May 2006 Archives

A promising bit of kit goes on sale for the first time in the UK today. The Slingbox connects to your home digital TV service (cable or satellite - it also has a built-in Freeview decoder) and, via your home broadband connection allows you to view your subscription services anywhere in the world on a secure PC. It apparently also plays nicely with personal video recorders such as the Sky+, so you can record programmes at home and then, in theory at least, watch them anywhere.

Since the weekend’s overnight TV ratings came out, the knives have been sharpened for previous golden boy of BBC Drama, Doctor Who. As you can see from the graph (which shows overnight ratings in blue, and the official BARB figures, which factor in timeshifted video recordings, in red), the numbers viewing the nation’s favourite Time Lord have dipped in the last couple of weeks, prompting The Guardian’s media blog to speculate that the series may be going off the boil.

With the start of the comforting Springwatch (it’s like Horlicks in a good way), BBC4 slipped a Bank Holiday treat into the schedules with a night devoted to Bill Oddie, which I caught up with last night via some time shiftery magic. The highlight of the evening was Mark Lawson Talks to Bill Oddie, and I strongly urge you to catch tonight’s repeat on BBC4 at 11.20.

Not only is this a hugely revealing interview with a 70s icon enjoying a renaissance as a cuddly David Attenborough, it has to be seen for the glorious footage of Bill rejecting the advances of Michael Aspel on This is Your Life. Witness the adamant refusal to take part: “I always said I wouldn’t do it, and I won’t…”, and the Aspel’s crestfallen look of bemused rejection.

Bill’s reasons for not doing it seem fairly sound (being a pact between The Goodies that Tim Brooke-Taylor broke in 1981), but his change of heart to subsequently take part was brought about by a phone call from his daughter to tell him in no uncertain terms that “I hate you!”

The things we will do for the love of a daughter…

Today marks an end of an era, as Grampian Television in Scotland is merged with Scottish Television and replaced as a brand with STV — and a logo that, it has to be said, brings to mind nothing more than the old British Steel one.

South of the border, we’ve become so used to everything becoming a homogenous, generic “ITV” brand that regional identity seems a dim and distant memory. Sad to say, it looks like the rest of the UK is following suit.

Thank goodness we’ve got the internet to store and share memories of the good times, when Anglia was represented by a silver knight on a horse, the word “Thames” rose up out of the, erm, Thames, and Central television had — well, a non-descripit white ball.

Happy times.

• Welcome to stv!, stv.tv

After a Bank Holiday afternoon of snoozing between Meteor and snatched episodes from ITV3’s blissful Sherlock Holmes weekend, there it was, shining like a beacon of hope at 6.30 – I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue on erm… Radio 4.

Yes, yes, I know this is TV Today, but sometimes you just have to go off-piste, especially when you’re trying to quench the thirst of your excitement for the premiere of X Factor – Battle of the Stars (Simon Cowell versus Gillian McKeith? There is a God!). And it struck me that after 34 Years on air, the singular greatest achievement in television history is that no bright-eyed executive has ever sought to plunder this radio gem for the cathode ray…

Oh. Somebody did.

The BBC, in its wisdom, had clearly seen the folly in a TV version of “the antidote to panel games”, but in the early 90s, Granada thought that bringing chairman Humphrey Lyttleton and regular team members Graeme Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer and the late Willie Rushton, to the small screen was something of a goer. What current ISIHAC producer John Naismith describes as “an inexpensive pilot” was duly recorded – the thought of a visual Mornington Crescent scarcely bears thinking about, let alone Sound Charades.

According to Tim Brooke Taylor, the reaction to the pilot from ITV was:

“Yes, great programme but could we have some younger people in it?”

Well, I’ve heard about having a face for radio, but an age..? Thankfully a series never materialised, so the charms of the lovely Samantha, the girl who scores everywhere, can be enjoyed where they belong…

Read what the teams have to say about their experiences recording the pilot here.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carried an informative article about MTV America’s latest foray into television delivered via mobile phones.

For television veterans, the advance of cellphone television makes for competing anxieties. They’re worried that they may be moving far too slowly, but they’re anxious, too, that they could be moving in the wrong direction. It’s a feeling something like television’s pioneers must have had, trying to create visual shows for a nation still huddled around the radio. But another, perhaps more apt, comparison is to the early years of the Internet, when so-called content providers pumped prodigious amounts of material and ideas onto the Web and hoped that the demand for it would follow. More often than not, it didn’t.

