Automated Daydream

The last human being alive

2008-05-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Weekend's TV reviewed: Ray Mears Goes Walkabout; Greek; The Inspector Lynley Mysteries

Ray Mears Goes Walkabout begins with a wonderfully ludicrous title sequence, in which honeyed shots of the presenter eating bits of bark and setting fire to twigs are decorated with printed imperatives, fading in and out on screen. "Journey," the words say, "Reveal... Encourage... Search... Inform... Learn... Understand... Engage... Enlighten." Dearie me, I thought, give us a break, Ray, just get on with it and bite the head off a witchetty grub. Still, it's not his fault, I imagine, but that of some bright spark on the production team, who presumably thought that quoting at length from the commissioning editor's latest pitching brief would be a good way of showing how zealously on-message the series is. Whoever came up with the idea, the result is ridiculous, conspicuously failing to grasp that Ray Mears is not loved by the public as a guru in khaki shorts but as a comedy act of delicious understatement. I suppose you could watch him in earnest he does nothing himself to prevent you but I would have serious doubts about your sense of humour if you never cracked a smile at all.

Maybe that's the secret behind the intergenerational, cross-demographic magic of Mears. Obviously, it helps that most people have an interest in survival techniques. We'd all like to believe that, come the Apocalypse, we'd be the ones knocking up bivouacs and skinning newts, rather than, as is more likely, incomprehendingly screaming “My BROADBAND has gone DOWN!” as feral zombie children gnaw our arms. Additionally, when first turning on Mears's shows, it momentarily appears that you are watching the former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy wandering around in a wood, wearing an Indiana Jones hat and licking twigs. The resemblance is, I must say, quite uncanny.

Over my Mears Years, then, I have had many favourite Ray Moments. In many ways the episode in which - surviving in the middle of a Romanian forest - Ray rolls out some pastry, using a stick as a rolling-pin, to make a quiche, is the quintessential Ray Moment. A combination of absolutely unquestionable survival “chops”, and a great fondness for pies, as clearly indicated by his enviable status as the “cuddliest” survivalist on the block. Ray's Survival Quiche is Ray in a nutshell - a nutshell he had gathered, boiled, crushed, sieved, put in a muslin bag, left to rinse in a stream for 48 hours, and then fashioned into a small, fundamentally unappealing grey lump, to be burnt at the end of a stick.

But then, I could also argue for the inclusion of an anecdote by Ray's posh on-off survival chum, Gordon “The Prof” Hillman, as well. In the last series Hillman recalled the moment when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he realised he had inadvertently eaten a fatally poisonous mushroom, and was already becoming paralysed. Unable to talk, he simply wrote the Latin name of the mushroom he had eaten on a Post-It note, stuck it to his own chest, and then passed out in a bar. That's the kind of people with whom Ray rolls. People who can even survive in Latin, in a bar.

Given all this then, who would not rejoice at the advent of Ray Mears Goes Walkabout? A series of hour-long shows wherein Ray, to use the current vernacular of young people, totally “pwnz” the Australian Outback (verb meaning to beat in an activity), using only a cup, a knife and a sheet of polythene. In the opening show, he attempts - well, does more than attempts - he TOTALLY SUCCEEDS, because he's RAY FREAKIN' MEARS - to recreate the epic journey of John McDouall Stuart, an early explorer who successfully crossed the continent from south to north, opening the centre up for the telegraph and trade. Where other explorers set out with the full paraphernalia of Victorian society (Burke and Wills even took a wooden dining table with them on their fatal expedition), Stuart travelled light and fast, letting the land draw out his route in a dot-to-dot of reliable waterholes. By 1862 he had become the first European to traverse the country and return alive. Admittedly, having a Land Rover made it a bit easier for Mears to follow in Stuart’s footsteps. Nonetheless, we got a powerful sense both of Stuart’s bravery and of just how unimaginably inhospitable the Australian interior proved to be.

First, we saw Mears driving along the Stuart Highway. The terrain might have been chosen to advertise the car. Mears parked and laid out his maps, which he had numbered. Numbering the maps, he told us, is important. It might save you a bit of confusion during the journey. He's full of this kind of stuff. It's partly the fact that no tip is too trivial that makes you warm to him. One of the first things he did, having got out of the car, was to put a net over his head, in case of flies. Of course, the outback is probably much more dangerous than it looks; that's because it looks great on TV, with the big sky and the reddish-yellow hue of the ground. For all I know, the place might be full of killer flies. But still. Mears looked a little eccentric in the net, but he knows what he's doing.

He went to a museum to look at Stuart's 19th-century equipment. It was a lot lighter than his own. But, as he pointed out, Stuart didn't have a Range Rover; he had to rely on horses. Mears, who is slightly chubby, looked with amazement at Stuart's belt. "I would barely get that round my thigh," he said. Mears then ventured into the desert. "It still has teeth," he told us. It made him very happy. That's the difference between him and Grylls: Grylls always looks as if he's desperate to get away from wherever he is. Mears wants to sit around, being contemplative. He showed us his solar firestarter, a shiny, curved disc with a pointy bit in the middle. You spear kangaroo dung on the pointy bit, and reflect the sun on to it. "The fibrous texture of kangaroo dung is particularly good for lighting fires," said Mears. “That'll smoulder away quite nicely now”. It was a lovely scene: simple, instructive, deeply comforting. The programme was worth watching for this moment alone.

We saw how Stuart had navigated the outback: by looking through a telescope for signs of greenery and birdlife in the distance. These indicate water and that's where he would head, to make camp. But why had Stuart wanted to explore the outback? What had been in it for him? He was lonely and friendless. So, in the desert, he was no worse off. In the past, exploring was about getting away from people. These days, as Mears demonstrates, it's about communicating with them. Watching Mears tell this story isn't the funny bit. I was engaged. I was enlightened. And his enthusiasm for the landscape and its surprises is rather endearing. But it's the superfluous bubble of survival information that makes me giggle, offered in a way that suggests he's addressing members of an imminently departing expedition, rather than a random group of couch potatoes who want a bit of proxy adventure.

As he travels, Mears shares with us the diverting fact that, while out on desert missions, the Australian Army discovered that a dehydrated man can buy more time on God's Earth by sucking the liquid out of a live lizard's bladder. In the hands of a flashier survivalist - obviously I'm thinking of Bear “SURVIVAL! FUCK YEH!” Grylls here - this would have been the cue for an almost unbearable level of survival brio. Grylls (on who Mears recently launched a surprisingly full-throated attack for faking some of his adventures) would probably have got a runner to assemble a whole trunk full of ready-to-urinate lizards, and seen how many he could suck dry, against the clock, while the readers of Nuts and Zoo sent in live text messages such as “Bare UR da shnizz haha LOL”. But Ray merely points to the lizard, tells us the fact, and then gets on with the more humdrum, but oddly soothing business of telling us how he has a calibrated tin mug, and how this is a very “personal” object to him.

At one point, Mears carefully took time out to give us a little tip about how to attach the shackle to your 4x4 when it gets bogged down in desert sand (“Here’s a little tip: When you’re winching and you tie your shackle on…”). He very nearly drew a diagram, so concerned was he that we would get the details right, and there was the same misplaced concern for our future safety when he showed us how to extract water from a desert eucalyptus with a large plastic bag. This, as always, was done in the apparently genuine, and certainly flattering, belief that one day we might actually use such knowledge. We also learn how to turn the salty water of the Outback’s mound springs into something drinkable. (Basically, very slowly.) In the sure and certain knowledge that information doesn't weigh anything at all, there's no harm in tucking it away just in case.

You look at Mears, in his jungle or desert, and you imagine him as a boy in a Surrey garden, dreaming of jungles and deserts. He brings an oddly suburban, almost Pooterish, extremely English attitude to his world-class survival chops. I loved the way he rigged up a sheet in the branches of a tree. Within a couple of minutes, it had the air of an awning. Then he lit a fire and baked a loaf of bread. When the Apocalypse comes, he'll be standing in a wood somewhere, drinking a cup of tea from his personal, calibrated mug, saying: “I'm the last human being alive. Gosh. Sorry about that.”

Greek, a new series on BBC3, also showed us an explorer venturing into hostile terrain with very little in the way of equipment and resources. It is a new US series about college fraternities and sororities. It's another example of how different the Americans are from us. We imagine students as slackers and drifters. Over there, they have complex formal social networks. In Greek, it's not enough just to get into a good college. You have to qualify for a fraternity or sorority, or you're a nobody. At first, I was sickened. The girls were all skinny and bitchy, hungry for status and power, and the guys were chiselled hunks. They looked like the people you see in those catalogues that come through the door. The hero, Rusty Cartwright, is one of a small number of people who looks normal. But against this background of buff bodies and nose-jobs, he looked like a bug-eyed freak. And Rusty had a problem: to get on in life, he must either become an off-the-peg hunk, or take on the whole system.

Rusty is a freshman at Cyprus-Rhodes University, arriving to find that he was rooming with a born-again Southern Christian whose first act was to lay out his bible and tack a Confederate flag to the dorm wall. This wasn't what Rusty was hoping for from college life and the engineering course's freshers' party was a considerable letdown, too, a giant stack of Red Bull cans and people playing robot wars. So Rusty decided to go in for Rush week, where prospective members eyed up various frat houses in the hope of being invited to join. Rusty's socially ambitious sister is a member of Zeta Beta and is going out with the head of Omega Chi, the most desirable fraternity, which gave the otherwise hopelessly geeky Rusty an outside chance of a place. But romantic complications meant that he also had an in at Kappa Tau, which clearly regards the film Animal House as holy scripture.

It is, I suppose, what US TV executives like to call dramedy, though there isn't a lot to justify the second half of that ugly hybrid, since it is distinctly timid about sinking the knife into America's gilded youth. The tubby Christian redneck got a pounding because, presumably, the execs calculated his demographic wouldn't be watching anyway. But the pretty characters are treated much more gently, and we're clearly expected to care about their emotional dilemmas. It has the essential dynamic of Scrubs an innocent at sea in a society that requires a meticulous knowledge of the done thing but none of Scrubs' Indian-burn relish for making its characters yelp.

Finally, the last ever series of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (BBC1, Sun) began with the man still sunk in alcoholic grief after the death of his wife six months before. For most TV coppers, this would mean waking up in a tatty flat covered with as many empty pizza boxes and beer cans as the props department could rustle up. Being an earl, though, Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) was in his plush riverside apartment surrounded by a few decorously arranged bottles of superior whisky and a sadly neglected cafetière. He was roused from this rather civilised torpor by the discovery of the body of a young boy, who’d disappeared from a house party Lynley attended 12 years earlier. Since then too, the boy’s sister Julia (Georgina Rylance) had become estranged from her parents and was living in Rome – which meant Lynley’s first job was to persuade her to return home for the funeral. This he duly achieved by talking to her in front of a kaleidoscope of Rome’s most famous buildings.

For her part, Julia proved, if anything, even posher than him, with her Celia Johnson accent and languid aphorisms. (“‘What if’ are the deadliest words in the English language.”) Luckily for Lynley, she was also a goer – and back in London they shared a night of passion during which a photograph of his late wife fell symbolically to the floor. The next morning Julia’s lifeless body was found on the street five floors below his balcony. Lynley was then arrested for her murder by the weirdly vindictive Michelle Tate (Geraldine Somerville), whose questioning included the sensitive enquiry, “Your wife was shot dead right in front of you, wasn’t she?”

All of which soon led to the familiar tale of a policeman operating outside the rules, as Lynley set out to find the Real Killer: a process to which the programme took a somewhat unhurried approach, carefully crossing out the list of suspects one by one. In traditional whodunit style, the list also turned out to be a close-knit affair with the same people doubling as suspects, policemen, family lawyers and victims. The result was a perfectly serviceable way of passing the time. Even so, I can’t imagine too many viewers being sunk in alcoholic grief themselves when Inspector Lynley finally heads off into the television sunset (or UKTV as it’s also known).

Censor sensibility

2008-05-24T02:01:00.000-07:00

Julie Walters, who plays Mary Whitehouse this week on BBC2, tells Michael Deacon that there was more to the campaigner than angry rants...

We can never know what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the news that Julie Walters is to play her in a film of her life. But we can take a reasonable guess. “I’m sure she would have disapproved of some things I’ve done,” says Walters. “The Wife of Bath, Personal Services… Someone in America said, ‘There’s something there to offend the whole family.’”

Personal Services was a 1987 film in which Walters starred as the madam of a brothel – not exactly Whitehouse’s cup of tea. And you could say that about more than a few things on television. From 1963 until her death in 2001, the Nuneaton-born teacher-turned-campaigner protested against what she saw as British television’s flouting of decent moral standards.

As BBC2’s new one-off drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, shows, she fired off endless letters of complaint to broadcasters and gave impassioned public speeches. Televised discussions of premarital sex, swearing in Till Death Us Do Part, the wanton disregard for authority displayed by the children’s puppets Pinky and Perky… All were contributing, Whitehouse believed, to a collapse in morality in British society. To fight back, she famously launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK).

When Walters was young, however, she thought Whitehouse was merely a killjoy. “She figured highly in my teens and twenties,” she says. “To my generation, she represented our parents. It felt like she was spoiling the fun.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who made television weren’t too keen on Whitehouse either. Walters recalls seeing her “cruelly lampooned” by ITV’s Eighties puppet satire Spitting Image.

But Filth, says the star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, doesn’t mock Whitehouse. If that had been the aim, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the part. “I was sent another script about her, but it was having a lot of fun at her expense,” she says. “This one was different – it was very balanced. It explains who she was, where she was coming from. It’s easy to take the piss out of someone like her.” No, that’s not an expression Whitehouse would have cared for. But Walters is right: Filth is, a lot of the time, sympathetic to the tireless campaigner (although some scenes make her seem a little dotty, or short-tempered).

