Radio punning

I went on BBC FiveLive this week to discuss more woes at BlackBerry. I went into a remote studio in the BBC for this and stared into a big, fluffy red mic as I chatted to the invisible Nicky Campbell and his colleague, whose name I can't remember, via the big, official looking headphones placed upon my head.

This was a particularly fun interview, I thought, because we break down in the middle for a brief bit of punning, which I definitely regard as a bit of a career highlight.

TV debut talking tablets on the BBC

Yesterday I was very kindly invited to appear on the BBC News Channel to talk about Google’s new Nexus tablet that it unveiled at an event in the US.

It was obviously a combination of fun and fear sitting in the studio waiting for the transmission to start as the interview was going out live and then would be replayed during the evening, and was also edited to run on the website too, as you can see embedded below.

It was my first time on TV, and I enjoyed it, especially how painless the whole process was: turn up, have a cup of tea, sit in video room, talk, leave, done. No faffing with forms or screen tests or make up or anything. Not what I had expected, really.

The funny thing was they told me to make sure I stared directly into the lens and not look up, as there's a monitor relaying what's being broadcast directly above that, which the women who wired me for sound said can often cause people to glance up and looks odd.

As such I stared intently at the lens in front of me, which I think you can sort of tell as my eyes barely move during the entire time (although thankfully most of the transmission feature footage of the device itself, rather than my manic eyes). (Also, yes, I know I need a haircut.)

Onwards and upwards.

A trip to the Euros in Warsaw

Last week I was lucky enough to get sent to Warsaw in Poland to meet up with UEFA and talk technology before heading to the stadium to see Poland v Czech Republic in the quarter-final of the European Championships.

While there I sat on the seats reserved for the coaching staff and the substitutes, so of course I took the opportunity to sit there and gesticulate wildly at the imaginary players on the pitch in front of me. It was fun.

During the match the crowd was dominated by Polish fans who had either pre-bought tickets for the quarter-final assuming their team would make it through, or just wanted to see some more football as it's taking place in their city. This meant chants of "Polski!" were far louder than anything the Czech or Portuguese fans (of which there were about 12) could muster during the game.

Ronaldo won it for his country, after numerous misses, and seeing him in action for the first time - the preening Portuguese winker - it was easy to see why he's so much better than most other players. Firstly, he just looks bigger, and is clearly so much faster than everyone around him. As Hansen loves to say, "it's all about pace and power, if you haven't got that in the modern game, you're toast".

Also, why does Mark Lawrenson hate football so much? To hear him commentate on the BBC you'd think he'd been ordered to serve a lifetime's sentence carrying out a task that brings him as much ennui as possible, with the judge concluding spending all his time being paid to watch football the worst punishment he could imagine.

When John Gray and Karl Marx collide

I've always liked John Gray, he writes in a nice style of grand statements peppered with historical facts and quotations that augment his argument very convincingly.

His piece on the BBC about Karl Marx and why maybe his views of capatilisms inherent instability is being recognised more widely is exactly that. Worth reading.

Behind the scenes at the museum

Ah, the BBC. A fine, venerable institution, as old as slippers, as warm as a roaring log fire, full of heroes of yesteryear, and new names, keen to make an impact. (That should be read in a Terry Wogan ever-so-slightly patronising tone of voice).

I was inside the BBC on Monday, deep in its cavernous bowels, being ushered into a green room (yes, really) to take part in the first recording of Dave Gorman's show Genius. I was a genius. Or hoped to be, if my idea was to be discussed. Long story short, it wasn't. I got to read it out, but guest Chris Addison (who just does not look old enough to have two children) and Mel from Mel and Sue, didn't think it worthy of more discussion. More's the pity.

For the record it was a pay-per-snooze alarm clock that would deduct money from your bank account each time you hit it. Evil genius. I doubt I will get mention it on TV, but I may make the cut. The jolly farmer next to me did get to discuss his idea at length though so perhaps my grinning mug shall be on TV at some point. I'll let you know.