Now, instead of simply repackaging content, MTV are producing Sway’s Hip-Hop Owner’s Manual, “a documentary-style show that deciphers the ever-changing lexicon of rap”. What’s notable is that they are going out of their way to work out what style of camera work best suits the medium.

To be intelligible on screens sometimes smaller than 2 inches by 2 inches, most shots must be close-ups. Producers also have to limit zooming, panning and quick movement, which can blur because of slow streaming rates and because cellphones often deliver only 15 frames of video per second, compared with 30 frames per second on regular television.

It’s ironic, in a way, that the channel that gave its name to the “MTV generation” — that nebulous concept of an audience that wouldn’t tolerate television unless it’s frenetically paced, always moving — should be pioneering a way of making that content more static and less animated, so that it looks better.

• The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show (NYTimes.com) [via PaidContent.org]

As the fantastic The Line of Beauty comes to a close this coming Wednesday on BBC2, it seems no sooner that Andrew Davies closes off one project, than another is announced to take up the slack. A Room with a View, adapted from the E.M. Forster novel, will be broadcast by ITV1 next year, but my word, hasn’t the poor man got enough to be getting on with?

After the BAFTA triumph of Davies’ Bleak House adaptation, you’d think he might want a holiday, but it seems not. Aside from the Forster adaptation, he has been tasked by the Beeb to give Little Dorrit the Bleak House treatment, alongside a return to comfy Austen territory for Sense and Sensibility. And that’s not to mention tinkering with a riff on the novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and changing period tack to bring the much-missed Channel 4 comedy, The Book Group, to the cinema. And there’s just time to squeeze in the screenplay for a new look at Brideshead Revisited, due sometime in 2008. Phew!

Davies is without doubt one of TV writing’s finest talents, but the 12-year-old me who rushed home to goggle at the fabulously anarchic Educating Marmalade, finds it a shame that he’s chiefly known for his alchemic skills on the work of others (and a tip top job he does of that too.) For me, A Very Peculiar Practice will always stand as his finest piece of work. Original, distinctive, and bleakly dark, its characters were almost Dickensian in their execution, from the malleable blandness of protagonist Dr Stephen Daker to the deliciously moral-free Bob Buzzard (a never better David Troughton). It’s no wonder then that Davies’s deft skill with character should have such an affinity for Dickens, Austen and Waugh, but by rights, he should be a TV auteur of the stature of Poliakoff.

But, when The Line of Beauty comes to a close on Wednesday, leaving us with a long summer of Big Brother and Love Island and no discernible drama of merit on the horizon, I’ll take an Andrew Davies adaptation of somebody else’s work over Heartbeat any day.

Well folks, summer is well and truly underway. No I don’t care what the weatherman says, you can tell just by looking at the TV schedules. There’s nothing on except filler TV and by god, is it filling column inches. So I’ve taken a “If you can’t beat ‘em” approach… what? I write about telly - it’s my job - I still have principles.

Now I’m sure you’ve all been glued to your screens for Soccer Aid, but I hear things are already gearing up for the next big “event” programme the network has up its sleeve.

I am, of course, talking about The X Factor: Battle of the Stars, which hits screens on Monday with a host of “celebrity” contestants including motormouth Chris Moyles, Nikki “I used to be soap star but now I just sit in my underwear” Sanderson, and Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. Rather unsurprisingly the original rent-a celebs, reality tart Rebecca Loos and serial love twat James Hewitt are also putting an appearance. Now don’t tell anyone I told you, but word is the production team have rather unkindly taken to calling them Posh and Becks.

Seriously, isn’t their 15 minutes up yet?

Oh one more thing… more than 60 million votes were cast in the final of American Idol, apparently more people voted than for US president. Simon Cowell calls that fact astonishing; I have some rather more unkind words in mind. Nonetheless a 30 second advert broadcast in the final reportedly cost more than $1 million, which shows rather comprehensively that reality - whether we like it or not - is far from dead.

Contrary to what the ITV and Channel 4 schedulers would like us to think, there are many of us who aren’t into football — especially of the pro-celebrity kind — or who, like Mark, are trying to escape the William-Golding-brought-to-life-in-Borehamwood behemoth.

So, let’s dance!

It was with curiosity (and not a little horror) that I noticed last night during the closing credits of Big Brother that there is a nod for a Story Editor. (And before I go on, apologies for starting off with the dreaded BB, but it will be the one and only time. If I didn’t mention it once, you’d only be waiting for it with the anticipation of the arrival of a necessary but unpopular guest at a party).