It starts by showing what prompted Whitehouse to launch her protests, then her efforts to form a pressure group made up of like-minded West Midlands women. But the central story is about Whitehouse’s long and fiery battle with the BBC’s Director General from 1960-68, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, played as a crude, sneering bully by Hugh Bonneville. Time and again he refuses to meet her – but she devises plenty of other ploys to get his attention.

Researching and playing the part changed Walters’s opinion of Whitehouse, she says: “I was surprised by her compassion, and she was a good mum. In retrospect, she had a point. There’s a watershed because of her. Children shouldn’t view things that they’re not emotionally developed enough to deal with. I don’t have a Mary Whitehouse attitude, but I do believe in the watershed.” After all, Walters is a mother herself. When her daughter Maisie was a child, they were watching a drama (Walters can’t remember its title) that contained a scene of a nature Walters hadn’t bargained for. “Mum,” said Maisie, “why has that woman taken her knickers off?” Walters said, “I think it’s by accident…”

She didn’t feel the need to shield Maisie from every programme that Whitehouse disapproved of, though – soaps in particular. “I couldn’t stop that because of my own addictions,” she says. “When she was born, we came home from the hospital and we were sitting on the sofa and the EastEnders theme tune came on. Her little head looked straight at the telly.”

Of late, Walters has been working on plenty of family-friendly entertainment, with the exception of Filth (which inevitably contains swearing). She’ll be Ron Weasley’s mum again in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (out before Christmas), and will play Aunt Betsey in a new film version of David Copperfield (which should be out next year). In July she appears in Mamma Mia!, an Abba-inspired romantic comedy film.

At 58, Walters is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, and this year she was made CBE for services to drama. She’s recently been writing her autobiography. She seems so pleasant in person that it’s hard to imagine the book containing many Whitehouse-style tirades. Still, she says, there are things that make her angry: “Rudeness, racism, snobbery, tiredness, Cellophane things you can’t open…”

Swearing and sex scenes on television, though, aren’t among them. Indeed, Walters confesses to being a fan of one modern-day show that would surely have horrified Mary Whitehouse more than any from the past. “I was glued to Celebrity Big Brother,” she says. “It was grubby stuff, but I couldn’t switch it off.”

Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm

British TV mogul Simon Fuller is the real winner of American Idol

2008-05-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Standing beside a swimming pool overlooking the Los Angeles skyline, the British TV mogul Simon Fuller congratulated the latest American Idol at a private party on Wednesday night — but the real winner was undoubtedly Mr Fuller who, for seven years, has dominated America's TV ratings and made himself a dollar billionaire.

At the end of a celebrity-filled two-hour show, this year's winner was revealed to be David Cook, a soulful Missouri rocker who built up a fanbase by performing grunge versions of Lionel Richie's Hello and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. Mr Cook, 26, prevailed in spite of what many regarded as a superior finals night performance by his more wholesome rival David Archuleta, 17. The numbers spoke for themselves: a record 97.5 million votes were cast by viewers of the singing contest — with Mr Cook getting approximately the same number of votes that President Bush received in the 2004 general election.

“We're still a goliath,” Mr Fuller told The Times, referring to the status of the show — a spin-off from Britain's Pop Idol — as the most-watched show in the US. “We're still bigger than anything else, and now David Cook is going to sell millions of records for us.”

With ratings declining and criticism of American Idol mounting — including accusations of vote rigging — many are asking how Mr Fuller and his British executives can continue to make such spectacular amounts of money out of an ageing franchise. The genius of the show is that Mr Fuller makes money out of the talent-scouting process and cashes in again if the stars of the show sell millions of records — as has happened with Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson (who also won an Oscar) and others.

The show — which is broadcast on the Fox network, part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times — is thought to earn at least $500 million (£253 million) a year from advertising and sponsorship deals, with 30-second slots during the final selling for $780,0000 each. The show also makes money from the text message and telephone voting, a post-season tour, CDs, merchandise and — as of this year — live, on-the-night performances sold via the Apple iTunes store. The magazine Advertising Age valued the entire franchise recently at $2.5 billion.

Although the show has made a celebrity out of Simon Cowell, thanks largely to his willingness to put unflinching criticism ahead of the feelings of contestants, few Americans are aware that the production is an entirely British creation. Apart from Mr Fuller and Mr Cowell, the co-executive producers are Ken Warwick and Nigel Lythgoe, also Britons. Even the director, Bruce Gower, is British.

But the expats have a difficult job ahead of them for next season. For most of the show's run this year ratings were off by about 10 per cent. This was blamed on the aftermath of the writers' strike, which drove viewers away from television, and results from the Democratic Party's primary race, which came in on Tuesday nights at the same time that American Idol was on the air.

Critics complained of being bored with the format and Paula Abdul, one of the judges, made a gaffe when she gave her verdict on a contestant before he sang, revealing that her notes had been scripted in advance. The show staged a recovery for the finals. On Tuesday, when the contestants gave their last performances, ratings were up 7 per cent on 2007, to 27 million. The following night, when the results were revealed, the ratings were up 4.5 per cent, to 26.5 million, according to preliminary data. But executives were clearly rattled.

At the party on Wednesday Mr Fuller promised radical changes for next season, with rumours suggesting that a fourth judge would be hired to join Mr Cowell, Ms Abdul and Randy Jackson. “There's going to be a big shake-up,” confirmed Mr Cowell, who spent most of Wednesday evening with the $12.5 million-a-year host of Idol, Ryan Seacrest. “You'll see.”

TV starlet ain't half hot mum

2008-05-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Australian Defence Department is investigating allegations that television celebrity Tania Zaetta had sex with special forces soldiers during a recent tour of war-ravaged Afghanistan. The high-level document says that Zaetta had relations with troops at the Australian base in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan province, last month. Pictures and a video were said to have been taken. It was revealed that the unsubstantiated claim was made by veteran rock singer Angry Anderson. Zaetta and Anderson were the two headline acts on a 17-day tour of the Middle East that staged concerts for Australian soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The department has been severely embarrassed after admitting it broke privacy rules by naming Zaetta - who has denied the allegation - in a briefing document to the Minister for Defence Joel Fitzgibbon. Australia’s military was in retreat last night, apologising to Zaetta for the leak, and ordering an immediate inquiry into how the document — officially referred to as a “hot issues brief” — became public. The federal Opposition demanded Mr Fitzgibbon apologise for the "gross" and "extraordinary" invasion of the TV star's privacy. Spokesman Nick Minchin, who travelled on a transport aircraft with Zaetta and Anderson during the tour, has demanded an explanation from Mr Fitzgibbon. "This is a gross invasion of her privacy," he said on Fairfax radio today. "It is very unfortunate and I think Mr Fitzgibbon, as the Defence Minister, should come out today and explain exactly how this has occurred. He should apologise publicly to her. This is an extraordinary invasion of her privacy. He has got some answers to provide."

Zaetta, who has appeared on Baywatch and Mission Implausible, a British pay-TV show, strenuously denied the allegations and said there had been little opportunity to be alone with any soldier, even if she had wanted to be. She described the claim as "hurtful". "That is the absolute first I've heard of it. That is the most ridiculous story I've ever heard about my life - and I've heard plenty over the years in this industry," she said. "It takes the cake. I've just done this most amazing life-changing experience, been to the most unbelievable places and for this to be said, it's very hurtful."

Zaetta was the co-host of 1990s television stunt show Who Dares Wins, which is also the motto of the Australian SAS. She is also a popular film actress in India; starring recently in Charlie’s Angels-style hit, Mr. Black, Mr. White. “How does a supposed document . . . that I don’t know about get leaked in the first place — that’s a little bit concerning about the security of the country,” she said. “It’s complete lies . . . apart from being hurtful, it’s damaging to a woman’s career, to her reputation.” The Government now faces a potential compensation payout after she sought legal advice over the claims.

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, reluctantly commented on the scandal, which drew criticism from the opposition conservative Liberal Party over invasion of privacy. “These matters are under investigation within the Defence Department and I will leave it for that investigation to reach its own conclusions,” Mr Rudd said.

Artists on the tour - dubbed "Tour de Force - Middle East 9" were warned they would breach Defence Force regulations if they fraternised with troops. Another performer confirmed the entertainers had been told that they would breach regulations if they consorted with the troops. “I have heard of quickies but I have never heard of anything that quick . . . a tour like that is hard work,” John Clinton, of the country rock band the Wolverines, said.

Anderson, lead singer of rock band Rose Tattoo, told The Daily Telegraph he had no knowledge of any complaint. But the document says the secretary of the Defence force's entertainment division "was informed yesterday by Mr Anderson that he had been told by SF special forces troops whilst at Tarin Kowt that Ms Zaetta had sex with them and they had the photos and video to prove it."

"The issue was not raised by Mr Anderson during the tour. The tour CO commanding officer was aware that Mr Anderson did not think highly of Ms Zaetta, often criticising her," the document says. A Department of Defence spokesman confirmed that an investigation into the allegations was underway and that statements would be taken from those who participated on the tour.

Anderson, who said he is a member of the Forces Advisory Committee on Entertainment, said he had not made a complaint about Zaetta. "I don't know where that came from. I don't get into personal or petty dislikes, particularly when it could hamper or have a detrimental effect on a tour," he said. "I don't know Tania very well. As far as I could tell she conducted herself in a very professional manner. It's two weeks away, it's pretty intense and I pretty much kept myself to myself." Anderson said he had formed a friendship with a male comedian during the tour. "I guess I could be accused of being homosexual. I was often seen in his company."

The document says all personnel on the tour were briefed on Defence force policy on fraternising with troops 10 days before they flew to the Middle East. Under a heading "Talking Points" - briefing notes given to ministers as suggestions for handling controversial issues in public - the document suggests the minister say: "I'm aware of the allegation and understand that an investigation is currently being conducted.

In interviews given to publicise the tour, which was filmed by the ABC's Australian Story and aired over the past two weeks, Zaetta said: "I'm single and there has been a lot of teasing that I am going into a place where they haven't seen girls for a long time." Just before the tour left, she said about touring the Middle East: "If you can't get a date out of there then you've got no hope."

Commanding Officer of the tour Lieutenant Colonel Greg McCauley said he could not comment and referred inquiries to the Department of Defence's public affairs division. Sources on the tour said they had no knowledge of any Defence investigation and were surprised that an allegation had been made by Angry Anderson.

The Street gets third BBC series

2008-05-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

A third series of Jimmy McGovern's award-winning drama The Street has been commissioned by BBC Fiction boss Jane Tranter. The new series will air on BBC1 in 2009 and further explore the "darker side of human nature", according to the corporation.

Made by ITV Productions, McGovern will once again work on the six-part series with new writers. Casting for the new series has yet to be agreed. Previous cast members include David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Gina McKee, Jane Horrocks and Sue Johnston. McGovern – whose credits include Cracker, The Lakes and Hillsborough – co-created The Street with Sita Williams and they will both be executive producers the third series.

Williams said: "It is a great credit to Jimmy McGovern that we have won the most prized drama awards for two consecutive years." BBC Independent Drama commissioning editor Polly Hill said: "I am delighted that The Street will return for a third series. Jimmy's compelling storytelling and the wonderful cast it attracts continues to deliver powerful drama about ordinary folk. We are delighted it's captured the audience's imagination and are thrilled to see it receive an RTS and BAFTA for the second year running."

The Street has also won an International Emmy for Jim Broadbent's performance.

Monty Don recovers from stroke

2008-05-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

The television presenter and gardening writer Monty Don is stepping down from Gardeners' World after suffering a minor stroke, the BBC said yesterday. The 52-year-old has been absent from the screen for the past six weeks following the stroke and now intends to take "gardening leave" over the summer while he makes a full recovery.

A spokesman for the BBC said: "Monty Don has decided to stand down as the main presenter of Gardeners' World. Monty has presented the series for the past five years but has been off our screens for the past six weeks as a result of a minor stroke. "Although he is making a good recovery he feels unable to commit to regular filming for a while." The spokesman added that Don would be "sorely missed by viewers and the production team".

Don has appeared on Gardeners' World for five years, and this year also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens, a horticultural odyssey which took 18 months to film. Don and his crew visited locations from the Arctic to Australia, to profile gardens - and their creators - on every continent.

In a statement yesterday, Don said: "I am proud to have led Gardeners' World for the past five years and have enjoyed every minute of sharing my passion with the programme's viewers. I intend to take some gardening leave for the rest of the summer to make a full recovery and so that I am ready to tackle new projects."

A self-taught horticulturalist, Don also wrote a long-running column for the Observer, often straying beyond gardening to discuss personal issues such as his own experiences with depression and seasonal affective disorder. He is the author of a number of popular gardening books including 'The Sensuous Garden' and 'The Complete Gardener'.

He began his television career as the resident gardener on This Morning before going to present a string of Channel 4 series including Don Roaming and Lost Gardens. He lives with his wife and three children in Herefordshire.

ITV's Fincham wants more of The Fixer

2008-05-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

The new ITV director of television, Peter Fincham, has made his first commissioning decision since starting his job - ordering another series of ITV1 drama The Fixer. Fincham has given the thumbs-up to a second run of the drama, which stars Party Animals actor Andrew Buchan, Tamzin Outhwaite (left), former Shameless actor Jody Latham and Peter Mullan.

The Fixer premiered on ITV1 with an audience of 6.3 million viewers and overall the six-part series averaged just under 5 million, making it the network's highest rating new drama this year. Fincham promised the drama about a soldier who becomes a paid assassin targeting people who have escaped the law will be even "bigger and better" when it returns. "The Fixer was a gripping first series that had an unmistakable touch of class. I'm delighted that it's coming back - it'll be bigger and better than ever," he said.

Jane Featherstone, the joint managing director of Kudos, which makes The Fixer, and the show's executive producer, added: "We're thrilled to be bringing The Fixer back and look forward to more fun and action from our unique team of renegade crime fighters."

It is understood that the new series will contain more action, while keeping the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of the first run. An ITV insider said the second series was also likely to include cameo roles by some star names.

Ex-BBC1 controller Fincham began his job at ITV last Monday, May 12, and is said to be keen to bolster ITV's drama department, which suffered a disappointing reaction to new shows such as The Palace and Rock Rivals earlier this year.

