have made a special effort for them at Christmas."

He has a point about childrens' broadcasting, although I think that's not relevant to the argument here where there's plenty of child friendly fare at Christmas.

Meanwhile the Telegraph castigates ITV for repeats when it's own commercial department will be able to explain that it's simply not worth spending valuable editorial resources too close to Christmas since advertising drops off a few days before Christmas, and post Christmas, there's really just "Sales" advertising.

Having raised this irrelevant and misleading question, the piece ends with:

A BBC spokesman said: "We are showing a wide range of original programming on both channels this Christmas and there are no repeats in prime time on BBC One from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day. However, we are told by our viewers that they also appreciate being able to see some much-loved programmes again, and therefore repeats have a place in the mix alongside new programmes for an enjoyable Christmas schedule."

At least the Telegraph isn't filed with repeats dredging up this non-story at the same time every year... This filled most of page 3 by the way.

[UPDATE] Media Guardian has coverage of the Express' ludicrous front page as well as the Mail, and years passim.

For a good year or so I've been using Sky's mobile service on my phones - in particular their Remote Record function that allows me to browse the Sky EPG and set my Sky+ at home to record the programme I want. But it's not been the easiest thing to use. Not because the service doesn't work, but because Sky has seemed to make it as hard to use or find as possible. I'd end up in recurring loops chasing around the Sky website looking for a downloadable application, or a mobile web address I should go to.

On the first N82 I had (before it was damaged), I had to hunt high and low to find the Sky application, eventually getting it from a forum somewhere - certainly not a sky.com website. When I needed to reinstall the application, the same hunt across Sky's website revealed precisely nothing. I ended up with an inferior Java based application which still worked. It allowed me to log-in and set remote record reminders.

Sky seemed as keen as anything to get me to take out a mobile TV subscription, but I find Remote Record the most useful application.

Remote Record is also available via a texting mechanism which is fine, as long as you can remember the format that Sky wants date, channel and programme title:

Programme Title. Channel name. Two-digit day/Two-digit month. 24-hour time

Send this to 61759. Sky's example would be: 'Simpsons. Sky One. 22/03. 18:45'

That's fine, although I've struggled in the past with programmes like Match of the Day, which can be frustrating.

Their PC implementation is fine. But mobile is surely the most useful. Indeed Sky's recently launched an inevitable iPhone application to do this. The number of people who've got excited about something that other mobile users have had working for the last two years is extraordinary.

Which makes it all the more curious that yesterday Sky sent me a text to let me know that from November 29, their application would no longer work.

"We regret to say our Sky App will no longer work from 29 Nov. If you have Mob TV you can still watch via VF Live. For our latest Mob services visit sky.com."

To say this is disappointing is an understatement. Here's a service which works - and works well. What's more it's something that only Sky offers in the marketplace. So quite why non-iPhone users should have this functionality removed is bizarre. Does this cost Sky an awful lot to administer?

Someone I know who used to work at Sky once mentioned that hardly anyone used their mobile application service (this was pre-iPhone). I pointed out that this was probably because it was practically impossible to find on their website, and install. With the advent of the (flawed) Ovi store, Blackberry World, and Android store et al, people know about installing applications on phones more than ever.

A scan over at Digital Spy reveals similar consternation to my own, with the same confusion.

The text suggests that I visit sky.com to learn more about their mobile services. But I can't see anything on their main site or their mobile site to suggest a replacement service is coming. Indeed the Sky Mobile landing page currently pictures a Nokia N95 running the very app that is due to die next week.

In summary, I'm at a loss. Perhaps I've missed something obvious. But if I have, Sky has communicated this information very badly.

[Update] A further Google reveals this. There's a new Sky App for more Nokia phones! If that's the case, then why doesn't Sky say that we'll need to update our applications and not just say that they're all finishing?

In fact, having now installed and played with Sky's new Nokia application, it's actually pretty decent (although I'll wait to see if the programme I've just set to record did indeed record when I get home later).

Poor communication from Sky then?

How about this time, they make it a bit easier for people to find and install the application at sky.com? It's a shame to invest in developing a product and then not tell people about it properly.

[UPDATE 2] Sky responded to an email I sent them and are now directing customers to http://d2c.wecomm.com/sky to download the latest version of the application, which as I say above, is a welcome improvement.

There's a lot of rubbish on televison. Most of it in fact.

But once in a while there's something good. And even more rarely, something exceptional gets aired. Last night on Channel 4 we got the latter. The Force is a new three part documentary from Patrick Forbes. He's made some excellent observational documentaries in the last couple of years including National Trust (which I haven't seen but was widely praised) and English Heritage (which I have seen and is excellent).

In these films he follows the Hampshire Police as they solve crimes. That could be very dull - the networks are full of cheap observational police documentaries. ITV airs Nightwatch every night after all. But this was something more than drunken youths in a city-centre somewhere being locked in the cells overnight.

We followed a case where a body of a young woman was found burnt in a suitcase. A nasty murder. The police had to piece the whole case together. The body was unidentifiable initially, and they had no witnesses. A car had been seen and had an accident. They had some of its paint. Slowly the story came together. But forensics in real life aren't as slick as those of CSI or other dramas. DNA evidence doesn't always come up trumps.

The film was edited in such a manner that it felt like a well-told crime drama. Yet it was real, and the death of the young Polish woman was not just some Sunday evening fun. There was tension and reality - the cameras couldn't always be everywhere at exactly the right time. But we saw enough to realise that here were a group of people diligently carrying out their job even when somebody at Vauxhall was being unhelpful about getting a German contact to talk about paint to.

Curiously the film's credits listed Mark Strong as narrator, yet one of the film's strengths was that it had no narrator. Maybe I've forgotten about something at the start, but all the information that we needed to know was conveyed in brief on-screen captions. Indeed my biggest complaints about contemporary documentaries - that they feel the need to recap after every ad-break - was nicely side-stepped by a brief summary caption for latecomers or the slow of thinking.

Overall this was a little gem, and I'll be looking forward to the rest of the series.

Do yourself a favour and watch the first episode. It's repeated on Channel 4 this Thursday at 1am (ie. Very early on Friday morning), so set your PVR for then. Or watch it again on demand. You'll thank me later!

Short answer: No.

I alluded a little the other day to this, but I think it's a discussion worthy of its own topic anyway.

Every couple of years or so, Sky One gets a new controller - most recently Stuart Murphy who was appointed at the start of this year. Every new channel controller wants to make his or her mark, and that's always been the case with Sky One - or indeed any other channel. More than once we've heard that a channel controller of Sky One wants to make it a bit more like HBO in the US.

The problem is that HBO is sold as a specific add-on in the US, whereas Sky One is usually sold in a basic entertainment pack in the UK. In the US they'd talk about the former being "premium cable" while the latter is "basic cable." That means that the amount the channel receives per subscriber is much less than what HBO gets.

Let's take a bit of a look at HBO. It's certainly not like any UK channel. First of all, it's actually a pacakge of channels with HBO being the main brand. Most of the secondary channels show repeats of the main channel's fare, but as well as original dramas and comedy, HBO largely shows first run films (a la Sky Movies), plenty of boxing (sometimes on a pay-per-view basis), and sex "documentaries". How much subscribers pay can vary by cable or satellite dish operator, and other packages subscribed to, but it's clear that HBO is getting around $35 a month per subscriber for its offerings.

The key thing for HBO then, is to ensure that it has a package that's attractive enough for people to keep subscribing to it on top of their "basic" cable bill.

When we think of HBO in the UK, we think of The Wire, The Sopranos, Entourage, Sex and the City, Generation Kill, True Blood and Curb Your Enthusiasm amongst others. But the reality is that those are (or were) all Sunday night shows. And they're then repeated - a lot - during the week.

So last Sunday there was an airing of the film Marley and Me, followed by new epsiodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bored To Death (coming sooner or later to a UK broadcaster I've no doubt). These are then repeated before another movie - the most recent Mummy film.

The rest of the week is just a succession of films with the only other new programme being an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday evening at 10pm. Otherwise, there are a few repeats of these shows scattered about.

Daytime and late night is the same. The only other HBO produced show that week is an episode of Taxicab Confessions and a "First Look" at a new film.

In effect, then, HBO is actually Sky Movies Premiere with a few original productions scattered within.

That's quite interesting because next year HBO launches its next mega-production: The Pacific. From the producers of Band of Brothers, it's a sort of sequel set in the Pacific rather than Europe. In the UK, Sky has bought the rights to it - no doubt at great cost - with the result that it's going to be shown on Sky Movies and not Sky One. If Sky One was really the UK's HBO, then surely it'd be there.

Now I'm not trying to knock Sky One too much. It picks up a good selection of US dramas - although they're nearly all free-to-air shows in the US. And it makes the odd drama. While series like Dream Team and Mile High are long gone, it produces a Terry Pratchett two-parter each year, and made the well-regarded Skellig last year.

It's also worth noting that HBO makes a series of well-regarded one-off dramas, often being co-productions with the BBC such as the forthcoming Emmy-winning Into The Storm about Churchill, a sequel of sorts to The Gathering Storm.

But Sky One has struggled with home-grown comedy. And it actually seems to be making more gameshows and talk shows than anything else right now. Last week we heard about a commission for a gameshow called Sell Me The Answer to run alongside the previously announced Angela and Friends (which sounds a bit like Loose Women and is probably hoping to be like ABC's The View in the US).

Aside from the aforementioned big dramas, there was also The Take recently and the forthcoming Strike Back based on some Chris Ryan novels. These are obviously costly, but perhaps a little more ITV than HBO? However it's unfair to judge the latter until we see it. They've also got a They Think It's All Over -type comedy panel show, and to be fair, their Twelve Days of Christmas short films initiative sounds very interesting.

Otherwise it's mostly studio gameshows. We've had Don't Forget the Lyrics, Smarter than a Ten Year Old (with its bewildering array of presenters), and there's the forthcoming Just Dance.

There are the odd documentaries including Ross Kemp's surprisingly good series, Justin Lee Collins' "In At The Deep End" style series recently (although he's been snapped up by Five now), the curiously funded UK Border Force, and a forthcoming Bird Watching programme with Bill Bailey.

Yet when all's said and done, Sky One is its own beast. It's not HBO. It's not BBC1 or ITV1. It needs to follow its own path.

And if proof be needed, today comes news that Sky has commissioned a couple of shows based around renowned "psychic" Derek Acorah performing a "Live Séance" with the recently deceased Michael Jackson. I'm not making this up. Sky One isn't HBO. It's Living TV.

Apologies in advance - just about everything I'm going to mention here is now beyond the iPlayer's Listen Again window.

The BBC World Service has just finished another Worldplay series, this time based on the subject of science. The last piece was called Moving Bodies by Arthur Giron and starred Alfred Molina. It was actually an edited version of a production from LA Theatreworks.

The play is all about the life of Richard Feynman, the physicist. It covers most of his life, from his time as a child with his domineering father right up until the subject which bookends the play - his work on the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster.

Feynman's story is a remarkable one, and if you ever get the chance to watch the full version of his 1981 Horizon interview you should jump at the opportunity.

Although this play is no longer available to listen to on the iPlayer, Audible.co.uk does have the full version available for download and it's on iTunes.

I first heard of Gerard Hoffnung when I was in Edinburgh on a university placement. A friend of mine there expressed surprise that I'd never heard Hoffnung's rambling story of the bricklayer (Listen to it - it's very funny. I've just ordered the full CD on the basis of that re-listening.). He lent me a cassette and that was how I learnt about the man.

If you listen to that clip of Hoffnung, you might surmise that he was a gentleman in his late fifties or early sixties. But he gave that address in 1958 when he was only 33. And he died a year later, making this year the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Those nice people over at Speechification recently posted a link to a Twenty Minutes on Hoffnung that was broadcast during the Proms which is well worth a listen.

Then last week Radio 4 broadcast a play by Alan Stannard called Hoffnung - Drawn To Music, starring Matt Lucas and Gina McKee which was nicely observed and explored the way that Hoffnung was able to cajole respected composers into helping him put together the Hoffnung Music Festival at the Royal Festival Hall.

Elsewhere, I'm pleased that The News Quiz is back in the Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy slot and that rather awful I Guess That's Why They Call It The News has finished. Obviously Radio 4 has to experiment with new comedies, but I can fairly easily say that this was certainly a failed experiement.

Meanwhile on Mondays The Unbelievable Truth with David Mitchell is back (read his excellent Observer piece on Tracy Emin today), causing fun on Feedback.

And Dave Gorman has started his new Sunday morning show on Absolute Radio (Disclaimer: Clearly I work there).

As for TV? You are watching Spiral aren't you? If you're not, then it's available on catch-up on the iPlayer. So there's four hours of your life accounted for (or five if you read this after 10pm tonight). The Fixer just finished its second series, and given the way ITV treats drama these days - cancelling a popular programme like Kingdom for example - I'm not going to hold my breath for a third. Finally, you are watching the BBC Four Electric Revolutions season I trust. In particular, I loved Micro Men and Gameswipe.

And so it has come to pass - this weekend's dead rubber between the Ukraine and England, will only be available online or at your local Odeon cinema.

The prices seem to range from £4.99 if you book now to £11.99 if you book on the day of the game. Odeon cinemas seem to be charging the higher of the two prices.

There's been a combination of teeth gnashing and apathy today. The game is pretty much meaningless since England has qualified (although it might subtly affect our "co-efficient" for determining things like group stages draws in future tournaments).

That said, I certainly can't be bothered.

The reason given for the match not finding a television home with the BBC, ITV, Five, Sky or ESPN is that "broadcasters were willing to pay the asking price to screen the game." In other words, if none of those guys - even someone like ESPN which is surely trying to create a new business, isn't willing to pay to screen it, then clearly too much is being charged.

What's actually happened is that when the draw for this round of group stages was made by FIFA a couple of years ago, a few sports agencies dash around and purchase the rights to games from individual nations' football associations. They move quickly since if a footballing "minnows" have games against larger football-mad nations. Rather than selling group stages to one rights holder, individual nations can sell their own home games separately. So whatever the English FA would like it to do, it's the Ukranian FA that gets to sell its home rights.

So it was that back in November 2007 a company named Kentaro snapped up the rights to a number of England games. Setanta came along and bought them. There was probably a hope that if it came down to the wire, this could be a critical game for England to qualify for South Africa. A high fee was probably demanded and paid. In the event, England strolled the group, and the match is meaningless, as is the final fixture against Belarus. Meanwhile Setanta went bust and rights reverted to Kentaro who were then left with a problem selling them in a down market at a time when England were strolling to qualification.

Kentaro has taken a gamble and it hasn't paid off*. So now, rather than cutting their losses and accepting the highest offer from a "traditional" football broadcaster, they're trying the direct-to-consumer route. They claim that they'll limit the number of streams they sell to a million which represents a minimum of £5m revenue if they get to that number.

In the future, we'll perhaps see more of this kind of selling, although there are plenty of regular pay-per-view platforms available like Sky Box Office, Virgin Media and BT Vision. None of these seems to be being employed. So unless you're able to hook up your PC to your TV, you're reduced to watching the game on a smaller screen - quite possibly a laptop sized screen. Not your 42" plasma. A pay-per-view option would also have enabled some pubs to show the game.

Will the feed be stable? Who knows. The BBC has struggled at times during key Wimbledon fixtures that take place during office hours. Sky's Player also struggled at certain points during The Ashes. These are large broadcasters with big IT teams who are used to serving significant numbers of simultaneous streams. Sport will always show up a poor digital picture - I'd always want to watch some sport on any prospective flatscreen TV I was buying for example.

How strong is Kentaro's backbone? It's possible that we won't find out, because I'd be amazed if all that many pay up.

The Odeon idea is interesting, and I assume that it'll be an HD stream - certainly not an internet stream. In the past Odeon cinemas have simulcast live football in big tournaments, as well as HD Formula 1 coverage. They also regularly show live opera from places like the Met and Glynebourne.

But let's see what happens at the weekend. I doubt we'll ever learn how many streams are sold. However, it will be interesting to see what happens when the draw for the group stages of Euro 2012 are made in February 2010. Will we see some higher profile away games going online?

*Clearly, I have no real insight into Kentaro's business plans, but I think that's a safe assumption to make.

Or perhaps they're not so smart.

This week, Channel 4 starts showing a couple of hot(tish) new(ish) shows from HBO. On Wednesday at 10.00pm it starts showing True Blood, a great vampire show based on novels by Charlaine Harris set in the Deep South. It's a bit soapy, not a little sexy and but great well-made fun. And it comes from Alan "Six Feet Under" Ball giving it a quality imprimatur.

It's taken a while to reach free-to-air screens because it's just completed a first run on pay-TV channel, FX UK. But even they took a while to get their hands on it as the first season began in September last year on HBO in the States, and they didn't mess about with the second season which has already concluded.

Following True Blood on Four, is Generation Kill - David "The Wire" Simon's most recent piece of work. This has also taken a while to reach free-to-air shores. Again FX got in there first showing it at the start of this year. It actually aired on HBO in the summer of 2008, and UK DVDs have been available since March of this year.

Now clearly it's a quality piece of work that deserves the wider audience that Channel 4 can afford it, but their scheduling is clearly questionable. Running it at 11.20pm in the evening so that it doesn't end until 12.45am on a weeknight is bizarre - if not downright extraordinary. Unless Channel Four thinks their entire audience will be PVRing it rather than watching live, I'm not sure I can really think of a reason why it's being shown so late.

The BBC two has recently stripped The Wire in a post Newsnight slot, burning through all five series in a matter of months, but that's a series that first aired in the US in 2002, and has been repeated a large number of times on FX, and been available on DVD for nearly as long. It's not quite the same.

(What you might notice from all this is that FX picks up a lot of decent shows that only later emerge fully. FX is underservedly buried in the EPG, and I'm sure, if it ever went free-to-air, could easily be as successful as Dave. That won't happen as it's part of the Murdoch empire. Let's face it: while Stuart Murphy might want to make Sky One like HBO, the programming doesn't entirely back that up. Actually FX is the most HBO-like channel in the UK).

Channel 4 has recently been a bit miffed that the BBC has been buying some of the big new US series. They bent the ear of a few Shadow Cabinet members, and I heard Jeremy Hunt at the Radio Festival explicitly mention The Wire as an example. A poor analogy as it happens. The Wire has surely been available to all broadcasters since 2002. FX was the only channel to pick it up until recently. At the point the BBC started showing it, vast numbers of its potential audience had already seen it on either FX or via DVD box sets. I'm pretty sure that had Channel 4 wanted to buy The Wire in the meantime, they'd had something like seven years to make a move.

In actual fact I think Channel 4 was more annoyed about Harper's Island which BBC Three is showing. I'm not sure why because it was cancelled.

Indeed More 4 "poached" Curb Your Enthusiasm from BBC Four, and most major US shows - with perhaps the exception of Heroes - are on either Four, Five or Sky One. Flash Forward being perhaps the biggest new hit - although I think we'd better wait a few more episodes before being certain.

At least Five and Sky One have better understandings of sensible scheduling as we head towards the end of the first decade of a new century. In May 1977, Star Wars got a US release. In the UK, we didn't see it until the end of that year, with most screenings only beginning in 1978, seven months after it had premiered. That's how things worked in those days. Publicity machinary could move on to Europe, and the same prints - by now pretty beaten up - could be shipped across and reused, certainly in English language markets.

These days of course, blockbusters open globally as close to simultaneously as possible. This means PR has to be coordinated very carefully, and since we're still largely in an age when cinemas still use prints, there's a high cost in getting all those screens filled - especially when one multiplex may be using five prints itself.

Film companies will probably claim that this is mostly due to minimising piracy - and that's true. But piracy is driven because we all know when new blockbusters are coming out. Digital PR starts the second production starts, and possibly earlier. That builds demand. And nobody is prepared to wait until Christmas for a film that opened in the US in May. At least that's the case for most blockbusters. The one notable exception seems to be Pixar's films which always seem to wait for the autumn half-time in the UK to open, two or three months after the US release.

What's this got to do with TV scheduling? Well, like it or not, the same is true of TV. Especially genre fiction. Fans of Fringe, Flash Forward, House, Lost et al know exactly their favourite shows air in the US and want to see them. Not only that, but they can see them if they download them illegally. Indeed, with a credit card registered in the US, you can also download them legally via places such as iTunes.

Last year the BBC finally realised that its audience for Heroes was being damaged by downloads and it started broadcasting soon after its US broadcast. That's changed this year, and it seems that we'll have to wait until January. Viewing figures will undoubtedly be hit.

Five, as I mentioned, is taking as little chance as it can with Flash Forward, and just about everything on Sky One is airing within days of its US broadcast.

Police dramas seem to suffer less and CSI ends up being broadcast up to a year after its US broadcast, but there are lot of miffed Mad Men fans annoyed that BBC Four is making them wait until next year.

The long explained reason for these delays in that US networks stretch 22 weeks of programmes from September until May - a period of more than 22 weeks. In other words they take weeks off for sport, Christmas, non-ratings periods and so on. They run repeats from just a few weeks earlier and so on. But that's not the case with cable shows, and it's become less the case with any kind of continuing dramas. Series like 24 and Lost don't work well if the story doesn't run continuously. So US networks have learnt and schedule accordingly.

But whatever the scheduling habits of US networks, if a UK channel purchases a US TV series, they'd be wise to look at the scheduling pattern that the series' original broadcaster is following.

That's even more the case if you're the co-producer of a TV series - as ITV is with the forthcoming remake of The Prisoner. It's producing it in conjunction with US cable channel AMC. This is the channel that makes Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

Due to the curious nature of how US TV ratings are calculated, they still have "sweeps" periods three times a year. During most of the year, ratings are calculated nightly in only a number of major markets. But during four months a year, old-school diaries are employed and since these are the most researched periods, it's the overall numbers generated at these times of years that set the numbers for large amounts of TV advertising traded.

What this means is that during the key "sweeps" month of November, no channel worth its salt wants to be doing anything apart from putting out the best programming it can possibly muster. You know when your favourite sitcom suddenly has a big-name guest star? It almost certainly aired during a sweeps period.

AMC is, perhaps unsurprisingly then, beginning the epiosde run of The Prisoner on 15 November.

ITV is planning to show it during Spring 2010.

Now I'm sure that ITV's Autumn schedule is already jammed full of great programmes (unless you live in Scotland, obviously), but why on earth are they letting this programme slip into next year?

It's clear that if there's one genre of programming that suffers from downloading more than any other it's SF. Tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of people will have already seen The Prisoner by the time it airs in the UK next Spring. This month's SFX magazine features The Prisoner on its cover. It's a hot property, and like it or lump it, whether legal or not, nobody wants to wait.

Kudos to ITV for getting involved in making The Prisoner - and with Ian MacKellen leading the cast they have a fantastic coup. But since they co-made this programme, from the outset, they should have agreed a simultaneous airing with AMC that met both broadcasters' needs. If you don't do this, then you're just saying goodbye to a percentage of your audience.

Although you could perhaps say that ITV doesn't realise this because it's not got into this game before. Episodes of Marple aired months ago in the US and won't have hampered ITV's ratings for the same episodes. But it's also realised that it's smart to show HBO's Entourage on ITV2 in the same week as its US airing. The reverse is true with BBC America and SyFy getting much closer to the UK with airings of Doctor Who and Torchwood.

Perhaps it's too late now for ITV this time around. All those extra long episodes of X-Factor and I'm A Celebrity can't be moved now! But maybe it's something to consider next time?

Tonight, [channel] Five shows the first episode of what we're told is the hot new US series of the Autumn - FlashForward.

But their advertising campaign is a bit odd: "From the US network that brought you Lost..." run the trails. That's true - they both air on ABC in the US.

But that's really incidental to the series. They don't share producers or production teams - there may well be crew members who've worked on both, but that's neither here nor there. The two have nothing in common aside from being commissioned by the same network.

It's a bit like saying "Spooks... from the network that brought you The Weakest Link!"

I was thinking some more about this when I read something in the Guardian Guide previewing the fact that True Blood finally debuts on "terrestrial" television next week, when Channel 4 starts airing it after an initial run on FX (and well aftter the second series has finished in the US).

Because True Blood comes from HBO, and HBO commissioned The Wire, it has to be mentioned in the copy.

That's really not relevant. Yes, we know we get "edgy" fare from HBO, but then this is the channel that also shows "documentaries" including "Co-ed Confidential", "Real Sex", "Pornucopia" and "Cathouse" amongst others. Strange that they never get a mention!

Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago, the excellent French thriller serial Spiral returned to BBC Four - indeed BBC Four now gets a production credit! But of course, it has to be referred to as "the French Wire".

It's nothing like The Wire.

It's an excellent series in its own right, set amid the various strands of the French judiciary system as well as petty criminals, drug dealers, and goodness knows who else.

When Spiral first came out, the comparison was made with CSI because it was beautifully shot, and there were scenes of forensics. But again, the comparison was a misnomer. And of course, even though this was only 2006, and The Wire started airing in 2002, nobody in the UK had heard of that series then.

Private Eye has a regular feature in which something is referred to as "the new black." Perhaps this needs replacing with a comparison with The Wire?

Doc Martin - Cornwall's answer to The Wire
Dragons' Den On Tour - Duncan Bannatyne is Dragons' Den's equivalent of The Wire's McNulty
Derren Brown - Magic's equivalent of The Wire

Etc. Ad nauseum.

OK - so I made those up, but you understand my point!

I realise that we need cultural touchpoints, but you're not a script-writer having to make an elevator pitch to someone in a Hollywood elevator: "It's a cross between Speed and Pretty Woman set on a space station!"

There are other reference points out there.

Here are two separate programmes that you simply must watch and listen to... for entirely different reasons.

First off, there's my current favourite radio feature on any programme anywhere at the moment. Yes, it's an Absolute Radio show and I work there, and yes, I know all the people who make it. But honestly irrespective of all that, it's just thoroughly brilliant.

Over the last few week's there's been new feature on the Geoff Hometime Show: Annabel v The Internet.

Each week Geoff sets the "technophobic" Annabel Port a challenge to see if she can do something we now take for granted by using the internet. She can't use the internet to help her succeed in her tasks. Instead of just looking up the answers online, or emailing folk, it's all down to visiting places and ringing people up.

Geoff sets the challenge on Monday, and then she reports back over the following three evenings with points either being awarded to Annabel if she's doing well, or the internet if she fails.

It's brilliant!

So far, Twitter, Skateboarding Dogs, Wikipedia, Friends Reunited, MySpace, Ebay, IMDB and, this week, World of Warcraft have been topics.

But last week Annabel had to replicate sites like Holy Moly and Popbitch. She had to come up with some celebrity gossip and let us know who's been seen where. Listen to the whole week, but if you listen to nothing else, you absolutely must listen to last Wednesday's edition when Annabel goes to, amongst other places, The Ivy.

Go and listen now.

I'll wait.

Click here and navigate to Wednesday 9 September.

Just terrific radio.

Now here's something else, also from last week, and also unmissable. But for entirely different reasons. Thanks to Emily for pointing me in the right direction, otherwise I'd have certainly missed Channel 4's 3 Minute Wonders from last week.

If you've never seen them, these are quirky little themed films made by all sorts of people that fill that bit between the Channel 4 News, and the time you turn over from Channel 4 before some property porn programme comes on.

Last week, featured a "magazine" called Super Super. Now I say "magazine", but it's not something you'll find in your local WH Smith. Indeed, I've been keeping an eye out for it all over the place following this series of programmes because I'm fascinated by it. And curiously, if you visit their website (sponsored unendingly by Adidas) there simply doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe to the magazine. Nor, in fact, does there seem to be any mention that there is a magazine. Now call me old-fashioned, but wouldn't it be a smart idea to let web-visitors, you know, buy your product. Indeed, from what I know about the magazine business, subscribers are vital because they're guaranteed revenue when news-stand sales can stand or fall on lots of things. I assume that there really is a magazine...

Four films aired: SuperStyle, SuperPeople, SuperMusic, and SuperSlinky.

I urge you to watch them all. Here they are!

SuperStyle

"The magazine's founders, Super Steve and Namalee have been hailed as cultural revolutionaries."

Who by? Their mate who made this film?

"They've inspired a whole generation with their magazines super-relentless optimism."

A whole generation? Like Pepsi? Who are these people?

Super Steve (always shot in black and white): "The world looks a lot more super now than it ever did before."

Namalee: "Do you think that people are going to start dressing more like cartoon comic book heroes in the future?"

SuperPeople

"Most of the contributors for SuperSuper are doing things themselves. They're part of the world."

Phew - at least they're not imaginary.

"I think I've found the reason why there's loads of flies in the room. I put these rotten apples into my plant pot cos I thought it might give it some nutrients..."

SuperMusic

All I can say about this is that you have to listen to Namalee's song. Has anyone signed her yet?

SuperSlinky

"Slinky" seems to spend his time in Argyle Street annoying people with a loudhailer, although it's all clearly faked. But that's OK - he was set the "task" to have "a mock fight". That'll be worth reading about!