On the way in they have the Audi Quattro positioned prominently, a Tardis on display, and lots of large posters of grinning stars and people I've never seen before in my life. Everyone was very jolly, and sandwiches and cakes were laid on for us too. That's license fee value right there.

It was a fun show to be part of, due mostly to large amounts of audience interaction. I chatted to a nice girl (who may have been on drugs) who said she imagined portholes in peoples heads into which reality escaped, or could be entered (I forget which). She also explained her idea for telling good and bad actresses apart during rain-crying scenes, by creating eye-umbrellas which would ensure dry under-eye areas at all times, so you could see if an actress was actually crying during a scene in the rain, instead of just using the rain as her tears. Understand?

Minds, they work in funny ways.

Old dogs

Have you ever seen New Tricks? I seem to have a magnet in me that means I end up watching it every week when I am in on a Thursday. I don't know why. It's hardly good, the stories are always a bit flimsy, and by the end I'm never sure I've even understood what the outcome was.

I studied crime fiction at university - and thoroughly enjoyed it - so I've always had a slight affinity to crime shows, but Old Tricks ticks none of the boxes and yet I still seem to watch it. Dennis Waterman's character is 2D but Amanda Redman is good. One character has disappeared but I am not sure if we know why or not and the other character - played by Alan Armstrong - is always involved in the slightly silly plots - making friends with a radio enthusiast, awkwardly confronting a 'Polish' builder who turns out to be Albanian etc. So all in all, it's a bit weird that I keep watching it. Or, more than that, keep finding myself watching it without every really planning to.

That's all really.

War: what is it good for?

Two things yesterday:

1) DSEi: This show is known to some as the Death Show and is not popular with those of certain moral view points. Entry was Kafkaesque, involving several queues to be placed in queues, much anger at how slow the entire process was, and even a bag search before you could go in, to the Excel Centre. Felt utterly bizarre. Once inside I saw many tanks, guns, rocket launchers, an Apache helicopter, and various Asian generals wandering around in full military regalia.

On one side of an aisle you've got weapon manufacturers or suppliers with posters and literature proclaiming their weapons can 'pierce the strongest body armour on the market!' and on the other you have body armour manufacturers and suppliers saying 'can stop the strongest weaponry on the market!' And all beneath the brightly lit, air-conditioned, Subway sandwich franchised Excel Centre. Last time I was there was to collect my marathon entry number. Very different indeed.

2) Frontline Club: Access Denied. A talk about reporting from war zones and the implications for journalists. With Richard Sambrook from the BBC, Adrian Wells from Sky News, Jean Seaton and chaired by Tom Fenton.

It was a very interesting chat, and the floor contributed a great deal too, with those in attendance ranging from Al Jazeera reporters, to the London press official for the Dalai Lama. They discussed the use of Twitter, the difficulties of getting certain stories on the news agenda when they cease to have a news currency, and the challenges of trying to get in to areas you're banned from. Wells told us that Sky News tried to access North Korea by asking to cover the North Korean karate championships (and then do some other things on the side) but were politely refused entry. Darn.

It seemed though, due to the most recurring point, that war coverage, or conflicting reporting, is impossible to cover in a way that will ever please everyone, or cover all the necessary angles. Nothing is ever two-sided and war is surely one of the hardest things to pin down as to the causes, the rights and wrongs, the outcomes and so on - almost all wars are debated hotly by historians to this day, despite years of time passing, collation of huge numbers of documents, and even access to the leaders' writings. What chance do news reporters have, often embedded with military staff who take them where they want them to go, have of getting a 'true' story out? Have they ever been able to?

Twitter and the like may give the populations a chance to present views from inside but, again, it just adds more voices that conflict, disagree, present different ideas, to a picture that is already completely confusing and impossible to view in full, objectively. It seems hard to believe war reporting will ever move to a time when 'black holes' of information don't exist, especially when authoritarian regimes like Iran, North Korea and so on, are so staunch in their position on allowing foreign news teams in.