The Fixer was commissioned by Laura Mackie, the ITV director of drama. It was created by Spooks and Party Animals writer Ben Richards and is produced by Faith Penhale and joint executive produced by Simon Crawford Collins.

Sir Trevor McDonald may quit News at Ten

2008-05-23T05:15:00.000-07:00

Talks are taking place between ITV News and Sir Trevor McDonald over him stepping down from presenting News at Ten at the end of the year. Sources familiar with the situation said Sir Trevor was looking to leave the relaunched ITV bulletin on a high after the US presidential election, which takes place on November 4.

After intense lobbying by ITV and its executive chairman, Michael Grade, the veteran broadcaster came out of retirement to front News at Ten with Julie Etchingham when it returned to ITV1 in January. ITV has refused to reveal how long his contract is but it is thought to finish at the end of the year. One source said: "Trevor feels like he's done what he set out to do."

Another insider added: "If Trevor went after the US elections that would take him to almost the end of the year and he could leave on a high. He's come back to relaunch News at Ten but does feel a bit that times have changed."

Behind-the-scenes discussions are understood to be taking place as to Sir Trevor's commitments over the next few months. He is due to take three weeks holiday off over the summer and is also understood to be covering the Democratic convention in August.

After a shaky few months, News at Ten's ratings have rallied somewhat, though ITV sources conceded that the figures are still below those hoped for by the broadcaster before it returned. The new-look News at Ten premiered on January 14 with a scoop interview with Princess Diana's former lover Hasnat Khan and an audience of 3.8 million viewers. But figures hit a low of 1.7million viewers in March and analysis showed that over the first three months, BBC1's 10pm bulletin has won more than double the audience of its ITV counterpart when the two shows were head to head. Recently News at Ten's ratings have rallied and it has been averaging more than 2.5million viewers.

Sir Trevor's natural successor is seen to be Mark Austin. When News at Ten returned Austin moved to a roving anchor role, presenting on location for big foreign stories. Since then he has reported from around the world, including from Zimbabwe, in addition to co-hosting ITV's higher-rated early-evening news bulletin.

When he returned to News at Ten Sir Trevor said "We're not in this to lose", but declined to say how long he would stick with the bulletin, adding only: "I want to be in for some time." It is expected that after he steps down he would retain a commitment with ITV for other programmes such as Tonight or factual shows such as his recent Britain's Favourite View.

An ITV spokesman said: "We don't discuss confidential contracts."

Holding tight, letting it go

2008-05-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: Hold Me Tight Let Me Go; 13 Kids and Wanting More; Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts; Midnight Man

The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire is a boarding school where children are sent when other institutions have given up hope of being able to contain them or understand their extreme emotional trauma. It has 40 children and 108 staff, a ratio that seems generous until you see what the staff have to put up with. In the course of Kim Longinotto's marvellous film, Hold Me Tight Let Me Go (BBC Four), members of staff at the Mulberry Bush were spat on, slapped, kicked, sworn at with a concentrated viciousness that would make a Scorsese film sound maidenly, and had their clothes soaked in urine. They bore all this with a patience that would seem saintly if it weren't dressed up in the modern secular jargon of reconciliation ("I want you to think about what you've done..."). The children are damaged. They swear, they’re rude, and when they are being horrible, the staff do not tell them off, they don’t ignore them. They tell the children that they have upset them and address them as adults – if they want to be treated properly, they have to treat others properly is the message.

And from time to time, they are rewarded with eruptions of spontaneous affection, need and longing: children flinging their arms around their teachers' necks, throwing themselves on their knees to propose marriage with mock fervour, howling at the prospect of leaving the school behind. The children slammed from one emotional extreme to another, and the viewer was left to trail limply in their wake, wondering how long anybody could keep up this pitch of feeling. These documentaries are supposed to be uplifting, but it looked like thankless, horrible work. In a typical lesson, a teacher would be spat at, called a “fucking cunt” a few times, hit, and disrespected. One child’s abusive misbehaviour set off a chair-throwing chain reaction among the others. Yet, slowly their stories peeled away: like the boy who had lost his father. The staff persisted in drawing them out, the children responded. One went home happier, another said he wanted to marry his teacher, but she told him he was too old.

A neat summation of the film's moodiness came with the introduction of Charlie, aged around nine, who was warned that while he was at the school he would see lots of things that would make him think, "Goodness, what's going on?" Shortly afterwards, Charlie was seen standing on a desk, then waving a chair over his head while kicking out at a teacher. Goodness, you thought, what's going on? Here and elsewhere, the film seemed to show almost overwhelming surges of feeling, expressed with a boundless physicality, so that the teachers had to restrain the children in ways that, in other contexts, might be disturbing; but despite the strain visible on their faces, none of the teachers ever became overtly angry. As the title suggested, restraint and embrace can be hard to tell apart. The strange, recurring motif was the move the teachers used to becalm the abusive children; it was a very firm hug, a hug that stopped them harming others, but also taught them about being held and possibly – their very first acquaintance with love and safety.

One of the great things about the film was its reluctance to offer simple diagnoses or to shrug blame on to the parents; though in the cases that were lingered over, a sense of having been abandoned, either physically or emotionally, seemed important. Calming down after an outburst, Ben told one of the staff that his mother had said she was "bored" with him. He hated himself, hated his life, he said, but then temporised – he didn't want to say why in front of the cameras. His interlocutor pushed him to go on – perhaps other children who felt the same would like to hear him talk. Ben said: "'Cos my mum stabbed my dad."

That exchange was important because it answered in part one of the anxieties such films inevitably raise: how far were the children acting up for the cameras? Here we were offered a reassurance that nobody was being fooled into pretending the cameras weren't there; and reassurance, too, that we weren't just being voyeurs. But the exchange mattered, as well, because of what followed, when Ben's mother came to visit on one of the six days a year that she is allowed to spend with him at the school. As she played with him in the garden, and then stroked his head as it lay in her lap, Ben for once at peace, the idea that she was nothing more than an uncaring or neglectful parent was happily scotched. What was going on here was far more complicated, far more touching than Ben's account made room for. Similarly, we saw another mother explaining to the school's family liaison officer how hard she found it to talk to her son on the phone, how guilty she felt when she saw him, and that saying goodbye didn't feel as bad as she knew it should. Every parent must have felt some shadow of those feelings: the sense that you can never be a good enough parent, never love your child enough.

This was not a doubt that afflicted the parents presented in 13 Kids and Wanting More. As Karan Johnstone explained, "I'm brilliant at being a mum. I'm probably the best mum I know." I envied her that level of self-assurance, while wondering whether more self-analysis might have been in order. On her 12th pregnancy, Karan was gloating over the prospect of once more having "that baby smell" around the house, the excitement of buying more baby clothes. You did wonder whether a Tiny Tears and a few tubs of talcum powder wouldn't give her the same thrill.

Now I've seen a lot of freak shows on TV recently - programmes about people who are incredibly fat, or incredibly tall, or who appear outlandish in some other way, like being posh but poor, or obsessed with washing their hands. People on screen are becoming more freakish in general - a response, I'm sure, to the proliferation in channels. Weird stuff always catches the eye, and after that it's an arms race. So I thought I knew what to expect when I switched on this documentary about couples who carry on having children way beyond the norm. I thought these people would play the role of the incredibly fat or tall people, or the man who couldn't tidy his house. In these instances, the narrator just needed to speak in a normal-sounding voice while the camera focused on the subject, resulting in a huge, tragi-comic contrast. But this was different. This was not a freakshow at all. It looked weirdly normal. I kept thinking: what went wrong?

There were three couples. One couple had 13 children, and wanted another. Another couple had 10 children, with one on the way. The third couple had 12 children and wanted a 13th. I think I've got this right; the story kept switching around. Two of the couples looked absolutely normal. One woman joked that she was "pram mad". That was about as mad as it got. One of the husbands, Mohammed, liked to play the fool. He was twinkly, with a moustache and a mostly bald head. He said of his wife, "She finds me tempting and irresistible!"

Mohammed's wife Noreen wasn’t so much tired as exhausted. “No more,” she gasped as she lay in bed having just given birth to her 11th child at the age of 35. Her husband Mohammed was having none of it. “She says that every time,” he chortled. “It’s Allah’s will. It is up to him.” The health visitor, rather like us, watched incredulously as he cheerfully banged on about God deciding how many children he should have, seemingly utterly ignorant of Noreen in total agony. “God has chosen the female body to deliver offspring in his image,” he said. Mohammed dismissed concerns about Noreen’s health and likened multiple pregnancy to football training – the more you train the muscles the better they become, he intimated.

Deborah was in the health food store looking for unicorn root extract. “It’s supposed to tone up your uterus if it’s tired,” she said. “And after 13 children I’m sure mine is very tired.” Not tired enough to deter her from having another baby though, as the title of this documentary affirmed. Hubby Derek had just slipped a multipack of Siberian ginseng into his basket. “It helps with man things,” he said with a coy smile. Elsewhere, Karan insisted she just loved having babies. “There’s no other feeling like it,” she said cooing over baby clothes in the run up to bearing her 12th. Asked if she thought having so many children was selfish she merely replied: “We put our heart and soul into the kids.”

And they obviously did. In fact the joyful chaos of large families was nothing if not obvious in this thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally jaw-dropping film. What wasn’t so clear, though, was how any of them could afford it. For a question that will have baffled many viewers, it was skated over with an almost Victorian delicacy. “We do our bit, we go out and work,” said Karan’s husband Ellis. And that was it, apart from some fleeting references to his efforts to convert the adjoining pair of council houses the family occupy into one. As for Derek and Deborah, nothing at all was said of their finances – although their outgoings on wild yak cream and pregnancy test kits alone might have challenged the average purse.

Only Mohammed’s fiscal position was laid bare. A former maths teacher, he put his unemployment down to discrimination. “Nobody will give me a job because I am a Muslim,” he said. A claim put into perspective when a fellow Rochdale resident gruffly pointed out the high proportion of gainfully employed Muslims in the town. Mohammed seemed to be enjoying his reputation as tabloid bogeyman of Rochdale. He went to the town centre and had merry scraps with locals who thought he was a benefits scrounger. In what looked like a set-up, a man collared Mohammed and ranted at him for a while about how irresponsible it was to have so many children. But the man looked like an idiot; we sided with Mohammed. Meanwhile a trip to the local cash and carry made big-family sums more graspable: five gallons of milk every two days, 75 nappies a week, and so on. “Three to four hundred a week goes nowhere,” tutted Mohammed.

Mostly, what the camera captured was these perfectly pleasant people, with a few children in tow. Sometimes there were group shots, but these just looked like happy people going on a school trip. There seemed to be no way of capturing the extraordinary nature of the subject matter. Two questions were asked at the start. Why did these people want so many children? And what was it like to be in such a big family? The answers we got were: they have lots of children because they love them. And big families are great fun, but hectic. Ultimately, this film didn't stop to examine what was going on in its subjects' heads in any depth; but the impression you were left with was of people who did not know when to say enough's enough. I'm like that with chocolate biscuits myself. In the end, some things are just very hard to film in a light that is not positive. Giving birth successfully and happy families are two of them. We were left with a documentary about some essentially decent people who looked, at best, harmlessly eccentric. Which seems a pity, because, when you think about it, having 13 children seems pretty damn freakish.

If the 36 children borne by these three couples seemed excessive, it was as nothing compared to the 40 marriages clocked up by the six individuals featured in Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts (Five). There was rather more of a veneer of psychology applied here, compliments of psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, who trotted out a long list of reasons for this particular obsession, from immaturity to over-romanticism and straight forward attention-seeking. But the emphasis was definitely on fun.

Ron, currently on wife number eight, happily admitted his nuptial compulsion was an addiction. Martin blamed the collapse of seven marriages on his passion for Liverpool FC. The “Liz Taylor of Clydebank”, Sandra, who’s totted up seven big days, is still looking for Mr Right. Anyone who doubted the efficacy of this approach could always look to convicted bigamist Pam, who’s been up the aisle 10 times, though only six of those were legal. “It took me 10 times to find my Mr Right, but I found him,” said Pam, with a definite air of triumph.

Finally, the Government, secret services and a badly named defence policy think-tank were still bumping off people for not entirely plausible reasons in the final episode of Midnight Man (ITV1). The conspiracy drama ended with madness intact. James Nesbitt, as the ruffled hero Max, got used to sunlight and took off his silly hat. His cyber-literate daughter managed to bring down the fascistic Western industrial complex by downloading a vital video. The lady from the right-wing defence policy organisation betrayed Max.

Reece Dinsdale shot about 20 people in the back of the head, his hair shiny with black shoe polish. Nesbitt’s editor was also a criminal. Alan Dale lathered up his Ugly Betty American accent until it was so Yankee Doodle Dandy it made Boss Hogg look Home Counties. A blackhearted ending, with Nesbitt framed by the baddies as a murderous, light-phobic lunatic, beckoned but he was reunited with his daughter and all wrongs righted. Another police procedural with him as a decent though flawed hangdog hero is surely imminent.

BBC mix-up over verdict in Nisah Patel-Nasri murder trial

2008-05-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

The BBC has landed itself in hot water for another on-air gaffe today after the BBC News channel mistakenly announced that a verdict had been reached in the trial of the men accused of murdering special constable Nisah Patel-Nasri. Just after 11am today, the BBC News channel broadcast what it claimed was a "breaking news" story about the trial of the suspects in the case of the murder of Patel-Nasri, who was killed on her doorstep in north London in 2006. Today's inaccuracy is the third in a week for BBC News.

BBC presenter Jane Hill told viewers there was news in from the Old Bailey that a verdict had been reached. The BBC then announced the supposed verdict on air and on a "strapline" on screen. After a few minutes Hill said there was some "confusion" at the Old Bailey and that the BBC would bring more news when they had it.