I'm beginning to wonder if Chris Morris hasn't really been busily working on his film, and instead has sneakily brought back Nathan Barley without telling anyone, and has recast the whole programme.

Finally, a third thing I quite enjoyed this week (yes, I know this piece said two things): The Playwrite and the Grammarian, which appealed to me on a couple of levels. Still on the iPlayer as I write this and featuring cameos by Roger Bolton and Peter Donaldson.

Look - I really shouldn't spend much time on this as there's been far too much time wasted on the internet with people trying to guess how he did it and what he did.

Brown told us after Wednesday's live prediction that all would be revealed on Friday and we too would be able to predict the lottery.

First things first. Brown didn't predict it. We didn't see the numbers before they were revealed. I'd have been very impressed and seriously puzzled if I had seen them. But like everything else it's a magic trick and either he's going to let us in on the secret or not.

Penn and Teller are great at doing this. They often let you in on the secret - perhaps performing the cups and balls trick with clear plastic cups, or getting the audience to guess how they faked a truck running over Teller (sadly the linked video ends before the reveal - foam tyres and heavily weighted on the other side).

Indeed Brown himself likes to play around with the medium. In his Seance special, he pretty much explained how many "psychics" operate. He's not a fan. Indeed, he's reported to be conducting an online web show debunking psychics.

A year or so ago, we also had The System which I wrote about at the time. I was troubled at the time about some of the details which didn't seem quite right. But he did explain that he'd effectively conned us and how he'd done it.

In last night's "reveal" show, it was clear that we were going to have to wait until the end. Brown took us along a path that really just had a number of well executed tricks that had little or nothing to do with the lottery "prediction."

Then he moved on to a nonsense about the "wisdom of crowds" - something about which we've heard a lot recently. But that does not mean that a group of 24 people can guess the lottery numbers? Yet, in the end, that's what we were meant to believe. Why 24? Who knows.

The system was something to do with "automatic writing" - surely something Brown will be debunking on his psychic debunking series - and averaging everybody's scores.

But if I get a group of people to predict a number between 1 and 49, and then I average those numbers as Brown was doing (we're not told how he dealt with decimals - indeed we never saw any workings at all), I'm more likely than not to end up with a number somewhere in the mid-twenties. This is because if each number between 1 and 49 was equally likely to be "predicted", then the spread of numbers will tend towards a mid-point.

Furthermore numbers at the extreme ends - 1 and 49 - will be very hard to reach. If I average 24 people's numbers and end up with 1, then nearly everybody would have had to have chosen 1 in the first place. Given that 2 came up in Wednesday's draw, it would require nearly everyone in the room to come "predict" 1, 2 or 3 to arrive at an average of 2.

Indeed, if 23 out of 24 people "predicted" 2, and just one person predicted a number that was 14 or greater, then the average would have been 3 or more, and the "prediction" would have failed.

23 people x 2 = 46
1 person x 14 = 14
Total = 60
60 divided by 24 people = 2.5 rounded up to 3.

Even if Brown adopts a round-down approach, it would only take one person choosing 26 or higher to skew the results so far off that 2 wouldn't be achievable as an average.

Note: Obviously if a lot of people "counter" with a "prediction" of 1 then the maths doesn't quite work. But you can see what I'm saying.*

Anyway, this was clearly all bunk. We still didn't see the final numbers predicted, and Brown did the calculations himself, we were told, so there was no proof there.

At the outset, Brown claimed that there were three ways he could have done it:

1) Using numerology and studying probability etc.
2) Using the wisdom of crowds
3) Fix the machine

As the programme ended he took us through the machine fixing idea, and suggested that by getting a lottery programme insider to replace balls with differently weighted balls that would have been achievable. We're somehow supposed to think that this is what he did. Clearly this too is a nonsense.

But there was a fourth solution that Brown avoided.

It was a camera trick pure and simple.

And you know what, I'd have been more impressed if he'd admitted as much having reasoned that predicting numbers for the lottery was impossible.

As I say, there were some decentish tricks along the way, and the heads and tails trick was good and learnable. The maths involved is not at all "deep" as Brown suggested. In fact it's pretty trivial.

I still enjoy watching Derren Brown. His shows are great ways of showing magic off in the 21st century. And doing live stunts is always excellent.

I'm again reminded of Paul Daniels in 1987 with his Halloween stunt. His live show ended with an escape from an Iron Maiden. But it all appeared to go horribly wrong...

Indeed, as hackneyed as you might think that Daniels is, he uses many similar presentational traits, seemingly thinking of things as he goes along for example.

The programme ends with an unseen studio manager saying "Ladies and gentlemen, please leave the room in an orderly fashion" as the screen turns to black and the credits roll.

It was a Saturday night, and, as I recall, the next programme was something like Casualty. Over the end credits of that show, a BBC continuity announcer - or perhaps Daniels himself, I don't recall accurately - assured us that what we'd seen earlier was a trick, and that Daniels wasn't harmed.

This all caused a good bit of fun and sensation at the time, as Brown has managed over the last few days.

Let's hope that the rest of Brown's The Events series is a bit better.

[Update]

A couple of interesting comments were published on The Guardian's site following this.

One commenter was someone who'd been one of the '24' who'd been predicting the numbers.

"And the reason we didn't get 24/25/26 for every ball: we were allowed to think of numbers below zero and over 50."

So they were just thinking of entirely random numbers were they? It's amazing, in that case, that the numbers fell anywhere near the numbers 1 to 49.

"This is how it worked:

So we all knew it was built up so that we'd get 6 out of 6. We knew the Wisdom of Crowds thing was meaningless at generating numbers for a random draw."

Nothing surprising there really. But it turns out that they weren't even that stupid.

Another very interesting comment was this one. The commenter seems to have some very inside information. One might suppose that it's another magician.

"You've only left people with one plausible explanation and regrettably one that undermines the basis of your most powerful medium. The level of proof doesn't satisfy Wednesday night's claim ... and all we're left with is a split screen (invisible compromise indeed). How long will it take for the press to check out your back catalogue and find at least two other effects that could be explained by the same method?"

And:

"Misdirection happens before, during and after the effect ... get off the open topped bus, show us the ace up you're sleeve and you could still make all our Christmas' come early."

It's worth noting that there is supposedly another big reveal coming later in the series which, one supposes, will tie up all the "events."

In the meantime, doing a trick and not explaining how you did it is fine. That's what happens in most magic shows. Putting a bit of phony science is fine too, although people who know about the science will call you out. But claiming that you'll tell everyone how you did and then patently lie about that is not clever, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Hence the yards of comments.

Last night saw the first in a new three part natural history series on BBC1 called Lost Land of the Volcano.

The series follows a team of scientists as they search a remote part of New Guinea in a search for new species. I know this, because the programme mentioned it. Quite a lot.

In fact they mentioned most of the things they told us quite a lot in the Philip Glenister voiceover.

Then there was the story-telling style. Series like Planet Earth and South Pacific in recent years have been edited to 50 minute lengths for international sales (where they'll be shown with ads), while we're used to seeing full hours on the BBC, so we get ten minute "diaries" stuck on the end. These can be pretty interesting, learning about the lengths that various film-makers have gone to get those amazing shots.

But in Lost Land of the Volcano, this approach has now extended into the programmes proper. We got endless aerial shots of the film-makers' and scientists' camp. We were repeatedly introduced to the various characters, just in case we'd forgotten who the "characters" were. Of the whole team, only one seemed to be a cameraman. Which was odd because there were often cameras on him shooting other footage. And the credits listed at least half a dozen camera crew.

Broadly, if the programme was to be believed, there seemed to be three people doing things. The scientist who searches for insects, the aforementioned cameraman, and some kind of action man who mostly appeared shirtless showing off his "ripped" torso (there's also an attractive female bat expert to make sure all sexual preferences are covered off).

The action man headed off to climb into some caves hundreds of miles away. Every time the going gets tricky, in true primetime dumbed-down style, we cut to another "storyline", only returning to our hero later. So we see someone else finding a possibly deadly snake in the jungle... And then we cut back to our hero on a rope swinging into the cave behind a waterfall where a cameraman already seems to be... Before cutting back to the snake which is now non-venemous... And so on.

All the while the team is finding new species. They arrive in small bags and traps - although we don't often see how they were trapped (some vague shots of nets appeared early on). Could it offend our sensibilities? One bat was brought in injured and nursed to recovery. It didn't injure itself in a net placed out by the programme makers who trapped it could it?

Every newly discovered species is clocked up. And at every stage we're told that they're discovering far more new species than they'd planned to! That's great to know. Just to make sure, we heard it at least four times in the hour.

But then we cut back to our intrepid cavers. Are they really exploring this cave series at the same time as we're watching events elsewhere? Or could these events have happened days or weeks apart?

I tend to believe the latter, but producers seem to believe that our short attention spans mean that we can't cope with concentrating on one thing for more than a couple of minutes. And every time we cut back, we have to be reminded what we were watching before (if you ever watch any daytime factual programming, you'll know what I'm talking about).

The series loves its helicopters. As well as lots of aerial jungle shots - which are impressive - we have lots of aerial shots from helicopters of other helicopters. They take off. They land. They swoop through valleys. They appear from the foliage.

And they showed us the loggers. From the narration we were led to believe that the loggers will be reaching this part of the rainforest any day now. I don't doubt that logging is a real issue, and deforestation will cause countless species to be made extinct, mostly before we even discover them. But don't just show us the evil loggers from menacing helicopter shots without making clear how likely they'll be reaching the area we're based in.

Overall, this was programme felt like a daytime programme fighting its way out of a primetime nature documentary. The thing is that the presenters are actually personable and enthusiastic. Certainly this isn't a David Attenborough voiceover style documentary, and they don't all need to be. But it doesn't have to pander the kind of person who would Cash In The Attic a challenging watch.

The fact that it gained 4.1m viewers last night will probably just mean that we see more documentaries fashioned in this style and not fewer.

A Bank Holiday weekend ahead of the start of the Autumn TV season, saw a few new series start or return, and a couple of one-offs.

Framed was by Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of such films as Millions. What I suspected, but which I didn't gain from the credits, was that this was based on a novel. Not only that, but it was an older children's novel.

So my first question is why this programme went out at 8.30pm meaning that it didn't end until 10pm when surely in many households, younger children will have had to go to bed? It didn't really address "adult themes" and could quite easily have played at 4.00pm in the afternoon. The real reason is that soap operas dictate early evening schedules, and there isn't room before 8.30pm for a 90 minute drama, since Monday is Eastenders' night. In which case, Sunday evening might have been more suitable.

Incidentally, every time a soap introduces an additional episode of

The tale itself was desperately silly with a plumbing disaster at the National Gallery requiring all the masterpieces be transported to the same Welsh mountain mine that they'd been stored in during WWII. That's fine. I don't mind silly.

But what I did feel a little uneasy about was the casting. I've no problem with either Trevor "Shoestring" Eve or Eve "Torchwood" Myles who are both excellent actors. But when the former is 58 and the latter 31, I find it harder to believe in a budding romance between the two. Older men with younger women are common on TV - you just don't tend to see the reverse.

As I say, the story was silly, but fun. And it was a perfectly good family drama. But slightly miscast, and badly scheduled.

Over on BBC2, Tim Samuels (nope - no idea), was investigating the business of porn. In particular he was looking at the profits that are being made, and in particular the cash being made by otherwise respectable companies. This was quite legitimate with most mobile companies, the majority of hotel chains and the credit card companies making significant profits from porn despite projecting strong values in company statements.

The documentary ended with a disturbing section shot in Ghana, where we're told, the effects of unfettered porn was leading to some serious social problems.

But the programme had problems too. Samuels kept showing up on-set at porn shoots like so many porn documentaries before him. While sometimes the interviews with the actors were a little disturbing (lack of condoms and doing things they frankly don't want to do), there was a certain leeriness in his presence. And for some reason, the producers adopted a pathetic device for reading out statements from the various blue-chip companies who profit from "adult entertainment", by employer porn stars to read out the statements in their underwear. This felt like having your cake and eating it.

Over on Channel 4, the end of Big Brother is nigh - both for this series, and forever (at least on this channel). Yet a couple of new series did start this weekend. Scrapheap Challenge, the long-running series about making things returned. Except that it has clearly had its budget cut significantly (something that Paul O'Grady is not willing to accept). So instead of Robert Llewellyn or Lisa Rogers, we have Dick Strawbridge who first came to light on this show. And there's no scrapyard or 12 hour builds now. Instead teams build at home, and then come together for the competition at the end. This has the effect of lessening the emphasis on the build itself, and spending more time on the competition at the end. Three teams compete for the chance to take on a presenters' team.

Some of this is fine. I think the actual competing at the end was often the most entertaining part of Scrapheap. But the savings are obvious on-screen with limited coverage now of the build, and even the graphics explaining the science behind the technology being notably lower quality than in previous years.

Channel 4 also debuted a series called Atlantic Covoys which examined, in detail, what happened across the Atlantic during WWII as convoys were created and U-Boats attacked. It did a good job covering ground that, while not altogether new (there was an episode of World at War devoted to this very subject, for example), still merited this programme. There's also been a previous BBC series that covered the whole Battle of the Atlantic, but this series is concentrating - so far at least - on the merchant seamen.

Next week's episode looks at the effect of Bletchley Park cracking the cyphers that the U-Boats used (a favourite subject of mine, I must admit).

I just wish C4 wouldn't hide away quality like this at 6.45pm on a Sunday evening. They're scared stupid to put serious documentaries like this at 8pm or 9pm.

The Edinburgh TV Festival is all very depressing isn't it. The stories coming out, during a recession that's probably hit TV today to a greater extent than ever before, all seem to be about shutting things down, and leaving well alone.

James Murdoch has come out swinging with his McTaggart lecture and it's depressing stuff. Poor little Sky is being set upon from every side. This is the same Sky, by the way, that recently announced record numbers of subscribers including many who've been shifted over to HD (for which there's an additional monthly cost).

I think that Richard Sambrook (yes - of the BBC) really hits the nail on the head in his blog entry.

Allied with a good piece from David Chance in the FT the other day, it really shows where an embattled Murdoch is really coming from.

The printed media is embattled to put it politely. Rupert Murdoch's answer is to make everything paid-for. If he can just make this happen, then everything will be OK. But that won't work if everybody else doesn't go along with him. As even Murdoch will acknowledge, in a market like London, consumers seem to prefer the "news-lite" Metro to bargain-price 20p copy of The Sun. While clever things with subscription models and access to the web probably could make a difference, micro-payments (also beloved of many others in the TV industry who believe that we'll somehow go through the rigmarole of paying 10p to watch Susan Boyle or whoever sing on our laptops) have yet to really emerge, and quite possibly never will. (Robert Peston talks about an adjunct of this in his very long, but well-worth-reading blog.)

Meanwhile he feels the pressure from two sides in the TV business. None of the Murdochs have ever liked Freeview - ironic as they're a stakeholder in the consortium and continue to supply three free-to-air channels. Ofcom turned down their proposal to switch them over to a sports/movies subscription option, and so the stake sits there as Sky fumes, plots and schemes its next move. In the meantime, the forthcoming Freeview HD is likely to cost Sky subscribers in churn.

Ofcom really became unpopular with Sky the moment it announced proposals to force the broadcaster to wholesale some of its premium programming - sport and films - to other broadcasters. Yes, you can buy those channels on Virgin Media, but other platforms such as Top-Up TV and BT Vision don't have access. BT, for example, would love to sell Sky Sports to consumers in a way that doesn't force them to buy dozens of other channels to access the sports package as Sky effectively forces consumers to do.

Ofcom also talks about rights that Sky is unable to use, yet holds the rights to such as subscription films on demand. You pay a monthly fee for recent releases (a la Sky Movies) and watch them as you want. The main issue is that Sky does not have the bandwidth to offer this kind of service. Indeed, the return path is still largely reliant on phonelines. Cable companies and internet operators can clearly offer these kinds of services.

To say that Sky is furious at Ofcom's intervention here would be putting it lightly. It's livid. It could change the fundamentals of their entire business model.

Is it surprising, then that suddenly David Cameron has talked about limiting Ofcom in the future. Anyone would think that one or more of the Murdoch clan has a word with Mr Cameron...

Historically British broadcasting has been world class, and that includes commercial as well as public sector broadcasting. Yet, as Sambrook says:

What's missing so far is discussion of the public good. Because many commercial operations are struggling, the answer for some is to close or pull down the BBC's activities. A lowest common-denominator approach. Surely part of the justification for public funding and public media is to provide during conditions of market failure?

The argument is always to take down the BBC. But will we be left with programming that is as good? Will we have the information and resource available to all?

We're living in a wonderful age. The internet allows the licence payer to watch, listen and read so much of what we've already paid for. The BBC is just about the only news organisation in the world with a significant number of foreign bureaux beyond the agencies like Reuters, AFP and AP. We laugh when we see what we think are, say, ill-informed Americans not understanding the world view on issues, yet it's only because we get that world view ourselves via news organisations that employ staff in these locations.

James Murdoch talks about "unaccountable institutions" like the BBC Trust, Channel 4 and Ofcom. Yet he works for a very unaccountable company himself. Yes, I can buy shares in the business, but what I say or believe counts for nothing. I can at least have a say so in the next government with my views counting equal to those of the very rich. Sky and News International pretty much do as they wish (and they reportedly don't pay a great deal of tax either).

I find it amusing that Murdoch attacks the EU's attempts to force competition into football rights by forcing them to be sold to at least two companies should be attacked. Of course he's right that prices went up rather than down as consumers had to take out a second subscription, but is that really the EU's fault or Sky's? It still has the dominant share of matches including every single "glamour" tie. Setanta didn't play along and despite trying just about everything, went out of business (they made plenty of mistake to be sure). ESPN is not making those mistakes and has quickly climbed into bed with Sky who now handle everything from subscriptions to production on ESPN's behalf. It's clear that you get along or you die.

Has the BBC gotten too big? Sometimes, yes. I think that the provision of free video to various newspapers hasn't been the smartest thing. I can quite see why commercial providers like ITN, Reuters and PA would be furious. They're having a market removed from them.

Similarly, the Lonely Planet purchase really wasn't smart. Although I think that BBC Worldwide existing as a commercial operator who's job is to plough profits back to the BBC is clearly exactly what the BBC needs.

Murdoch's MacTaggart speech was based around a "creationism" theme which didn't really work I felt. But calling the UK "authoritarian" is misguided at the very least, and obnoxious in the extreme.

Somehow, I found his closing sentence to be fearful rather than fill me with support with his viewpoints. Wall Street's Gordon Gekko sprang to mind:

The only reliable, durable, perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.

As the Edinburgh Television Festival approaches, and Autumn line-ups begin are announced and begin, this week's Broadcast magazine is chock full of exciting, and mostly slightly less exciting news.

The big story is ITV reworking Blind Date into a new speed-dating format. Since even C4 who have previously piloted show called it "the cattle market of dating shows" I'm not at all sure that this is for me.

Five's big news is that they've signed up Justin Lee Collins in a golden handcuffs deal. That's great news - because it means we're far less likely to run into Collins on any other channel in one of those dreadful "Bring Back..." format shows. I always liked the fact that the Friday/Sunday Night Project starred both Collins and Alan Carr, meaning that by never seeing it, I could avoid both these people in one fell swoop.

Everyone by now knows that C4 has scrapped Big Brother. It has finally realised that it can do a hell of a lot better with the silly money it had to pay Endemol for it following a bidding war with ITV back in 2006. Indies around the country are dusting off proposals to grab their share of the cash. Incidentally, if you missed Paul Jackson's history of the UK independent TV sector on Radio 4 recently - Soho Stories - then you missed an excellent documentary series (Yes. That's the same Jackson who's going to be responsible for Justin Lee Collins' first Five series - Heads or Tails - based on coin tossing...).

Sky One is going through one of its periodic upheavals as it goes out and tries to take on the likes of ITV, C4 and Five by commissioning big homegrown shows. So it's moving The Simpsons and busily commissioning daytime programming, factual (bird watching from Bill Bailey) and drama like the forthcoming Chris Ryan Strikeback.

People even occassionally mention "HBO" in the same sentence as Sky One, despite the US behemoth not ever producing light entertainment programming, and what it does make tends to be more challenging and less like the mainstream. And let's not forget that Sky has bought the big new HBO series The Pacific (a kind of Band of Brothers sequel) but which is being shown on Sky Movies, also home to the Star Wars TV series, Clone Wars. And Sky Arts is where you'll shortly find another HBO series, In Treatment. Sky One certainly isn't aspiring to be HBO.

I predict that ratings bankers like The Simpsons will be back in place before you can say Gladiators...

Meanwhile Julian (Gosford Park) Fellowes is writing Downton Abbey for ITV1 next year. It'll be set in an Edwardian countryhouse, sounds quite interesting and probably won't be shown in Scotland.

The BBC is tracking the "buzz" of shows via a website called shownar.combuilt by Shulze & Webb for the BBC. It's not altogether clear to me why some of those terribly clever BBC types couldn't do this themselves via APIs from Twitter et al.

That said, it's an interesting idea and well worth a visit, since the information seems to all be out in the open. Being Human is the show with the most buzz at the moment, as it continues its BBC1 run.

According to the Broadcast piece it could include non-BBC programming at some point although there are currently no plans.

Given the long times between RAJAR reports, tracking this kind of buzz can give you a good feeling about how programmes are going down with the digitally enabled. Although clearly buzz does not equal ratings. Being Human is by no means the BBC's biggest TV programme of the week.

Elsewhere, More 4 has bough HBO comedy drama Hung, and it seems that they'll be showing the next series of Curb Your Enthusiasm in October which would seem to be simultaneously with its US screenings, a smart move recently adopted by ITV2 with Entourage. Hulu's now not expected in Europe until 2010, although ITV is in talks. Meanwhile Arqiva's purchase of Project Kangaroo assets means that it wants to get into the game too.

I couldn't find any radio specific news in Broadcast magazine.

Back in the summer of 2008, the radio station I work for was then called Virgin Radio which in turn was owned by SMG plc. Once upon a time SMG was a media force to be reckoned with. It also owned the Glasgow Herald, the cinema advertising group Pearl & Dean, an outdoor advertising company called Primesight, and of course STV and Grampian - the ITV franchises in Scotland.

Then there was something of a boardroom coup in 2007. The Herald group had already been sold off, and there were disposals on the cards for other businesses, as the share price crashed, and there was a general retrenchment.

Virgin Radio was finally sold to the Times of India, and became Absolute Radio. And SMG, having got rid of nearly everything with the exception of Pearl & Dean (which it has been unable to sell for various reasons), renamed itself STV.

The new management was led by Rob Woodward, and he decided that STV needed a new focus which meant producing more local programming. This came at a time when the rest of ITV was doing the reverse, and no longer making local programmes and closing regional studios and production bases.

STV has traditionally done well in Scotland, but ITV has changed over the years. Where once upon a time it was a network of seperate groups who'd meet every so often and divvy up who would make what programmes for the network, it slowly merged into one large company, with just some smaller players like STV in Scotland and UTV in Northern Ireland remaining outside ITV plc. However everyone continued to play out broadly the same programmes across the entire network.

In recent months STV has changed. Rob Woodward says he's trying to focus on more local programming. Ordinarily STV has to pay its share of production costs of any ITV network productions that it shows. But opting out of expensive dramas saves it money. Drama just happens to be the most expensive type of programming on television (possibly with the exception of something like X-Factor which is also expensive to produce).

In recent months this has meant that the most recent series of Lewis and Kingdom did not reached STV's viewers' screens. Seemingly these dramas - set in England - are of limited interest to Scottish viewers, despite garnering good ratings in earlier series. The fact that they're very expensive to produce is neither here nor there seemingly.

Then, when ITV relaunched The Bill as a weekly 9pm drama a few weeks ago, STV dropped that series as well - after 25 years. ITV responded this time by scheduling a same-week repeat on ITV3, which is available free-to-air to all digitally enabled homes in Scotland.

Today Broadcast reported that nearly all of ITV's Autumn drama schedule (excluding the soaps) will not be carried by STV. At the weekend, STV didn't show the one-off drama Gunrush, starring Timothy Spall I've yet to watch but awaits me on my Sky+ and has been well-reviewed). Nor will STV be showing Doc Martin, The Fixer, Wuthering Heights, Agatha Christie's Marple, Collision, Blue Murder or Midsomer Murders. These include some of ITV's most popular and upmarket dramas.

The only major ITV dramas that STV is going to show will be Murderland which stars the very Scottish Robbie Coltrane and is produced by Touchpaper Scotland, and the Quentin Crisp follow-up, An Englishman in New York. Not airing the former would have been a real kick in the teeth to Scottish viewers!

Not living in Scotland, I've not seen the full scale of displeasure that may (or may not) have been raised at these decisions to date. Not showing The Bill was probably the first instance of a show going missing that people noticed (viewers may not realise that they've not seen new series of Lewis or Kingdom just yet). I'd be amazed if there wasn't a bigger viewer reaction to this news too. There are plenty of very busy message boards though.

In today's Broadcast piece, STV's Broadcast Services and Regulatory Affairs Director, Bobby Hain, said that not showing these productions was not purely a financial decision. Yet it's odd that STV seems to be mostly opting out of dramas and not much cheaper factual programming.

STV has been busily talking up some of its home-grown programming including a documentary on Susan Boyle, and the fact that they took live coverage of the Scottish Parliament reaching a verdict on the Lockerbie bomber who was returned to Libya. But will audiences really hold up?

Tomorrow, in place of The Bill, Scottish viewers will be treated to Scotland's DNA Secrets (and it's Scotland Goes To War next week). On Sunday and Monday, when ITV's new version of Wuthering Heights starts, STV will be showing Sirens, a repeat of a 2002 crime drama made by STV. On Tuesday, when ITV begins the second series of The Fixer (from Kudos, producer of programmes like Life on Mars and Spooks), STV will be showing an episode of Fitz, the 12 year-old American Cracker remake which was cancelled after 16 episodes.

Incidentally, STV's website is so poor that I couldn't actually find out what was on TV beyond today's programmes. I could see no facility for seeing future programmes. I had to use the Radio Times website to see future STV listings.

While on the one-hand, it's admirable that STV still shows some locally produced documentaries when the rest of the ITV network has pretty much given up, it's clear that this absolutely is a money saving device. It's palpably nonsense to try and claim anything else. Other replacements include imported programming like South Park and repeats of films which were clearly acquired cheaply (although I do think Michael Grade's recent tirade against STV misfired a little when he mentioned Gregory's Girl as one of STV's replacement films. Clearly that does hold a lot of Scottish resonance. Actually it holds a lot of resonance for viewers across the UK).

The bigger question for STV is whether or not the audience is maintained over the longer term.

Bobby Hain, again, on Radio 4's Media Show (you can still listen) a few weeks ago was confident that they would. But the reality is that if STV can save its £60,000 contribution towards the £1m cost of an hour of Wuthering Heights, and show a seven year-old repeat at a fraction of the cost, then it can afford to lose some ratings and still come out ahead financially. But it does occupy the third spot on EPGs and peoples' sets, and that kind of thinking is how channels like G.O.L.D. and Dave are programmed, and surely STV has a higher purpose than repeats channels like those. I wonder how Becoming Jane will fare on BBC1 on Sunday night in the Scottish region while the rest of the UK gets to watch a new Bronte adaptation?

Something very interesting has happened on digital television as a consequence of this stand-off. Sky Digital viewers usually have their local ITV service determined for them by virtue of their postcode. Unlike the BBC, other regional options are usually hidden in the EPG. You can find them if you manually add a channel but it's difficult if not impossible to record shows from those channels, and they appear in a different part of the EPG. But recently ITV London appeared on 993 for non-London viewers. In other words, Scottish Sky viewers can watch these programmes with relative ease if they go looking in the outer reaches of their EPGs. And the same has happened with Virgin Media customers who can now find ITV London on channel 853, while Freesat viewers can get ITV London on channel 977. Watching ITV's HD service might also get around the problem, although I'm unsure given the fact that it's only reachable via the red button currently.

Who loses? Well Freeview and analogue viewers obviously. But also Scottish advertisers. If more people start watching ITV London, then local Scottish advertisers will receive fewer viewers than they might have hoped. That in turn hits STV's finances.

But potentially all Scottish viewers of ITV and STV lose out. They're going to need to stay alert to even know that programmes like Wuthering Heights are even being shown. I'd be fascinated to see next week's Scottish edition of the Radio Times. The London edition has a big three page feature on that very programme with "(not STV)" alongside it. I suspect that feature sits in the Scottish edition too. Viewers will just have to wait for the DVD. If I was ITV, I'd actually simulcast that programme on ITV3 and look very carefully at the ratings for that channel in the Scottish regions.

Otherwise local versions of listings magazines and Scottish newspapers won't mention them. So how would a viewer even know about ITV showing these new series? Perhaps via ITV2, ITV3 or ITV4?

The other danger is for the long-term futures of talented producers, writers, actors, directors and other staffers working on Scottish drama productions. Since Rebus was cancelled, STV has been left with Taggart, the long running detective drama as its sole ITV drama commission. And as far as I know, that's not yet been recommissioned by ITV with un-aired episodes dropped into the schedule at seemingly random intervals, hardly helping the series maintain a decent audience following.