A few people introduced themselves, when speaking from the floor, as 'news consumers'. So you watch TV?

Office Politics

BBC2 showing the entire first series of The Office was an enjoyable treat and, as a convert to the American version (which is five seasons strong and still going at 100+ shows) it was a good reminder of just how different the two shows really are despite sharing a title and the same plot lines (in essence).

It would be fair to assume the American version would be an inferior remake but the two are very different and seeing the British one again was a reminder of why. While the American one is incredibly funny and full of pathos, like the British show, it is a fair warmer, more likeable place and the office itself seems like a nice place to work, despite some eccentricities. The Slough branch of Wernham Hogg looks like a soul destroying, grey, dreary place to work. Scranton in Pennsylvania has a sense of small town charm to it; their office looks warm, in temperature and in colour, while the corporate head quarters in New York, full of good looking, if idiotic, people. Even the bars in Scranton are fine, nice even. Chasers in Slough looks utterly grim.

Signposting

If something good happens - look for the symbol of the hands clapping.


If it's something bad - look for the...skull and cross bones? Coffin?

What's in a name?

A fairly mundane piece on the BBC website in which people explain their various nicknames through the years - great. However, number 20 is quite a funny one, in a double take, melancolic comedy, sort of way, and runs as follows:

20. As a kid, my older friends called me Beverage. it came about as a transmutation of Steve-a-rino which became Bever-ino which became Beve then Bev and finally Beverage. I still hate all of these nicknames, especially Steve-a-rino.
Steve Ayres, Seattle, Washington, USA

Which demands the question - why are you telling the world about them then?

Merry Christmas

This story about the rubbish Lapland is quite sad, but it's nice to see the normally stocial British getting jolly irate having wasted money on a trip to a fake lapland in Dorset. However, it's the comments from the events organiser Henry Mears that are most bizarre.

"Mr Mears, who organises the park's marketing and advertising, told the BBC he was "bemused" by the complaints. He blamed "a few groups of professional troublemakers" for the allegations over the attraction."

You can imagine it can't you: 'here guys, I've had an idea of how we can cause some more professional trouble - there's the Lapland thing on in Dorset, why don't we pay £25 quid to go and then come back and claim it was rubbish.

But the best line is this: "Like all people they like to get into queues and just generate a bit of aggravation."

Oh yeah, all people love doing this. Us Brits are known world-over for our love getting in queues and causing a bit of argy-bargy. Some would say it's our defining trait.

The sky at night

Can you imagine what someone in the 11th Century or in the Roman era would have thought if they'd have seen this in the night sky?

Photo by Felicia Sutantyo in Melbourne, Australia taken from BBC photo set here.

Dancing in the dark

Every blogger under the sun will be writing about this but what the hell so will I.

So, John Sergeant has quit Strictly Come Dancing because he doesn't want 'the joke to go on' and potentially win the competition despite it being obvious he is not the most technically proficient dancer on display. What does it all mean? There are several points that spring to mind.

1) The judges' annoyance with Sergeant's continual survival, despite the low scores they awarded him, shows they don't understand about the show's success. If the show was about the quality of the dancing they wouldn't need celebrities to get involved. They could have pairs of professional couples and still have the voting format. However, people only watch the show to see celebrities (like animals at the zoo) and how they improve through the coming weeks (or in his case, don't improve).

2) The show is merely mindless entertainment. If the public has chosen to keep on the most entertaining dancer (because he's bad) then that is their right. If they are charged for the privilege of keeping him on, and they still choose to do so, then they have even more right to feel ignored when it seems clear the minority of voices from inside the show have caused Sergeant to quit, despite the public clearly wanting him to win - or at least remain.

3) Personally I feel somewhat disappointed that a man who is involved with political reporting and all that jazz has decided to ignore the wishes and whims of the public and drop out anyway. He's been democratically asked to stay through a paid medium and has ignored those wishes. Of course, he does have the right to stop whenever he wants but for him to do so purely because he doesn't want 'the joke' to go on is unfair. Still, did he jump or was he pushed?