Hill's co-presenter Tim Wilcox then said they would move on to something on "stronger grounds" and the breaking news strapline disappeared. However, sources at the Old Bailey said the courtroom was locked at the time and the jury was out considering its verdict in the Patel-Nasri case on its fourth day of deliberations.

It has not been an easy few days for BBC News – which, like other broadcasters, has found its resources stretched by covering the disasters in Burma and China. On Tuesday the BBC admitted that a factory making Adolf Hitler dolls that it told viewers was part of the rise of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine was actually located in Taiwan. The BBC apologised for the mistake, which it broadcast on television and online on April 23.

On Friday last week it made an on-air apology after it broadcast a picture the previous day which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

A BBC spokeswoman said: "We wrongly reported that a verdict had been delivered in the Nisha Patel-Nasri murder trial. The mistake was realised very quickly and a live retraction aired soon after."

Elsewhere, The BBC has apologised on air and agreed to pay legal costs over an allegedly defamatory episode of BBC1 forensic drama Waking the Dead. A recent storyline in the hit show featured a villain who had a similar name and background to a former Guards officer, now security boss, Jonathan Garratt.

The episode of Waking the Dead, 'Duty and Honour', broadcast three weeks ago on BBC1, revolved around a corrupt former Guards officer called John Garret who helped set up security firm Apx Solutions – a company which specialised in working in Iraq. As well as the Waking the Dead character having a similar sounding name and background to him, Garratt's firm Erinys is one of a just a few British security companies working out in Iraq. In addition, the fictional John Garret was played by Rupert Graves, who is said to have a similar appearance and voice to Garratt. Jonathan Garratt's name is also often shortened to John.

However, unlike Garratt, the Waking the Dead character enters into a corrupt arrangement with a local Iraqi criminal, commits a murder and authorises another killing. After seeing the episode and receiving phone calls from people who had seen the programme, commenting on some of the "striking" similarities in background between him and the fictional John Garret, Garratt began legal proceedings against the BBC, claiming defamation.

Garratt's lawyer, media specialist David Price from David Price Solicitors & Advocates, requested an apology be broadcast as soon as possible. Two apologies were broadcast on BBC1 this week, immediately after Monday and last night's episodes of Waking the Dead, which were both watched by more than 6 million viewers. The BBC apologised for "any embarrassment caused" and said John Garret was "entirely fictional" and "was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt".

Price is also seeking for a statement based on the apology broadcast on BBC1 to be read out in court and for the BBC to pay "substantial damages", claiming that "considerable damage has been caused to our client's reputation". The BBC told Price that the matter was a coincidence. But he said he was surprised at the level of coincidence in the drama.

"We're waiting for an explanation as to how this happened. It does seem remarkable. We don't know if it was cock-up or conspiracy but the level of similarities is extraordinary," he added. "We assume there was some level of negative checking by the BBC before the programme went out." The BBC had not responded to requests for comment at time of publication.

It is not the first time Waking the Dead has courted controversy. Last year Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei complained the drama had misrepresented some of its members – a claim the BBC rejected.

Erinys International and Garratt are not unknown to the media and have had some coverage in the press. In an interview in 2004 with the Independent on Sunday, Garratt called for international regulation for private security guards.

A BBC spokeswoman said the corporation had no comment at this stage about costs and damages. "The BBC carried out a number of checks (as is usual practice with such dramas) to clear the fictional character name John Garret prior to filming Waking The Dead: Duty And Honour," she added. "Following the broadcast of this episode, the BBC received a letter from solicitors representing Jonathan Garratt.The checks we had carried out did not pick up the alternative spelling of Mr Garratt's name. We were happy in these circumstances to apologise and make clear that the character, John Garret, as with all dramas like this, was entirely fictional and was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt."

CBBC shows set to get kids wriggling and voting

2008-05-22T16:23:00.000-07:00

Digital channel CBBC is to make a 13-part food series called Gastronuts that will encourage children to stew worms, catch farts in jars and bake toenail cakes. Fronted by Stefan Gates, the presenter of BBC2's Cooking in the Danger Zone, the series aims to educate children about the way food is grown, made, shaped and marketed.

Questions that Gates and his team of junior Gastronuts will examine include "should we eat insects?", "why don't we eat turkey eggs?" and "what would happen if I didn't fart?", according to the BBC. Other promised activities include eating scorpions, cooking with a JCB and eating dog food. Gastronuts is being made by Objective, the independent producer behind Channel 4 comedy Peep Show and Derren Brown's TV output.

"Gastronuts will encourage children to dabble in the science of food and nutrition, guided by intrepid expert Stefan Gates," said the CBBC controller, Anne Gilchrist, who commissioned the show. "It's not a cookery show and it's not about recipes but it will leave no scone unturned in the search for answers to the weird questions every child has about the food on their plates."

Andrew O'Connor, the chief executive of Objective, will executive produce the show alongside CBBC's Alison Gregory. In addition, Gilchrist has also commissioned Zodiak Television-owned independent producer Diverse to make a CBBC series focusing on a search to find a leader among British children. The 10-part series Election will whittle down applicants to a shortlist of 10 children in the first episode and present a set of challenges to the candidates. The winner will be chosen in the final episode, but the means of voting has not yet been decided according to a BBC spokeswoman.

Gilchrist said: "What does it take to be popular and persuade people to vote for you - is it amazing policies or a friendly demeanour and skilful communication skills? CBBC viewers are about to find out in this exciting new series - democracy in action for six- to 12-year-olds." Election is being executive produced by Gregory for CBBC and by Matt Paice and Roy Ackerman for Diverse.

Both programmes are expected to air on CBBC later this year.

Whishaw to star in BBC thriller

2008-05-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

The BBC is to broadcast a drama from Hawking writer Peter Moffat, starring Ben Whishaw as a young man imprisoned for murder despite protesting his innnocence. The five-part drama, called Criminal Justice and due to be shown on BBC1, features Whishaw, star of the recent film Perfume, as Ben Coulter, who wakes to find that a woman he has just slept with has been stabbed to death.

Whishaw's character is unable to remember what happened and the drama follows his life in prison and his encounters with the criminal justice system. His co-stars include Pete Postlethwaite as a hardened criminal called Hooch and Bill Paterson as the policeman investigating the murder. Rome actress Lindsay Duncan plays Ben's defence barrister in the drama, which has been commissioned by the BBC Fiction controller, Jane Tranter, and will be shown in the summer.

Kate Harwood, the BBC head of series and serials, said: "This is not a prison, legal or police drama. Peter Moffat has created something beyond these labels. He has delivered an exceptional and audacious piece of writing – full of colour, texture and humour. This is a combative, insightful, and sophisticated look at the criminal justice system."

Former barrister Moffat's previous dramas have included the BBC2 film Hawking, about scientist Stephen Hawking, and the BBC1 series Cambridge Spies, as well as the critically lauded but short-lived legal series North Square for Channel 4. His forthcoming dramas include BBC1's Einstein And Eddington, starring David Tennant and Andy Serkis.

ITV under attack from Ofcom, unions and God

2008-05-22T16:04:00.000-07:00

ITV is facing another investigation after it failed to match its quota for programmes to be made outside London for two years running. The network is required by the government to spend half its budget on productions made outside the capital. Figures to be revealed by Ofcom today show that it fell well short of that at 44% last year. After being forced to audit and restate 2006 figures, it missed the target that year too, at 46%.

"It is something that Ofcom is taking very seriously and we are looking at what action should be taken," said the watchdog's market research director, James Thickett. "Action could potentially include fines but at the moment we are not in a position to comment on any sanction we might impose." The latest investigation into ITV follows Ofcom's imposition of a record £5.7m fine on the broadcaster this month for "misleading its audience" over years, causing viewers to waste millions on worthless premium-rate calls.

Sources at ITV said last night it would like to see a reassessment of the level and criteria used by Ofcom, particularly given disparities between requirements on ITV and its rivals. The other public-sector broadcasters all met or exceeded their out-of-London targets in the past two years. But their quotas are lower: 30% for the BBC and Channel 4 and 10% for Five.

Programmes must meet two out of three criteria to qualify as out-of-London productions. Ofcom asks whether a production base was outside the M25 motorway, what proportion of spending occurred outside the M25 and how much of the behind-the-camera and on-screen talent are from outside London. In ITV's case, that means that even though shows such as Doc Martin and Kingdom are made in Cornwall and Norfolk respectively they do not count towards the quota because other criteria are not met. ITV insisted it was "committed to a diversity of production". "We recognise that we must comply with these challenging obligations and we will be taking the necessary steps to meet the quota in 2008," said a spokesman.

The company is also on a collision course with unions over production outside London. Broadcasting union Bectu yesterday lambasted ITV's announcement this week that it wants to make 89 staff redundant, with job losses targeted on production centres in Leeds and Manchester. It said that was at odds with ITV executive chairman Michael Grade's pledge under a turnaround plan to increase the levels of in-house production.

"What is clear is that the company's turnaround plan is failing," said Bectu's David Beevers. "The five-year plan promised acquisitions and greater commissioning power to re-establish ITV's network presence. Those objectives are not being met so the company reaches for its most cowardly weapon, the P45." An ITV spokesman said: "Technological advances in production techniques combined with a slowdown in studio commissions means that the level of resources staff in Manchester and Leeds is higher than required for the business levels forecast."

ITV was also attacked yesterday for entering just three religious programmes for the annual Sandford St Martin Trust's awards rewarding excellence in the genre. The Reverend Colin Morris, the chair of the awards judges and a former head of BBC religious broadcasting, speaking at the prize ceremony at Lambeth Palace in London, said he thought it was sad that ITV seemed to have "abandoned religious broadcasting".

ITV put three programmes up for this year's Sandford St Martin Trust awards, out of a total of 43 submissions from broadcasters. BBC2 documentary The Boys from Baghdad High won the trust's award. "I think it is sad that one of our great public service broadcasters seems to have abandoned religious broadcasting," Morris said.

Morris, also the former head of BBC Northern Ireland, added that ITV's stance was a sharp contrast to the rest of television, which "generally has discovered God ... or Allah" – a reference to the number of programmes about Islam – and was making high quality religious output. However, the award judges did pick out for special mention a clip from one ITV documentary, Little Town of Bethlehem, which followed the plight of Jews and Arabs in the town.

Though BBC2 won the main award with The Boys from Baghdad High, a documentary following four teenagers of different religious backgrounds, Morris added that the BBC's submissions generally tended to "be celebratory rather than analytical". He expressed disappointment that none of the BBC's submissions this year had been "in the tradition of Everyman or Heart of the Matter".

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who presented the awards, also commented on the entries: "There is a great deal about the body on television, cookery, beauty, exercise, and psycho babble, but very little about the soul." Widdecombe also pointed to the fact that three of the four programmes to win awards were about Islamic themes and society. "I hope next year the winners will come from the Christian religion. There is a creeping embarrassment about Christianity," she said.

Obituary: Margot Boyd

2008-05-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

Margot Boyd, the stage and radio actor who has died aged 94, had the voice of a duchess and a way of delivering every word she spoke as if she were addressing the back row of the gallery. She brought the sound of the grande dame to every role during more than 70 years of acting, and in recent years was best known as Mrs Antrobus in The Archers on Radio 4. While she did not normally play actual aristocrats, she remarked: "I've always played terribly fierce parts. But I've never felt fierce. Petrified, more like. I'm a terrible worrier."

In 1984, as a 71-year-old member of the BBC radio drama company, Boyd found a note in her file asking her to travel to Birmingham for a one-off appearance in The Archers, to give a talk to the over-60s club on "the colourful world of the Afghan hound". She knew "not a lot" about the programme ("I had never actually listened to it"), but her father had worked as an estate manager, and in her native Bath "every other woman was a Mrs Antrobus ... it was full of ex-colonial people who had servants galore. They were all very horsey and doggy." A regular visitor to Crufts dog show in former years, she proved such a success in Ambridge that Mrs Antrobus became a regular character for the next two decades.

Born Beryl Billings, Boyd belonged to a family that loved the theatre and entertaining itself with recitations. Acting at school led to a place at Rada, where she won a gold medal and found herself in a play directed by George Bernard Shaw. "He was wonderful - very encouraging," she recalled. Her first professional job was in twice-nightly rep at the Theatre Royal, Leeds. Although in her 20s, she would play women of 55 or more, and got the chance to play in all the touring West End productions. Thus it was a natural step to join the touring companies and go to London.

In 1950 Boyd got a part in Toni Block's Flowers for the Living at the Duchess Theatre, and ten years later came her first venture into Agatha Christie, Go Back for Murder. In the meantime, she had her own BBC-TV series as Mary Pemberton in Our Miss Pemberton (1957), and three years later was Mrs Trench in Richard Hearne's Leave It To Pastry.

Noël Coward gave her a two-year run in Waiting In The Wings, in the leading role of a manager of a home for retired actors. Not one of Coward's best plays, it nevertheless brought together a bunch of famous old players, led by Sybil Thorndike. When Coward turned up in Dublin to rehearse it before the London opening, he told the cast: "You're all worried in case you dry up. But I don't give a damn. If you forget a line I'll shout it from the box."

In James Hanley's new piece, Say Nothing (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1962) Boyd played a voracious, bulky, adulterous wife who thinks only of money. Her performance particularly deserved wider attention, for the play was quite unusual - a gloomy but original and sharp-witted study of a family which had turned in on itself. But without a transfer it languished. She returned to Agatha Christie, in the triple bill Rule of Three.

Then Boyd tried musical comedy. Joining Sandy Wilson's sequel to The Boy Friend at the Players, she came forward as the formidable Lady Brockhurst in the mildly successful Divorce Me, Darling (Globe, 1965). After touring to Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham as the housekeeper of a tense theatrical household in Lesley Storm's They Ride On Broomsticks, Boyd returned to the West End. Playing opposite James Stewart in Mary Chase's Harvey (Prince of Wales, 1975) she was cast as the mountainous Mrs Ethel Chauvenet.