ITV might become reluctant to commission drama from STV if STV refuses to show any of its dramas in Scotland. So perversely STV viewers could actually end up with less Scottish-made drama as a consequence; frankly, STV is not going to be able to produce £1m an hour dramas without the support of the rest of the network.

[UPDATE]

STV announced its interim financial results this morning. They've reported a steep decline in profits, but unlike ITV, they're still reporting a profit.

I found this part of Media Guardian's report very interesting:

STV said that it remains in discussions with ITV over the future commission of Taggart, a hugely important revenue and profit driver for the division, and that the company "remained confident" about the future of the series. Analysts predict the cost to STV if Taggart is not recommissioned to be in the region of £3m.

Finally, in good journalistic measure, I should note that I do actually have some shares in STV as a result of working for them during their ownership of Virgin Radio. I'd completely forgotten about them! However since the value of my shares would leave me hard pressed to buy a round of drinks for my brother and sister in a Wetherspoon's pub, I don't think that my ownership of them makes me anything less than objective.

Yesterday evening, England won the final Test at the Oval, and doing so regained the Ashes.

It was a fine moment.

And it was a moment that I experienced via the radio listening to Test Match Special on Five Live Sports Extra.

As it happened I spent most of the weekend at the V Festival in Chelmsford where Absolute Radio had an exclusive area. What we didn't have was a satellite dish, although thanks to the Sky Player, I was able to keep checking on the score when I wasn't listening to the radio (and watching and listening to bands playing obviously). I've moaned before about Sky's Player only being available to those Sky Sports subscribers who either buy a triple-play package from Sky or pay a supplement for an extra box - multiroom as it's called. I'm happy with my phone and internet providers, and living by myself, I don't need multiroom thanks very much.

But for July and August, Sky extended access to Sky Sports on the Sky Player to all subscribers meaning that all the Test cricket has been watchable via your PC.

But back to yesterday. Media Guardian this morning reports that Sky Sports' audience peaked at 1.92m viewers as the final Australian wicket was taken. An hour or so later, 2m watched Five's highlights of the same event.

These are both excellent numbers for the respective stations. But in 2005, when Channel 4 still carried live Test cricket, 7.4m viewers watched England win.

As I've made clear previously, I've no bone to pick with Sky who's coverage is excellent - particularly from a technical point of view. Although I much prefer Aggers and the TMS radio team to the dull David Gower and over-eager David Lloyd (his ridiculous trailers for the laughable England XI/Stanford Superstars damp squib have permamently lowered my apppreciation of him). And Mark Nicholas on Five's highlights is very good indeed. In the end, that's all a matter of taste.

The key point here is that far fewer people got to see any cricket this time around. And this cannot be good for the game.

Defenders of the ECB's short-sightedness will talk at length about how Sky's money is being ploughed into the roots of the game. But over the same period we've also seen an influx of highly paid overseas players.

We should also remember that cricket is state-sponsored. Sport England gives the ECB a lot of money (details of a recent £37.8m deal can be seen here), so I think that public at large should see some benefit of its munificance.

And even if we remove the "emotional" part of the equation, in pure commercial terms, do sponsors like Vodafone, Buxton and nPower really get full value for money by having their potential audience limited?

With cricket having been off-air to the "free-to-air"* masses for a number of years now, I can't see Test cricket making a return even if it wanted to. Channel controllers aren't eager, getting better ratings for vapid fare like Deal or No Deal, The Weakest Link or Loose Women.

But the lack of even one-day or Twenty20 games is surely going to cause the game long-term damage.

Are more schools playing cricket than before? Or have they sold their playing fields to developers (a major issue for all school sports)? Can they afford to maintain cricket pitches and have practice nets? And even if they do have the kit, do kids aspire to be the next Freddie Flintoff or Stuart Broad? Or have they perhaps never seen them do their stuff?

Which other Test playing nations in the world have no live cricket on free-to-air television?

Football's clearly the biggest sport in the country, and even though the Premier League is not live, there is free-to-air coverage of FA Cup, Champions' League, Europa League, international and now Championship fixtures. Rugby sees decent pay-TV returns from the Guinness Premiership and Heineken Cup fixtures, but highlights are available, and the Six Nations and Rugby World Cup are still free-to-air.

Other "minority" sports like tennis, golf, and athletics all reach much larger television audiences than cricket does, even if they only have a handful of tournaments broadcast every year.

Yes, some of those events are protected, but others aren't and the sporting bodies, rights holders and sponsors understand the value of making at least some of their sport available to a far broader audience. Even boxing has slowly realised that they simply won't attract a new audience in if they price the next generation of fans out.

The ECB should realise that now they've placed all their eggs in Sky's basket, they run the dual risk of both losing a potential new fanbase of young cricket followers, and lose cash in the medium term as sponsors don't reach wider audiences, while Sky can effectively hold them over a barrel next time around (if there's nobody else interested in your sport, then you're not going to maximise returns). It should be a matter of priority to get at least one tournament onto free-to-air television.

For slightly different reasons, horse-racing actually pays to ensure that Channel 4 continues to cover their sport. Yes - that's for betting income purposes, but it comes down to keeping an audience interested.

But in the end, the proof will be in the pudding. In 2005, the streets of London were lined wtih thousands of people who cheered on the winning side as they paraded in an open-top bus, culminating in a packed Trafalgar Square. Will we see the same scenes this time around I wonder?

[UPDATE] Just after posting this, I notice that in fact there'll be no open top bus tour this year:

"The team still have a packed schedule ahead of them and are flying to Belfast on Tuesday for a one-day international."

Hmmm.

*Some ECB defenders will point out that TV in this country isn't "free-to-air" because we are all required to pay for a TV licence. This is true, but in the same way that car drivers have to pay a vehicle licence tax, there's a difference between most "free-to-drive" roads and "premium" toll-roads. I also have to pay for my TV set, and electricity to run it, so that's frankly an irrelevant point.

I don't know about you, but I'm quite excited by this. The Prisoner was an exceptional TV series and while remakes and reimaginings always concern me, this looks to be worthwhile.

Of course this is an ITV co-production, but obviously this video isn't to be found on itv.com (or if it is, neither I nor Google could find it).

And AMC plan to air The Prisoner in November, but ITV's recent Autumn Press Pack doesn't seem to mention them airing the miniseries this year. Previous reports had suggested that ITV isn't airing it until 2010.

While ITV's audience for Miss Marple won't be unduly affected by the fact that PBS has already aired the new episodes featuring Julia McKenzie, I think it's safe to say that the bit torrent traffic will be heavy as soon as The Prisoner airs on AMC. And that means damaging ITV's UK viewing figures.

Curiously ITV2 seems to have learnt this lesson as Sky and BBC Two have before it, and Entourage is currently airing in the same week as its US screening on HBO.

Quite why ITV isn't scheduling a genre piece like The Prisoner simultaneously with its American partners is unfathomable.

England finished off a great victory this morning (well technically, this afternoon) at Lords. And you'll just have to watch it on Five this evening - or on news bulletins.

Great coverage from Sky: and they even opened up their Sky Player to all Sky Sports subscribers for a couple of months - something I wish they'd make permament (It did fall over for the crucial final wicket though).

But I think David Mitchell in yesterday's Observer makes my feelings on the matter clear - if they weren't already:

Why did the ECB make this insane choice? For money. It forgot about building on Test cricket's growing popularity after 2005's triumph, about keeping it a presence in our national life on a channel people receive automatically, and it took a big cheque. It's as if it was getting out of cricket - selling up for a fast buck, taking the money and running. But it can't run - it's English cricket's governing body - so it's left holding the money while it stares at the diminished popularity and, therefore, significance, of English cricket as a result of its actions.

On Sunday I was at my parents - who are retired - as the conclusion of the first test was reached in the unlikeliest of manners. England hung on to claim a draw. A friend even texted me to make sure that I was watching.

It was nail-biting stuff, but I wasn't watching on Sky as my father doesn't subscribe to it. Instead we found ourselves staring at a scorecard on BBC Interactive while listening to Test Match Special.

I thought about this as I read this piece by David Conn in The Guardian.

I won't run through my reasons about why the ECB is doing its level best to destroy the future of cricket in this country. But the distribution of that Sky money is interesting, and we all know that interest in the game, Twenty20 notwithstanding, is likely to decline.

Yes Ashes series will sell out. But few enough people could tell you more than three names in the current England team.

So Setanta's finally died - or at least gone into administration. It's as good as dead.

It won't be missed by many. It did itself no good by having a reputation for truly awful customer service. In particular, cancelling it proved near impossible with, at times, people being asked to write a letter (no phone calls - no email). I never subscribed, but I heard enough other people talk about the dreadful customer service to mean that I never would.

Where does that leave premium TV sport in the UK?

Well ESPN has picked up all Setanta's Premier League rights for next season and the three following seasons. But is that enough?

Rumour has it that they've paid essentially what Setanta paid for the rights going forward (allowing for the fact that Setanta had already paid some cash in advance for next season which is seemingly non-refundable).

Then there are all the other sports that had deals with Setanta.

So ITV will pick up some England games that they'll no doubt be happy to show. The fact that England is going to quality for the World Cup in South Africa at a canter probably won't help audience figures, but England games are always worthwhile. Will ITV also hold on to those FA Cup games that Setanta had? Or will they go to someone else like ESPN or Sky?

This season it felt that the free-to-air operator didn't have the strong hand that the BBC had previously had on the FA Cup with big fixtures going on pay-TV. With ITV losing one of its two weekly Champions' League games, they might want to make up some of that shortfall.

Scottish Football must be worried. Although Sky is rumoured to be coming in to make a bid, they're effectively going to just take what they're offered. ESPN - even if it has to build up a decent sports offering from scratch - can't just replicate what Setanta had by picking up precisely the same rights. Well they can, but will they want to?

Likewise, my previous employer, STV, will be concerned as they had the contract to produce all that Scottish football. Will they hang on to those contracts?

Other sports will be less hurt although I can't honestly say that I know the value of the Blue Square League fixtures.

So what does this all mean for Setanta. This morning on Five Live I heard some thoroughly misleading information regarding ESPN's US service. They've just lost Champions' League football on their US service; it's now all on Fox Sports. This is a UK only deal.

From what's being reported, it seems ESPN will launch a new UK only service and not use either ESPN America or ESPN Classics. They could certainly fill it up with other sport like French and German football, but it probably needs a more attractive pricing policy than Setanta had.

In the US, ESPN is considered a basic cable package, and you'll almost certainly get it without playing a specific premium for the channel. They get their revenue by the vast majority of cable customers effectively paying $3-4 a month without choosing whether or not they specifically get ESPN. A low per user value, but it adds up.

In the UK, Sky packages channels differently with customers choosing packs. Eurosport, for example, gets a small amount of my sports subscription, while Sky One gets cash if I choose the Entertainment pack. Perhaps ESPN could be funded this way, but I doubt it. It'll be a bolt-on of some description.

Previously Virgin Media offered Setanta as part of its XL package - giving them a decent level of viewers but at a very low price. I suspect that this is an offer that won't be repeated.

The price creep to £12.99 per month for a number of channels, few of which people were interested in, was too steep - particularly as most subscribers already had Sky Sports. The additional games are in the "nice if you can" category. Unless you had an allegiance to a team they were showing, then you didn't mind missing the games. As an Arsenal fan, I'd just go to the pub if I felt radio commentary wasn't going to be enough for me.

With the number of games falling to just 23 from the 2010 season onwards, it seems that ESPN is going to have to swallow some costs and try to build an audience. They have to come up with a good deal to build an audience in these troubled economic times.

Setanta also offered a way of many of the club TV stations to be packaged. I never subscribed to Arsenal TV because it effectively would cost be £12.99 a month. How these are going to be funded going forward is another interesting question. The same was true of ESPN America - I quite like the odd baseball game, but I wasn't prepared to deal with Setanta.

ESPN does have an interesting offering, but pricing is going to be key. And they don't have long with just 8 weeks until the first games of the 2009/10 season. I look forward to hearing their proposition.

According to a report in Media Guardian, ITV has been considering taking its channels from free to view to subscription only.

The reasoning is that despite losing out in terms of viewers and their associated advertising revenue, there'd be enough gains to be made in getting a small share of the Sky revenue to make it an overall win.

There is a very fundamental flaw in this plan. As we speak, homes across the country are converting to digital as switchover gets properly underway. The most recent Ofcom figures published less than a couple of months ago, tell us that digital penetration has now reached 88.9% of the population. But free-to-view digital - largely Freeview, but also free-to-view satellite such as Freesat - accounts for 39.3% of households. In other words, these are 10.1m homes that won't be able to receive the channel. That's not 10 million people. That's 10 million homes.

Furthermore, there are 35m secondary sets in the UK. These are TVs defined as not the main one in the household. So they tend to be in places like bedrooms, kitchens, and other smaller rooms. 40% of these have yet to be connected to a digital device, and they'll all need to by 2012. That's three years away.

The chart above shows a chart from that Ofcom report which explicitly points out that the vast majority of secondary sets are connected to DTT (aka Freeview) boxes, with very few connected to Sky (Multiroom) and even fewer connected to cable.

This isn't surprising a surprising result as additional Sky or cable boxes invariably cost more money.

Those are a lot of TVs that ITV is potentially going to be missing from.

Currently ITV's digital channels are available on approximately 43.4m of the nation's 60m sets. This move would reduce that figure to something like 17.6m sets. Furthermore, or the 16.6m or so sets that have still to be converted, the vast majority are likely to be free to air sets. There's relatively small opportunities for growth.

Then let's look at multichannel performance. Below is the share for the last two years for ITV's digital channels.

Source: BARB

Although those numbers look quite small, they're actually very impressive.

Compare them with some other relatively successful digital only channels.

Source: BARB

Living is probably the closest direct competitor to ITV2, and is pay TV only. While I don't know any of these channels' budgets, Living does commission new programming on a fairly regular basis. It's total share of 1.1% isn't nearly as good as even ITV2 on its own.

Sky 1 and Sky 2 are different proposition altogether. I'm pretty confident that their budgets far exceed those of ITV's digital channels with exclusive imported programming like 24, Lost and recently House. Yet ITV3 on its own has a bigger share.

GOLD also commissions a limited amount of new programming, yet is relatively low.

Even Dave which is available on Freeview, struggles to meet the success of ITV's channels.

The scale of the potential audience loss by ITV taking its digital channels pay only is massive. This would be a brave, not to say foolhardy, decision to make.

It would, however, mean that a significant amount of Freeview real estate would be freed up. I believe that much of the space on Mux 2/PSB2 where ITV's digital channels currently sit on Freeview could not be replaced with encrypted channels - not that I'm sure who would want to launch such a service. ITV Digital anybody?

Anyway, I suspect that this whole thing is moot anyway. This sounds like another piece of posturing by ITV in the run-up to Digital Britain. The success of ITV's digital channels means that the Government is unlikely to want to see them disappear from the Freeview EPG as switchover gets a proper head of steam up. Sky, on the other hand, would love it. Although with the seeming implosion of Setanta, the fact that it's not yet rid itself of its ITV shares, the potential of it buying Virgin Media's channels and so on, I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't get yet another investigation into monopolistic practices if it's not very careful indeed.

I know Channel 4 is strapped for cash, but this is ridiculous.

On Sunday 24th May at 18:20 - a week ago - C4 showed Night at the Museum, the comedy film starring Ben Stiller. This was the film's terrestrial premiere, and was timed for the weekend of the opening of the sequel Night at the Museum 2.

Then last night Channel 4 was advertising its line-up. And wouldn't you know it? Night At The Museum was on again at 20:05.

So C4 has shown the same film twice, on the same day, within a week. OK - so it was advertised as a "2nd Chance Sunday" but that's really got to take the biscuit.

Repeats on E4 or More 4 make sense. Film 4 is on a pemament loop, but we expect film channels to be just that. ITV2 or BBC Three repeat films within the same week. But they're "digital" channels. We've come to expect it.

The odd drama gets a repeat either in late night or through omnibuses of the soaps at weekends. But I simply can't remember a time when a major "terrestrial" channel did something like this with a film.

Quite what such a broad film was doing on Channel 4 is a separate question.

Still - they're in dire straits and they desperate for this year's Big Brother to be a success. Yes - it's that time of the year again. The time of the year that I have to avoid the channel because I can't stand it. And nor will I watch Coach Trip or Come Dine With Me - other series that fill up vast hours of the schedule.

The sad fact is that I watch so little of the channel during these periods, that if they do have something decent on, I won't know about it unless I saw it in a listings guide, because I won't have seen a trailer.

Moving on to a totally different subject...

Memo to Five: Every time you run a "special" episode of The Gadget Show, like tonight's "The Gadget Show Summer Special", you do realise that it drops out of my Sky+ series link because the box thinks it's a different programme? It happened a few weeks ago with another special episode. You might want to think about keeping the Sky EPG programme name the same! You can have that one for free.

"Series link" is one of the most valuable things to have happened to broadcasters in the digital age. Making full use of it and ensuring your shows don't drop off should be key to everyone's strategy. Things like this, and Eurosport's seeming refusal to adopt the technology, only damage your viewing figures.

The most recent issue of The Word magazine, and most recent edition of their podcast both discuss "Monkey Tennis" - the phenomenon best illustrated by the Alan Partridge clip where he desperately attempts to win a commission from a BBC controller:

Jump to 4:55 for the really good stuff - although it's all excellent.

In both the article and podcast Aris Roussinos talks about exactly how TV programmes are commissioned and frankly that Alan Partridge pitch seems pretty accurate. It's horrifying, it really is.

Commissioners have such a low opinion of the general public that all those "says what it is on the tin" series which clutter up most channels these days. I've said before that I'll never watch another show, no matter how brilliant, if it's called "The Real..." anything.

Flicking through this week's Broadcast, just brought more of the same. The big story is Shine US's commission of something called The Marriage Ref. Despite having the input of Jerry Seinfeld, this show in which a comedian judges which of a husband or wife is right in a discussion sounds like lowbrow daytime television rather than primetime entertainment.

But what other great TV have we got to look forward to?

Virgin 1 has commissioned The Naked Office, in which a Newcastle ad agency has run an "experiment" that involved everyone removing clothes to "improve communication and break down hierarchies in the office." It's being considered for a potential series. And it's not just an excuse to look at people naked.

They've already commissioned a programme about Jim Davidson entitled So You Think I'm An Arsehole. Actually, I'm more inclined to believe that of the commissioner... And there's also Why Men Watch Porn in which "medical experts" try to measure the effect of watching lots of pornography. Groundbreaking stuff.

Still, that's all Virgin 1. What about the BBC? You wouldn't get that kind of garbage on a licence fee funded channel would you?

Well BBC 3 is sending Snog, Marry, Avoid overseas for 12 episodes with an ex-Atomic Kitten. Challenging stuff. And the same channel has commissioned Clever v Stupid: "Clever v Stupid explores the notion that you can be brilliant without engaging with Aristotle" according to the executive producer. Just as well, since Aristotle died over 2,300 years ago which is going to make "engaging" with him quite challenging right now.

And there's yet more BBC 3 news - their budgets must have just been agreed or something. Dancing On Wheels will pair wheelchair users with able bodied partners in a dance competition. I've no problem per se with this - if I honestly thought that it was being commissioned for the right reasons. You just know that the programme title was created first, and a format shoe-horned into it.

Over on ITV, following her success with the Gurkhas, Joanna Lumley is presenting Cat Woman. Sounds enthralling. Well it would perhaps, if it was a remake of either 1942 or 1982 versions of Cat People. Sadly, I think this is more about her looking at, well, cats. Let me know when the DVD's out.

I know that nobody has any cash on TV at the moment - although ITV should at least have earned a pound or two this week, but coming up with halfway decent programmes which cost

Incidentally, tonight on BBC1 is a documentary called Tourettes: I Swear I Can't Help It. As we all know, this medical condition never gets any airtime, and this must surely be the first documentary covering this subject? Well, apart from Teenage Tourettes Camp (ITV), Tourette de France (C4), Tourettes on the Job (Five) and Extraordinary People: Tourette's Rewired (Five) all of which have aired in the last three years. Then there was the Big Brother contestant suffering from it.

I'm sure that this wasn't commissioned just because there'll be an audience for people swearing at inappropriate moments.

...or not.

I'd completely forgotten this, but then I saw last week's edition of Have I Got News For You presented this week by Alexander Armstrong.

The MPs' expenses scandal is the gift that keeps on giving as far as satirical programmes go, but when illustrating the resignation of the Speaker, Armstrong pointed out that programmes like this one were explicitly not allowed to use parliamentary footage. (He went on to use an "artist's illustration" to make the point).

I've just been looking around, and that's completely true:

no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any light entertainment programme or in a programme of political satire;

I really hadn't thought about this for years. But it's in the Rules of Coverage.

So while over on More4 we can nightly watch Jon Stewart mercilessly taking apart C-Span coverage of US politicians, we're simply not allowed to the same here.

Interestingly, this doesn't prevent magazines such as Private Eye, taking stills from the video feed and putting them on the front cover with words coming out of the speakers' mouths.

Meanwhile Sky News is running a promo for itself which uses an extract of the (soon to be retired) Speaker saying nice things about it. Curious in itself, but seemingly not against the rules:

no extracts of Parliamentary proceedings may be used in any form of advertising, promotion or other form of publicity, except in the form of trailers for programmes which use extracts within the requirement of these guidelines and where the trailers also comply with those requirements;

As Sky News obviously can run extracts, it can use extracts to promote itself.

Here's The Daily Show's take on it:

(Not at its best to be honest) But they didn't use clips from Parliament - probably more by luck than judgement.

It's worth noting that More4 will make the odd edit - there's a rant about that over here.

Over at Media Guardian, their big Ofcom news is that C4 has been cleared of any bullying on Celebrity Big Brother, but I don't think that's the big news from Ofcom today.

The really interesting news is the changes in advertising that are being announced. There are some smaller changes like the number of breaks allowed in programmes longer than an hour - they're going up for PSB channels. So if you thought that you saw more breaks in longer form programmes in the multi-channel world than you did in the "terrestrial" world - you're right. You did.

But the really interesting/disheartening news is the relaxations on shopping channels.

Against the background of falling advertising revenues, Ofcom has made changes to allow broadcasters to generate additional revenues from teleshopping.

In limiting teleshopping on PSB channels to overnight transmissions, Ofcom balanced the recognition that teleshopping services could contribute to PSB funding with its view that teleshopping content does not contribute to the public service remit.

In other words, you might soon see shopping after dark on ITV, C4 or Five.

In some respects, that can only be better than the dreadful Quiz Call which still pervades on Five when they're not showing overseas sport. But as anyone who's seen daytime TV on many digital channels will tell you, the extended "advertorials" for exercise machines and cleaning fluids are pretty tawdry. They're not QVC quality.

Anyway, my prediction is that ITV puts together a decently produced show with a "name" presenter fairly quickly. We'll have to wait and see.

Channel 4's Chief Executive, Andy Duncan, has been appearing in front the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee.

He's been complaining about the BBC buying acquired - that is to say, American - programming.

C4 was outbid for the 13 episode Harper's Island, which is still to air here.

That may be so, but overall his argument really doesn't hold water. The BBC's acquired programming basically comprises of Heroes, Mad Men, Damages, Medium, The Wire, and Family Guy.

Damages and Mad Men had no competing bids when they were acquired. And Heroes was first picked up by the SciFi channel in the UK. That means they got it for relative peanuts. The BBC came in later and bought terrestrial rights with no competitors at that point.

The Wire has been run in full by FX, and been available on DVD for some time. Was C4 really going to bid now?

I suspect that only Family Guy might have had some competition.

Of course, as shows become popular, then others are interested (see my last post), but that's not really the BBC's fault.

C4 outbid the BBC for both The Simpsons and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Although Duncan says foreign acquisitions, he really means American. Because if BBC Four didn't show Spiral, the Swedish version of Wallander or the Inspector Montalbano shows we had before Christmas, you can be certain C4 won't be (once upon a time it did run foreign shows!).

The US distributors wouldn't like the market distorted. And as the BBC has already said when C4 came at this before, only 1.5% of its programming is acquired.

In fact - and I'm sure Duncan knows this - the competitors for acquired programming are Five, Sky One, ITV's digital channels as well as secondary channels like Virgin 1, FX et al. Lost started out on C4 after all, but they couldn't afford both it and Desperate Housewives at the same time.

If I thought C4 treated the imports it has had with more respect then I might have more time for them. But they're run in the small hours if at all when the channel loses interest in them. Why doens't The Big Bang Theory run at 10.00pm on a Friday night for example?

The idea that C4 would have bought The Wire at this late stage is laughable. I'm still bitter from the fact that the channel stopped showing David Simon's earlier series, Homicide: Life on the Street before the series ended. It took Hallmark to air those last episodes first. E4 was the first channel to show The Corner - Simon's mini-series that predates The Wire. But they buried it. FX is showing it now, with much more gusto!

Acquired programming has a place on Channel 4 like it does everywhere else, but if they hadn't paid so much more to Jamie Oliver and Heston Blumenthal than they'd been getting at the BBC, and not spent quite so much money on the overblown and very-long-in-the-tooth Big Brother, they might be able to make a US acquisition work well for them.

Maybe they could have bought the fun HBO vampire series True Blood. But they let FX get that.

As far as I know, nobody's showing Friday Night Lights in the UK.

I've just started watching DVDs of the excellent HBO show In Treatment. No UK channel has picked this up, and it must surely be pretty cheap. Writing aside, the cast is either two or three people for each episode, and there's a single set. Series 1 had 42 episodes. It'd work beautifully on More4.

I've not seen Eastbound & Down, the new HBO Will Ferrell comedy, but surely a UK channel's interested?

Better Off Ted, a new ABC sitcom, is showing promise. It has no UK home that I know of.

Southland, the new NBC cop drama, sounds a little out of the ordinary and has a strong cast and comes from John Wells who made ER. No UK interest so far.

Showtime's United States of Tara comes from Diablo Cody who wrote Juno, has Steven Spielberg as Executive Producer, and stars Toni Collette. Why is it not on UK screens?

Oh, and FX has just let its contract to buy The Colbert Report lapse. Can someone please buy this for me. Otherwise I just have to go looking elsewhere.

Loads of US programming. None of it - to the best of my knowledge - yet acquired by a UK station. And Duncan moans that he couldn't get Harper's Island which is only going to run for 13 episodes as a closed series anyway. Everything else I've mentioned here is certainly aiming to be a repeating series. And that's what C4 wants.

Except they seemingly have no cash to buy a series this year anyway. So I'm not sure what the complaint is.

The Stage had a great piece on all this earlier in the year.

Broadcast magazine has a story about Sky One (or should that be Sky 1?) trying to lure Harry Hill from ITV1 to its channel with his BAFTA winning TV Burp.

ITV has the series signed up for the autumn and winter, but beyond that I guess that negotiations remain open with indepedent producer Avalon.

The story goes on to say that the channel tried to get the third series of Gavin and Stacey! I find it incredible that they'd have even had a chance to get that. Although it's made by indie, Baby Cow, it's surely a BBC TV show as much as anything.

Similarly, ITV has shown great support for TV Burp over the years, sticking with the show when ratings weren't perhaps as strong as they might have been. Now it's a storming success for the channel - and unmissable TV.

In the past Sky One's taken imported shows that first became hits on free-to-air channels and plucked them off as their value increases. So Channel 4 let Lost go, 24 went from BBC2, and Five lost Prison Break. Most recently House has left Five to move to Sky One. I don't know how much of that was Five not wanting to pay top dollar for the fifth season, and how much was it just trying to save cash by sticking with the newer and less tested Mentalist. Channels can do life of series deals to guarantee that they don't get

If I was making a popular comedy show like Harry Hill or Gavin and Stacey, I'd think very carefully before going to the relative backwaters of Sky. Kids won't be repeating your catchphrases in the playground if your audience is close to one million than ten million.

Remember when Harry Enfield went to Sky? Harry Enfield's Brand Spanking New Show didn't help Enfield's career greatly, and it's only recently that his mainstream sketch shows have proved popular again with Harry and Paul. That didn't work too well did it? And Sky gave Al Murray a go with Time Gentleman Please. It ran for a couple of series and did better - but at least Sky was producing a new show.

To think that back in 1985, there was outrage when Thames Television did a deal with the prodcuers of Dallas to outbid the BBC for the series. Such was the outrage at the time, both within the BBC and in other ITV companies, that the BBC held back episodes it already purchased and promised to run them opposite Thames' newly purchased episodes. In the end Thames backed down, and Dallas remained on the BBC.

Getting back to Sky One, the Broadcast story has a quote from a Sky spokesperson saying that they strive "to provide our customers with the best content. We continue to invest in programming and are examining a number of high-profile programmes that have a natural fit with Sky 1."

Creating new programming is great. Their big budget stuff like Skellig shown over Easter, is fine programming to be encourage. Ross Kemp's Afghanistan trips are very good too. And picking up programmes, particularly imports, is fine - although I think that hijacking proven popular successes is just lazy.