The final point is that now the BBC has to reimburse all the people who paid to keep Sergeant in. How on earth will they do that and what will it cost? Will they send cheques back to people for 25p? Or can they uncharge them from their mobile phones? However they do it you can be sure it's a lengthy, time-consuming and expensive process.

And of course what does this all mean in the long-run? Well nothing. The show must go on as they say and undoubtedly it will while there are the audiences and a healthy revenue being generated. But let's not pretend that Strictly Come Dancing is anything more than another celebrity show. If it wasn't they wouldn't need to get celebrities on in the first place to get people watching. It would be nice to think the public would make a stand and boycott the show, or at least not vote at all, but somehow I don't think it will happen.

---

Good article on this subject on the BBC site.

Ah ha!

This reminds me of this:

Under the sea

The BBC’s new series Ocean is billed as “a series of underwater scientific expeditions to build a global picture of our seas” which sounds good. But like many BBC shows of this nature it featured two elements that seem to be recurring more frequently.

Mild Peril. In the first episode we were forced to watch a scene in which the boat lost contact with the diver below the surface. Those on the boat were extremely worried about this and there were audible sighs of relief all round when the connection was remade. There’s no reason to doubt this happened – although maybe there is – but whether it did happen or not is irrelevant. The show should not be about this, it should be about the fish, the sharks they were there to try and capture on film and, obviously, the ocean. Not presenters in fake danger. As everyone knows shows like this go through endless health and safety checks so there is probably very little real danger beyond what would occur on any dive in ocean waters infested by sharks. Secondly if something really had gone wrong there is no way it would be on TV. It would most likely have resulted in some BBC Trust being called in to examine the ‘serious breaches of editorial policy’ that had occurred.

Forced Social History Lesson. There must be something in the BBC charter that now means more must be done to focus on the social history of areas that shows cover. In Ocean we had a segment in which Dr Lucy Blue, a maritime archaeologist, swam around the wreck of a boat in which Chinese immigrants had attempted to enter the US. Okay, but what’s that got to do with oceans? They came by a boat that travelled on the ocean? Is that it? And there’s not some tragic tale of the ships sinking either. It was only explained at the end of this section that the boat had been deliberately sunk to create an artificial reef. Surely that’s the most relevant angle to be covered in Ocean’s remit? It felt like a snatched footnote of information that should have been at the core of the show.

The BBC though is a victim of its own success. After decades of making some of the best nature documentaries ever made – Trials of Life, Blue Planet, Planet Earth – with David Attenborough, winner of the Culture Show’s Greatest Living Icon award, at the helm, they appear to have reached a crossroads and can’t decide where to go next. Should they be serious or fun? Educational, entertaining or edutainment? They need to make up their mind soon though before they risk undermining a legacy of shows on the natural world that, even now, still justify the license fee.

This isn't spam

Don't you always wonder who the people (morons) are who actually click through on spam emails and buy whatever the hell it is that's being offered? I for one can never really understand why spammers do it. But a very interesting study, just reported on the BBC, underlines there is significant money to be made by simply sending out countless millions of emails, and knowing 0.00001% of people will be dumb enough to buy.

If the internet didn't exist - try and imagine it, hard though it is - what would these people do for a living? And what would the people wasting money through spam emails be doing with that money instead? Buying more junk from shops? Saving it? Or perhaps donating it to charity, like my marathon sponsorship page? One would hope so.

Sing along

While some radio presenters have been in the news for making phone calls, others have been making very clever football player / song lyric changes. Just click here to see what I mean. Also you can 'sign' along with the BBC if you want, if you look at the bottom.

Working through lunch

The BBC's Working Lunch had a little bit on blogging yesterday (video), and even had on blogger Annie Mole from London-Underground blog, one of my Netvibes favourites, so maybe you want to watch it? Who knows.

Iran makes huge ostrich sandwich

Even The Onion couldn't top this.

The Crunch

This is the first feature I have read that has really hit home just how hard average people are being affected by the credit crunch.