Television work continued with Dixon of Dock Green and Middlemarch; in 1973 came an appearance in ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs and there was also a lot of radio work. Looking back at her introduction to The Archers, she remarked: "When I first looked at the script it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. In my 70s I'd have been mad not to have taken it on. I've always loved working on radio anyway. It demands such precision and discipline to get the timing right."

Boyd, who did not marry, found her 90th birthday celebrated with a surprise party at BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham, when she went to record scenes for the programme, now as the oldest-ever member of the cast. She had her favourite lunch: egg and chips with a whisky and soda.

Margot Boyd, actor, born September 26 1913; died May 20 2008

Self-censorsip at the cup final

2008-05-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

The after-match interviews with participants in the FA Cup Final were highly revealing: not for anything that the players or coaches said, but for the way in which the questions were put. "How sweet is this moment?" the triumphant Portsmouth boss, Harry Redknapp, was challenged, while his goalkeeper, David James, was asked to "describe your emotions at this moment?"

Behind these exchanges lies an intriguing story of TV self-censorship, says Mark Lawson. For years, TV critics and letter-writers to listings magazines ridiculed the habit of asking sweaty athletes, straight after their event: "How do you feel?" Survivors of high-school shoot-outs or earthquakes would also be prodded for immediate feedback on their feelings.

In a relatively rare example of satire changing behaviour, the complaints eventually resulted in on-the-scene reporters recognising that these four words had become unacceptable. Hence, now: "Describe your emotions."

But such translation is the linguistic equivalent of repainting the walls in a doss-house. Equally, "how sweet is this moment?" is not inherently a better question than "How do you feel?" and may, in fact, even be a worse one because it assumes a positive response, whereas even the now-discredited four-worder allowed the interviewee to say that they felt shitty or angry.

Another solution is to use a boring formula but try to defuse it. So, after Ryan Giggs received his latest Premiership medal, Sky asked him: "It's a cliche that the first one is the sweetest but how does this compare with the rest?"

This was another good example of the nervousness about hackneyed phrases. But switching from inanity to inanity that's apologised for is a small step. The problem is not the language but the format. No good interview can be drawn from an athlete who is exhausted and desperate to celebrate, so the only possible question is a stupid one, however phrased. How would they feel about dropping these breathless encounters completely?

Erectile dysfunction and tissue market penetration

2008-05-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise; My New Best Friend; The Apprentice; Desperate Housewives

"I can, hand on heart, say I've never had a tofu experience," said a journalist called Jenny Davis in Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise. Jodie Marsh had, though, and she recalled it in terms of wondering bemusement, a moment when her ability to induce turgidity had momentarily failed her. They weren't talking about food but responding to an unusual piece of equipment intended to help doctors gauge the precise extent of their patients' erectile failure. It consists of a small rack containing a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana and a square of tofu, each of which the sufferer is invited to compare, in terms of rigidity and resilient bounce, with his own sluggish organ. The cucumber struck me as cruelly redundant, frankly, given that only men with a problem are likely to encounter this diagnostic kit. It protruded at the end as a grade-four erection, a mocking green reminder of lost glory for those still haplessly mired in the territory of the grade one (tofu) and the grade two (a peeled banana). But who knows, perhaps it offers hope as well.

In the old days, there wasn't a lot of hope around. Getting the salad- days crispness back in your erection was a laborious business involving pneumatic pumps, self-administered injections into the penis (even the female narrator gave an audible squeak at that point) or full-blown surgery. But then a pharmaceutical company testing a new heart drug discovered that their male guinea pigs were unusually reluctant to hand back the surplus pills when the trials were over – and Viagra was born. To celebrate its 10th birthday, Five had glued together this loose assembly of anecdote, innuendo and television cliché with a script that sounded as if it was sidling around a bedroom in a rubber nurse's uniform. We got saucy talk about lead in pencils and descriptions of how combat pilots had been given the drug so that they would have "better control of their joysticks". We got reversed film of factory chimneys being demolished. We got stripper jazz on the soundtrack and soft-focus reconstructions involving improbably toned models. We even got that old trope of interruption: the gramophone needle skidding across the grooves. I think the whole thing was supposed to do for our attention span what fluffers used to do for male porn stars before Viagra made them redundant, but I'm afraid it just left me with viewer's droop.

Not as much as My New Best Friend (BBC Four), though, a new series about children making the transition from primary school to secondary school that, on the evidence of the first episode, could successfully be marketed as an aid for insomniacs. I can't work out why this is, because there's nothing inherently dull about the lives of children and the subject here – the fraught diplomacy of playground relationships – is a perfectly good one. It proved to be a very long haul, even so. This first episode followed Daisy, Nanae, Annabelle and Lydia, four girls taking up places at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and there was the odd flicker of class tourism in watching them pack their tuckboxes and trunks for the start of term. Of cousre, friendship is hard enough without the distorting prism of boarding school. Cliques, isolation and homesickness all affected the girls in different ways. Lydia had the most circumspect approach – “You don’t want to become someone’s personal stalker”. Daisy felt betrayed when her first close friend started to ignore her. Nan felt only a “semi-Cheltenham girl” because she was a day pupil. Why their friendships flamed into life, burnt brightly, then died the girls couldn’t express – but all seemed privileged and confident so it will probably all work out.

The real problem, as any parent will know, is that 12-year-olds aren't very forthcoming when questioned by adults about their inner feelings. "What does making really good friends mean?" one girl was asked. "I know them a bit more than I did and I play with them a lot," she answered, less than enthrallingly. "And how do you sort things out when things go wrong?" the off-camera voice inquired of another. "Well, in the end we just do, I can't really explain it," she said. I suspect that if they'd left the camera and removed the grown-up from the room – as video-diary films have successfully done with children in the past – they'd have ended up with something a lot more satisfactory. Someone we assumed to be the headmistress said at assembly that she wanted her girls to learn the value of “compassion and tolerance”. The Apprentice contestants must have missed that assembly.

In the original, US-based version of The Apprentice (BBC1), Donald Trump is in charge; one writer said he was playing the part of God. In our version, Alan Sugar plays the part, not of God, but of money - or possibly mammon. Here, Sugar is money. Everybody wants to know where he is, what governs him, and how to get as much of him as possible. Like money, he is ruthless, judgmental and, in the end, incomprehensible. If money could speak, it would speak with Sir Alan's sneering finality. If Big Brother reflects, and condenses, the world of slackers, The Apprentice does the same thing for aspirational people. And it turns out, of course, that these business-heads, with all their sharpness and life-skills, are just as hollow as the contestants on all the other reality shows. I say, of course, because that's the point of reality shows - they are anti-talent contests. Is there one for aspiring politicians? If not, there should be.

We are just over halfway through the series now, so we're down to the serious contestants - human beings who want, above anything else, to turn themselves into money. This week's show concerned tissues - the task was to create a brand of nose-wipes, and make that reliable source of Apprentice hubris, the TV advert. The fact that the product was anti-bacterial tissues might have struck some people as a bit unsexy – but not Raef. As project manager of his team, he excitedly greeted Claire Young’s suggested brand name of “I Love My Tissues” as “fun, all-embracing and slightly cheeky”. His main interest, though, clearly lay in directing the advert itself. After all, he’d done some amateur dramatics in the past. He and Michael reminisced about their love of performance and musical theatre: “I played Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Raef said to which Michael offered a few bars of Fagin: “Can a fella be a villain all his life?” From not knowing what a kosher chicken was, Sophocles celebrated “one of the great Jewish characters”.

Raef's first decision was to cast weather forecaster Siân Lloyd- principally known for losing her freaky MP boyfriend to a Cheeky Girl- as the mother of a small boy who, once his own nose had been safely wiped, would later give a tissue to a little girl crying on a school bench. How he knew the process of booking celebs was one of those gaps you occasionally get in the Apprentice narrative, but here the real mystery was why he’d booked this one. Certainly, Siân was baffled – what with her not being a mother, and the advert having nothing weather-related about it. “They’re using me for my acting skills, not my weather symbols,” she noted. But the boys didn’t care. Raef and Michael were happiest wiping yoghurt off each other’s noses.

Lucinda, wearing another killer beret, wound up Alex (the other project leader) and Lee by suggesting they shoot a gay-themed advert for their tissue, “Atishu”. The two men whinged they would never buy a tissue if gays advertised it. Despite Lee (his “That’s what I’m talking about” was in abeyance) pleading for the team to unite, Lucinda scolded Alex, the ineffectual heart-throb, with a “Naughty naughty naughty” when he offended her. She couldn’t understand why they had put a picture of a woman blowing her nose on the cover of their box of tissues. “It’s quali-eeeeeeeee,” Lee replied.

In the meantime, Raef had soon disappeared into some sort of a parallel universe in which he was a major film director. Strangely, he didn’t opt for jodhpurs and a riding crop, but he did stalk about dispensing lordly advice on the whole business of film-making. “When you’re dealing with children, it’s about simplifying,” he explained. “In the bench scene, everything is done through gestures.” Admittedly, Michael’s sense of proportion wasn’t much more developed. (“Plenty of passion,” he urged Siân before she went for her crucial piece of maternal nose-wiping.) Nonetheless, as project manager, it was surely Raef’s fault that in the final ad, you couldn’t tell that the mother was Siân Lloyd – or what product was being advertised. Raef said he was aiming for a “nonWoody, DiCaprio-esque” style, focusing “on gesture and action”, while Lee, Lucinda and Alex oversaw a hideously wooden family trio (scary dad, singsongy mum, devil child with runny nose). Lee delivered a thuggy presentation to a group of advertising experts about “Atishu” being aimed at something called the “female genre” and “the muvvver communiii-eeee”.

For a long time, I thought Raef's team would cruise it, because they had more taste. But I should have known better. The Apprentice is not about taste. It's about money. And that's why this show always has the capacity to surprise the viewer. As a stage villain, money is never predictable. It's always more diabolical than you thought it was. The winning team came up with a surprisingly plausible name for their product and then crafted a pack and a pitch that were so awful they made you want to crawl under a table. Raef, however, decided to let his inner luvvie out to play and went all theatrical, copywriting a touching little vignette of school-day tenderness in a baffling attempt to arouse feelings of attachment towards a product entirely defined by its disposability. Raef's advert could be watched without involuntary grimacing, but he'd forgotten that its purpose was not to get him a place at film school but to make money. He opted for the soft sell while his rivals chose the hard- garish packet and garish name. Fatally, he had forgotten that when it comes to marketing thrust, Sir Alan is a grade-four cucumber man all the way – tofu just won't cut it.

Their adverts may have been more garish, the other team’s more stylish, but as Sir Alan exploded at Raef and co (calm down dear!): “I do not know what your bloody advert is about!” To Lucinda, Lee and Alex: “You won! Your horrible ad, your horrible box threw it in people’s faces!” After Sir Alan had pointed this out, Raef bravely vowed to blame nobody but himself. He then blamed everybody but himself – including the entire modern world, with its mad insistence that adverts should advertise things. “If that’s what advertising’s about these days,” he lamented, in a manner reminiscent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, “then God help us.” Later, when he was summing up, it was great to hear Sir Alan utter the words "Cheeky Girl"; this is a show that feeds the tabloids, and is, in turn, sustained by tabloid cruelty.

Raef tried to raise the tone of the final boardroom: he was determined it would not degenerate into a back-stabbing bearpit. Some hope. Snake Sophocles said that “everything good about the ad came from me”. The one very small part of me that still likes him does so for his unself-conscious way of calling people “dum dums”. Still, Sir Alan is a fan despite his mounting calumnies. Raef was too posh, too elegant and, according to the Gnome on High, full of “hot air”. This wasn’t true (all available evidence seems to suggest he is just kind and decent) and so not for the first time Sir Alan fired the wrong person. Despite being barbecued by Snake Sophocles, Raef said they were still friends.

So yet again, we sat back and saw capitalism in action. This was our system laid bare. This, I kept thinking, is what people do. Worse, this is what people aspire to do. In a way, The Apprentice gives us a clearer view of what the world is like than anything else on television. Here, the teams talked less about the tissues, and more about the boxes the tissues came in - the whole problem of capitalism, in a nutshell. Still, looking on the bright side, maybe Raef has gone off being a businessman anyway. As he’d said while cocking up a 30-second commercial for his bacterial tissues, “after doing this, I want to get into movies.” Raef: buy a Biggles flying scarf and keep The Quiff.

Meanwhile, over on Channel 4, another old TV favourite is also going from strength to strength. In last night’s Desperate Housewives, a tornado blew through Wisteria Lane – and this time it wasn’t metaphorical. No less uniquely, Mary Alice’s opening voice-over actually added to the action. With its usual mixture of lugubriousness and glee, it told us that the tornado was on the way – and that by the end of the day, one of the four main women would have lost a husband. Once we knew this, the ever-sparkling dialogue suddenly had a darker undertow, and the programme as a whole became an impressively teasing thriller. (Not so much a whodunit as a whowoulditbedunto.)

In fact, the CGI tornado that eventually showed up proved about as convincing as the supposed baby Bree (Marcia Cross) carries around. At first too, it seemed to have resulted in far too convenient a disaster. For one thing, the husband who died was only Victor (John Slattery) who received a white picket through his black heart. For another, impending catastrophe neatly managed to make friends of the most unlikely people – up to and including Bree and Katherine (Dana Delaney). But that was all before Lynette (Felicity Huffman) emerged from her own hiding place, saw that the house sheltering her family had been demolished and let out perhaps the best scream of horror in recent television. (Cue, needless to say, the closing credits.)

Sean Bean and Sam Neill to star in Crusoe series

2008-05-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Sam Neill and Sean Bean are to feature in a big-budget production of the Robinson Crusoe story being made by a UK independent producer for US network NBC. Crusoe is to be played by Philip Winchester, who featured in the 2004 movie remake of Thunderbirds, while the role of Friday, his companion on the desert island, is yet to be cast. Flashbacks of Crusoe's life are interwoven with the action, with Bean playing his father James, Neill playing family friend Jeremiah Blackthorn, and Anna Walton playing his love interest Susannah. Joss Ackland will appear in one episode in the role of Judge Jeffries.