Every so often, somebody at Sky will liken the channel to HBO or at least draw parallels between the two. But you can't imagine HBO picking off The Mentalist or CSI from CBS because they'd proved popular (it couldn't happen anyway, because you can imagine that contracts with the networks are pretty water-tight). There are instances of programmes in the US moving between networks - most recently Scrubs. But that's more a question of a series not being wanted by one network, and wanted by another.

Create a few must-see programmes, and the audience will follow.

A very strange story is in today's Times. The presenter of ITV1's Tonight programme, Jonathan Maitland, writes about product placement and sponsorship on TV.

First of all, Maitland seems to confuse product placement and sponsorship. As he says, Andy Burnham seems to have ruled out product placement, although I'm not sure that any shift in thinking by Ed Richards at Ofcom will really affect the issue. If there's not a government willingness to relax the rules, then they won't find Ofcom doing so.

However, product placement is very different to sponsorship, which is I think, what Maitland's really driving at. Product placement - the placing of sponsored products within the editorial of a programme - is surely near-impossible to do with current affairs or documentary programming. It's much more likely to find take-up, should it be legalised, in drama or light entertainment programmes.

The Ofcom Broadcasting Code does of course allow the sponsorship of TV programmes. However, there are certain types of programmes for which sponsorship is forbidden:

9.1 The following may not be sponsored:

* news bulletins and news desk presentations on radio; and
* news and current affairs programmes on television.

That means Tonight.

And there's worse news. Article 10 of the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive (which basically trumps UK law), also strictly prohibits this:

4. News and current affairs programmes shall not be sponsored.

So at a European level, it wouldn't be legal for Tonight to be funded by Maitland's un-named insurance company.

In some respects, TV is limited in what it can do compared to radio. Take sponsorship credits. In television, they're sold at a discount from spot airtime despite the fact that as more homes get PVRs and we fast-forward through commercials, sponsor break-bumpers become the things to look out for. But TV is limited in what it can do:

9.12 Sponsorship credits must be clearly separated from programmes by temporal or spatial means.

9.13 Sponsorship must be clearly separated from advertising. Sponsor credits must not contain advertising messages or calls to action. In particular, credits must not encourage the purchase or rental of the products or services of the sponsor or a third party.

Unfortunately, the Television Without Frontiers directive (the forerunner to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive) puts these stipulations in. Ofcom explained it all in a recent Broadcast Bulletin that took a close look at TV sponsorships and found some to be in breach of its Broadcast Code.

For example, PC World's sponsorship of The Gadget Show was found to be in breach because it used the following phrases:

* "Any TV big or small, it's at PC World"
* "A huge range of mp3 and mp4 players at PC World"
* "A wide choice of laptops with mobile broadband at PC World"
* "Take the internet anywhere with mobile broadband at PC World"
* "Any game and console, it's at PC World"

Ofcom said:

In this case, the credits consisted of animated shots of the sponsor's products combined with promotional language to describe the extensive range available, followed by a very brief identification of the sponsorship arrangement.

Ofcom considered that the predominant focus of the credits was on the products and range available from the sponsor, with the identification of the sponsorship arrangement appearing to be secondary. The credits were therefore in breach of Rule 9.13.

Now compare and contrast with the rules for sponsorship of radio, which doesn't fall under any of the European directives mentioned above:

9.8 During longer sponsored output, credits must be broadcast as appropriate to create the degree of transparency required.

9.10 Credits must be cleared for broadcast in the same way as advertisements.

So on TV "sponsor credits must not contain advertising messages or calls to action" but on radio "credits may contain legitimate advertising messages." And there lies the difference.

Of course that works to the advantage of radio!

But after this entertaining diversion into the rules and regulations surrounding broadcast media sponsorship, let's return to Jonathan Maitland's piece. The unspoken part of this story is something that Broadcast reported this week: Tonight is facing its second major budget cut in six months. In November it had a 20% budget cut and made 12 of its 65 employees redundant. Now it has to cut a further 15% from its budget. Times are tough, and its undertstandable that Maitland believes in the programme and is perhaps fustrated that ITV can't benefit from sponsorship of the programme.

If my show had just received a cumulative 32% budget cut, then I'd be looking at new funding models.

Spoon Jar Jar Spoon on Radio 4

A nice little documentary about Tommy Cooper that delved into the world of magic in London during the sixties and seventies, when there were magic shops all over the place, and clubs where magicians hung out. The late Ali Bongo was also interviewed for this.

And if you're seeing this after the iPlayer window has closed, perhaps you should check out Speechification...

ABC and the BBC Concert Orchestra on Radio 2

A live recording of last week's performance of the whole of the Lexicon of Love album. I've always had a soft spot for this album, so it was great to hear it played live in such a luscious way. (My top tip is to skip the Janice Long interview at the start).

State of Play on DVD

We're due for a spate of big screen remakes of BBC dramas and I'm not inclined to believe that the originals will be bettered. The Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck version of State of Play opens next week and it'll be interesting to see how they've managed to shrink six hours of plot heavy TV into just over two hours of cinema. I notice that Paul Abbott's name isn't on the script, although Kevin MacDonald is directing.

Anyway, the original is only a fiver at Amazon so why not go back to that first?

Coming soon: the Mel Gibson version of Edge of Darkness directed by original series director Martin Campbell, but seemingly no longer scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin.

Newswipe on BBC Four

Charlie Brooker was great on the G20 coverage. GMTV's John Stapleton practically insisting that there'd be trouble; Sky's "Skyboat" from which they could see nothing; and Ben Goldacre on MMR and the media.

But best of all:

Brooker: "Still at least they didn't try to "oomph" things up by slapping together a montage of violent looking protest material backed by I Predict A Riot by the Kaiser Chiefs."

Cue: Montage of violent looking protest material backed by I Predict A Riot by the Kaiser Chiefs.

Spiral on BBC Four

You'll probably need to get the DVDs of this unless you've already been watching. But they're worth the cash. Roll on the second series.

Finally - is it just me, or is this series of The Apprentice really disappointing? They really do seem to have removed any intelligent people from the mix this year.

Interesting piece in today's Guardian about how the ECB is going to use social networks to popularise cricket this summer: Facebook and Twitter are both bandied around.

All very noble and forward thinking, but to use a massively over-used expression, they're ignoring the elephant in the room.

"This is the biggest summer of cricket ever to take place on these shores. This really is cricket's time. There's no World Cup, there's no European Championships, there's no Olympics," said the ECB's head of marketing, Will Collinson.

He's right. There really are no major sporting events to clash with. So will everyone be watching the cricket?

Er. No.

It's not live on terrestrial, free-to-air television. No cricket. At all. Not a single ball.

Just nightly 45min highlights packages on Five.

The ECB did a massive deal with Sky, and then moaned that the BBC didn't compete. Yes, there'll be radio coverage, but if you want your sport to be followed avidly by a nation, you have to put it on TV.

The World Cup, European Championships and Olympics are all available on free-to-air TV.

When England won The Ashes in 2005 the team got a ticker-tape parade.

In 2005, some of the sessions were watched by as many as 2.5m people live. In 2008, the largest audience for a Test on Sky came on the Saturday during the Third Test against South Africa when 0.58m watched.

While I'm not comparing like with like, it's clear that fewer people watch when it's all on Sky.

Again last summer, only two highlights packages on Five broke the 1m mark - getting 1.00m and 1.02m respectively. C4 got higher viewership for their morning sessions when they broadcast live. That's the difference.

Incidentally, I'm not having a go at Sky. They're entitled to their rights, and they'll be promoting The Ashes like mad. Lots of people cancel their Sky Sports subscriptions when the football's off-air after all. But even Sky probably realises that the reason they sell fewer pay-per-view boxing fights is because there's a generation that's grown up without ever seeing a free-to-air fight. So why would they take an interest?

Perhaps all this will change following the Listed Events Review. Perhaps not. But next time around, the ECB might want to try much harder to get their sport into as many homes as possible. If they want it to have a mainstream future that is...

There I was earlier today, reading the sports section of The Guardian - the printed version. As well as lots of coverage about tonight's game between Chelsea and Liverpool (and what a thriller that turned out to be!), there were a couple of pieces about tomorrow night's quarter-final second legs.

The piece about Manchester United and Porto was larger, but there underneath was a piece filed by Dominic Fifield about Arsenal's second leg at home against Villarreal - I game I'll be going to.

At the foot of the piece, in both the printed and online versions I read:

Arsenal v Villarreal is available in high definition on Sky Sports HD3 from 7.30pm. To upgrade call 08442 411 333

Huh?

That's an ad for Sky appearing in editorial space in The Guardian. What's going on?

At first I thought: times are tough at The Guardian. Perhaps Sky, who are indeed covering the game live, flew Fifield out. Then I remembered that this was the home leg, and the trip between The Guardian's new Kings Cross headquarters and Arsenal's stadium in North London was actually completely walkable.

The piece is based around an interview with injured captain Marcos Senna. That can be the only answer. There are compulsory press conferences with the managers that are dictated to by UEFA (even Fergie can't back out of those if he's fallen out with Sky or the BBC - something the Premier League should take notice of). Individual player interviews might be separately organised, but I really do think that if a newspaper like The Guardian is getting an interview due to the arrangements made by a host broadcaster, that should be made clear in the copy. Simply printing HD upgrade details really isn't enough.

So what do we make of the news that BBC2 is going to make a TV version of the excellent Radio 4 comedy Down The Line?

Well obviously there's a top-notch list of castmembers attached led by Paul Whitehouse. And it's following hot on the heels of other Radio 4 comedies transferring to TV - recent weeks have seen Genius and I've Never Seen Star Wars debut.

But I'm a little more apprehensive about this. You see Down the Line is based on something that already happens - the radio phone-in. From LBC to Talksport to Five Live to Radio 4 - we all know and understand the grammar of the radio phone-in. That's what Down The Line mocks, with its ignorant presenter Gary Bellamy.

TV's different. There's no phone-in programme that I can think of for it to mock. I guess the Matthew Wright programme on Five is about it - and to be honest I can't remember if they actually take calls to air, or just limit it to views. Instead, we're constantly urged to text and email our thoughts.

The TV version is going to be more about meeting members of the public, but again that's not really based on the grammar of a pre-existing show. There's Jeremy Kyle at one end, and Question Time at the other. The vox-pop is a standard I guess (and Charlie Brooker mused on it during last night's excellent Newswipe), but is there really a programme that relies on them?

The joy of Down The Line has been the fact that it's only a very small step removed from programmes that do air - yes, I am thinking of Stephen Nolan on Five Live. If the TV version mocks something that doesn't really exist then it'll be missing the point. But let's wait until we actually see it.

Broadcast Magazine has a new picture of Sir Ian as Number 2 in the ITV/AMC remake of The Prisoner.

Slightly worryingly, the piece says that AMC is planning on airing it later this year, while ITV is showing it in 2010. Might I suggest that this is a bad idea if ITV wants to avoid rampant piracy?

Simultaneous broadcasts - or as near to as possible - is the only way to show this kind of event TV. Not doing that will just reduce the available audience. That's especially true with genre programming, and is why Sky One has been showing Battlestar Galactica as near to the US screenings as possible.

Friday night saw the first in a new series of Genius on BBC2. It's a TV transition of the popular Radio 4 comedy presented by Dave Gorman. The radio series is very funny. The TV version is also very funny, being basically the same, except that you can see some of the mock-ups they've built of various "Genius" ideas suggested by viewers/listeners.

Now I've had bad things to say about Sam Wollaston's TV reviews for The Guardian here in the past. He's obviously angling for his own column rather than being really interested in television. So perhaps I shouldn't have been so disappointed.

But I think that one sentence really gives him away in his Saturday review of Genius:

This is not about real ideas; it's about comedy. Actually, it's already been a Radio 4 comedy (three words that have rarely sat together well in my book) for a while.

[My emphasis]

Do I take it that Wollaston thinks that all Radio 4 comedy is bad? Does he actually ever listen to comedy on the radio?

I wouldn't for one second say that every comedy that Radio 4 puts out is comedy gold, but I think it covers a lot ground with a "something for everyone" approach. While there are certainly duds, the quantity that it commissions means that it does get quite a few hits. Whatever you think of The News Quiz - it's pretty much the same as Have I Got News For You.

The Now Show's always entertaining; "Clue" is recording a new batch sadly without chairman Humph; Ed Reardon is unfailingly excellent; and I enjoy Clare in the Community. Then there's other returning series like Heresy and The Unbelievable Truth (on tonight). And I've just picked up CDs of series 1 of Bleak Expectations following Barry Cryer's recommendation at a Radio Academy event last week. Then there are Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, Down the Line, Nebulous and Chain Reaction.

Has Wollaston listened to any of these? Is none of them funny in his eyes (or ears)?

Saying something like that is just a display of his own ignorance. He really doesn't deserve to share a column with Nancy Banks-Smith.

Stewart Lee's new comedy programme is excellent, if the first episode is anything to go by. Each week Lee addresses a different topic and this week it was books.

OK - so this ticked all the boxes with me, with Dan Brown, Russell Brand, "Tragic Lives" and Chris Moyles all targeted for their books. Moyles in particular had a thorough lambasting. I once picked up Moyles' first tome in WH Smith and realised by virtue of the fact that I was flicking through it, I'd pretty much read the whole book in ten minutes in the shop (I should quickly explain that I was looking for a reference to a friend - I certainly wouldn't have given it ten minutes of my valuable time that could have otherwise been spent washing what's left of my hair otherwise).

The standup was broken up with short sketches featuring people like Kevin Eldon and Simon Munnery (credited for two book jokes!).

After it had finished, we learnt that behind the red button, the show's producer, Armando Iannucci interviewed Lee about the very show we'd just watched. This was a pretty good 10-15 minute watch too. I'd link to it on the BBC site, but sadly it doesn't seem to be online. I stand to be corrected but I did have a good look and search.

[UPDATE] The Stewart v Armando episode is now available via the iPlayer.

(Incidentally - the BBC homepage really is awful. It's just not easy to get to the BBC Two page from www.bbc.co.uk - you go there and try it. Honestly. What's the quickest route? There's no "Explore the BBC" button so I had to go to the mini schedule and click from there, two thirds of the way down the page.)

I'll look forward to these in coming weeks, although I'll be upset if I can record the main programme but not the Iannucci interviews.

All this talk of Iannucci reminds me that I'm really looking forward to seeing In The Loop when it opens on 17 April. I should get The Thick Of It DVDs in readiness, although I find it curious that BBC Worldwide hasn't released a boxset of the first series and the specials.

An interesting piece in Media Guardian this morning about some forthcoming changes to TV ratings from BARB.

I look forward to reading a bit more detail about how exactly they'll be able to monitor these new programme streams.

This Friday is Comic Relief night, and I shan't go on my usual rant about all the plugs that amount to free primetime advertising for Sainsburys, Rymans, Subway, TK Maxx and other participating retailers will receive on BBC1 that evening. Oh...

Anyway, what I have noticed is that traditionally the other channels tended to sit back a little and not try too hard for ratings. Primarily, that means not running major dramas or particularly comedy up against the charity programming.

But we live in financially difficult times, and ITV seems to be doing the complete opposite this year.

Last time around, in 2007, there was the regular episode of Emmerdale followed by a single Coronation Street, before a repeat of A Touch of Frost provided safe alternative programming against the all star fun and appeals over on BBC1.

In 2005, ITV ran a Bond film - Tomorrow Never Dies. It was a repeat, and the evening was rounded out with All New TV's Naughtiest Blunders which was never going to trouble the ratings people.

This year, however, things are different. ITV1 is running its regularly scheduled Friday evening with a major plotline involving a wedding on Coronation Street(don't ask me details - I've never watched the show). They're actively plugging Friday the 13th on-air, and you can hear it advertised on commercial radio too. And both the 7.30pm and 8.30pm episodes are present and correct. ITV wants a big audience.

Then at 9.00pm the new series of Moving Wallpaper continues featuring the excellent Ben Miller. Miller, of course, can be seen on BBC1 as well taking part in various skits. According to the Radio Times, his segment with comic partner Alexander Armstrong and Mitchell & Webb, isn't due to air until 11.30pm, but nonetheless, he's multi-tasking as far as the viewer's concerned that evening.

Then at 9.30pm ITV's sketch show, Al Murray's Multiple Personality Disorder is also on in its regularly scheduled slot. As I say - there's been no let up in ITV's drive to win ratings.

Of course C4 used to sit aside as well. But its Friday night line-up is not the comedy powerhouse it once was. So this week, the only real comedy they're running is Free Agents at 10.00pm which is neatly up against the news on BBC1 (Although "Comic Relief Does Top of the Pops is on BBC2. Oh, how I hate the grammatically dreadful "Does" that they use).

In 2007 the BBC averaged 9.73m viewers between 7pm and 10pm on Comic Relief night. Will ITV diminish that this time around, and will that mean a reduced amount of cash raised as a result?

When Horizon is good, it's very good. But when it's bad, it's terrible.

And tonight we had possibly the worst Horizon I've seen in quite a while. What's The Problem With Nudity was as blatant an example of ratings grabbing as I've seen in a long time.

Did nobody see that excellent recent Screen Wipe in which Charlie Brooker gave Trinny and Susannah a mauling over their recent programme in which for no reason at all lots of people took off their clothes to titillate a prime time ITV audience. And then there's the various Gok Wan series that always seem to involve people getting their kit off.

According to Horizon this was a "unique study."

No it wasn't. They admitted that everybody who took part knew that the programme was going to be about nudity. They all knew that they'd be taking their clothes off.

Evidently nobody had been watching BBC Three. They've been making the same specious arguments on Naked. Each week, for no obvious reason, a group of people who share only the same occupation spend a week building up the courage to take their clothes off for a photo shoot, or a catwalk or whatever. Apparently it's in some way really important to get your clothes off in public.

Or could it be a cheap way to get a decent sized audience on the otherwise troubled BBC Three. This would be the same channel that a while back also had Dawn Gets... Naked, culminating in an open-top bus load of naked women.

I can understand why a mostly poor channel like BBC Three carries this nonsense. But Horizon? Really?

As I keep banging on, there was once a popular science show called QED for which this nonsense could just about be justified. But for the BBC's flagship science show it's a travesty.

Incidentally - why is there no Horizon website these days? It use to be a good resource for transcripts, additional video and even further reading. This is supposed to be science isn't it?

[I should probably mention that BBC Three has nearly earned the right to its existance by showing Being Human which has been excellent.]

Have you seen the new ITV gameshow presented by Chris Tarrant yet? It's called The Colour of Money and has nothing to do with the Terry Pratchett novel of the same name.

ITV's clearly very excited by it. It's presenter comes from the global phenomenom that was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and the production company behind it 12 Yard is owned by ITV and has the team who were also responsible for another highly successful format - The Weakest Link (although I believe the BBC retains the rights to that format).

A couple of weeks ago there was a good Money Programme looking into the format business Media Revolution: Tomorrow's TV (it wasn't actually called The Money Programme, and you might only have known that it was from that if you'd recognised the theme tune). That looked at global formats that come from the UK like Millionaire, The Weakest Link and Dancing With The Stars (aka Strictly Come Dancing). They all feed lots of cash back to a burgeoning production sector.

So ITV undoubtedly has high hopes for The Colour of Money - not just as a popular early evening Saturday night gameshow that leads into Ant and Dec, but the production fees payable from all over the world as local versions are made.

I looked carefully at the credits of the show, because I wanted to know one thing - was Capital Radio responsible for it?

You see for many years, Capital Radio in London has had someting called The Bong Game. Listeners phone in, and perhaps after some kind of qualifying question they get to play for cash as a voice reads out cash amounts that get higher and higher until either the listener yells "Stop" or the dastardly bong comes in at a pre-determined point and the listener wins nothing. It's all about greed then.

In The Colour of Money, competitors are told that they must win a certain amount of cash and they have ten goes to reach that sum cumulatively. The "cash machines" they play against work just like the voice in the Bong Game, stopping at a pre-determined point. Competitors need to bank that cash a machine at a time until they've reached the sum they must reach. It's all or nothing.

So effectively it's like playing the Bong Game ten times in a row and getting to keep all the cash if there's enough of it.

There are other elements to the game of course. We get heartbreaking stories of each constestant explaining just why they need to win so much money. And the machines are all colour coded so that the element of sheer randomness becomes more akin to the bizarre reasoning behind contestants choosing boxes on Deal or No Deal. I'd love a constestant to play one of those games just going in numerical order or left to right. Let's get rid of this fake nonsense.

Interestingly, The Money Programme I referred to earlier explained that Millionaire had its roots in a Capital Radio game, and in particular a man called David Briggs who had worked on promotional games for the Capital Breakfast Show - presented by Chris Tarrant. He is also the man behind The Bong Game.

This is much more obviously based on the Bong Game format. But does Capital Radio, or its owners Global benefit?

Gameshow formats are an interesting thing, and unless you rip them off completely and in detail, it seems that they're hard to protect. Most of today's big talent shows like Idol, X-Factor and so on are essentially remakes of Opportunity Knocks. And many gameshow formats are deceptively familiar. Wikipedia notes that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has had plenty of disputes over its format. And ownerships change. Celador sold the Millionaire format to 2waytraffic (although retaining the rights to use the format in films - hence Slumdog Millionaire produced by Celador). 2waytraffic was in turn swallowed up by Sony.

There's no David Briggs listed on the credits of The Colour of Money. Instead, six other people are credited with its creation.

But then if the Bong Game is renamed, as it has been, can other radio stations run it? Well they do. I've heard it in many guises and on many stations over the years. I hear that another radio format the "secret sound" has had lawyers chasing around in the past, but the idea that getting listeners to identify a mystery noise is copyrightable seems difficult to support. I'm sure that it's existed in radio for as many years as phone in competitions have taken place. It's probably best not to call it the "secret sound" however.

Anyway, I'm sure Global has enough lawyers to chase after any infringers of their copyright.

And finally, if you're looking for a great unproduced format: I still have one.

Just to be clear, in case any lawyers are reading this, I'm in no way suggesting that there's anything untoward about any of these formats or their ownership. I just find the whole area very interesting.

There's a documentary on Channel 4 this evening entitled "The Real Pink Panther" which, as The Stage points out, is completely misnamed, as "The Pink Panther" was a jewel and not the criminal ("The Phantom").

This was my comment for that story which wouldn't seem to post, but was worth putting here:

I've got a broader problem with programmes like this. It's the all round laziness in titling them. Seemingly, we can't cope with a more general title for this series of documentaries. We, the audience, are so stupid that we'll only watch docmentaries with the words "The Real..." in the title.

In the last week, we've had The Real Casino Royale and The Real Slumdog Millionaire on Sky One. Then there've been The Real Da Vinci Code, The Real James Bond, The Real Stephen Hawking, The Real Charlotte Greys, The Real John Betjamin, The Real Hustle, The Real Rain Man, The Real Dad's Army, The Real Exorcist... And on and on and on, across most of our broadcasters.

Obviously this is a lazy way to get a known brand/TV series/movie associated with your documentary. But enough's enough.

I don't care if you've carefully fashioned the most beautifully put together documentary since The Ascent of Man; if it reaches the screens entitled "The Real..." then I simply won't watch it.

Have we really reached the point where we can only use the Ronson "Says What It Is On The Tin" school of programme naming will let a documentary cut through? If we have, then we're in a very sorry place.

This Wednesday, ITV2 launches that rarest of things, a new sitcom. Actually, that's a bit unfair, as ITV has been commissioning a reasonable amount of programming for ITV2. It's just that most of it really doesn't interest me.

But this week there's something that I am looking forward to - FM. Indeed, if you head over to ITV's site, you can watch a preview of the first episode.

It's not too bad with The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd playing a DJ alongside Kevin Bishop, who plays his co-host, and was a one-time boyband member.

If Skin FM, the radio station portrayed, doesn't look too much like your local radio station, that's because it won't. There really aren't any radio stations like those you see on TV. Skin FM is evidently modelled on Xfm - well Xfm before Capital (and now Global) took it over.

But sitcoms are more about the characters and a DJ who can't mix but decides to fake it with a mix CD is not really that far from the truth at all (so I hear).

As ITV's trying to be edgy with this show, there's lots of swearing, and a bit of sex too. And we get a few cameos: the first episode features The Guillemots, Justin Hawkins (ex-Darkness) and Marianne Faithful! And we're promised that there are more to come. They add, I suppose, a hint of Larry Sanders to proceedings.

I suppose the most disappointing thing about it, is not what was on-air, but the quote from producer Izzy Mant in last week's Broadcast (NB. Quote isn't in the online piece):

"When I first came across this project I thought: why hasn't anyone done a sitcom set in a music radio station before?"

Umm. They have.

As I mentioned a while back when this series was announced, the UK's seen Kit Curran and The Lenny Henry Show (the sitcom incarnation). And they're both British!

And possibly more famous than either of those was WKRP in Cincinatti.

They're just the shows set in music radio stations. There've been others set in non-music radio stations: Frasier immediately springs to mind. And radio comedies like Radio Active or even On The Hour.

Indeed, of all occupations featured in sitcoms, radio has definitely had more than its fair share.

That shouldn't detract from FM, but let's not forget our heritage shall we?

As I said at the start of this piece, it's always entertaining to see your place of work featured in fiction, and invariably it's not accurate. A couple of weeks ago Radio 3's The Wire had a play by Mark Lawson entitled The Number of the Dead. This was set in an un-named news studio and featured Tim McInnery as Timothy Freeman, a slightly jaded news presenter with his much younger co-host. Suddenly a breaking news story begins to impact on his life personally.

Now Mark Lawson obviously has a good idea about how radio studios work (he frequently presents Front Row in between his otherwise gargantuan workload), but in this instance you felt that he was like a cook presented with a rack of herbs and spices, trying to desperately shoehorn all of them into a recipe.

So we had lots of lingo that those "in the biz" would probably recognise. But it was all just a little forced. His producer was rude and offensive to his wife, when if there's one thing we all know about producers, and that's that they don't upset the talent. And the character was just that bit too jaded.

What was really more entertaining was trying to work out who Lawson might be basing this story on. With talk of studios like "C7" it could only be the BBC since even the largest commercial operator has a relatively finite number of studios and usually names in a sensible scheme: "A, B, C..." or "1, 2, 3..."

There really is no commercial news station with the exception of LBC, and Radio 4 doesn't do long news programmes that continually ask for emails and texts. So it must be Five Live that he's thinking of. And the obvious show there would be Five Live Drive with Peter Allen and Anita Arnand. But I don't really think Peter Allen behaves like McInnery's character!

(I'd love to post the mp3 of this, since we're long after the iPlayer window, but I'd probably be shot).

At least we have series two of Moving Wallpaper to look out for on Friday. Not content with generally showing off on QI on Friday, Ben Miller's back as his wonderfully awful TV producer Jonathan Pope. This time, he's without the dreadful Echo Beach which I stopped watching after one episode (either you believe in a soap or you don't), and we have a seemingly non-broadcast zombie series instead.

And it was all going so well.

Last year the BAFTA awards had the sound messed up for the BBC1 broadcast. There were apologies all around, and we were told that this wasn't because the OB was put together by an independent. We were told that the production team had years of experience.

This year, things looked like they were going well. Coverage ran over three channels for no obvious reason with an hour each on BBC Three, BBC Two and BBC One. I watched the latter two covering the awards.

The whole ceremony is broadcast on a significant delay - presumably to allow time to bleep Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech (and Mick Jagger).

But the real problem came when we saw the Terry Gilliam montage sequence as he was inducted into the academy was just appalling. It looked like an early edit had been used, as we saw repeated clips and sequences of clips. It was clear that nobody had watched the final edit all the way through at the end. Given that the one thing we knew before the evening was that Gilliam would definitely be winning, this particular montage could have been edited weeks ago.

But instead it looked like they'd given it to the work experience kid.

It was an embarrassment.

Gilliam came on and made his acceptance. He got out a long piece of paper and threatened to thank all the "little guys" beginning with those from Time Bandit. Now I don't know how far down the list he made it, but there was a clunky edit as he suddenly ended his speech with a thanks and left. Again, very poor production.

As is traditional, we then began had a round up of the awards that didn't make it into the two hour broadcast (BBC Three's coverage was red carpet stuff). So we had the winners of the Best Short, etc.

As we watched Nick Park accepted for Short Animation, who let's face it, is much loved by British audiences, the credits rolled right over the top. This was obviously for timing purposes, but it was awful. And given that we were only a minute over the 10pm scheduled finish, nobody would have minded a very short over-run.

After Nick Park, we had the editing award for Slumdog Millionaire and had credits running over credits as the winner accepted his award. Then the same happened for Animated Film (Wall-E). Then we had the transition music and we just cut to an end credit as the broadcast ended.

I think we got to see all the awards, casting an eye over the official winners' list, but it was complete amateur hour. Absolutely dreadful.

These awards are broadcast internationally and it really did not reflect well on Whizz Kid Entertainment who co-produced the awards with BAFTA for the BBC.