The inclusion of a story editor among the swathes of segment producers, senior producers, executive producers, prop supervisors and cinematographers does make a perverse kind of sense, reinforcing the image of Big Brother as a soap for the iPod generation.

The story editor will doubtless pounce on those personalities with the potential to provide the most value over the mammoth 13 week run. The best of Big Brother has always had these rich strands of “story” running through it, but now it seems utterly contrived and lacking spontaneity. Nobody could have predicted Jade (and who’d want to?), but last year’s shenanigans with Makosi et al felt like a well rehearsed stroll through Emmerdale Village. Editing of the events is often cruel and highly manipulative, but clearly employs the smoke and mirrors craft of a soap to get the point across in this multi-camera world.

And as a result, Big Brother as a subset of the reality boom has ceased to be its own genre – it’s a soap, as much as EastEnders and Corrie are and erm… Family Affairs was. Announcements of Ross Kemp’s hokey-cokeying in and out of Albert Square jostle for space in the tabloids alongside the exclusive life story of Shahbaz. A quick tap on the calculator shows that around 91 hours of Big Brother will be shown before the crushing deflation of the final eviction (and that’s just the nightly shows, not including Big Brother’s Little Brother or Big Brother’s Big Mouth). That would keep Holby City going for two years.

The depressing thing about all this (and this is purely a selfish thing) is that I haven’t seen one second of footage from the house this year, aside from the blessed release of the closing credits when I can safely creep back into the living room. I have willingly become a social pariah at the water cooler by a conscious decision to go Big Brother free this year – and yet, it’s impossible to avoid. Through nothing other than passive media exposure, I know that somebody called Shahbaz walked earlier this week, and that Dawn followed soon after. Is it childish of me to feel cheated by this?

Whether I’ll be successful in my attempts to go organic in my avoidance of Big Brother remains to be seen, but the only thing that would possibly tempt me back would be some cross-programme fusion. Let’s have Coronation’s Street’s Sean Tully or Norris Cole mixing with the housemates next year. They’d be just as fictional as everybody else in there.

One thing that no one ever talks about in a straightforward manner when in the company of actors and production crews is the fact that in the eyes of advertisers, all television viewers are certainly not equal. But this is a fundamental issue behind the reshaping of ITV’s output in particular, taking place before our eyes as it battles with Channel 4, and in decisions about casting and the hiring of talent.

It is a fact that television advertising is sold against 14 different groups of people, divided up by age and class, with the young, the upmarket and the light viewer some two and a half times more valuable to sales forces than the old, downmarket heavy viewers who traditionally lap up ITV.

For a certain age of Stage reader, our esteemed print weekly will forever be The Stage and Television Today. Back in 1959, the box in the corner of the room was becoming such a part of the professional performing arts that it already had its own dedicated section in the pages of The Stage. In February of that year, the decision was made to increase the coverage, with a paper-within-a-paper to be called Television Today.

The Stage’s TV editor at the time, Derek Hoddinott, became editor of the new supplement — except, as he was at pains to point out, it was no such thing:

One thing I must make clear: “Television Today” is not, repeat not, a supplement! Many people have written to me using that term. “Television Today” is a newspaper just like any other newspaper and the fact that it appears within the pages of “The Stage” doesn’t make it anything like a supplement. It means the opposite. It means you’ll be getting two papers for the price of one — and that, especially today — is certainly value for money.

You can almost smell the chips on his shoulder, can’t you?

Whether you call it a paper-within-a-paper or a supplement, Television Today lasted in its distinct form until December 1995. At that point, a redesign brought broadcasting news and features back within the Stage umbrella. The new masthead retained a nod to the paper’s heritage, with the words “incorpating Television Today” sitting elegantly, if unobtrusively, underneath the main Stage logo. It nestled there until 2000, when it was replaced by the more practical, if slightly less romantic, www.thestage.co.uk. A solitary reference above the leader column hung on until June 2002, when it too was replaced by the website address and Television Today was definitively no more.

Until now.

When we decided to create a blog celebrating and revelling in the best of British television, there was really only one thing we could call it. And so now, you’re reading the first ever post of TV Today. We’ll be supplementing our coverage in the print edition and in our online news and features with loads of great stuff.

I’ll be dropping in occasionally, but the blog will mainly be in the capable hands of Liz Thomas, The Stage’s resident broadcasting expert, and Mark Wright, who has written about TV for various books and magazines for more years than he’d probably like me to mention here.

Basically, if your live revolves around television — on either side of the camera, or just from the comfort of the sofa — you need to be here.

Just don’t call us a supplement, okay?