The series, written by Stephen Gallagher and directed by Duane Clark, follows the swashbuckling adventures of the two island dwellers as they contend with marauding militias, hungry cannibals, wild cats, starvation and lightning storms. NBC's Crusoe is the first TV remake of the Daniel Defoe novel since the 1964 French children's drama series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was repeated on UK TV during summer holidays for many years.

Power, the show's UK producer, claims this is the first time a US network has directly commissioned a British supplier for nearly 40 years. The producer is currently looking for UK distribution for the series, which will screen in the US next year and has also been sold to other territories including Canada.

Crusoe has a production budget for 13 one-hour episodes of $25m (£13m) and the Power chief executive, Justin Bodle, has promised "a landmark piece of event television" and a "new take on an old favourite".

The series is currently filming in the UK and the production will soon move on location in South Africa and the Seychelles. Executive producers are Justin Bodle for Power, Michael Prupas for Muse and Genevieve Hofmeyr for Moonlighting. Previous productions by Power, which was founded in 1995, include Flood, The Virgin Queen and Casanova.

ITV hopes for £10m Euro final payday

2008-05-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

ITV could make more than £10m in ad revenue from tonight's all-English Champions League final, with major brands flocking to the event - including Ford, which is launching a $60m (£30m) pan-European TV campaign. Huge interest in the first all-English final, between Manchester United and Chelsea, has led ITV to speculate that viewer numbers could hit 13 million across around two hours of live coverage.

The broadcaster has lined up an array of top-flight advertisers for the final including Nike, Heineken and Audi - as well as some more unusual names, such as BlackBerry, which is thought to be running its first TV campaign in the UK. Ford Europe is using the event to launch a TV campaign, created by Ogilvy Advertising in London and Stockholm, to launch the four-wheel drive "crossover" car Kuga, which will compete against models such as Toyota's Rav4. The car manufacturer, which is launching the multimedia campaign across 21 markets, is committing around £30m to the campaign, around £6m of that in the UK market.

ITV will make close to £9m from TV advertising during the final, and more than £10m if the match goes to extra time and penalties, according to Havas-owned media agency MPG. The advertising bonanza compares with between £2m and £3m in ad revenue for a typical Wednesday night schedule and between £3m and £4m for a Champions League final with no British presence, said MPG.

Advertisers have been flocking to book Champions League final ad spots, which have rocketed in price from between £100,000 and £150,000 for a 30-second slot in a final with no UK teams involved to as much as £250,000 for tonight's match. "On top of a hugely valuable football fan demographic, this type of event gets people watching who are not heavy TV viewers. It is a unique opportunity," said Gary Digby, the customer relations director at ITV. "The market will pay what it will pay. We have sold out so they [the ads] are at a price the market thinks is sensible."

Digby added that the contest could easily crack a live match average of 13 million viewers because of the presence of United - which attracts more viewers than other top-flight English clubs - particularly if the match went to extra time. United's last-gasp 2-1 victory in the 1999 Champions League final attracted a peak audience of 19 million viewers.

Ford's TV ad opens with a woman waking up and running outside to find that an entire city has been covered over - from street level to the tops of buildings - as a giant white canvas. The ad states: "We keep following the same old design rules. Imagine if we could start again with a blank canvas." It finishes with a Ford Kuga rolling through the "white-out" of the city.

Ogilvy Advertising used 53,475 sq ft of artist's canvas, most of which was recycled after the shoot. The commercial was directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, who was also responsible for the Guinness "Tipping Point" and Sony "Balls" ads. Ogilvy Advertising estimates that Ford's ad will reach an audience of around 360 million across Europe when it airs during the final. Ford used last year's Champions League final to launch the "Balloons" TV ad to promote the launch of its new Mondeo model.

Last year's final, which saw Liverpool lose 2-1 to AC Milan, attracted a peak audience of 10.1 million viewers and a live match average of 9.5 million. The 2006 final, which saw Arsenal lose 2-1 to Barcelona, drew a peak audience of 12.2 million viewers and a live match average of 11.2 million. And Liverpool's epic 2005 win over AC Milan after extra time and penalties saw an average of 10.8 million viewers and a peak audience of 14.6 million.

Defective memories

2008-05-21T05:48:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: The Supersizers Go... Wartime; One Life Special: Mum And Me

In The Supersizers Go… Wartime Sue Perkins and Giles Coren began their new series about six historical British diets with an episode set in 1940-45, when, it was usefully explained, “Britain was at war”. This exploration of the nation's wartime diet contained some interesting details. Mock duck, for instance, was made of sausage meat, grated apple and sage, ersatz coffee comprised roasted chicory and dandelions and cooks apparently used paraffin in cakes. It also contained some highly dubious ones, such as that Spam, of which Britain imported 45,000 tonnes, was made by throwing “a whole pig in a blender”, and that Churchill ate and drank “like a lord, which, of course, he was”. Another surprise was how healthy it was. By the end of the week, the pair were significantly fitter than when they started. Perkins, already a willow, had lost two pounds, and Coren three and a half. Which is surprising, considering he stuffed himself in style at a Churchillian lunch in the war rooms under Whitehall. Then again, less surprising remembering he threw up after the cigar.

Before last night’s programme, I hadn’t realised that the officially-imposed wartime diet served two purposes: not just to ration food, but also to build a population that would indeed be able to fight (rather than simply waddle about) on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills. In this, not much was left to chance. We were told it was illegal not to eat everything on your plate, however unappetising. Every morning, the Minister of Food would address “the kitchen front” on the wireless – and his message was driven home by adverts featuring such characters as Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot. So wartime food was fairly shared and pretty good for you. You couldn't complain, as opposed, say, to the inhabitants of Rouen, besieged by Henry V: "They ate doggys, they ate cattys, they ate mysse, horses and rattys." Dedicated meat eaters, the French, while the British wartime diet was largely vegetarian. And almost completely tasteless.

Thank god for the British Empire. The Canadians would sent endless parcels of tinned salmon. Tasmania sent cakes so stuffed with fruit that the cake crumbs had to fight for breathing space. Soldiers from Burma brought chocolate, bleached curiously white in the sun. South Africa sent snoek. This was a fish too far. The battle-hardened nation set its face like stone against snoek in any shape or flaming form. Hence this vignette of Sue and Giles at home.

She (talking rather fast): "It is the most extraordinary thing I've ever created. You'll be mesmerised. It's an unspeakable delight."

He (flatly): "It's snoek again, isn't it?"

The story of snoek proves that just because the Ministry of Food worked itself up into a fine froth of enthusiasm, it does not follow that anyone paid any attention. The programme seemed to have swallowed some Ministry of Food propaganda whole. I refuse to believe that anyone cut up stale bread to make Wheatie Bangs (unless you mean bread and milk, a bedtime snack favoured by old dears). Show me a single case of anyone being sent to prison for failing to clear their plate. If that had been so, why were there malodorous pig bins in most streets, designed to take leftover food? Potato sandwiches, cake made with liquid paraffin - are you insane? In a recent issue of the Radio Times, Coren complained: "In the wartime programme we had these old dears in a pub singalong and we had jam jars to drink beer out of and they were saying [assumes old dear voice] 'Oh no, dearie, we never done that!' ... And I was going: 'Well you have done that. We've seen the pictures.' But you can't really use the footage when it's just someone grumbling that you've got it wrong."

In keeping with the demands of our own times, Coren and Perkins were required to dress up in period costume, provide an endless stream of amusing banter and generally put themselves centre-stage. Now and again, their preference for bad jokes over no jokes at all created an unfortunate sense that they were mocking the people of the Forties. Occasionally too, the programme teetered close to caricature. (Surely there must have been some spivs who didn’t dress in wide-lapelled suits and trilbies – and perhaps the odd GI who didn’t come complete with nylons and pineapple chunks.) Then there was the Vision On antics which the director Hugo MacGregor made them perform: mock broom fights, a session in the Home Guard, a pitiful attempt to humiliate some airmen from a US airbase with a laxative-laced cake. As a relative used to say to me, the pair behaved like children of much younger years.

Still if you could ignore the annoying bits, the overall result did painlessly – and sometimes even entertainingly – teach us quite a lot about the wartime diet. Allegra McEvedy had come in to cook for them, scrambling dried eggs and making them a woolton pie, which contained more vegetables than the Sargerson's probably ate in a year. Her chief triumph, though, was an entire dinner of ersatz recipes, including mock duck, mock apricot tart with mock cream and the disgusting-sounding mock crab, which was made out of margarine, dried eggs, vinegar, cheese and salad cream and seemed very likely to result in authentic vomit. "You know when you rock that it's not really a good sign," said Perkins, teetering queasily in her chair after popping a freshly steamed garden snail into her mouth and discovering that it had a bit more crunch than she'd expected. Sadly, they didn't attempt the recipe for baked hedgehog.

It was also a nice idea for Coren to take a break from rationing to sample a typical dinner as eaten by Winston Churchill in the Cabinet War Rooms. The lunch menu, dated 1942, read: native oysters, petite marmite, venison, ice cream and raspberries, Stilton, fruit and nuts, Pol Roger, chardonnay, claret, port, cognac, cigars. Andrew Roberts, a historian there to testify to Churchill's capacity for champagne, mounted a heroic defence of the wine list, working up to a Churchillian crescendo. "My view - and I think the general one - is that if Winston Churchill during the second world war didn't have the right to drink 1870 brandy, then who the hell in history ever had that right?" Having emerged on the other side of the feast Coren duly pronounced himself “trolleyed”. The general view in most boozers at the time, when Churchill called on us to fight on the beaches, was that he'd been at the bottle again. It was partly the combative content and partly his characteristic slurred delivery. It never occurred to me until now that they might have be right.

Nowadays many TV cooking programmes seem to me merely masturbatory. Celebrity chefs play with their food. Dishes, described as witty and sexy, are an exercise in tickling tastebuds and nothing to do with nourishment. In belt-tightening times - and they come and go - food is not funny. Morgan Spurlock, incidentally, should consider a breach of copyright action.

Sue Bourne’s last television film was My Street, in which she had the brilliantly simple idea of finding out about her own neighbours. In Mum and Me (BBC1), she moved even closer to home, by tackling her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. “The dead don't care” is a viable justification for saying what you want - especially the truth - about someone no longer with you. But what if the someone no longer with you, at the same time, still is? Do the Alzheimec care? Bourne must at some level have thought they did. For she showed her mother her film before BBC One showed it to us as a One Life Special. Whether Ethel Bourne, the mum and Alzheimer's victim in question, had the power of veto is not clear.

"I wanted to make a film that was jolly and uplifting about Alzheimer's," said Bourne. Yes, well, we can file that one alongside the laugh-a-minute account of terminal bowel cancer and the crack-'em-up account of 9/11, I thought, but oddly enough she very nearly managed it, helped towards her unlikely goal by the bracketing generations of her own family. Her daughter, Holly, got a joint credit, for holding the camera and coming along on many of the filming trips, but it was her mother who did the real donkey work, being possessed of a sudden, eruptive laugh that could take the chill off even the most melancholy scene. "That's not your dad," said an exasperated Sue, after Ethel had failed to identify a dashing figure in a bedside photograph, "that's your bloody husband, Mum, that you were married to for 49 years." "Oh," replied Ethel, "that's why he's so familiar." And then she doubled up in hilarity at her own moth-eaten memory.

So we began with the scene in which Ethel sat down to view the completed film and ended with one in which she pronounced the documentary admirable, and assured her daughter that there was nothing she wanted removed from it. It was a way of incorporating a release form into the fabric of the film itself, and if it occurred to you that an Alzheimer's patient might not really be in any condition to give informed consent, it occurred not long after that she wouldn't remember any indignity for very long anyway. This couldn't entirely remove the discomfort from some humiliatingly intimate scenes – in which Ethel wet herself and had to be cleaned up in front of camera – but it's hard to see how the film could have given a true account of the sorrows of Alzheimer's without them. And the fact that Sue and Ethel chuckled away together in the middle of replacing a soiled incontinence pad proved that there were very few ordeals that couldn't be softened by a little laughter.

It wasn't all fun. Ethel became tetchy and distressed when her daughter mentioned that her care- home bedroom was beginning to smell a little. "It's really quite devastating to be called a smelly old bitch," she snapped, a sense of injured dignity rearing up suddenly. And Sue included a nasty bickering row with her mother after a weekend break had given both of them a little too much of each other's company. But there was something very touching about the relationship of all three women in the better times, loving enough to bear the exchange of remarks that would have been insults in any other context but here came across as shared jokes. "Lots of people love you, Mum," Sue insisted after her mother had complained of her isolation, "they just don't want you to come and stay." Ethel roared.

There were, of couse, plenty of questions thrown up by the film, which was as horribly gripping as it was amateurishly filmed. Many of them concerned the illness itself. Why could Ethel securely lock on to the fact that Holly was her granddaughter but not that Sue was her daughter? Did Ethel really, as she claimed, live for Sue's monthly visits to her care home in Ayrshire or did she in fact live in a continual, unreflecting present? Most of all, you wanted to know if the disease had limited not just her memory (she even forgot how to blow her nose) but her emotional range. Every time Sue visited, Ethel greeted her with smiles and laughter, except once when the laughter turned to sobs. Sometimes laughter is not the best medicine, merely the best hiding place.

A subsidiary question is why Sue made the film, and I fear that the answer can only be that a documentary-maker is as greedy for material as any other artist or journalist. The three-year project also, presumably, made the Scottish visits less boring. To her credit, Sue was as ruthlessly clear-eyed about herself as she was about her mother. It would have been easy for her to have left out the moment she turned on her mother and called her stupid. The film was a lot about her. When she had a mastectomy she could not tell her mother for fear of worrying her. She missed that. A parent is a parent even when you have to parent them. Together, these women failed to make a jolly and uplifting film about Alzheimer's. They made something richer. Which just leaves the traditional question of whether the exercise was intrusive. My answer, I’m afraid, would be “sometimes” – especially when we got to see Ethel’s incontinence in such unsparing detail. Certainly, I suspect I can’t be the only viewer who finished the programme hoping that, if I ever end up like Ethel, none of the children in my family has grown up to become a film-maker.