How about next year we get the awards live - or at least on a very short delay for the potty-mouthed likes of messrs. Rourke and Jagger. Run it on one channel, and if it over-runs, then it over-runs. Award ceremonies make a habit of that, although at least unlike the Oscars, the BAFTAs cut to the chase without silly interludes.

(PS Why does the BBC correspondent in Sydney this evening look like he's talking down the line on Skype? For a major story like that in Australia, surely a satellite feed should be used?)

What on earth is going on in the States?

As UK readers will almost certainly know, we're currently embarking on digital switchover. That's to say that by 2012, nobody will be able to watch TV in the UK without some kind of digital box. Sky hopes that will be via their system (and they posted excellent results today), Virgin Media through their system, but for perhaps the majority of people (if not TV sets) it will be via Freeview.

According to Ofcom, 88.2% of households currently have digital TV in some form or another, which is a great place to be, but 40% of secondary sets like those in bedrooms, kitchens and offices, have yet to be converted.

It's a challenge, and one that's concerned me for a while. But the plan has been to roll full switchover out on a channel by channel basis, region by region. It started in the Borders region which is lightly populated and allows time to take learnings from it before attempting big metropolitan areas. As far as I'm aware, everything remains on track.

In the US it's a different story. Many more people receive their TV via cable, and that's relatively unaffected by digital switchover. Far fewer homes use rooftop aerials or set-top "rabbit ears" to receive over-the-air pictures. But those who do still use such methods are inevitably older and poorer.

The method the US decided to take was to set a single date, February 17 2009, for the whole country to switchover. They put in place a coupon system: you could apply for a coupon with a value of $40. This could then be put towards a digital converter box (effectively the equivalent of a Freeview box) which plugs into your TV as normal. Of course, like Freeview, many recent model TVs have this receiver technology built-in, although that information doesn't seem to be as widely known as it might.

But there were some problems. First, when the coupon system was introduced, no cheaper boxes were available. Consumers were expecting some boxes to priced as low as $40, effectively making them free. But the cheaper boxes came online relatively late.

The scheme also had finite funding. Coupons expired after 90 days, so you had to buy promptly when you received them. And now, as D-day approaches, the scheme's run out of money. Upwards of 100,000 people are on a coupon waiting list. They're waiting for unused coupons to expire before the cash set aside can be put towards new coupons.

The date set was in February, and of course TV stations have been preparing for this date for a long time. One problem with the February date was that it falls in a "sweeps" period.

The US TV market isn't able to measure all stations in the country all year around - overnight data is only available for larger markets. So four times a year, a diary method is used to measure every station's ratings. These are the sweeps periods, and key to them is desperately ensuring that you have your best and newest programming available during them.

[As an aside, to my mind this is a fundamentally flawed system. The ratings that come from these periods are used as the basis for vast advertising sales, yet stations have used every trick in the book to maximise their ratings during this period. They might have saved up new episodes of series that had otherwise been in repeats, and they have special guest stars and events that aren't representative of other times of the year].

Such is the concern over digital switchover that the February sweeps period this year has been moved to March. And big events like the Oscars were considered for moving. Broadcasters were concerned that a significant proportion of its audience simply won't be able to see its programming.

Estimates of how many people are unprepared vary, but it's clear that the number is in the millions of homes.

Criticism has been widespread.

Then on Tuesday, the Senate voted to delay the switchover until June 12.

So all of a sudden, something that was going to happen in just over two weeks, is getting a five month delay. Obama was said to be in favour of this. More time would be available to get those last homes converted: as I always say, who wants to be the politician that takes away someones TV?

But now the House has voted against this delay.

Digital transition will take place in two weeks' time after all.

Confused? You will be... after this week's... digital switchover.

I'm not sure that anyone could have made a bigger mess over this if they'd tried. Will it happen on February 17 now? We'll just have to wait and see. But you can be sure it'll be the poor, the minorities and the elderly that will lose out.

(Oh, and of course this isn't the biggest story in US media - they're more concerned about adverts in this Sunday's Superbowl...)

Given the general lack of science programmes on TV, it's a bit of a shame that when they do come along - they clash.

Last night Horizon returned with an edition entitled "Why Are Thin People Not Fat" (I'll just leave that there...) while at the same time on BBC Four we had the first in a season of Darwin programmes - What Darwin Didn't Know.

OK - I realise that the BBC Four programme will get about fifteen repeats across the week, although sod's law says that the edition I record will have signing. And at time of looking Horizon is going to be available on the iPlayer for just another 84 days!

Sense prevails next week when Horizon moves to Tuesday nights.

And while I'm talking about television science, what happened to the popular BBC 1 science programme that we were due?

In the meantime, the BBC has announced some bigger science programmes: History of Science, Seven Wonders of the Solar System and Professor Regan's... [insert one of four subjects here].

There's a wonderful story in this week's Broadcast magazine. In a piece that explains how UKTV chanel "Watch" is having a bit of a rethink, it explains that challenging fare like Cranford, Mistresses and Love Soup is too "demanding" for its viewers. Instead they're going to show more Dancing with the Stars and Wipeout (aka Total Wipeout).

To paraphrase something someone else once said, nobody ever got poor underestimating your viewers.

They're saying that their viewers are too thick to understand continuing storylines are they?

Yes - I'm being a little disingenuous. What they really mean is that programmes with continuing storylines don't play as well on a channel that is largely sampled on an occassional basis. But that just means you have to try a little harder.

I think that UKTV just expected Watch to succeed on the basis that Dave had been a success. But then Dave's proposition is clearer, and crucially, it's on Freeview. Allied to top quality BBC2 programming (largely), you know what you're going to get. And fairly shortly we'll be getting Dave+1 on Freeview too. One wag asked why it was necessary when Dave repeats its shows in the course of the evening anyway.

But back to Watch. It's not on Freeview, and perhaps they'd have been smarter using that Freeview slot to launch it on that platform. Evidently the amount of Sky/Virgin Media subscription cash they're getting means that the economics don't work.

Then there's Richard and Judy. They defected from Channel 4 to the station in what can only have been a big money signing. But they went out at 8pm - opposite soaps, sitcoms and popular drama on BBC1 and ITV1. You can only think that R&J's audience was more likely to be on those channels rather than Watch. 8pm is a curious time for a nightly chat show.

The press loves to report how few people are watching the channel on occassion, but that's unfair for a channel that repeats those shows several times over a 24 hour period.

Nonetheless, 6pm is probably a smarter time for the show to go out. It's against news on the main channels, or the likes of Hollyoaks or Eggheads on C4 or BBC2.

In the long run, I can't see that R&J will ever return to their heyday. They're probably banking decent cheques, but they're out of sight and out of mind now. And I still find it amusing recalling an interview that Richard Madeley gave to the Media Guardian podcast when the show launched explaining that jumping to Watch was a smart move because in a few years we'd all be watching digital, irrespective of the fact that Watch is pay channel and Freeview and Freesat are clearly going to be the overall winners.

A news report announces the fact that CNN launches on Freeview this week - effectively replacing Nuts TV. That's got to be good news for Freeview viewers, giving them an additional news service alongside the BBC News channel (never News 24!) and Sky News (will it remain on Freeview?).

But The Guardian's report (perhaps based on a CNN press release, and illustrated by a picture of very occassional presenter Mylene Klass) is a little misleading:

News channel CNN International is to join the Freeview digital TV service from Thursday, just days before the inauguration of new US president Barack Obama.

The channel will air on Freeview 84 seven days a week between the hours of 9pm and 1am.

It's that last little bit that's problemmatical. While inaugural events are taking place all day, the main address takes place at midday Washington time, which is 5pm UK time. The parade then kicks off at about 7pm UK time. So by the time 9pm rolls around and CNN reaches Freeview screens, most of the key action will have already taken place. BBC One, for example, is carrying live coverage between 4pm and 6pm UK time, while ITV, er, isn't.

Still, four hours a day of CNN is better than none.

Good news - in the lead up to the ITV/AMC remake of The Prisoner appearing on our screens later this year, AMC is making the original series available to stream, free of charge, on their website.

Bad news - it's only available in the US. ITV doesn't seem to have done the same deal (Although it should be said that ITV does have an enormous raft of classic programming available to stream online, they just don't shout about it much).

Anyway, for something like The Prisoner you should go out and get the wonderful Network DVD set.

BBC1 is stripping The Diary of Anne Frank at 7pm this week in place of The One Show, and I must say that after yesterday's lambasting of poor TV, this is a refreshing change. It's fabulous. Ellie Kendrick plays Anne herself, and is wonderfully naturalistic in her performance. After a few exterior scenes to convey Amsterdam, with Anne's parents (a very dour Tamsin Grieg and a practically unrecognisable Iain Glen as her upstanding father) bustling her across the city, stars stitched into their coats, the action moves into a claustrophobic interior set as the family settle in for the long haul.

I'll freely admit that I've never read the book, but you really feel that a teenager is talking to you as life goes on. It may be up against Emmerdale, but this is a finely made drama that I'll be looking forward to throughout this week.

Meanwhile, if you've not been watching Underbelly on FX, you're missing out on an absolute treat. Telling the story of the gangs of Melbourne over a ten-year period, the series is reaching its conclusion. Last night's episode saw an horrific killing of an otherwise nasty piece of work in front of his children. This actually happened.

Underbelly aired in Australia a while ago, but the UK DVD is out in a few weeks if you've not watched this great miniseries.

And if, for some reason, you're not able to use the iPlayer, The Diary of Anne Frank is out on DVD next week.

If there's one thing clear in recent times, it's that ITV really needs to up its drama quotient. So I watched Demons at the weekend - effectively ITV's sister programme to Primeval, and competing with the BBC's Doctor Who, Merlin and Robin Hood. I don't know when that latter programme is due to return, but the early evening scheduling of Demons means that it has the family-friendly Saturday night drama slot to itself at the moment.

But this was a mess. First of all, Philip (Gene Hunt) Glenister has an abysmal American accent that seems to serve no purpose at all. Aside from the haughty air that he carries which could be symptomatic of being an American (at least in the eyes of a hackneyed scriptwriter), his character could have originated anywhere. If, for international sales purposes, there had to be an American in the cast, then get an American actor - we've lent them enough of ours.

At Christmas, I was given a DVD set of Neverwhere, the 1996 Neil Gaiman penned series. Now while I wouldn't say that this was a rip-off of that programme (and subsequent novelisations and comics), there was certainly inspiration coming from it. That's not necessarily bad (I'd probably say that the fine BBC Radio 7 drama, Undone, also shares more than a little with Neverwhere), and there are also aspects of the BBC adaptation of Gormenghast in the make-up and style of the programmes humanesque beasts. But mostly, the show's creators have been watching Buffy. And Primeval. I heard a recent radio interview with Glenister promoting a book he'd helped with (I hesitate to say "written" since it sounded like a Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes unofficial cash-in), and he managed to barely mention this series at all. I suspect that unless things improve, we won't be seeing series 2. I quite liked Zoe Tapper in the recent Survivors, itself a little hit and miss, and she's obviously going places, but here she plays a blind concert pianist. Well - we know that there's no other profession for blind people than music don't we?

Neither of these two are the main character or his girlfriend. But they were perfunctory, yet otherwise forgettable. I can't remember their characters' names, and I can't be bothered to look them up.

The best character was Mackenzie Crook's who had a nice air of menace. Unless he reincarnates next week, they seem to have killed him off in the first episode though. I'm really not at all sure I'll bother with episode two.

Over on BBC1 we got an overlong monstrosity called Total Wipeout. A complete rip-off of Takeshi's Castle (as seen on Challenge TV), this programme saw twenty or so over-hyped contestants attempting an obstacle course, with a high likelihood of falling into mud, water or both. For reasons completely unexplained, the Endemol production is taped in Argentina, in an area with over-green turfed area making it look not dissimilar to the sets of Teletubbies or In The Night Garden. Indeed, the key three to six-years old audience is likely to find this funniest.

The main presenter is Top Gear's Richard Hammond, but he's sat by himself in front of a large screen reading scripting sarcastic ad-libs over the action unfurling in far away Argentina. Indeed, it's not clear whether he was brought in late in the day, because the show has flown out its own presenter in Amanda Byram, who also takes a fairly sarcastic attitude to precedings. That's probably not helped by the fact that each contestant was evidently forced to drink five litres of espresso before being asked to get over-excited on camera. In any case, Craig Charles was much better making stuff up for Takeshi's Castle when you knew that he little to no idea what was going on. Hammond is just snidish, and that's unfair given that this is a BBC commission. Laughing at funny foreigners can just about work, but laughing at people you've asked to do something for you doesn't.

The overall effect is that, all of a sudden, you're looking forward to series two of Hole in the Wall.

There's perhaps a half hour show in here, but instead, the limited obstacle course is seen again and again with all the contestants going through. Then we get slow motion replays and so on ad nauseum. By the time we get to the final where there's lots of fire in the background of the set for no good reason, and enormous towers of scaffolding that similarly take no part in the proceedings, we're worn down. The three finalists compete against the clock, but since the editing is all over the place with HD super-slomos abounding, the clock is on screen for an arbitrary length of time. Thus, the final competitor has no clock at all in-vision, so that some kind of false tension is built up. In the end the last contestant finishes something like 30 seconds after slower than the previous contestant, so leaving the clock on screen would have removed "suspense" in the result.

Still, I'm sure all the contestants had a lovely time in sunny Argentina. I don't suppose that there's any chance of having a new gameshow that - you know - asked questions or something?

[In fairness, I should point out that ITV brought back The Krypton Factor this week, and aside from replacing Gordon Burns with the anodyne Ben Shepherd who wasn't seemingly even able to ask his own questions, it was reasonable. At least there was a certain level of skill involved.]

Wow. Channel 4 has an interesting and incredibly timely programme on next Monday. I assume it'll detail how to survive on the Gaza Strip when you're being bombed daily by the Israelis.

Wait a minute... My mistake.

It's actually called "Surviving Gazza", and is about the famously off-the-rails footballer.

Of course this is scheduled after an episode of the returning Celebrity B** B******. The fact is that Channel 4 can't survive without the ratings that this garbage gives them. We all know that they're in trouble, and are desperately short of cash. BB doesn't rock my boat. The people they sign up are "celebrities" in the loosest sense, largely doing it to reignite their waning careers (there's no other real reason to go on). But as I've said before, the downside is that C4 is effectively off limits for me for the next x-weeks - I neither know nor care how long it lasts.

So what's the answer? C4 needs BB to at least attempt to balance the books. E4, More 4 and even Film Four are appreciated by their respective audiences, but overall the station is haemorrhaging cash, and has recently made quite a large proportion of its staff redundant. It's unable to really benefit from international sales or DVD revenues because it doesn't its own programming - it's all made by independent production companies. And its news is facing problems as ITV cuts ever back, perhaps even leaving news behind altogether. As it is, the channel relies on ITV's regional news divisions.

Is it time for the end of Channel 4? I'm not sure that its is, but I worry that the direction it's headed is doing it no good in the long term.

As seen on a London Evening Standard billboard today. Perhaps they've had a preview of the Christmas special?

They do know that he's a fictional character don't they?

If Strictly adopted the US voting system as I'd advocated, then it's incredibly unlikely this weekend's incident would have occurred.

This isn't, of course, important. Votes placed will still go to viewers' favourite dancers. So everyone who's saved the BBC or Ofcom's phone numbers on speed dial to complain at the drop of a hat should probably take a close look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why they actually voted for the programme.

I heard some fool of a woman on the radio saying that she wasn't going to watch the final next weekend because she was so upset!

So she's willing to watch the first 13 weeks, but a 15p vote that will still count is enough to make her not want to watch the show? (And she's so upset, that she got up really early this morning to head to a studio in W12). As William Shatner once said, "Get a life!"

Matt Wells had something of a moan this week about what he called an advert for DAB that he'd heard on the BBC this week. He saw it as a straight ad for BBC viewers and listeners to go out and buy a DAB digital radio.

A couple of things Matt:

The BBC did exactly the same thing last year(That's a link to the Media Guardian site containing the video from last year). And indeed the BBC has been effectively promoting the DAB format since it started. Indeed since their charter requires them to broadcast on DAB, it would be strange if they didn't. The BBC is not promoting a particular brand of radio - they're promoting the format. That's not surprising since they broadcast in the format and have a national DAB multiplex.

Secondly, this is no different to what happened with Freeview where the BBC kicked life into the DTT format. They happily promoted - on air - the availability of the £99 box.

The BBC has also recently been promoting its HD channel. To watch that, I have to go out and buy and HD ready TV. And to watch that I also have to pay for a subscription to either Sky or Virgin Media, or go out and buy a Freesat box.

I know Matt Wells hates DAB digital radio, and he's welcome to his opinions, which we hear endlessly week after week (although it was nice to hear the promotion of his sister company's Christmas programming this week as news), but let's have a little fairness shall we?

And it was entertaining that he enjoyed the Branagh version of Wallander. Last week, sight unseen, he wasn't at all sure and thought that the books, which he hadn't read, were rubbish. He might be interested to learn that the dramatisation was pretty accurate to the books. So perhaps he should try one or two before condemning them unread.

As for the Media Talk discussion about Project Kangaroo - well I'm going to get into that in another post. But I was disappointed by the level of discussion.

So a few interesting things are going on in television at the moment. I'm going to come back to Kangaroo because I think it deserves a bit more detail.

But I'm not exactly impressed by Five's recent hiring of Richard Woolfe from Sky One. But then Dawn Airey herself fills me with dread a bit.

Most visibly, she returned the Five logo to our screens, and in doing so, lost me as a viewer. More than that, she's been busy commissioning "fast-turnaround" documentaries - i.e. worthless tabloid-esque garbage. Out go those worthy early evening arts programmes, and in come filler that might wash for a digital channel that's looking for an occassional hit, but don't really work for a major "terrestrial" channel.

Five's schedule is lazy at the moment.

Sky One is a channel that has never done what it has promised. It doesn't help that it continually shifts gear and can't decide what type of channel it wants to be. At the moment it thinks it's a big entertainment channel, so we have Noel Edmonds and Shane Ritchie presenting big audience shows. And Gladiators is coming back for a second series, although not with all the first series' line-up and the long standing referee.

At other times, Sky One has aspired to be like HBO. But it no longer seems to commission drama. It's been a while since Dream Team was cancelled, and while Mile High and Is Harry On The Boat are regularly repeated on Sky Two and Sky Three, there's not been anything along to replace them for a while. We're now limited to the odd Ross Kemp series which actually isn't as bad as I thought it might have been, and the odd big budget Terry Pratchett dramatisation - most recently The Colour of Money.

For the most part it relies on The Simpsons and big budget imports like Lost, 24 and Prison Break. Fringe is the most recent of these. That's not a bad plan, and they've bought well. But they need more in the schedule. It's not a destination channel. Last week's Media Talk podcast mentioned the programming on FX which is effectively a sister channel that often feels hidden away. I agree that merging Sky One and FX would give it a stronger programming footing. Currently, the Australian miniseries Underbelly, is superb.

Elsewhere Sky Real Lives is getting a vast amount publicity over a documentary it's putting out this evening about someone who commits suicide on camera. I'll leave the rights and wrongs for others, but I'd be very curious to learn about how this documentary ended up on such an obscure channel. As far as I know, Sky Real Lives isn't known for its original documentaries. Surely it can't just be a ratings grab?

Screenwipe last night looked at those dreadful "mission" documentaries that clog up too many networks and are often just sleazy attempts to get people to tune in to see naked people. I've never watched a Gok Wan programme in my life, and I'm not about to start now. But The Observer's TV critic Kathryn Flett was one the "judges". This doesn't surprise me, as she's by far the worst critic on that paper, and when she's "away" I leap for joy and read someone who knows about television beyond the world of Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity. Brooker also concentrated on Dawn Porter who makes abysmal television too. I always point anyone interested towards her woeful Broadcast magazine blog entries.

Spooks finished on Monday night, and although the final episode wasn't as strong as the penultimate episode, because we all knew London wouldn't suffer a nuclear attack just yet as it'd spoil the continuity of Spooks: Code 9.

I did wonder how, when escaping Russian FSB agents in the tunnels under London, at the last minute the party broke up with Lucas ending up in Charing Cross, while Ros and Connie somehow ended up at London Bridge. Last time I looked, that was quite a hike. Not as much as a hike as it was starting at Liverpool Street which is also an awful long way from Charing Cross.

But when all's said and done, roll on the next series...

Last week, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that it wouldn't award the EBU the rights to the 2014 winter Olympics and the 2016 summer games. In the past the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has collectively bought the rights to the Olympics for the past fifty years. All the public service broadcasters chip in and they get the rights between them.

But the IOC is something of a money grabbing beast, and they've decided that they can do much better if they individually negotiate with each of the countries in Europe rather than go with a single deal.

Reports talking about the BBC not getting the rights to the games are probably very wide of the mark. In the UK the Olympics are still a protected event, and as such, have to be made available free to air, to the whole country. So ITV could bid in theory, but that seems incredibly unlikely - they've just decided that even the relatively low costs of covering the boat race are too much and have pulled out after next year. They'd be hard pushed to garner enough advertising to cover the costs. The production costs alone are enormous, with thousands of hours coming from Beijing this year, and even more likely to come from London.

In theory, an operator like Sky could bid for the games, but it'd have to broadcast them free-to-air. That might mean using DTT (the only service it'd have full national coverage with) to broadcast to most people with more on satellite, but that'd probably cause an outcry. That said, I noticed that Trevor East, previously head of sports at Sky and now with Setanta, doesn't see anything wrong with Sky going for the rights. He correctly points out that Sky Italia has the Olympics in Italy. However, Sky Italia is required to subcontract free-to-air rights, probably with RAI (the state broadcaster).

It seems a strange time for the vultures at the IOC to playing fast and loose with their games. We're entering a global recession which means that everyone's re-examining what they're able to bid for, or to what extent they expect advertising to cover costs of future games. And with London getting the games in 2012, the 2016 summer games will almost certainly not be at a favourable time for Europe. We won't know until next year who will be getting the games, but if most events take place in the middle of the night or during the day, that's not going to make European broadcasters want to pay more.

Of course UEFA and FIFA have done the same thing recently.

And all of them would like to see the review of sporting "crown jewels" be reviewed with significantly fewer events on the schedule. David Davies just been appointed by culture secretary Andy Burnham, to review the list. Currently it looks like this:

Group A - must be covered live:

• Olympic Games


• FIFA World Cup finals tournament


• European Football Championship finals tournament


• FA Cup final


• Scottish FA Cup final (in Scotland)


• Grand National


• Wimbledon tennis finals


• Rugby League Challenge Cup final


• Rugby World Cup final

Group B - highlights must be available free to air:

• cricket test matches played in England


• non-finals play in the Wimbledon tournament


• all other matches in Rugby World Cup finals tournament


• Six Nations Rugby Tournament matches involving home countries


• Commonwealth Games


• World Athletics Championships


• Cricket World Cup


• Ryder Cup


• Open Golf Championship

FIFA and UEFA would like only the final, and perhaps semi-finals and other matches involving the home nations to be included on the list. They'd happily sell the rest of the tournaments to Sky or Setanta.

Meanwhile England tests don't have to be broadcast live. Has interest in the national summer game lessened since it disappeared from free to air? I think it has.

The boat race isn't on either list, and Premier League highlights aren't guaranteed either. I'd be surprised if we saw much change. Ofcom recently published the equivalent list for the rest of Europe and they're equally as comprehensive with some events specific to their nations - e.g. The Tour de France or Giro d'Italia, and even the Ialian Grand Prix in Italy (F1 is otherwise free to go where it likes).

What's still clear is that if your event relies heavily on sponsors, you probably still want to stay free to air, as the coverage dwarfs anything that paid for television is able to give viewers. Indeed, if I was in charge of a sport, I'd perhaps be thinking more about how I can persuade the BBC or ITV to cover it rather than lusting after Sky's millions and forshortening my sport's future (Yes, cricket, I'm looking at you again).

BBC One took an appalling decision this week. They cancelled an episode of Little Dorrit to show a "fast-turnaround" episode of Panorama. Thousands of viewers have rightly complained.

Now I have no problem with current affairs programming taking precedence over drama, soaps or comedy, but there were two major problems this time around.

1. They're not rescheduling an episode of a serialised drama. That's right. Because the schedules are already so tightly woven up before Christmas, they can't squeeze it in. So instead, viewers will have to watch the Sunday omnibus. They'll either have to watch the whole thing, including Wednesday's episode, or come in roughly around half way through and hope that they don't miss anything. I've been using Series Link on Sky+ and as I type this on Sunday morning, no new entry for the Sunday omnibus has been put in my planner. I would have missed this altogether. Continuity announcers telling you to watch at approximately 6.45pm on Sunday just aren't enough.

2. The tabloid nature of the Panorama that replaced it. We got an hour long primetime show on something that frankly isn't all that important. It's tabloid fare. A stupid couple effectively kidnap their own child because of something they saw on an episode of Shameless. The story does not warrant the exposure. The reason that the episode was rush-released was because the court case had ended and the people concerned had been found guilty. The only "rush" was to beat the tabloids (and, sadly, broadsheets) who'd next day be printing page after page of nauseating detail.

Do you honestly think that if the night had been jam packed with Eastenders followed by Strictly... followed by Spooks, that one of those shows would have been postponed? Too right they wouldn't.

The only reason the BBC did this is because unlike the previous attempt at doing something like this - Bleak House, a couple of years ago - the viewing figures haven't been that great this time around. So suddenly, a ratings hungry BBC will piss off 2.5m loyal viewers, and instead hope to grab 6m viewers for a one-off Panorama.

I sort of expect this kind of behaviour from a commercial channel, but there's no excuse for the BBC. It's lowest common denominator scheduling of the worst kind. It was poor editorially, and frankly if there are any apologies being made by the BBC, they shouldn't be for stupid things that happened on the radio with John Barrowman. They should be apologising to viewers who've invested in time in watching a 14 part drama series.

(PS Happily, viewers in Scotland were able to watch the missing epsiode on Friday as originally scheduled. It seems to have been beyond the wit of anyone at the BBC to at least tell my Sky+ this. It could have easily recorded the episode. That still doesn't help other viewers though).

We seem to be going through a significant period of remakes at the moment. Actually, that's a little unfair as television has always remade successful programmes. How many Agatha Christies or Robin Hoods have we had over the years? And when isn't there another Austen, Dickens or Hardy production on the cards?

But recently we've had a remake of Survivors for which the jury's still out in my view, and now we hear that The Day of the Triffids is also being remade.

I've not seen the original version of Terry Nation's Survivors, but I'm told that it's broadly the same story as the remake. But Survivors is obviously already following in the footsteps of 28 Days/Weeks Later and even Dead Set. A plague/virus/flu has spread and there are few humans left.

The Day of the Triffids, based on the novel by John Wyndham, the story has already been made into an enjoyable TV series as well as a good radio dramatisation. There's also a film version that I've not seen from the early sixties. I suppose I'm a little concerned that it's being made by Power, who's recent Crusoe leaves a little to be desired, and their Flood was simply appalling. Still we'll wait and see.

I suppose the timing is what's a little off, with this version coming so soon after Survivors. Perhaps some rights were about to expire?

Mind you, another curious remake perhaps coming soon is a BBC/Showtime reimagining of Camelot. Isn't there already a Camelot series running on the BBC? Ah, but this is a contemporary retelling - so it'll be a bit different.

But the remake I'm really looking forward to seeing is the ITV remake of The Prisoner with Sir Ian McKellan. I've only just discovered there's a blog covering its production, which has now nearly finished.

It's due sometime in 2009 and I for one can't wait.

For whatever reason, I've recently ended up on a few PR companies' lists for "Bloggers'" events. I've been invited to a few film screenings here and there - although I've not been able to make disappointing number of them. That's more the shame because screenings tend to take place in and around the West End, and that's where I work.

Then, recently, I was invited to the launch of an interesting new 3 handset which I wrote about here.

Then last week, I got an invitation to a bloggers' screening of the new 24: Redemption two hour TV-movie. The screening was to take place the following Thursday.

Er - hang on. It was going to be shown on Sky One on Monday and it had aired on Fox in the US on Sunday.

Ah. But this was to be the DVD release which was an extended cut, and would feature a trailer for series/day 7 coming in the New Year.

So should I just watch the Sky One showing on Monday, or wait until Thursday to see it in a nice screening room?

Decisions, decisions.

Because I was a little slow in replying my place wasn't secured until the last minute, but circumstances meant that I hadn't had a chance to watch my Sky+ recording anyway. So I headed off to Soho House to watch the screening.

Recent series of 24 have swung wildly between good, and very bad. The most recent series - season/day 6 - began well although it was clear that by the time they'd let off a nuke, they were going to struggle. And the plot involving Jack's own dad trying to kill him was dreadful. The writers looked like they'd struggled for ideas - seemingly repeating storylines that had appeared in previous series.