RDF profits hit by Crowngate affair

2008-05-20T15:27:00.001-07:00

RDF Media, the independent producer behind Wife Swap, has reported a dramatic fall in profits in its first full year set of financial results since the Crowngate affair last summer. Profit before tax for the year ended January 31, 2008 was £2m - two-thirds less than the £6.2m profit figure for RDF's previous financial year.

Both ITV and the BBC slapped a commissioning freeze on RDF for a period after it emerged in July last year that promotional footage for a BBC documentary about the Queen had been misleadingly edited. The promo clip, shown to journalists at a BBC1 programme launch, appeared to show the Queen storming out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz but in fact she had been walking in.

Stephen Lambert, the RDF creative director, accepted responsibility for the misleadingly edited footage and resigned. The BBC1 controller, Peter Fincham, also resigned over the Crowngate affair.

Richard Eyre, the RDF chairman, said the company's strong performance in the US had helped offset the lost business in the UK last year. "It would be an understatement to say that the events of the summer have cast a shadow over the full-year performance," Eyre added. "However, I am pleased to report that overall group revenues rose 21.5% to £120.6m. Year-on-year UK production revenues were effectively flat for well documented reasons, but US production revenues posted a 93.2% increase, early justification for our investment in this division."

ITV ended its commissioning freeze in November and the BBC in March and the company has been hired to produce 100 episodes of Way to Blue, a pre-school children's series for digital channel CBeebies to be broadcast in 2009.

Gross profit was up 16% to £35.5m, including a 104% rise in US gross profit and a 100% rise in gross profit from exploitation of intellectual property - a key part of RDF's growth strategy. However, margins fell because of higher operating costs, with overheads increasing year on year by 29% to £26m.

The company said it had expanded its sales and acquisition teams and invested in infrastructure ahead of growth that did not occur because of the Crowngate commissioning hiatus in the UK. Gross margin in the UK content division fell year on year from 27% to 22%, while gross profit margin in the rights division was 24%, down from 29% the year before.

Last month it emerged that a consortium including RDF founder David Frank and other members of the company's senior management team had made a buyout offer to the board, though analysts have warned shareholders would be unlikely to accept an offer below the 144p a share at which the company was floated. An RDF spokeswoman said today there was no further news on the buyout offer.

RDF shares, which are traded on AIM, were worth as much as 250p before the Crowngate affair but fell to a year low of 94.5p. The shares have rallied since the buyout offer emerged and yesterday closed at 127.5p.

BBC News in second pictures blunder as war breaks out over Asian coverage

2008-05-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

The ITV News editor-in-chief, David Mannion, has criticised the response of the BBC and Sky News to the two Asian natural disasters, while the BBC has accused Sky News of allegedly "misleading" viewers with its coverage of the Burmese cyclone. The outbreak of bickering between the three major UK television news providers over their coverage of the cyclone in Burma and the Chinese earthquake may be a sign that the competitive pressures in covering the two disasters in difficult conditions are starting to show.

TV news budgets are also being strained by the two Asian disasters, together with the longer than expected US Democratic presidential primary process, and recent crises in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, with warnings that smaller stories later in the year might suffer as a result. In an internal staff email, veteran news executive Mannion said ITV News' coverage of the Chinese earthquake had "comprehensively" beaten the BBC, while the corporation and Sky News had been left "floundering" in covering the Burmese cyclone.

"The brilliant and rapid reactions of the foreign desk coupled by the extraordinary endeavour and bravery of the team in Burma left not only the BBC and Sky floundering; it produced the only first-hand television account of events in that closed country," he added. "Once again we comprehensively beat the BBC [on the Chinese earthquake], despite their huge resources and the numbers they have in Beijing. Sky too were unable to match us for both speed of response and quality of work. Our partner news broadcasters around the world have been fulsome in their praise, as has ITV's new programme boss Peter Fincham."

ITV News correspondent Neil Connery reported from inside Burma from May 7 to last Thursday, May 15, when he flew to Bangkok. The broadcaster's China correspondent, John Ray, and his team are reporting on the earthquake. The international editor, Bill Neely, and his crew are also in China for ITV News, which is supplied by ITN.

However, the BBC's world news editor, Jon Williams, refuted Mannion's allegations, although he also praised ITV's coverage. "I wouldn't say we have been floundering. I am quite happy with what we have done," Williams said. "We were in Burma before ITV got there, but their coverage has been nothing less than impressive. It is that sense of competition that is good for the audience," he added.

However, sources say that questions have been raised internally within the BBC over its coverage of the disasters, although a spokesman denied this amounted to any sort of formal review. "We assess coverage every day, but this does not equate to a review," he said. The BBC has also been stymied by having two of its correspondents - Andrew Harding and Paul Danahar - deported by the Burmese authorities.

An on-air apology also had to be issued by the BBC on Friday after it mistakenly used a still photograph of the 2004 Asian tsunami before a report about the Burmese cyclone during Thursday night's 10pm news on BBC1. The BBC spokesman said the corporation currently had "small undercover teams" in Burma, while in China its Beijing bureau team - James Reynolds, Michael Bristow, Dan Griffiths and Paul Danahar - has been covering the earthquake. Williams said he wanted to get more people into both Burma and China but visa restrictions meant it was difficult.

Meanwhile, on the BBC news website's editors' blog, Williams also seemed to criticise Sky News for some of its coverage of the Burmese cyclone. "A number of reporters are also operating inside Burma. But don't believe everything you see on television!" he wrote. "While the BBC and most other UK broadcasters are reporting from Rangoon or the Irrawaddy delta, this weekend one news channel set foot across the Thai border, many hundreds of miles away from the areas worst hit by the cyclone, and claimed to be reporting from 'inside Burma'," Williams added. "It's not a lie - but it is misleading. Burma is a big place - 'day-trippers' are allowed to go to some tourist parts of the country. But it doesn't equip those who travel there to comment on what's going on elsewhere. The truth is not always as it appears."

A BBC source later confirmed that Williams was referring to a Sky News report on May 10. A Sky spokeswoman declined to comment on Williams's allegation. But she said the broadcaster was covering the two disasters with two correspondents in China - Peter Sharp and David Bowden - while it also had a reporter and producer on the ground in Burma, although she declined to name them for security reasons.

The costs of covering the two disasters are putting strains on the budgets of all the UK's main news broadcasters. "This stuff is expensive, but that is the business we are in," Williams said. "We are not not spending money, we are throwing money at these stories. If we have to make some difficult choices later in the year about the smaller stories that is an issue we will return to."

In other news, the BBC today admitted that a factory making Adolf Hitler dolls that it told viewers was part of the rise of Neo-Nazism in the Ukraine was actually located in Taiwan. The BBC has apologised for the mistake, which it broadcast on television and online on April 23.

It is the second BBC apology over an inaccuracy in one of its news broadcasts in four days. The corporation admitted that the item about a Ukrainian manufacturer producing dolls of Adolf Hitler and a rise in neo-Nazism in the country contained a "factual error". Following complaints, the BBC launched an investigation and found that the dolls were actually made in Taiwan while it said a contributor interviewed in the piece who claimed that the policies of Ukrainian leaders were contributing to a revival of neo-Nazism in the country should also have been challenged.

The BBC said the pictures came from a Russian television station "via a trusted agency route", but that they had not been scrutinised properly. "When the BBC takes material from other broadcasters it is subject to scrutiny under the BBC's editorial guidelines," a spokeswoman said. "However on this occasion a potentially controversial story was not subjected to the required rigorous examination. After complaints were received we investigated the item and immediately decided not to run it again on television and to remove it from the website. We shall be looking at what lessons can be learnt from this episode and applying them as a matter of urgency. We regret that some of our viewers were upset by the item and felt it was not up to the BBC's high standards."

The editor of BBC Breakfast Alison Ford, writing on the BBC news editors' blog, added: "We apologised to those people who had told us they were offended by the piece, and of course we're happy to repeat that apology publicly." The piece ran on the BBC News channel in the UK and international rolling news service BBC World.

The acknowledgement of a new mistake follows the on-air apology the BBC made on Friday after it broadcast a picture the previous day which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Peter Horrocks, the head of the newly created BBC multimedia newsroom, said the corporation would review its processes for checking pictures it received following the incident.

BBC reveal two new dramas

2008-05-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Atonement actor Gina McKee and Jeremy Northam, who was last seen in The Tudors, have signed up for BBC1's hard-hitting drama about a family torn apart when the husband downloads child pornography. Fiona's Story, which has echoes of the case involving The Thick of It actor Chris Langham, is based on "extensive research", according to the BBC.

McKee, who has also appeared in The Street and Tsunami, will play a mother who battles to keep her family together after her husband, played by Northam, who also starred in Gosford Park, is accused of downloading indecent images of children. The 90-minute one-off programme, being made by BBC Scotland, has been written by the newcomer Kate Gabriel. Fiona's Story will be produced by He Kills Coppers' David Boulter and executive produced by Matthew Read.

Filming begins today in Glasgow for four weeks, with broadcast expected at the end of the year or early 2009. Anne Mensah, the head of drama for BBC Scotland, said: "Fiona's Story is an amazing piece of writing. It has an emotional intensity at its heart which captivates everyone who reads the script." Boulter added: "Fiona's Story is the heartbreaking tale of a marriage breaking down. Its power lies in writer Kate Gabriel's original voice, which has attracted top-level talent across the board."

Langham served three months in prison last year after being found guilty of 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children.

Elsewhere, the BBC has confirmed that it is also developing a biographical drama based on the life of the legendary Daily Mirror journalist Marje Proops. The as-yet-uncast drama is likely to be aired on BBC4 if it gets the green light and is understood to be an in-house BBC drama production.

Proops' own autobiography, her 1975 book Pride, Prejudice and Proops (Time Remembered), is likely to provide source material for the script, which is still in development. The drama is also expected to rely on information contained in Angela Patmore's 1992 biography of the journalist, which claimed that she had a long-standing love affair while married to Sidney Proops.

Proops became a journalist in 1939 and joined the Daily Mirror as a fashion journalist. She later became famous for writing the Dear Marje advice column for the paper, which was accompanied by a trademark photograph of her clenching a pen between her teeth. She was made an OBE in 1969 and continued writing her Mirror column until her death at the age of 85.

The development of the drama follows a successful run of one-off autobiographical dramas on BBC4. BBC4's biopics, which aired in a season called The Curse of Comedy, examined the lives of figures including the entertainer Hughie Green, who was played by Trevor Eve, and another about Tony Hancock, who was played by Ken Stott. Another about comedian Frankie Howerd starred David Walliams as the comedy actor, while a fourth examined the troubled relationship between Steptoe and Son actors Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, who were played by Jason Isaacs and Phil Davis respectively.

A BBC spokeswoman confirmed that the Marje Proops project was in development.

White House accuses NBC of misrepresentation

2008-05-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

The White House today accused NBC news of twisting George Bush's remarks on Iran and suggested that the television network had absorbed the bias of two of its star pundits. The rare presidential condemnation of a news network comes days after Barack Obama lashed back at Bush for likening negotiations with US opponents in the Middle East to the appeasement of Hitler.

During an interview aired today on the network, NBC correspondent Richard Engel asked Bush whether the remarks were aimed at Obama. "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has," Bush said. "People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said is that we need to take the words of people seriously." But NBC cut the programme to show only the first sentence of Bush's response, adding an introduction that said the president got a "cold reception" from Arab leaders after making his Iran remarks in Israel.

Senior Bush aide Ed Gillespie, in a letter to the NBC news president, called the editing "deceitful," "misleading" and "irresponsible". "NBC's selective editing of the president's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterisation of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it," Gillespie wrote.

Gillespie reached back two years for further criticism of NBC news, questioning the network's decision to begin referring to the conflict in Iraq as a "civil war". The decision was viewed as the harbinger of widespread opposition to the war in the American public. "As you know, both the United States government and the government of Iraq disputed your account at that time," Gillespie wrote to NBC.

The Bush aide also targeted the network for reporting last month that government economic indicators show the US "just short of" an official recession. Gillespie defended the White House economic policy and cited a US unemployment rate lower than the historical average. In fact, unemployment numbers reflect only workers who are actively seeking a job. Other economic data show that employment for men ages 25 to 54 is at its lowest rate since World War Two, suggesting that a growing number may be forced out of the job market entirely.

Conservatives in the US have long frowned on what they consider a liberal bias at NBC, singling out the network's cable TV pundit Keith Olbermann for his fiery tirades against the Bush administration. Olbermann has escalated his years-long feud with Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly in recent weeks, with O'Reilly accusing NBC of supporting the Iranian government. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch has personally intervened to protect O'Reilly, the Washington Post reported today.

Gillespie appeared today to bring the White House into the row, personally referencing Olbermann and another NBC host in his letter. "I welcome your response … and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network's viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division," Gillespie wrote.

NBC news did not immediately return a request for comment on the White House letter.

Moffat named Doctor Who supremo

2008-05-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Scriptwriter Steven Moffat was today named lead writer and executive producer on hit BBC1 drama Doctor Who.Moffat, who has written a number of episodes of the show - including the acclaimed 'Blink' episode which won him the writer prize at this year's Bafta Craft Awards - will replace Russell T Davies. Davies, the key creative figure behind the Doctor Who revival in 2005, stands down next year.

The appointment makes Moffat Doctor Who's showrunner - the key creative force behind the programme - on the fifth series, which will be broadcast on BBC1 in 2010. As well as 'Blink', his previous work on Doctor Who includes 'The Girl in the Fireplace' for series two which earned him his second Hugo Award. His first was for the series one two-parter 'The Empty Child'. Davies said: "It's been a delight and an honour working with Steven, and I can't wait to see where his extraordinary imagination takes the Doctor. Best of all, I get to be a viewer again, watching on a Saturday night!"