When the writers' strike go under way in autumn 2007, it knocked production of 24 completely out, and the producers and network decided to skip a year and return in 2009. Early story ideas were going to see Jack Bauer in Africa, and these have ended up being used in this film. In the meantime, behind the scenes Joel Surnow, one of the series' creators was kicked off the show, and we began to wonder whether the over-reliance on torture ("It doesn't work" said Leonardo DiCaprio's character to Russell Crowe's in the recent Body of Lies).

And so to Redemption which takes place in the fictional Sangala in Africa. Jack is holed up in an American sponsored school for local African kids run by the Irish (!) Benton (Robert Carlyle). We're told that Jack and Benton know one another from the special forces, but it's unclear why and how and they might have met.

Across the border from Sangala, a vicious warlord is rounding up kids so that they can be armed and sent into battle - effectively as cannon fodder. In perhaps the film's best scenes, you find kids holding AK47s quite chilling.

The real time concept is kept and we're told that the action takes place between 3pm and 5pm. Meanwhile in Washington, the new president is being inaugurated seemingly without a great deal of help from the outgoing Powers Boothe. 24 of course gave us a black president, and now that we have Obama in reality, they're giving us a female president in the shape of Cherry Jones. We also meet her son, and his friend. But the Washington aspect of the story is really all set-up for the forthcoming series 7.

Back in Africa, the rebels still need more kids despite the fact that they have no time to train them as their attack on the country is imminent. And guess which school's kids is in the firing line. Fortunately there's a hidden cellar where they can hide out - along with the cowardly UN guy who, of course, is French.

Can Jack save the kids with Benton despite the US government having a warrant for his arrest? What do you think?

The build up is quite nice and measured. Despite the short running time, it doesn't run at the same lunatic pace as many episodes of 24 can do. Quite why the rebels would get so worried about Bauer is a little unclear (he kills someone's brother, so there has to be revenge). But in an attack on the school, the soldiers are still after a dozen kids, even when about a dozen adults have been killed in the attack. It doesn't seem worth it!

What was a bit disappointing was the terribly clunky product placement. Seemingly US network Nextel is available in fictional African countries - the phones are held up to the camera just a little bit too long to make sure we can see. And when the US president conducts video chats on three monitor set-ups, he or she sees a massive Cisco screensaver whenever they switch off the video conferencing system. It's a bit clunky.

We also saw a 15 minute preview of day 7 - essentially the first fifteen minutes of the first episode. It begins with a terrific stunt involving the kidnapping of someone. Then we cut to Jack Bauer who's giving testimony about his torture. It seems that all that shooting people in the legs to get information is finally catching up with him.

It's no surprise to learn that Tony Almeida is back - Carlos Bernard's name is in the credits. Yes - I know we thought he was dead. But could he really be working for the other side? We'll have to wait until next year to find out...

This morning, the BBC Trust rejected plans for a local BBC video news service.

Concurrently, Ofcom published the results of its Market Impact Assessment and concluded that the plans would have had a significant negative impact on commercial news providers.

The BBC proposal would have seen it producing more localised news which would be delivered on demand either via fixed or mobile internet. The BBC's aim was to provide another layer of depth to its current local and regional services which often stretch significantly. For example, if you sit in North Norfolk, the local news will also cover goings on in Watford.

Most commercial news providers were utterly opposed to the plans for understandable reasons. Local newspapers have suffered enormously as they've seen their advertising revenues fall. Traditionally much of their cash came from classified ads, and lucrative property and jobs ads. Yet all of these have - to one extent or another - moved over to the internet. As a result, they have less money to invest in news gathering and we're seeing redundancies, and closures. The one thing they have going for them is their ultra-local news. And they didn't want to see the BBC getting their hands on that.

Meanwhile, local commercial radio operators were similarly opposed to the BBC's plans. As well as their on-air local news provision, the more forward thinking operators have been investing in online local news provision as the newspaper groups have. They want their sites to become the local news portals for a given region. If successful, they're in a strong place to develop new online revenues (seemingly the only area of the UK media landscape that is showing growth).

They make good points, and I think the BBC Trust and Ofcom are probably right. But I think we also need to think forward a little. As newspapers suffer, so their newsrooms are shrinking. Fewer reporters mean that news is harder to come by. As Nick Davies pointed out in his excellent book Flat Earth News, with a retrenchment in journalists, comes a retrenchment in journalism. No longer does either a local newspaper or local news agency have a regular person sitting in the local courts or council chambers all the time.

And we're seeing some local radio news operations being cut back - either by creating news "hubs" for a group of local services, or by even removing the one advantage local radio stations have over other broadcasters, and removing local news at certain times of the day altogether.

Can we really get all our local news online? I'm not sure we can.

If there aren't any decent primary news gatherers - i.e. local news reporters on the ground - then everybody will be republishing the same Press Association copy. And that's not enough. Like elsewhere in an open society, competition is important for news providers too.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, but as budgets are squeezed, plurality of news providers remains important. If we all rely on one source - something that we're getting closer and closer to - then we become less open. Without the concern that your competitor is going to scoop you, a reporter isn't as incentivised to work harder and dig deeper. Who's going to look hard into more difficult stories?

Perhaps beyond that danger is nobody at all covering the news. Local newspapers will have closed down. Local radio will cover things at a very superficial level perhaps having one or two people in the newsroom (including the newsreader). And local television won't really exist and the likes of ITV offers the same "local" news for everyone between Carlisle and Newcastle.

As ever, these are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

The BBC Trust reported today on lots of things. Of most interest to the press was the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand fiasco. But frankly, that's so dull now, I can't be bothered to get into it at all. Tomorrow's papers will be all over it.

Of far more interest, in the same report, is the response to Jonathan Ross' interview with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Undoubtedly Ross was crass, and like "complainant 1" in the report, it wasn't the languarge per se that I found troubling, but the context. Ross was like some juvenile schoolboy, and you got the feeling the Paltrow was just being professional in agreeing to everything and going along with Ross.

Maybe she did find it funny, but I don't agree. And it was seeing this particular episode that meant that I wasn't surprised by Ross' later antics with Brand.

Do I want him to continue to be irreverand? Absolutely. But I don't want to be squirming in discomfort when I watch his show.

So John Sergeant has quit Strictly. Don't say that I don't cover the important issues of the day. What's that about Congo or pirates off Somalia?

What I still find perplexing is the lack of openness in whole TV voting world even post the telephone voting scandals we've had over the last eighteen months or so. We regularly hear that more young vote in Big Brother than General Elections, yet unlike a General Election, where the full results are published, we never get that information in TV contests. Instead, we're just told who wins or loses.

In Strictly's case, the judges count for half the votes, and viewers the other half. Of the eight couples dancing, according to the judges John and Kristina came bottom with 1 point, while Rachel and Vincent came top with 8 points.

Suppose the perverse British public essentially voted in the exact opposite manner putting John top and Rachel bottom - both would end up with 9 points (as would everyone else).

But we never actually get to see the final numbers of voters to allow us to determine what the overall results are. All we know are the bottom two couples. So maybe John has been squeezing through by the skin of his teeth, or perhaps he's been "walzting" through unimpeded such has been the strength of his fanbase. Who knows?

Producers are obviously loathe to publish the numbers because it might influence how people vote next time. But that's precisely why we need to see it.

And thet gets me on to multiple votes. There are no obvious limitations for the number of votes any particular line can make. Why not? OK - a family sitting down in a household may all hold separate opinions and want to each vote (thus cancelling out one anothers' votes - but hey...). But a limit of four or five votes per phone line would be easy to implement.

Interestingly, the US version of the show adopts a percentage format that means that a very low scoring couple is at an extreme disadvantage however popular they are. This is much better than the British system where even a big points gap might only mean you're one point worse off than the couple immediately ahead of you.

Anyway, it's all moot now, and frankly I don't even care about it that much. It's an entertainment show and not a dance competition. Although quite why the Beeb hasn't quietly reinstated a regular version of Come Dancing in Strictly's off-season, I'm really not sure. It'd surely be popular early on a Sunday evening. And I'm sure Anton would be happy to present...

There's a new series of The IT Crowd starting this week on Channel 4. Hurrah!

In the last series, one of the episodes opened with Roy and Moss sitting down to watch a DVD. We then saw a brilliant mock DVD piracy advert to warn viewers of how bad the criminals you're supporting are if you buy pirate DVDs.

We all hate these things - and they only ever show up on legal DVDs.

Anyway, I grabbed the video and put it on YouTube. It's 45 seconds long, and it's been there since September last year. Of course it's not mine, and there are loads of other versions of it online as well. Writer Graham Linehan obviously touched a nerve.

So how amusing today to get the following email:

Dear adambowie00,

Your video "Video Piracy" is still available because Channel 4 does not object to this content appearing on YouTube at this time. As long as Channel 4 has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video's page.

As I've said, before, I'm happy that Channel 4 has an enlightened attitude to using YouTube like this.

But I can't be the only person to see the irony of the situation here...

BTW - I do of course own a copy of the boxset of Series 1 and Series 2 of The IT Crowd which are authored brilliantly! I would still advocate that an elightened attitude leads to more revenues in the long term.

These are interesting times for Kanagroo - the BBC Worldwide/ITV/C4 joint venture that, simply put, is supposed to do for commercial (and commercially sold) TV, what the iPlayer does for the BBC.

Last week Ashley Highfield quite the consortium after four months, having moved across from the BBC mothership to take charge. And a long piece in today's MediaGuardian suggests that the project has been ridden with internal politics.

It's also true that the venture has been knocked off its timetable by a Competition Commission investigation which attempts to identify whether the consortium would be monopolistic.

The problem with all of this is that it feels a little like the record companies all over again. I suppose the organisations are at least talking, and know that they have to do something and make some money. But exactly how and what seems to be the question.

In the meantime, iTunes steals a march on video as it has done with music. With its technology being locked to a single, fantastically popular, device line for music, it now has a say so over everything the music industry tries to do. They have to accept Apple's pricing or not be on the platform. They've lost control. Other players have attempted to use Microsoft's format which works with a wide range of non-Apple devices, but they have small market share and are clunky in their usability (see James' piece on his attempts to load some video on a WMV player recently).

The various MP3 offerings might be able to take this on, but they tend to be hampered by not having full offerings - the majors are missing from eMusic, Play.com's MP3 service offers only a subset of what's available on CDs without all the majors on board, and Amazon's MP3 service simply hasn't turned up so far this year despite promises to the contrary.

So iTunes has the whip hand.

And now the same is happening with TV. If you want to go out and download a film or TV show, you really only have one choice - iTunes. Certainly all the broadcasters offer their own services to a lesser or greater extent. But they're messy - usually streamed - and the user experience is not nice. Only the iPlayer can really compete - and it was actually a latecomer to the market with most of the other broadcasters long having since put their offerings live. The iPlayer has been well marketed - with catch-up reminders accompanying every trail on-air as well as bespoke trails for the service.

There's nowhere else to go. It's not even as though iTunes is actually that good for film and TV. The TV is largely US fare with a limited amount of British TV. That's one of the reasons the Competition Commission got involved of course - one gets the impression that ITV and C4 are holding their programming back to a certain extent. And films are slow to arrive on the platform, often only being available to buy in the first instance, with less profitable rentals coming later (This is unlike Blockbuster, who needs to recoup the cost of each DVD - so multiple rentals on release make sense, as well as offering the copies for sale. Apple on the other hand, does not need to "recoup" a download's cost, so it prefers to "sell" at a higher price rather than "rent" a digital download).

For a strong and healthy marketplace, we need more than one major operator, which is why it's important that Kangaroo gets off the ground. Of course, ir's important that programming is not limited to one supplier - I want to able to choose buy the new Indy film (or not) in HMV, Zavvi, Sainsburys or ASDA. But delays in getting the project off the ground just makes Apple stronger. As it did for music, it has already positioned itself in a good place for portable video with DRM attached (and that, sadly, is going to be necessary in the short-term). That's not to say that other deals can't be done - the Sony PSP is an obvious route to market as well as Windows Media video devices. Deals with mobile phone operators would be good, although the manufacturers and networks tend to want you to use their own offerings rather than those of third-parites. But don't mess around - and get cracking!

We do now hear that a trial will launch in January following an alpha next month. This is ahead of possible approval from the Competition Commission in late January next year or early February. The sooner the better...

I never know quite what to make of Children in Need. Simplistically it's simply a fund-raiser to help children in variety of ways shapes and forms. And nobody can argue with that.

But there are the other elements of it, that I always find uncomfortable. It's notable that Channel 4 always gives its comedy programmes a week off when Children in Need is on. This time around it ran Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Then there are the big cheques from large corporations - supermarkets and the like - that all have the companies names on them. With the cancellation of the Jonathan Ross show, bands and artists with their Christmas releases out, have nothing much beyond GMTV or This Morning to appear from. So Children in Need this year gets a big name line-up. They're all doing it for the kids you understand, and not to remind people who only buy one new CD a year that their new albums are in shops now.

Certainly the various soaps compete to outdo one another with either musical numbers or bizarre crossovers with other shows. And then there's the regular news readers song and dance number. They're harmless enough.

But we get West End musicals that helpfully all advertise their availability (do theatre audiences get short-changed on Children in Need night, or do they all hop on limo-bikes to W12?).

I know I always sound like I'm some kind of anti-charity person, and Children in Need is in no way as bad as Comic Relief in the way that commercial sponsors get thirty seconds on the BBC (that truly is outrageous, and I really hope it changes next time around), but I still get a little uncomfortable at the commercial aspects.

CNN's Election Night "hologram" was truly the most pointless graphical mechanism I've ever seen on any type of broadcast.

I say get Max Headroom as a pundit for 2012.

As America votes, there were a couple of fascinating films on TV recently which had well-timed screenings.

On Friday there was a cracking film on BBC Four which isn't available to watch on the iPlayer, so I can only recommend picking up the DVD instead. CSNY Deja Vu followed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on tour across the US in 2006. This documentary which appeared to have pretty full access and was made by an ABC journalist, showed that many people thought that when a band in its sixties tours so many years after it had originally been behind the protest movement, it might have mellowed. Those people were wrong as became clear when they begin a song with the lyrics "Let's impeach the president..." I hold not particular candle for their music, but their beliefs are heartfelt, even if some of the disagreeing crowd had the perfectly valid opinion that if they were paying $200 for a ticket, they shouldn't be preached to. But CSNY always preached, so more fool them.

And speaking of DVDs, if you missed Recount on More4 a month or so ago, and the Channel 4 screening on Saturday night, then you'll have to wait until January to buy the DVD of that excellent film (or import the US edition). I trust that this evening's procedings will be completed somewhat more speedily. If the polls are anything to go by, that's the case.

A heavy cold means that going out to an election party is out the question, so I shall be taking in supplies this evening and settling back in the sofa with a remote switching between the BBC, Sky, CNN, even Fox, and possibly CNBC if they're carrying NBC programming through the night. Sadly there's no way to watch the Daily Show/Colbert Report show until tomorrow when the result will be known.

I'll write more about this perhaps at a later date, but it suitably scary and a thoroughly enjoyable piece of drama. Obviously influenced heavily in style by 28 Days Later, but still excellent. How many times did I find myself saying "If only... If only..."?

I see that it got a very strong audience of 1.19m. But I do wonder about the sense of E4 not to run a trailer for part 2 or let the audience know that Dead Set is airing every night this week.

The Spooks-like lack of credits, and the disappearance of the E4 DOG were ordained by the producers. So it's quite possible that the no-trailer idea was also theirs. But still...

E4 scheduled Dead Set in a one hour ten minute slot. I somehow suspect that it'd actually comfortably fit into an hour slot, but they were packing their biggest show of the night with ads. C4 and its spin-off channels are making a habit of the "long" hour. The Neil Morrissey vehicle tonight is scheduled to run 1:05, as is Desperate Housewives tomorrow. This is a show that happily fits in a one hour slot in the US, so as I've said before, we see more ads on these shows that US viewers do.

Far too much has been written about Kerry Katona and her behaviour on This Morning a couple of days ago. I can't be bothered to go into it, and if she is ill, I'm not about to link to YouTube clips of her being ill on national television. That's despite whatever I might think about someone who lives their life in Heat and Zoo magazines. If you feel that your interviewee is not fully with it, curtail the interview and either go to a pre-recorded piece or a commercial break. Don't dwell on it.

But I think some of the post-rationalisation has been interesting. First of all we had Philip Schofield defending himself and ITV on Chris Moyles because she'd actually arrived at the studio really late.

I don't doubt that Schofield is an honourable man, but I find ITV claiming to care about Katona's welfare somewhat questionable when my weekly ITV.com email dropped in my inbox today:

"Watch Kerry Katona on This Morning..." said the subject line.

"Watch Kerry's dramatic interview.

"Kerry Katona caused a stir on This Morning this week.

"Did you see the controversial interview? Watch it and see what all the fuss was about."

For which read: it's not fair that YouTube gets all the traffic. We want some of that action.

That's clearly the most important thing happening on ITV this week, because it's the only headline story on the email.

I expect that even now, executives are eagerly poring over their analytic programs seeing what kind of uplift the Katona footage has had.

It's been an interesting week or so for Digital Terrestrial Television in the UK - or Freeview as it's better known.

SDN has somehow been able to squeeze a little extra space out of the platform and put another channel up for auction, and it was won by Discovery.

Before everyone gets too excited thinking "Woo-hoo - Discovery Channel's coming to Freeview," I should point out that it will be a new, so far un-named channel, that will be coming Freeview's way. Expect to see repeats of programmes previously shown (and reshown) on their main brand services.

It was illuminating to read that only one third of Discovery's revenues actually come from advertising. Allowing for some sponsorship cash, some DVD sales etc., and some digital media revenue, that still means that upwards of half their revenues come from subscriptions. Perhaps somewhere in the 70p to £1.00 of your monthly Sky or Virgin Media subscription (I'm guessing). That's not revenue that anyone will give up lightly.

But the bigger Freeview news is the Ofcom announcement that HD is ready to roll on the platform. It looks quite exciting - there'll be a BBC HD channel, an ITV one and a C4/S4C one (depending on whether or not you live in Wales). This essentially means that all those people with HD Ready TV sets who don't currently subscribe to Sky HD or watch movies or play games on their Blu-Ray/PS3/Xbox 360 consoles, might actually have something to watch.

[An aside - it's somehow very funny to hear about people who have a Sky HD or Blu-Ray player and then hook it up to their TV with a SCART cable, and then perhaps extol the virtues of high definition!]

Interestingly, the commercial broadcasters are looking at subcontracting space on their HD channels in off-peak hours. Channel 4/S4C will either offer an "on-demand" service overnight, or sub-let their capacity, while ITV will simulcast between 1800 and 2300, but may also offer "on-demand" services or sub-let its off-peak capacity.

This whole endeavour will require new boxes for everyone who wants to receive the channels to allow for the MPEG-4 and DVB-T2 standards. And I'd guess that it'd be in most people's interests to heavily promote PVR devices rather than simple £20 decoders. If ITV and C4 are going to sublet capacity then viewers will need to be able to record their services. So I'd look out for a "Freeview+ HD" badge on any box I'd buy.

I'm interested in the idea of "On Demand" though. Sky has something called Sky Anytime TV which has never worked on my Sky+ box, but records and saves choice Sky programming for me to watch "On Demand". I'd imagine that it's this kind of thing that ITV and C4 are thinking about. I may not have realised that I wanted to watch Jamie Oliver last night, but C4 knows better and has recorded an overnight version of the show for me to watch at my leisure on an "un-used" part of the hard-disk on my PVR (it doesn't record the peak-hours version because I'm more likely to be using my PVR to watch/record other channels). These on-demand services needn't be HD either. Ofcom was happy in its invitation to apply, to consider multiple SD services to be offered in off-peak hours.

I just hope that sub-letting capacity isn't a backdoor into offering premium rate programming on a subscription or pay-per-view basis.

The other interesting aspect of this is that the new technology that'll need to be employed for HD is exactly that which Sky was wanting to put through with its "Picnic" proposal. To re-cap: it wanted to replace its three current free-to-air Freeview services (Sky Three, Sky News and Sky Sports News), with four premium channels (e.g. Sky One, Sky Sports and Sky Movies - yes I know that's only three). Sky got in quite a bitter row with Ofcom over who was prevaricating and who was providing what information.

With the technology that Sky wanted to implement likely to be built into all Freeview boxes post about 2010, perhaps they'll renew their interest in the scheme? Of course their capacity is not enough to provide HD programming, but they could undoubtedly broaden their offering to Freeview households. While I appreciate the news and sports news channels, I get the feeling that Sky isn't really trying with Freeview. Sky Three is an afterthought that is only very occasionally used well. It's true that you can watch repeats of superior acquired programming like Deadwood on the channel, but with a 0.6% share in September compared to 1.0% for Sky One, you know it could do a lot better. Don't forget - Sky One is not available to Virgin Media or Freeview customers after all!

The one thing that still concerns me about this move to HD is what impact it's going to have on channels that are already being broadcast in that space. To make it clear, Multiplex B - the spectrum being handed over for HD use - currently carries all the BBC radio services, BBC Four/Cbeebies (time sharing), BBC Parliament and the BBC interactive channels (two full service channels, plus the news on-demand channels).

All this has to be packed into Multiplex 1 (currently used by BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three/CBBC, BBC News, and by regional radio services in Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland), and Multiplex 2 (currently used by ITV1, C4, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, C4+1, More4, E4, and a radio service). Anybody who watched the coverage of Arsenal on ITV4 the other night will realise that the bandwidth on this multiplex is not spread evenly, and some channels have very poor resolution - especially if you put them up on your brand new 37" HD ready TV. Multiplex 1 is on 16QAM and will move to 64QAM which does allow more capacity - but I'm worried about the quality of the shifted channels, and those already on Multiplex 1, and especially, Multiplex 2.

Ofcom, with its original findings, presented this very simplistic diagram of what would happen:

But I remain concerned that quality is going deteriorate following this shift.

London is perhaps going to get these new Freeview services ahead of much of the country following an announcement from Ofcom consulting over whether a pilot scheme should be held here. But this looks like utilising additional spectrum which means that even if it works fine, we won't know how things will work out when we're limited to the six DTT multiplexes currently in existance.

Of course, post analogue switch-off, there'll be plenty more spectrum around, but Ofcom looks to be trying to make as much cash from that as possible and not simply handing it over for more Freeview services - HD or otherwise.

While many papers like the Daily Mail are getting rid of their TV critics, despite the fact that vast parts of their paper revolves around the medium, others provide a fuller service, but I begin to wonder why they bother.

My paper of choice is The Guardian. And they employ one of the finest television critics writing today in Nancy Banks Smith. They also have the excellent Screen Burn with Charlie Brooker.

But then they insist on employing Sam Wollaston as well.

Why should writing about TV be seen as some kind of way to get into comedy writing? We're talking about the medium that is foremost in most people's minds. They spend many precious hours in front of their television, and by and large take it seriously. They care about what they watch - be it Emmerdale or University Challenge. Certainly, people want entertainment, but if they think a programme is rubbish, they don't watch it.

That's why I want to read a critic who can inform as well as occasionally entertain me.

The Guardian also employs Peter Bradshaw as its film critic. Now he may be sneeringly supercilious, seemingly hating most films that he watches. But he does care about them, and even if he only gives Burn After Reading two stars out of five, he at least believes in it, and it's because he takes the medium seriously.

Wollaston on the other hand, reviews an episode of Timewatch, largely concerned about how attractive he finds the presenter.

Phwoar, new TV history totty. She looks like a cross between Boticelli's Venus and Meryl Streep's French Lieutenant's Woman. And she's brainy as hell and writes books.

Yes - I know he's saying it for effect. But over time, you wonder if that's really not all he's thinking about. Was the show any good? Is it worth me watching on the iPlayer?

He then goes on to discuss a programme on Ian Fleming, largely on the basis of how attractive he finds Joanna Lumley. Only a review of the US edition of Wife Swap do we learn anything vaguely interesting - basically that they make stuff up for it and reshoot scenes.

That's not enough. Tell me about the programmes please. And if you can't do it seriously, then maybe I should be looking elsewhere for my television criticism.

Now let me chase down a copy of Clive James on Television.

[UPDATE]

Oh dear. Today's Wollaston column is arguably even worse than yesterday's. Shark sex "looks wrong" to him. This is then followed by lots of guffaw guffaw writing about animals having sex. How amusing thirteen-year-old Guardian readers must find it all.

Later on he moves on to The Sarah Silverman Programme. This has apparantly leapt ahead of Fonejacker as the funniest thing currently on television. Now Silverman is funny - although that's probably debateable if you were in the audience at Hammersmith the other night when you got 45 full minutes of comedy for your £50.

But even the idea that Fonejacker was ever the funniest thing is utterly bizarre. It's a rehashing of the decades old art of phone pranking better practioned in the medium of audio by such people as Victor Lewis Smith, The Jerky Boys and even Jon Culshaw as "The Doctor" on Dead Ringers.

With Wollaston at The Guardian and Kathryn Flett at The Observer, it feels like a horrible pincer movement's happening.

[I must admit that this is a revised version of some comments I already posted on a Guardian blog]

Peter Kay is someone I've observed more from afar than anything. I've never watched Phoenix Nights (shoot me now), and I've only caught bits of his various live routines. I enjoyed the Amarillo video enough, but I really wasn't sure what I was going to make of his one-off X-Factor take-off on Channel 4 last night.

Overall, I was disappointed - it just wasn't funny enough.

The programme was brilliantly close to the real thing. And that, for me, was its problem. The original is already a pastiche of itself with over-hyped editing, long pauses, whooping audience, over the top comments and so on.

I'm sure that they've simply employed many of the staff who usually work on these shows to get the look exactly right - from the stage set to the choreography and the editing.

But that makes taking the mickey out of it very hard to do.

The main problem was with the players. While the "contestants" were all comedy actors including Kay himself as "Gerladine", the show was held together by presenters, judges and "celebrities" who were all playing themselves and had to read lines that had been written for them. And they just weren't good enough. While those shows are scripted anyway, they're not expecting to be getting laughs. In this instance, they were - it's a Peter Kay comedy after all.

I think it would have been funnier if Kay had perhaps played more characters himself - perhaps all the contestants. Or if he'd had comedians taking the place of the presenter and judges. Instead, we had Cat Deeley, who is a perfectly fine presenter, but who wasn't funny delivering her lines.

And I'd have liked a little more subtlety in some of the gags. There were some nice jokes about how little of the price of the phone vote went to charity. But once we'd seen it several times onscreen, we didn't need Deeley telling voicing the joke as well. Just leave it for those who read it to get it.

Also, it was very odd scheduling to put it up against the Strictly Come Dancing results show. Undoubtedly it would be most appreciated by people who love the shows it's mimicing.

While there were some entertaining set pieces like the two women from 2 Up 2 Down being winched into the air to retrieve balloons and cats in a truly tasteless piece of choreography, and one of them falling out of their chair only to not be rescued by Rick Astley until he realised that his line in the song was imminent and he had to drop her.

But overall, I thought the gags wore thin, and I didn't bother with the second half.

Finally, given that this wasn't live, there were a few bits that perhaps should have been bleeped for a pre-watershed show. "Dr" Fox mouthed an expletive in close-up that definitely shouldn't have been left in, and a blowjob gag really isn't suitable that early on. A week or so ago, Bruno Tonioli made a tasteless gag that got him a swift look from Bruce on Strictly Come Dancing. Not clever, but it was live. I'm no prude, but rules are rules and ours are pretty good. So either it should have been edited or gone out a bit later. And I hear that the language was "fruitier" later on. Again, you can curse and swear as much as you like post watershed, but not in a programme that partially airs before the watershed. I really dislike the idea that a show that straddles the watershed should be acceptable viewing for kids earlier on, but not later on. This show is bound to have had a decent sized audience of kids, so it's a bit schizophrenic to have the final part essentially unsuitable for kids (I know we could get into a massive conversation about whether shows aimed at kids like, say, Skins, are really suitable, but that's for another time). Be one thing or another - not both.

These seem to be popular, so I might attempt one a week or so as the mood takes me. Best viewed large (or even original).

Think of them as an ongoing comment on the state of British TV.

Here's me defacing a copy of this week's Radio Times showing today's TV. It's part of a very irregular series.

Best viewed large.

Word magazine's website has a great list of things that people find annoying - or the dumbest things in entertainment. It's a great list, and you can't help but nod as contributors add more and more.

Someone halfway down the list mentions half-hour TV programmes that throw-forward to the second 15 minutes just before the ad-break, then re-cap the first 15 minutes when they return from the break before summarising what's going to happen next.

This doesn't happen on just commercial TV either. BBC programmes have annoying habit of doing precisely the same thing, even though there's not really a break in the programme except to trail the next section. Perhaps they do it because at some point the show will appear on UKTV Homes Style + 1, and then it'll need it because the average viewer of that channel only watches 6 minutes a year, so needs to understand what's happening in that 6 minutes.

Anyway, it's become obvious that these things are terribly easy and formulaic to make. Let's use Highland Emergency as an example. This is a Granada produced programme for Five. I've seen several episodes because I have a bizarre fascination for all things set in the Highlands of Scotland.

The show basically follows Scottish emergency services to various accidents and emergencies. In particular, they especially love helicopter emergencies.

The show opens with a brisk run-through of the exciting accidents and emergencies we're going to see in this week's episode as a teaser. Then we get the well produced opening credits with lots of helicopters and dangling winchmen.

Next we're introduced to the crew of a particular helicopter - let's say it's a Royal Navy crew. They're called to Ben Nevis or somewhere where a climber has been injured. The voiceover tells us that the person almost certainly needs immediate medical care, and that it's a thirty minute flight to Ben Nevis. We see a graphic of a map indicating where on the Ben the injured party is lying. The crew search for and find the missing person. But it's too dangerous to land, so someone will be winched down, although crosswinds make this treachourous...

CUT TO: A quick graphic that has a helicopter and the word emergency.

VOICEOVER: Meanwhile in Lossiemouth...

The action could just stay with the injured party on Ben Nevis, but no. In case we get bored, it instead shows us a different crew, somewhere else, who have to rescue someone who's torn a ligament on a remote Scottish island.

The injured person is on a beach. We're anxiously told that the crew refer to tide times. The tide's coming in. It really is urgent!

Then we arrive on the beach, and there's no sign of the incoming tide. Not only that, but local doctors/paramedics are on the scene. There was little danger of anyone being washed out to sea. The tide's still so far out that the helicopter can happily land on the beach, but before they load up...

We get a preview of what happens next. We see clips we've already seen of the helicopter over Ben Nevis, swiftly followed by clips we've just seen of a helicopter landing on a beach. And because there's no hope of stretching these two cases out through another 15 minute (well 10 minutes once you remove ads) segment, we're told of a third case in Aviemore of someone who's, er, twisted an ankle on a ski-run.

After the break, we get more generic graphics of helicopters and the word "emergency." Then we return to Ben Nevis, with another resumé of the previous action, before we see that, yes, the climber was successfully hauled into the chopper. This is intercut with a few interviews of the crew basically telling us what we've just seen with our own eyes, and what a voiceover person has just told us.

The now familiar graphic of helicopter alongside the word emergency allows us to cut to the new story featuring a doctor who looks after injuries on a ski-run. Who'd have thought? A teenager has twisted an ankle. It hurts, and she's cold. She's brought back to some kind of hut where she looks sulky like any teenager - albeit one in pain. But before anything else happens...

We cut back to the person on the beach who's very unlikely to drown. They're loaded aboard the helicopter and returned to Aberdeen hospital where they're treated.

One more look at the graphic and we're back to Aviemore, where stroppy (but in pain) teenager is loaded into another ambulance and sent off to hospital.

A final graphical interlude and we see clips from all the incidents we've just seen, this time with some kind of special effect applied to the footage - perhaps they're now in black and white. The voiceover tells us that each person went to hospital and what they were treated for. They all lived.

Finally we get a sneak look at next week's programme in which some climbers are in trouble on a mountain, someone's hurt at a ski-resort and someone has a threatening condition on a remote Scottish island.

Repeat times 13.

Of course there's a little more to it than that. The producers tie together stories that happen at night with others than take place around the same time. The implication is always that these things are happening simultaneously, when you know perfectly well that they were probably months apart, that's why it looks like summer in once case, but another takes place in snow covered peaks (Yes - I know that snow covers some peaks pretty much all year round). The same goes for episodes set in poor weather and so on.

Now I'm not knocking these series too much, but they really don't add much to the sum of human knowledge, and the A to B to C editing-by-rote is just a bit sad. There's a really good series to be made with these emergency services, but a Five budget for the 7.30pm slot (up against the soaps), is never going to be enough.

Fringe is Sky's big new import, and one of the first US shows of the new season to get the full order of shows commissioned.

But it's basically The X-Files isn't it? Were it not for a bit of Googling, I'd have even thought that it was shot in Vancouver like early series of that show were. In fact it's set in Boston and shot in New York. Make of that what you will. Personally I kind of like shows being shot in the cities they pretend to be set in. Sitcoms are about the only real exception to this.

So we have Anna Torv (an Aussie) as FBI Agent Olivia Durham, who's got involved in some kind of weirdness involving events that together make up The Pattern. So we have an ultra-conspiracy at the heart of the show. This being a J J Abrams show, that's not surprising. But it's also a little concerning. The X-Files ultimately got caught up too much in its own mythology. Abram's previous series, Alias, was sillier, but by the end, the story arcs made little to no sense - especially to the casual action/adventure viewer. And Lost cannot possibly answer all the questions its set itself.

I really hope that this time, the writers have a big whiteboard or book or something where they note down all the conspiracy and unexplained elements, and then tick them off as they're answered. It's too been too much of a problem in recent years that the nature of US TV commissioning allied to ongoing stories has led to too much dissatisfaction overall.

I quite like the inclusion of an enormous corporate entity rather than just government at the heart of the matter. So we have Massive Dynamic (of course it has a web presence!) at the heart of things. And given the way that big business has finagled its way into things like defence, that seems a good route to travel and explore.

The worst part of Fringe is surely that of Dr Walter Bishop, who is played as an archetypal mad professor. Indeed, he'd put Back to the Future's Dr Emmet Brown in the shade on the scale of madness in mad professors. The character needs reigning in if he's not to become incredibly dull. This job falls to his son, Peter Bishop played by Joshua Jackson - Pacey from Dawson's Creek. He's a grizzled character who has his own issues - i.e. backstory, that'll be later explained - involving Mafia. We meet him in Iraq.

Incidentally, in Fringe, we always know where we are, because massive 3D lettering appears "welded" into the landscape to let us know. It's a stylish gimic that reminds you of the letter-zooming that used to happen in Alias. The only problem is that the device is massively over-used. Once we've seen Harvard once, we know where we are for the rest of that episode, and we don't need to see it again. That said, I was interested enough in discovering how it was done to find VideoCopilot.net which is a fantastic resource teaching you how to use things like Adobe After Effects and various 3D packages. Indeed the site's tutor, Andrew Kramer, worked on Fringe's opening credits, so this is top-level stuff.

At least Fringe gives a new role to Lance Reddick - Lt. Cedric Daniels from The Wire.

Meanwhile, Five has bought the UK rights to another intriguing show also starring an Australian in the lead - Simon Baker. The Mentalist is not some kind of outrageous slur on the handicapped (although a country which happily uses the word "retard" to describe people without approbation is to be questioned), but a series about a reformed psychic performer. This comes from the hand of Bruno Heller who most recently was responsible for the HBO/BBC production of Rome. It has X-Files connections too in that regular X-Files director, David Nutter (how could you ever forget his name) has directed the first two episodes. But it really shares a pedigree with CBS's Numb3rs, the series that features a maths genius solving pretty much all the FBI's crimes on the West Coast.

Baker plays Patrick Jane, a man who used to pose as a psychic and appear on show similar to ones that fill up all too many hours on Living TV. Then one day, a serial killer (who's still at large) murders members of his family, and he changes tack. He's now admitted that he's not a psychic but a mentalist, and he's using those skills to help solve crimes.

Like Monk before him, he's really just a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes who used amazing feats of observation to deduce truths. It's not played for laughs as much as Monk is, but it quite happily fits into a procedural mix. Robin Tunney (from series 1 of Prison Break) plays Watson to Baker's Holmes, but aside from worrying that there won't be enough mentalist tricks to employ to keep the stories flowing is my only real concern. That and the fact that we're not totally let-in on some of the tricks Jane is employing. It'll be interesting to see this show develop, assuming its ratings hold up and it's not cancelled.

A cracking article from New York magazine on product placement and it's implications. Well worth a read.

Sunday night in the US saw the Emmy Awards - theoretically, the most important American TV awards. Now their credibility is obviously nil since the best TV series to emerge from the US (and arguably the English speaking world) has had precisely two nominations in five years and no awards. That's The Wire. It's got a black cast and is set in Baltimore. Emmy voters are white and live in LA.

But the big winner at the weekend was another HBO show that I've been looking forward to - John Adams. It's a seven part drama that aired in 90 minute ad-free chunks on HBO earlier this year. It won a grand total of 13 awards including one for Paul Giamatti who plays Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of America.

So I've been looking forward to it, and next weekend it starts on UK TV. Now whereabouts in the schedule do you think this 7-part epic is going to play?

Well it's not on BBC1 or ITV1 - certainly. Nor Five... BBC2 would work, but nope. Channel 4 would be a good fit, but nope.

You're getting warm.

BBC Four? It'd work nicely there. But no.

Instead it's on More 4.

Now that's a good fit. More 4 shows some challenging and interesting programming. In particular they bring us the nightly delight that is The Daily Show (Incidentally, did they give last Friday's episode with the Tony Blair interview much cross promotion on C4? I don't really watch much C4 these days so don't know).

If I tell you it's on at the weekend, when do you think you can catch it? 9pm or 10pm on Saturday or Sunday nights? Well Saturday night has "The 30 Greatest Political Comedies" - a list show presented by no less than Michael Howard (who I saw in the street in Golden Square the other day oddly enough) and Charles Kennedy. Not quite BBC Parliament's coverage of the Labour and Tory conventions is it? That's followed by a recording of the previous evening's US Presidential Debate.

Earlier in the evening there's a double bill of Property Ladder - and we're all thinking about moving just now aren't we? So there's no space on Saturday night in the schedule clearly.

What about Sunday? Well there's a repeat of a Jamie Oliver programme, then a repeat of a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall programme, followed by repeats of two Gordon Ramsay programmes. Clearly everyone's cooking on Sunday nights.

So when can this 13-time Emmy Award winning mini-series air? It cost over $100m to make afterall.

5.30pm on Saturday. That's when.

Now on the one-hand, you could argue that it's good counter-programming to things like Merlin or X-Factor that are on BBC1 and ITV1 at the same time. But it just feels completely hidden, and it's a real shame. Surely there must have been some kind of primetime slot for the programme?

It reminds me of another cracking HBO show that was thoroughly hidden away in the schedule by Channel 4 years ago - From The Earth To The Moon. Produced by Tom Hanks no less, this dramatised the Apollo space race and was made at great expense. It was shown on Saturday lunchtimes or thereabouts here, and consequently most people will have seen it in repeats on something like FX or on DVD.

While I'm highlighting shows that you really should see, More 4 has another Emmy Award winning one-off next week that is airing in primetime, and is absolutely unmissable. Next Friday they're showing Recount, which tells the story of the Florida part of the 2000 Presidential Election. You know, the one that Al Gore should have won.

The scene early on shows us mostly clearly what "hanging-chads" really were and it's a masterly dramatisation of an important, but fairly dry subject. It'd be easy to have made it uninteresting, but a cast that incldues Kevin Spacey, Denis Leary, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and a wonderful Laura Dern, makes this an exceptional film. It's followed by the intriguing sounding Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

[UPDATE] I've just listened to the most recent Guardian Mediatalk podcast and More4 controller Hamish Mykura talks up his channel's showing of John Adams (and Recount) with great proudness. What a shame he's scheduling it at teatime on Saturdays.

Hole in the Wall is BBC One's new Saturday teatime game show. Imported from Japan, it involves two teams of celebrities dressed in lycra space suits and crash helmets trying to form shapes to fit through the holes in a polystyrene wall that heads towards them.

If they don't make the correct shape, then end up in a small pool behind them. It's very silly and is taking the world by storm.

You can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for a week or so here.

Anyway, one of the rounds is a "question" in which the team playing must select one of the two answers and stand behind that answer to go through a hidden door. The wrong door is solid and means that you'll end up in the drink.

This week's question was a maths problem, and you can see it below.

Anyone who's studied GCSE or O Level maths should also see the problem. The answer's neither 11 nor 12. It's 38.

There's something called Order of Operations in maths and it means that you calculate things like multiplications and division first - particularly when there's no more information to help you decide which order to do things.

So, in effect, this sum is the same as saying:

(3 x 12) + (8 / 4) = 36 + 2 = 38

You can't just read it from left to right as the producers (and indeed the contestants did). It's just wrong.

If it was worth it, I'd have complained to someone at the BBC. But it's not, although arguably the points different might have meant the other team won, and their (undisclosed) charity might have missed out on £10,000.

It's just a shame that the solitary question in the entire show was, er, wrong.

You know how I love watching Bear Grylls' programmes - particularly since he had to tone down what he was claiming in his second series of Born Survivor.

Back in May, when Ray Mears was promoting his latest series - set in the Australian outback - he laughed off Grylls. Now Grylls is conceding defeat in the battle of TV survivalists. Grylls has a new series of Born Survivor starting on Discovery next week and C4 in October.

This sounds like the perfect opportunity for a Children in Need or Comic Relief stand-off: first person to Uluru or the North Pole is the winner. Something like that.

I never knew that it had been given the working title "Picnic", but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice.

Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services - Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three - off the Freeview platform, and use the space to put four or so new subscription channels on in its place. It would use a higher spec of encoding that would mean consumers needed new boxes to both decode this, and to provide a slot for their subscription smart cards.

Ofcom wasn't too happy and the whole thing disappeared deep into Ofcom's Southwark Bridge offices for further consultation. Sky was an original partner of Freeview, and suddently DTT wouldn't quite be so free.

The cynic in me thought that this was a chance to get back at Setanta who was soon to be launching with Premier League football. And due to their tie-up with Top-Up TV, they'd be on Freeview, unlike Sky.

At Sky News, they were a bit unhappy as not only were they off Virgin Media (and still are, I believe), but now they were coming off Freeview.

Ofcom has quite forceably responded to Sky's press statements regarding the suspension of development work on Picnic. In particular they highlight a tardiness on Sky's part to get responses to them on deadline and in full detail.

So a questionmark must hang over how serious a proposition this ever was. On the one hand, the venture had employed as many as 70 people (doing what, exactly, beyond technical work and responding to Ofcom, is a little unclear)., but the original hope had been to put something in place in time for the start of the last football season. The idea was surely to confuse a marketplace that Setanta was then entering into.

I suspect that Sky is now not so fussed about Setanta. They've certaininly come out well following last week's debacle. As yesterday's Observer noted, they've made Rupert Murdoch look like the good guy.

It'll be interesting yet to read what Ofcom has to say, but adopting MPEG 4 still feels like something to do further down the line, when Freeview HD starts. Still, it'll be worth watching what happens to this most popular of digital television formats.

According to Media Guardian, Setanta is broadcasting free-to-air highlights of Croatia v England later this evening on its own channel!

This is very odd. They're reported to have turned down an offer of £500,000 from ITV. And now, at the very last minute, they offer these free highlights.

The story on Media Guardian was published just before 6.00pm this evening, and I can't see many outlets* advertising that fact now. So basically aside from a few people reading various forums and websites, nobody will know.

And I think it's fair to assume that we'll be bombarded by ads for subscriptions. Still, something is better than nothing, although I can see that something being the goals on the respective Ten O'Clock newses.

[*UPDATE] Well my employer's mentioning it in the 7.00pm news in fact!

"We always intended to make highlights available, and were disappointed that we were unable to reach agreement with any of the terrestrial broadcasters," said the Setanta director of sport, Trevor East.

Hmmm.

[UPDATE 2] Roger Mosey talks about both the Setanta situation and Paralympics coverage over at the BBC Sport blog.

OK - it's a well known fact to people who read this blog or sit near me at work that I hate all reality shows.

That said, there are a couple I watch despite myself. The Apprentice is getting close to boring me as they choose a nice cross section of generally inept people, but I'm still bearing with it. Then there's Strictly Come Dancing and most recently Maestro.

It's those latter two I'm going to talk about here - if only to question myself.

Maestro has busily been taking a group of "celebrities" and teaching them how to conduct an orchestra. At the end of each week one or more of them is eliminated. The contestants are scored by judges, and because that's far too straightforward, the BBC Concert Orchestra votes to decide which of the bottom two stay in the competition. I suppose we should count our lucky stars that the public largely aren't involved. At least they weren't until last night.

It's been an unusual show in the sense that particularly in the first programme, I felt as though I was actually learning about something hadn't previously really understood - a conductor is doing somewhat more than just waving a baton in time with the music. But by the second week, the show had changed tack, and although we weren't quite "following their journeys", we had less time to learn about the intricacies of what's involved, and more time just watching the contestants perform.

In the final, as I mentioned, suddenly we were presented with an audience vote to determine the winner. The real problem with this isn't that I might be overcharged in a rigged phone-vote; the problem is that I don't have the skills to be able to determine which is the better performance. Many's the time during the series that I thought I'd just seen a good performance, only to be corrected by the judges who said that they were smiling too much or bouncing around or whatever.

In point of fact, this series would have worked just as well without famous people at all. Ideally all the contestants should have had similar musical training/backgrounds. As it was, Sue Perkins who won, can play the piano to a significant level. That's got to help.

Moving onto my other guilty pleasure - Strictly Come Dancing. Again the viewing public is being asked to judge something they're really not able to. Most of us can't dance, and while we might know what we enjoy when we see it, don't understand the technicalities of it.

But more to the point, it's the dancing that we enjoy. The format is accessible and there's plenty of concession for the new viewer about what we should be seeing in a particular dance.

OK - so we'll leave Strictly alone. But then last Saturday saw the second edition of the Eurovision Dance Competition, and in a tweaked format, we suddenly had to have an amateur (who was in most cases a celebrity of some sort in their home country). Why did we need this?

Someone who stars in The Bill in the UK is unknown throughout most of the rest of Europe, so that's only a sop to the UK audience. If we appreciate good dancing, why don't we just have professional dancers representing us?

Frankly, the BBC should simply bring back Come Dancing. The old format would need a tweak, but I'm sure it could work. There's just no need to have the public vote at every moment, and for actors, singers, sportsmen and women et al taking part. The change would be refreshing!

Here's a stat for you:

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Olympics on US television: 3,600 (2,900 of which was live)

Number of hours of coverage of the Beijing Paralympics on US television: 1.5 (0 of which is live)

That's right. Of all the US TV channels, there is a single 90 minute highlights in the middle of next month. That's it.

The BBC, incidentally, is showing 5-6 hours live a day (albeit on digital) alongside a nightly one hour highlights package on BBC2, with more live action at the weekend.

In the 2012 London Paralympics, I think it's a fair assumption that the US team will probably include a significant number of athletes who are ex-military and have been injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I've just had a scary thought.

Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they've declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio rights were sold separately and the match will be on BBC Radio Five Live (I don't think that Talksport is also covering it, but I'm happy to be corrected).

The radio rights are obviously significantly cheaper than television rights. But what's to stop Setanta buying up those rights as well? Is there any reason they could buy them and not use them? Or perhaps just put the "radio" out on their own subscription TV channel to show that they're using them.

That'd incur even more wrath of the fans, but they could do it. Of course we might see the return of the old Talksport trick of reporting what's going on from a television.

Just a thought!

So if you don't have Setanta, and can't make it to a pub that's showing Setanta, the only coverage you're going to have of England's World Cup qualifiers against Andorra on Saturday, and Croatia next week is going to be goal clips on the news. There is, of course, radio coverage too.

Media Guardian reports this morning that Setanta still hasn't sold terrestrial highlights of the games to either ITV or the BBC. They're fulminating that the offers they're getting don't exceed what the stations paid for Champions' League qualifiers. Last week BBC Three showed Arsenal's game against FC Twente (effectively a dead rubber since Arsenal were a comfortable 2-0 from the first leg, and they won on the night 4-0 to go through 6-0 overall), while ITV had the more attractive proposition of Liverpool's must-win game against Standard Liege which ended with a last minute extra-time goal. But these were live games and thus more valuable.

I would have previously said that Setanta will come to a last minute deal to sell on terrestrial coverage, but with the bigger of the two games being next Wednesday's Croatia fixture, I'm not so sure. Setanta desperately need those subscribers - it's never clear how many they really have, and what price they're paying. So I don't think that this time we're going to see the games on terrestrial.

I would hope that the FA are a little embarrassed about this. They've just entered into a big new deal with ITV and Setanta, and yet here are one of their partners effectively denying much of the football viewing public the chance to see even highlights. Of course Setanta are perfectly within their rights to do what they like, but I think using phrases like "emotional blackmail" makes it obvious that we're not going to see any capitulation from them.

A sorry state of affairs for the national game...

Last night I was sitting at home tinkering with this blog (it will have its five-year overhaul soon), when my brother called me to say that there was someone from Virgin Radio on Dragons' Den. I flipped on the TV and saw that the person being called "Christian" was Robin Banks, a DJ who used to work here and who I know a little. He's since spent quite a lot of time at Kiss 100, and more recently joined Leicester Sound. You might also know his voice if you ever watch Mythbusters in the UK as he re-voices them in an English accent.

I rewound the Sky+ as I'd been recording the show anyway and watched the full segment. Rachel and Christian were pitching for cash for their business - the Tiny Box Company.

The editing of Dragons' Den has to be good to keep us in suspense, although it has to be said that as last contestants on, the chances were that they'd do a deal. One of the problems with the format is that sometimes it's just a little too formulaic.

Their business was for the manufacture of recycled cardboard gift boxes - the sort of item you might get jewellry packaged in. From an external point of view, on several levels the company seemed to be a bit of a non-starter. The idea was unpatentable - indeed there must be hundreds or even thousands of packaging companies. They hadn't sold all that many, although they had a couple of decent clients. So it was surprising that in relatively short time, three of the dragons had dropped out.

Then something strange happened. I'd have expected that, however well the pair came across, the last two dragons would surely give them short shrift. But Theo wanted to know about their backgrounds. Christian said he'd worked in radio... on-air. He namechecked Kiss and Virgin, and talked about broadcasting in general. But then he'd gone into rehab after which he'd met his business partner. Rachel had a good business background but some kind of illness had struck her causing the loss of both her job and home.

Theo announced that he thought that there might have been some kind of broadcasting background to Christian. How? Theo doesn't strike me as someone who listens to a lot of Kiss, although his kids might. Maybe he used to listen to the Robin Banks evening show on Virgin? But even then, it might have been hard to tie together a familiar radio voice with a face in a different environment.

Could the producers have suggested that asking about the entrepreneaurs' backgrounds would be an "interesting" thing to do? In this case, it livened up an otherwise so-so pitch, and in the end, both Theo and Peter pitched in together for £60,000 to back the firm.

It made me think. I know that television is an artifice, and on something like Dragons' Den, producers will see fit to ensure that a few mad inventions are put in front of the dragons as well as more investable business enterprises. But are the dragons being fed details? Unless they've got an uncanny ability to dig into people (and they are shrood investors so they weren't bprn yesterday), they do seem to have an unerring ability to find out the more interesting backgrounds.

How many times have you seen a pitch going seemingly quite well before a leftfield question - something that might not otherwise be asked - knock the pitch off-course. Perhaps there are hidden debts, or some kind of technical issue. On other occassions they'll suddenly probe deeply about forthcoming orders, and a contestant will eventually admit that - yes - they have had conversations with Tesco, suddenly making them very investible.

I suppose that I'd naiively expected that the nature of the "Den" with strict rules about not contacting dragons in advance, and the nature of filming meaning that many more ideas passed through the den than made it to air, might mean that the series was slightly more honest.

But in this instance, I think it's pretty clear that the dragons were "directed" a little. I wish Christian/Robin and Rachel all the best with their business, but I'm just left a little

I've just been watching an excellent episode of Dexter on the FX channel - at a slight delay via my Sky+. I let the playback run at the end and up popped a couple of things of interest.

First, I see that Generation Kill is coming to FX in the UK soon which has got to be a good move (Indeed FX seems to show just about all my favourite current US TV shows at the moment).

But then they ran a promo for The Wire. Now I've not really blogged about it here, but it really is everything everyone says, and I really enjoyed the fifth season on the media. Anyway, the promo consisted of David Simon the show's creator, giving answers to Charlie Brooker in an interview evidently conducted somewhere like the NFT BFI London. A good idea, since Brooker is a notable fan of the show and made a pretty good behind the scenes programme for FX a year or so ago.

On screen during this promo we first see on screen and then hear Simon say: "I can't watch a storytelling medium that breaks every 13 minutes to sell you soap and iPods and cars." He says that he can't watch network television, and he uses the analogy of breaking up a story around the campfire to pause and introduce his sponsors.

What Simon's getting at is the fact that HBO shows its programmes uninterrupted and without ads or on-screen distractions like BUGs and other logos. That's fine, but over here it's on FX, and they do take commercials since they're not a premium cable channel like HBO which relys on significant subscription levels. So it's utterly bizarre that FX should use that particular statement in this promo.

The one coda I should make is that for various reasons, I've caught up with The Wire on DVD, and so just maybe, FX run the show ad free. The fact that it's scheduled for about an hour and ten minutes tomorrow night when the show runs about 56 minutes tends to suggest that like all the rest of their programming, they do run ads in The Wire, but having not seen the programme on the channel, I can't be 100% certain. Still curious.

I did love the story in the promo about Obama saying that The Wire was his favourite show and that he loved Omar the most - the murdering thief Omar, that is.

In the US it's convention season. That is to say that the Democrats and Republicans are holding their quadrennial events. In the UK we have party conferences, but really the two cannot be compared.

In the UK we have access to all this malarkey on BBC Parliament which nightly shows two hours of live coverage between 2am and 4am each evening (and then repeats it at 4am, 6am, 8am, 10am... 6pm, 8pm, 10pm and 12am - so you should be able to catch it). Happily, that means that the conventions' coverage runs between 9pm and 11pm EST - right in the middle of primetime.

But what a curious affair these conventions are. So far I've watched the first night's coverage and bits of the second where Hillary came on and spoke for Obama.

In the US, all the networks cover these events, but while the word "convention" might suggest some sort of meeting, the outcome of which is possibly not completely known, the reality is that these events are choreographed to within an inch of their lives.

It seems to go something like this:

- Off-stage band plays music while convention goers chat amongst themselves or bop around like they're really enjoying themselves.

- Somebody comes out and reads a speech from the autocue quite badly. The speech basically says that Barack Obama is brilliant.

- Another musical interlude to allow networks to run some ads and then some kind of analysis of what they've just heard. But BBC Parliament is showing the unadulterated CSPAN coverage which is unsullied by punditry.

- Someone quite dull comes on and gives a speech. Nobody's interested and you realise that the networks (all of whom are carrying this live along with the cable news operations) are still in pundit mode and aren't interested. They might have cut from their studio at the edge of the arena to someone 10 or 15m further into the arena for their take. The audience isn't really interested and the mics clearly pick up lots of background chatter.

- Someone vaguely interesting introduced someone slightly more interesting. But first we have to watch a professionally put together five minute video.

- More interesting person - e.g. Edward Kennedy - comes out and is given applause that's carefully timed so that the event runs smoothly. Audience members carefully hold up Placard A from their Placard Packs that all read "Kennedy" just so everyone knows.

- Speech is finished and more applause is received, perhaps with family in tow.

- Muzak begins again as we reach commercial/punditry time and the chatter begins.

- Repeat from the top.

Nobody says anything interesting. The convention - at least this public face of it - is simply there to give an hour of free coverage. Compare and contrast with the annual British party conferences where occasionally a dissenting voice is heard (OK - they're rare) and where speeches are only ever scheduled during the daytime, because you're lucky if BBC2 actually shows it live - let alone BBC1 or ITV1 in the evening.

Ted Koppel gave a cracking report on it all for BBC News America which you can watch here. Well worth your time.

Well - I better get back to last night's coverage as the third night starts in a little over two hours' time.

Or maybe I should just break out my Tanner '88 DVDs again.

Well - as things stand, England's World Cup qualifying games against Croatia and Andora will not have so much as highlights coverage on either BBC or ITV according to a piece in The Times.

It comes down to the fact that while England's home games were sold to ITV as part of a larger deal that ITV and Setanta signed with the FA which included coverage of FA Cup fixtures, away fixtures are sold by the various overseas rights holders. In this instance, Setanta purchased the majority of those rights last year following the draw for the qualification groups for the 2010 World Cup. In reality, they were probably bundled together by a rights organisation and sold on behalf of the Croatian, Andorran and other football associations.

Anyway, Setanta paid top dollar for those fixtures and they're now in a position where they want to use them as a big driver for subscriptions. Arguably, this is Setanta's make or break season. With those rights, the FA rights previously mentioned, and their Premier League rights, Setanta needs to reach a critical mass of subscribers.

There was talk about Setanta being sold - perhaps to BT or ESPN. But the market isn't right for that, and with a recent rise from £9.99 to £12.99 a month for the Setanta package, they need to start earning some of the money that they've paid out.

So the question is this: can they hold ITV or the BBC to ransom to pay something for highlights. Or do they consider it worthwhile to keep the price out of reach and try to gain subscribers. England's been looking a little lacklustre of late - friendlies are not being sold out. Would you pay £30 to see England play Kazakhstan for goodness' sake?

But on the other hand it's embarrassing for the FA to see the majority of the interested population only able to catch goals from news highlights. I suspect that a deal will be done at the eleventh hour, but you can't be too certain.

So what is there to make of the latest Spooks spin-off Spooks: Code 9? The series is set in the a near future of 2013 after some kind of nuclear device has gone off in London. MI5 seems to have been decimated and now relies on pretty young twenty-somethings to join their ranks, recruiting from all walks of life (seemingly, this hadn't previously been very necessary). The rest of the authorities all seem to have a much broader age range, so quite why our frontline terrorist defence department is led by a bunch of kids who have no experience at all is not clear.

Amongst their number is a mathematician (who by the end of the first had done very little in the way of actual mathematics), a junior doctor (seemingly, a country wracked with radiation poisoning wouldn't be in need of every doctor they could get their hands on, and instead would be happy to let them join the security services), an ex-con (he's black, but I'm sure that's just accidental), and a handful of others. And for the most part they're all terribly well spoken and very pretty. Oh, and they're all hiding something - MI5's screening is not as good as it once was obviously.

This motley band is put in charge of things like ensuring that Manchester is safe for a visit by the PM. When they say that they can't guarantee his safety, officialdom don't seem that concerned and say that they just have to do it anyway.

We're told that the north of England is full of refugees from the south, and to paint that picture we see various shelters making the whole thing look a little like US series Dark Angel, although with obviously less money spent on it. The cheapness of the production means that there are lots of extreme close-ups so that expensive wide-shots don't bother the production too much.

But that's nothing compared to the appalling script which is full of cliché after cliché. When they're looking for someone who might have uploaded some video to a university computer system they quickly catch sight of someone who was shockingly using a wifi enabled laptop in university grounds. This solitary person turns out to be the terrorist they're searching for. How lucky! Surely every university in the country is packed to the gunnels with students using wifi with their laptops? As a plot development, it was worse than something from a US daytime soap. I've not seen the kids spy show MI High (like this and the original Spooks, also made by Kudos), but it can't be as bad.

Overall it was thoroughly disappointing. There are some interesting darker areas that the series goes into: an ID card society is well and truly under-way, and torture seemingly works as an interrogation method (handily, having been interrogated and giving up some true information, the suspect committed suicide rather than, say, giving false information out and then committing suicide while they followed up a false lead).

There's an ongoing dark conspiracy that's obviously set to run throughout the series, but this was just lazy drama really. Spooks is pretty light and fluffy anyway (go back to one of the BBC's seminal Le Carré series from the eighties for a proper spy drama), so I'm not sure what was to be gained by producing something even lighter and fluffier. On the other hand, something like the US series Burn Notice (not noticeably showing on any UK channel) at least attempts something a little interesting with the spy genre.

Once upon a time, the Olympics were broadcast on both ITV and the BBC. For a lot of the time, they'd show the same events, and if you were interested in a minority sport, you could probably forget it unless a Brit had a chance of a medal.

Now coverage might be "limited" to the BBC, but because of digital television, just about anything you want to watch is available to see. On satellite and cable, the BBC is offering six different streams of video (in addition to whatever their main services are showing), and there are a choice of three streams on Freeview. So we can all hit that red button and watch pretty much what we like.

But while it's great, there are a few issues that need to be overcome that are brought about largely because the Olympics are taking place in Beijing and therefore many events will be taking place in the small hours of the morning and through into the daytime. Primetime coverage will largely be highlights of what took place earlier that day.

And this means that digital video recorders come into their own if you want to watch full coverage of an event that took place earlier that day. But if you have Sky+ then that's not going to help you. Because you enter the Open TV environment of interactive red-button technology, you're not able to record video. As a result, you can't set a Sky+ device to record in advance a sub-channel like those Olympic video channels.

Remote Record is another excellent Sky feature, but even there we have problems. It certainly isn't a workaround for recording an interactive channel, but if I look at Saturday the BBC simply shows a programme called Olympics 2008 from 1.55am to 6.00am, followed by Olympic Breakfast from 6.00am to 11.00am, further followed by Olympics 2008, and so on. That doesn't help me record individual sports, yet the BBC has already decided the broad running order if you look at the detail they display on their site. So it's either record five hours at a time of BBC1, or watch live.

While Freeview might have fewer streams (although the temporary closure of BBC Parliament does mean three streams rather than two), you can at least choose programmes to record in advance on a Freeview digital video recorder - something Sky+ is unable to cope with. And that's one area where a Freeview digital video recorder can trump Sky+.

You've really got to try this out - it's ace! It might be common knowledge in some circles but it was news to me, and I love it.

You know how it is. It's late evening and BBC1 has a film you've already seen or don't want to see again. BBC2 is running News 24, but you've already seen Newsnight and so have no real need to watch it. ITV1 has Bingo Live of which the less said the better. Channel 4 may well be showing B*g B*****r - I don't know, we're in a 13 week period when I feel duty bound to avoid the "4" button on my remote (or 104 on Sky). And Five is in that period between their decent programming ending and the start of their baseball coverage. Multi-channel's obviously not worth a dime, so what to watch?

Well thanks to some information from Steve Roberts, one of the people who works on the Doctor Who Restoration Team and contributes to their excellent forum, you can watch the test card any time you like!

Specifically, it's the widescreen Test Card W (yes - it really does have its own Wikipedia page). And most importantly, you need a Freeview box. But you've got to try this right now - it's wonderful!

1. Tune to the BBCi channel (currently ch. 105)
2. When the BBCi background appears, press Yellow (within 30 secs)
3. Tune away to a different channel
4. Tune back to the BBCi channel (currently ch. 105)
5. When the BBCi background appears, press Green (within 30 secs)
The word 'Secret' will appear in the top right hand corner [Note: I didn't get this I jumped straight to the status page]
6. Wait until the status page appears
7. Enter 3, 3, 5, 8, 2, Red, Green, Yellow, Blue
(note "33582" spells out the word "DELTA" on a mobile phone keypad)
8. Wait approximately 30 seconds [Note: this was instantaneous on my box]
Test card will appear

And it works. You're now watching something significantly better than most fare on television most of the time.

Indeed why not put on some test card music or listen to the radio - it's much better.

For the most part Hulu is pretty useless for UK residents since it's geo-locked to the US. We can't watch re-runs of NBC, Fox and Comedy Central shows.

But there does seem to be an exception - Dr Horrible is available on Hulu and doesn't seem to be restricted to the US which is just as well because it's not available through the UK iTunes store so this is about the only legal way to see it. It's thoroughly good fun coming from Joss (Buffy, Firefly) Whedon.

[UPDATE] Oh well - it was good while it lasted. It's no longer available in the UK.

So Channel 4 has managed to get itself into a bit of a mess with its longest running series - Countdown. Just before the weekend, Des O'Connor announced that he was retiring from the show. And this was followed quickly by Carol Vorderman announcing that she too was leaving.

Over the weekend it became clear that Vorderman, who's been there since the start, was being asked to take an enormous pay cut as the overall budget of the show was dramatically reduced. It's safe to imagine that Vorderman was on a decent wage having spent so long with the show, but didn't fancy a salary reduced to perhaps as little as 10% of what she was previously earning.

"Executives at the broadcaster are said to be bemused by the publicity surrounding Vorderman - who has claimed she was told to take a 90% pay cut to stay on the show.

"Channel 4 insiders questioning how much sympathy daytime viewers would have over her salary, which sources have put at £1.2m for 40 days' filming a year. Previous reports put her salary between £900,000 and £1m a year."

This must be hard given that Firstplus, the debt consolidation firm for which she was the public face (and faced a sustained campaign against her working for the secured debt business) has now stopped seeking new business.

Still at least she can fall back on the sales of some of the products she markets like Eat Yourself Clever (A 28-day Plan to Help You Lose Weight, Improve Brain Power and Boost Wellbeing), Detox For Life (also available as a DVD) and her many Sudoku games.

It was entirely natural, I guess, that when the initial wave of the sudoku craze swept the UK, Vorderman should get involved in this number-based game. Of course there's precisely no mathematics involved, but including numbers is close enough for any self-respecting marketeer.

Which brings me to a neat little sub-story emerging from Channel 4's press office in the aftermath:

"Among the plans to shore up Britain's favourite afternoon parlour game, Channel 4 sources have suggested they will launch a nationwide search for Britain's "brainiest maths graduate" to replace Vorderman."

Can we please just get one thing straight - having Britain's "brainiest maths graduate" is not really going to be a great deal of use of Countdown. The numbers game on the programme is simply a mental arithmetic game which, while undoubtedly involving a certain degree of skill, does not remotely require a top maths graduate. Indeed most maths graduates (and I include myself) would tell you that they probably stopped doing mental arithmetic of this type in primary school. Adding, subracting, multiplying and dividing are the foundations of arithmetic, but they have little to do with what graduates will have been doing for the past three or more years at university. Playing the numbers game on Countdown requires little knowledge of pure mathematics, applied mathematics, algebra, analysis, probability, cryptography, topology, number theory, logic, set theory, cosmology, stochastic modeling, wave theory, statistics or optimisation amongst many many other aspects of undergraduate mathematics.

I think this goes someway to explaining why so many people have so little understanding of maths and the sciences in general, a malaise not helped by the lack of coverage on television of these subjects - watching Numb3rs on ITV3 doesn't really count.

That all said, I'm sure some will apply even if they're not actually Britain's "brainiest maths graduate."

If you read the right sort of newspapers, you couldn't help but fail to notice that the fifth and final series of The Wire premiered on FX channel in the UK this week.

Then this morning, the various media sites, including Mediaguardian publish the fact that "only" 38,000 people watched the show last night. More people, it seemed, had watched Family Guy and NCIS earlier in the evening.

So is this as disastrous a figure as the reports might have you think, even if they don't out and out say that? Well of course not. There are several things to consider when reporting overnights for shows such as this:

1) Unlike Channel 4, the repeat on FX+ later that evening wasn't included. Ordinarily, perhaps because they have an alert press office, the Channel 4+1 figures are reported for major shows on that channel. OK, so a midnight repeat probably didn't garner many extra people, but it will have gathered a few.

2) FX will be repeating this show on several occassions throughout the week. We don't all watch at the first opportunity, and in the multi-channel world, same week repeats are important.

3) BARB really can't cope with overnights of a single programme at 10pm on a channel like FX. In total there are just 5,100 homes on the panel. I don't know how many of them are multi-channel, but let's be generous and assume that 4,500 of them are in multichannel homes. As I say, I don't have the actual figures, but run with me. At 10pm last night something like 21m people were watching one or another channel out of a total population of perhaps 50m. So roughly 1,890 BARB "boxes" were recording viewing. We learn that FX had a 1% share at that point in time so we're talking about roughly 19 boxes being in play. Perhaps just 19 homes then. That's simply not a statistically significant number to be working with - it only takes a handful of people to massive affect FX's viewing figures. So the 38,000 should probably be taken with a certain amount of salt.

4) In any case, channels like FX will be looking at an overall weekly or monthly average share. Programmers there will be looking at the broader picture and selling their airtime accordingly.

In reality The Wire, for all its plaudits, has never had strong viewing figures, including on its home network HBO, where it was something to be proud of rather than to gain viewers as other shows might. That's the only way it has managed to win 5 seasons. I suspect that many more people are watching the DVDs than watching on FX.

Victorian street somewhere. Indeed I recall once watching a now forgotten film in Bath's Little Theatre which actually featured that very cinema!

So it was exciting to learn of a major new BBC1 drama series set in and around Bath, using (an un-named) Bath University as a major location. What's more, the drama comes from the people who brought you Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, and has a first-rate cast including Adrian Lester and Hugh Bonneville.

Unfortunately, that series is Bonekickers.

It's really quite impossible to explain how dreadful this series really is. It's about a group of archaeologists who get involved in strange stories.

The series seems to have been conceived one Sunday when the creators, having been out to watch one of the National Treasure films the night before, they nursed their hangovers watching Time Team. Hugh Bonneville is supposed to be Phil Harding, a grumpy curmudgeonly character who wears a hat much like Harding's. He doesn't have the thick West Country accent, but that doesn't matter as the series is shot in the West Country.

In and of itself, archaeology is full of drama as viewers of programmes like Time Team and Meet the Ancestors will know. When you can tie finds together with other known facts about an area you can begin to tell a story. What you can less rarely do (unless you're dealing with recent history), is have some kind of modern day element to the story you're unfurling. That's particularly going to be the case if you're dealing with the Knights Templar or slavery around the time of American independence as the first two stories in Bonekicker did.

In both cases, therefore, some kind of modern-day idiots had to be included to give some kind of danger and relevance. And this is where any kind of realism is left well behind. We get CIA shootouts with a Barack Obama-type presidential candidate and beheadings surrounding stories about the cross of Jesus.

The series is really, of course, the bastard son of The Da Vinci Code, but it's so poorly done, you just can't help but laugh at the ineptness. Things are pulled out of the ground with wild abandon; seemingly nobody bothers to photograph or record a site. And seemingly small stories are given massive significance - it's no secret that Bristol became successful as a result of the slave trade, so if the bones of slaves were to surface in the Bristol Channel, I don't suppose it'd really become a hot political potato. It'd just be a reminder of our past.

So OK, it's not realistic, but does that prevent it being good drama? Well it doesn't, but it's terrible. The script is poor and tension really isn't achieved, with little real character motivation - in particualr Adrian Lester's character just drifts through procedings. The series is also shot in HD, but pretty poorly to my eyes on a non-HD set. It reminds me of the first series of Torchwood when they were still learning how to properly use the new characters. It appears smeary and feels very much like it was shot on video - which it was. That's especially the case in low-light conditions of which there are many given the nature of the series.

Bath University doesn't have an archaeology department, and they're unlikely to want to set one up off the back of this series!

On another matter entirely can someone please explain this? The latest series to examine a dangerous job (following Ice Road Truckers and Deadliest Catch) is Ax [sic] Men. Like the aforementioned shows, this follows several groups of people in a dangerous profession as they try to earn a living in the logging industry. All very watchable, but can someone please explain why this is on the History Channel? That's not just its UK home, it was a US History Channel commission, yet it's only history if last summer is now considered history. Sure, the episode that I watched aluded to how logging was once done, but that was about it. But I suppose it gives them something to break up the endless programmes on the pyramids, the Romans and the Nazis.

I see from today's Broadcast that ITV2 has commissioned "FM" a 6 x 30 minute sitcom about a "neurotic indie DJ" who works at Skin FM. The sitcom will apparently feature real bands and current tracks which is quite an interesting idea - if you think about it, with the exception of trails, sports montages and the radio left on in various pubs and cafés in the soaps, contermporary music is fairly missing from mainstream TV (OK - there's been Glastonbury, T in the Park and Later..., but that's still a limited amount).

Anyway, we'll probably have to wait until next year to see the fruits of this labour, but I wonder if it can be as good as other sitcoms set in radio stations. There was Frasier of course which is fairly peerless as a sitcom. Then there was The Lenny Henry Show from 87/88 which was set in a pirate radio station somewhere in South London and also featured Gina McKee. I know there's WKRP in Cincinatti which always seemed to be on late at night when I was younger, but I can't say I really watched it (and from all accounts the DVDs are a shadow of the real show since nearly all the music has had to have been replaced for copyright reasons).

But I think Kit Curran, the self proclaimed "king of the airwaves" must be my favourite. Starring Denis "Wedge" Lawson, there were two series of it. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (and much internet searching is unclear on the matter), the first series was broadcast on ITV, while the second series ended up on Channel 4. Anyway, given some of the rubbish that's being released on DVD these days, it must surely get a release one day.

The Guardian's blog has one of those impossible discussions at the moment about how terrible TV is these days.

In terms of quanity there's undoubtedly more dross to be found. But I can remember when we only had four channels - or even three - and there was still rubbish. But it was dull rubbish rather than inane rubbish.

Anyway, here's a picture of tonight's TV listings from the Radio Times once I've finished scrawling over it with a marker pen. I haven't so much highlighted what I'll watch as much as what is actually watchable on any level.

So immediately out are any soaps, most "lifestyle" programmes, dreadful comedies that should never have been "promoted" to late night BBC 2 (I think we know which one I'm talking about don't we). Also immediately struck off are reality shows that dare not speak thy name, cooking programmes, cookery "lifestyle" programmes, unfunny comedites, property shows and most digital shows.

Any shows set in an auction room are next to go. As are programmes featuring Andrew Neil. While I'm happy for the BBC to run Sign Zone shows into the small hours (one feels that digital TV should be able to support signing as an option), most other channels' late night offering would undoubtedly be improved by the reintroduction of the test card. Five's US sport is fine, but the money grabbing show that precedes it should be shot.

Channel 4 is showing My Name is Earl, but I'll never see it, as I won't be watching anything on Four after the news until a certain show finishes its run. It's just too risky to hit the channel button.

What about digital? Well forget ITV2 - that's obviously not made for me. Likewise BBC 3. They might have "next week's" episode of Heroes, but that just bumps their share up and destroys any semblence of a water-cooler moment the next day when you discuss the previous night's show with friends or colleagues. Of course everyone really into it has long ago downloaded it anyway so...

ITV3 just reminds you how good ITV once was. ITV4 is great if you can't get enough of The Professionals or The Sweeney. My tip - by the DVD box sets. E4 is pretty useless. A couple of decent shows hidden amidst a morass of repeats of Friends and spin-offs of the show that dare not speak its name.

More 4 does have The Daily Show, but an over-reliance on Grand Design and other property nonsense as well as Four's coterie of cooks makes much of it avoidable. A shame really.

Film 4 is not the channel it started out as and the odd premiere of films like This Is England does not do enough. Sky One has Lost, 24 and Battlestar Galactica. You can put as many Shane Ritchie, Noel Edmonds and Dick & Dom shows on it as you like, I'm still not watching.

Now there are still some un-crossed out entries in my RT. There's the football, and that single hour of Ofcom stipulated local non-news programming a week. Because of the football they're both on tonight - in London a Suggs chatshow shot for about 50p in the back of a pub somewhere and in Anglia, another Suggs fronted show. He's a good presenter you know.

There's also a repeat of some Isle of Wight Festival highlights which are fine - but I was there at the weekend anyway.

The BBC has a decent looking documentary as a football alternative - Britain's Lost World looks as though it's trying to combine Springwatch with Time Team or something, but I expect I'm doing it an injustice. Question Time can be good (although frankly the interactive element is as pointless as a Victoria Derbyshire phone-in on Five Live). Euro highlights are fair enough. BBC 2 has some early evening light history and nature before a Springwatch spin-off entitled Springwatch People. The longest day of the year in the UK is this Saturday so I think "Spring" probably isn't the most aposite title.

Heroes is fine, and will sit on my PVR until I get around to watching last week's. The Graham Norton Show seems to have bumped the Heroes making of programme into a post Newsnight slot because half an hour (as this programme was originally scheduled for) just isn't enough for Norton's so-so humour.

Of the terrestrials we're left with House which can be pretty good, Grey's Anatomy strikes me as something I have no time for.

Then we're into the murky world of digital. Leave BBC Four alone thanks a lot (although a bit more foreign TV drama wouldn't go amiss - there's simply nowhere in the UK to it apart from here. Bring on series 2 of Sprial please). And I think I've mentioned everything else.

So there's enough to keep someone at least partially entertained if all they have is a TV and a Freeview box. There's a lot of rubbish though, and PVRs will become ever more important for delving through the list to find it.

That means listings guides and even - goodness - TV reviewers (and previewers).

EPGs are all well and good but they're a mess really. Sky's new TV guide is fine, but the recommended shows are a joke. I doubt that there's ever anything on Living or UK Gold that I'm going to want to watch thanks.

So the thesis that we're at a low point is provably untrue. But it's becoming harder to tell.

There have been a couple of pieces recently wondering about why we're losing TV critics in our national newspapers. Ray Snoddy in Marketing magazine wrote about it last week following the ditching of daily TV reviews by the Daily Telegraph. He noted that the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have also ditched them. Now those latter two papers can do anything they like because I'm not likely to see them (even when I'm suckered into picking one up for a free DVD). But I'm surprised that the Telegraph has gone down this route.

Personally I find that the TV review column is one of the first I turn to when picking up a paper, and the column's loss would be akin to the removal of the crossword (something that wouldn't worry me, but I know would impact on sales overnight).

So why are they doing it. Well everyone whoops and chears if a drama gets 6 million viewers these days - mass audiences are not what they were, but 6 million is still a lot of people. As Radio Times editor Gill Hudson notes in a blog over at The Guardian, it's significantly higher than any newspaper's readership.

As others have noted, papers are happy to run reviews of classical music and theatre - activities that are far less popular.

I think it's actually a bad mistake on those newspapers' behalf to stop their TV columns.

It's true that some writing can become stale after a time. I got fed up in the end by Victor Lewis Smith in the Evening Standard. The facile jokes meant that I tended to join the review in paragraph two or three to skip them. But then he also reviewed programmes other than those provided by PR departments for that week. So if that meant a review of an hour of Ideal World, then so be it. And if something was good, he spoke up for it as well. I also dislike Sam Wollaston a lot of the time in The Guardian. He can be too much of a show-off far too often, and when he recently moaned that coming in at the start of series 4 of Battlestar Galactica was too confusing, I felt like throttling him. Having a complicated ongoing story is something to be applauded not moaned about. I'd also advise starting The Wire at episode one too. Finally on the moan list there's the appalling Kathryn Flett at The Observer. As a commentor on the Guardian's blog noticed, she doesn't seem to be writing her column for that newspaper's target audience.

But that's enough moaning. I like plenty of others. Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn is well worth a read even if he's likely to have a tendency to concentrate on tat like B*g B*****r. But he's happy to write about good programmes from time to time. Nancy Banks Smith is still great, and the Independent's reviewers remain good.

I think my defence for keeping reviewers is that TV is still incredibly important to a large proportion of the population. We spend over three and a half hours a day on average watching it according to BARB. Britain's Got Talent seemed to have a large proportion of the population held in rapture for a week or so recently, and the winners of anything from X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing or The Apprentice are devoured by reality TV obsessed media. So people do actually care about television.

Despite the advent of the internet, DVDs, video games and a plethora of other things fighting for your attention, people pretty much watch TV to the same extent as they did ten years ago.

Source: BARB

Of course a review of The Apprentice isn't the same as documentary on Early Music on BBC Four. But they're both important.

When I was younger, it used to confuse me that most TV reviews came out after the programme had aired. You'd not be able to watch the great show that the reviewer loved, but you might thank your lucky stars that you missed the one the reviewer hated. Either way, it was gone into the ether. There might be a repeat in a few months' time, but unless you knew someone who'd videoed it, you were out of luck.

These days programmes on digital channels tend to get multiple same week repeats, so if you missed the latest episode of Lost, you can catch up during another airing. And then there's the iPlayer and its equivalents. Missed an episode of The Apprentice? Watch it online and get up to date. You might have Sky+ed a show and not have watched it - the review may help you decide whether to bother watching it, or free up some space on your device and hit the delete key.

So why give up on them? I really don't know.

Some argue that anyone can comment on TV via their blogs or on forums. Well so they can. But they do the same with films, and I don't think anyone's rushing to dump their film reviewers. I can only think that it's snobbery that considers TV not one of the arts (it's instructive to look at newspaper websites or sections where TV is its own section and not part of the "Arts" section).

Well I can be the biggest snob in the world, but in this instance they've got it wrong, and I think it'll cost them sales in the long term.

As the sale of Virgin Radio nears completion, thoughts turn to the rebranding exercise to be carried out by Albion.

One of the most obvious, and spectacularly successful media rebrands of recent years was that of UK TV G2 into Dave which took place back in October 2007.

I wrote a piece on Dave's success back in December last year, where I thought it was particularly important to note that a major part of the new brands success, in my view came from it becoming available on Freeview. Adding close to 10 million new homes into the mix is always going to help. And with strong programming like Top Gear and QI repeats, that has helped it leap into the position it now finds itself.

Compare and contrast with Virgin1, another new channel launch from last year (launching 1st October 2007) which has also benefitted from being available on Freeview replacing the previous channel ftn.

Source: BARB

Note that I've not included their sister "+1" channels for which I don't have full data, and which don't broadcast on Freeview in any case. Also note that these share figures do include cable and satellite viewing and aren't solely Freeview, although I truly believe that Freeview availability is core to their success.

Although Dave's initial lustre is beginning to tarnish a little, it's still significantly stronger than it was at the start. It's no surpise that UK TV Gold is next to be relaunched with Richard & Judy signed up for a nightly 8pm show. Finding a Freeview slot will be critical though, as currently UK TV Gold is subscription only on Freeview boxes with programming available only through Top Up TV (there's not really a fully available channel space for it).

Virgin1 which launched a couple of weeks before Dave has benefitted from US acquisitions like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (how they must hate the US writers for going on strike and only producing nine episodes) and The Riches. They've also taken Star Trek programming away from Sky One. But their lack of UK programming is perhaps a factor is their relative performance compared with Dave. That said, there appears to be some growth there, and they've just gone widescreen which I think is vital for all significant non-terrestrial channels to use. Sci-Fi, I'm looking at you as possibly the most significant non-widescreen channel currently broadcasting, but Eurosport could do with it too - especially since they're in the process of going HD too.

But I digress. The key thing for both these channels' successes is not just strong branding and impactful advertising, but good programming. And home grown seems to trump a few acquisitions, albeit good ones.

And, no, Virgin Radio's not going to be renamed "Radio Dave."

Another old favourite. There's good news that the BBC is going to produce a new popular science show for BBC1 provisionally titled "What? Where? Why?" to replace the late, and sometimes lamented, Tomorrow's World. Science has been critically missing from our screens for too long now. We certainly get plenty of natural history, but that's only part of the story. Hopefully that'll also allow some of the more frivalous topics that Horizon's covered of late be incorporated into a more popular show and provide some serious, and more difficult science over on BBC2.

These days, the only place you can get really good and consistent science coverage is actually on the radio, where Radio 4 does a good job as does the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast.

There was a cracking In Our Time last week on probability, incidentally - it's available to listen again to here.

In exactly 265 days, analogue TV in the US will be switched off, and everyone will need to switch to digital TV. That is, the whole country is switching over on a single day. All 300m or so of the population. One day.

Does that really seem like a smart idea? I don't think so, as I've said before.

This week, Nielsen Media Research reported that 25m US homes have at least one TV that will currently not be ready for use next February when the switchover's due to take place. What's more, ten million of those homes are not ready at all. In other words, as things stand, they'll simply lose all their TV services completely.

It's no joke if 15 million people suddenly have reduced access to TV - that's a lot of people not watching the networks, and advertisers not being able to reach them as easily. The other 10 million are an even scarier story.

Seemingly, this survey "is one of the first in-depth assessments of the nation’s readiness for the digital TV transition." I find it astonishing that it's down to a private company like Nielsen and not the US government, to carry out this kind of work. How successful are politicians going to be in the next polls is they've managed to deprive millions of Americans of their TV services? I'm guessing that they're not going to be altogether happy.

And of course it's the minorities that are going to lose out - African-Americans and Hispanics in this instance. It's always going to be the poorer people who are going to lose out.

Since January coupons have been made available for US residents to claim to put towards a converter box (think Freeview box in the UK). But there are only a limited number of these being made available. When they run out, they run out. Currently that's likely to happen in August. And of course most of the information being made available is on the web. But the poorer you are, the less likely you are to have web access.

The coupons have a $40 value, and at the moment, there are no boxes on the market that are priced as low as this. So poor consumers (and we're in the thrall of a credit crunch of course) have to spend real money. They're more likely to be putting it towards rising food or gas prices than their TV, assuming of course, that they even understand what's going to happen.

At the start of the year, Robert X Cringely made his annual predictions, and making a disaster out of this transition was one of them. As the switchover day approaches, I can't help but agree with him more and more.

I hope everyone at Digital UK is watching the US market very carefully. We can learn from the mistakes of others...

By the way, if anyone can point me to Nielsen's full report, I'd be interested to see it.

Recount is a star-studded new HBO film that aired in the US on Sunday evening, based around the farcical procedings in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election.

It's easily the best drama I've seen this year.

The cast is phenomenal: Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klein, Al Gore's former Chief of Staff, and the lead Democrat during the procedings that took in hanging chad(s), complicated and ridiculous issues of Florida State election law, and an unprecedented set of findings from the Supreme Court. Then there's Denis Leary as Michael Whouley as Gore's Chief Field Operative, Ed Begley Jr. as David Boies, the lead Democrat lawyer.

Two British actors play the initial key figures with John Hurt giving another fine performance as Warren Christopher, while Tom Wilkinson gives us a wonderfully scary James Baker who runs the Republican camp.

In 2000, in Britain we sat back and watched agog, as the machinations of the world's only superpower unravelled in a painful, and at times complex manner. This film does a wonderful job of taking us through the steps that history took. This is not always easy stuff to follow, and the script has to be quite expository at times for us to understand what's going on.

The nature of making a film about recent history is that everyone will find it easy to criticise, with undoubtedly invented dialogue, simplifications and characters being given dramatic impetus for the sake of a drama where perhaps there was none initially. Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post, gives us most of these examples.

But to my mind, they don't really matter, because while some individuals may object to their portrayal, the overall tone is right, and we really shouldn't forget what a fiasco the whole situation was. Actually "fiasco" isn't nearly a strong enough term. There was utter incompetence at play, with thousands of voters denied the right to vote due to Katherine Harris's uselessness (she had a company

If I did have a criticis