For the current series, Moffat has written 'Silence in the Library', a two-parter starring Alex Kingston that transmits later this month on BBC1. Moffat said: "My entire career has been a secret plan to get this job. I applied before but I got knocked back because the BBC wanted someone else. Also I was seven. Anyway, I'm glad the BBC has finally seen the light, and it's a huge honour to be following Russell into the best - and the toughest - job in television."

Davies and Julie Gardner, the BBC Wales head of drama, have worked on the fourth series of Doctor Who and are working on four specials for broadcast in 2009. In 2009 BBC Wales, which makes Doctor Who, will also have a new head of drama when producer Piers Wenger takes over from Gardner.

The BBC fiction controller, Jane Tranter, said: "The Tardis couldn't be in safer hands. Steven's talents on both Doctor Who and beyond are well known. He is a writer of glittering brilliance, comedy and depth, with an extraordinary imagination and a unique voice. Steven has a wonderful mix of being a committed Doctor Who fan and a true artist, and his plans for the next series are totally thrilling."

Steven Moffat's professional television career began in 1989 as a writer of all 43 episodes, over five series, of the fondly remembered ITV children's drama Press Gang, starring Julia Sawalha and Dexter Fletcher. He won his first Bafta for the show, for best children's programme.

The writer, who was born in 1961, went on to write two BBC sitcoms, the first of which, Joking Apart, was about a breakdown of a couple's relationship. It starred Robert Bathurst and Fiona Gillies and drew on Moffat's own experiences around the break up of his first marriage. He joked afterwards that the series "lasted longer" than his actual marriage. Moffat also wrote Chalk in 1997, which was set in a school and starred David Bamber as headteacher Eric Slatt. The BBC1 comedy drew on Moffat's early life as an English teacher.

However, it was with BBC2 sitcom Coupling, produced by his second wife Sue Vertue and broadcast from 2000, that Moffat's career really moved into another gear. The show, featuring an ensemble cast including Jack Davenport, Sarah Alexander and Gina Bellman, dealt with the ups and downs of the love lives of a group of young single friends. Coupling ran for four series and won a best TV comedy prize at the British Comedy Awards. NBC commissioned a US version, but it was axed after only three episodes – a failure Moffat blamed loudly and publicly on the network for meddling with the creative team behind the show.

More recent work includes the six-part thriller Jekyll, starring James Nesbitt and Michelle Ryan, which was shown on BBC1 last year.

On Doctor Who, Moffat has penned some of the series' most critically acclaimed episodes. His episodes are among many fans' favourites, although perhaps the best praise came from Russell T Davies, who revealed in an interview that he often edits scripts for the series but "doesn't touch a word" of Moffat's episodes.

Moffatt will continue as one of the directors on the board of Hartswood Films which produced Coupling and Jekyll, and for which he is also developing a new comedy Adam & Eve. It is about a boss and his PA, who are long-term friends but never get together. He has also just delivered the screenplay for Tintin, the first instalment of the trilogy of films featuring the iconic Belgian comic-strip hero. Steven Spielberg will direct the film for DreamWorks, with a cast featuring Thomas Sangster and Andy Serkis.

There has been much speculation in recent months about who would replace Davies as the creative leader of Doctor Who and Moffat has generally been a popular candidate among the show's fanatical fan base – although there have been a few dissenting voices who worry that his writing for the show might suffer. Time will tell.

Women in a class of their own

2008-05-20T00:34:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: The Duchess in Hull; Class of '62 – from 16 to 60; Warship

Telling people they should eat healthier food and do more exercise is not all that complicated – or, in fact, very interesting to watch. Yet, thanks to the current epidemic of obesity programmes, television is stuck with the tricky task of trying to find entertaining ways of doing it. With The Duchess in Hull, ITV1’s latest ploy is to combine a celebrity vehicle with the kind of class contrast so often deployed by Wife Swap.

But the makers clearly had a spot of rehabilitation in mind as well. Since 1996, we were reminded, the Duchess of York has been living in America, where she’s become “a diet and fitness icon adored by the public”. Fortunately, she’s now realised that Britain needs her too. (“I haven’t forgotten you,” she assured us last night.) As a result, she’s taken on the challenge of finding out what “a typically unhealthy British family” eats, and getting them to stop it. Or, as she says, stop Britain blowing itself up. So, like a jolly red setter which has made a bit of a mess on the Axminster and been banished from the house, Fergie bounded back into our lives, not an ounce diminished in bounce and chumminess.

Before all that, though, we had a little PR film in which the Duchess confessed that she found it difficult dealing with the darkness in the morning. "Every single minute of the day I think I'm fat, ugly, disgusting, unworthy and nobody likes me," she confessed. "I've had 15 years of defamation of character." Hagridden by old headlines, she slumped on the stairs of the gym looking stricken but, after a dose of endorphins and a bath full of ice cubes, she was up and running.

Meanwhile, we were introduced to the Sargersons on their Hull council estate. Dad Mick is a disabled ex-squaddie with diabetes. Mum Tonia is unemployed with a bad heart. When we first joined them, they and their three teenage children were tucking into sausage butties and cigarettes. They did not know who to expect; clutching in their chubby fingers a little list drawn entirely from terrible TV: "Fern Britton, Nigella Lawson, Ricki Lake, Vanessa Feltz, Kerry Katonowa or whatever her name is and that bloke from Trisha Boot Camp." When Fergie arrived she demonstrated she had been away a little too long by saying, "It's not Oprah Winfrey! Did you think it was Oprah Winfrey?" Silence fell with a bit of a bump. "Oh my God, it's so sad! I just knew they wouldn't know who it was. All right, I married Prince Andrew. Diana was my sister-in-law." And, with increasing desperation, "You've heard of the Queen of England, have you? The Queen was my mother-in-law."

Once her identity had been established, Fergie’s main tactic was to claim instant empathy. “You and I could completely relate to each other,” she told Tonia, without fully explaining why. She then tried plenty of positive reinforcement (ie flattery), which when directed at Mick’s old dad provoked a cry of “Steady on, love.” I wouldn't say obesity was the Sargersons' chief problem. Only 25-year-old Terri (later arrested and released when a man was found dead in her flat) had a job. Only seven-year-old Olly (whom they were adopting) didn't smoke. Jim, hale, hearty and, appropriately, full of beans at 83, grew fresh food on an allotment that his family refused to eat. I must, however, hand it to 14-year-old Mikey for native shrewdness. He said, "She's all right, but I reckon it's just a publicity stunt. She's got a name for splitting up with Andrew so she's going to change it for 'I help fat people'. That's what I reckon."

Unexpectedly, Fergie proved to be a disciplinarian. When her mother left for the Argentine with a polo player, she was brought up by her soldier father. I remember that, when Ruby Wax rummaged, uninvited, through her drawers, she found Beatrice's and Eugenie's T-shirts folded and arranged by colour as if for a military inspection. At the end of the programme, She laid down some simple principles, which will be implemented tonight. Including - and she reached out to clip the ear of the youngest son - paying attention. From long practice he ducked. And that was about it really. Fergie said the usual stuff about food and exercise. She duly diagnosed several cases of low self-esteem. On the whole, however, yesterday’s first episode of two pottered along somewhat aimlessly – and certainly without the highs and lows, fights and reconciliations that this sort of programme is supposed to guarantee. All of which made what happened when Fergie bade her farewells feel distinctly odd. Maybe the programme was just badly edited, but surely nothing we’d seen justified the Sargersons suddenly breaking into helpless tears of gratitude.

Class of '62 – from 16 to 60 (BBC2) was the latest film by Marilyn Gaunt about her former classmates from a Leeds secondary school. She has filmed the lives of six of her friends for 25 years, sticking with them limpet-like over the years and over the miles. Given its subjects’ shared working-class background, Gaunt’s documentaries may lack the range of similar documentary series. Yet, by way of compensation, we get a powerful reminder of how the great social trends of the past few decades haven’t perhaps been as widespread as the media often seem to think.

Not many of these women, for example, spent the Sixties swinging away with flowers in their hair. That decade, as Larkin mentioned, arrived a little later than reported. Nor, when the Eighties dawned, did they instantly don large shoulder-pads and start making lots of money. Instead, they’ve mostly spent their time bringing up children, looking after aging parents and, in many cases, divorcing the husbands they married when very young. Only now, as they turn 60, can they talk of living for themselves – and then not always convincingly. No wonder that for all its warmth, and the likeability of most of its participants, last night’s programme proved quite a melancholy watch; the images and stories hanging about the street corners of your mind, refusing to be moved on.

The initial temptation, watching Marilyn Gaunt's engrossing film was to dwell on what it wasn't, rather than what it was. What it wasn't was Michael Apted's epic Seven Up!, a project that has chronicled the lives of 14 people from widely differing social backgrounds from the time they were seven years old in 1964, revisiting them every seven years, most recently in 2005. Apted was interested in class, and to what extent a child's future is determined by the accident of birth. He also wanted to test the old Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man". But what was fascinating about Gaunt's subjects, whom we first met at a reunion to mark the 21st anniversary of the day they left their secondary modern in Leeds, was that at approaching 40 their futures were no more mapped out than they had been at 16. The vicissitudes of death, ill-health, divorce, financial hardship, but also happy second or even third marriages, the joys of grandparenthood, success in business, plain good luck, all lay in wait – springing out, in many cases, when they were least expected. It is as though a bucket of quicksilver was thrown on the ground in 1962 and shot off in every direction.

The homogeneity of what I suppose might be termed the "Gaunt Six" turned out to enhance the story, just as Seven Up! was enhanced by diversity. It showed that the conditioning factors in a woman's life are not, or at least not necessarily, gender, education and class. In a strange way, Class of 62 offered a clearer microcosm of all our lives than the Seven Up! series. Over the 24 years from 1983 to 2007, Katy's husband Norman, a man seemingly in rude health, whom she described as her "Rock of Gibraltar", got throat cancer and died; Denise, who had been a battered wife, learnt that one of her daughters was gay, got fed up with Britain's "nanny state", went to live in Greece, missed the NHS and came back; Margaret divorced her Swiss husband, met a nice Italian called Luigi, and took up painting; Dorothy found that her husband, her childhood sweetheart, had been having an affair, divorced him and continued raising their son Steven, who has Down's syndrome; Sally had a part in Crossroads, cared for a mother with Alzheimer's, became a novelist, and went travelling round Europe in a camper van; Gillian became a surrogate mother to her grandchildren, a surrogate mother to her mother, got a job cleaning the church, and went to bed with a different man each night in the form of a succession of Mills & Boon heroes. Somewhere in there, but for the grace of God, go all of us. Except of course to the Crossroads Motel, which closed a while ago.

What was striking was how the needs of relatives had defined the lives of some of these women. Gillian had been dealt an especially wretched hand, and was also the only one without a companion, albeit that Dorothy's companion was her son Steven. We saw Dorothy taking Steven to York to be fitted with some chain mail for the historical re-enactments in which he loves to participate. It was as sweet and funny a piece of television as I've seen for ages. And I suppose that's the point: the ordinary lives of six women can engage all kinds of emotions. From Katy, the image of Mehitabel, with her third husband ("I'm going to have fun while I've got the chance") to Dorothy with her perpetual child ("the most important thing is love") they all opened up like flowers because they were talking to a life-long friend. Only one was still with the husband she started out with. Two had had their hopes of a career blocked by a father. Three live abroad, and a fourth dreams of being "a little Greek man and a little Greek woman in our little Greek house. Thoroughly brown."

All had reached a plateau of some contentment, even Gillian, who has never had a life of her own at all. "Suddenly I've a bus pass and can go where I want in West Yorkshire." Since April 1 you can go anywhere in England, Gillian. So off you pop. The Book of Heroic Failures includes a TV programme about an Armenian woman on her 60th birthday, how she met her husband, her illnesses and so on. Statistically, nobody in the wide world watched it. You can quite understand why, but the world was probably wrong.

Class of 62 was also fascinating on a purely physical level: it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the ageing process is accelerated dramatically by an excess of weight. The 20,600-tonne HMS Illustrious, launched in 1982, hasn't aged particularly well, either. It had to return to Portsmouth two days into a four-month tour of duty in the Indian Ocean because the fridge broke down. Then the engines failed. The Royal Navy, it rather worryingly appears, has a great deal in common with some of today's train operators. Also, the crew failed to show their battle-readiness, which was another reason to postpone the voyage. Warship is a six-part series, what used to be called a docu-soap, following these tribulations. I fear it might sink without trace.

BBC to reschedule The Apprentice

2008-05-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

The BBC risks angering fans of The Apprentice by switching the hit business reality show next week from its regular Wednesday 9pm berth to Tuesday because of a clash with an England friendly international football match.

Next week's scheduling move will see Sir Alan Sugar go head to head with Gordon Ramsay on Channel 4's The F Word, as well as ITV1's Britain's Got Talent, which is airing every night next week, at 9pm on Tuesday. BBC2's The Apprentice: You're Fired! will also switch days to Tuesday at 10pm. BBC1's commitment to screen the England v USA friendly means the network will devote two hours between 8pm and 10pm to the game on Wednesday next week.

The Apprentice, which regularly pulls in up to 7 million viewers, is one of BBC1's most popular shows and a must-see on Wednesday nights for many fans. A BBC spokesman confirmed The Apprentice's move to Tuesday next week. "The show has been moved to make way for this match. It is quite usual for us to move programmes to accommodate big sporting occasions. That is the reason for this schedule change," he said.

Elsewhere, Anushka Asthana has labelled The Apprentice as the most moral show on television. Writing in the Guardian, she states...

He started his journey as a silly posh-boy, notable only for his thick eyebrows, floppy hair and absurd manner. Then a single act of kindness propelled Raef Bjayou, a disliked contender on the hit television show The Apprentice, into a realms of chivalry. It was a wonderful moment: the 27-year-old 'entrepreneur', dressed in a smart pink shirt, leant forward, raised his hand and demanded an end to the savage attack being carried out on his fellow contestant, Sara Dhada.

'A decision has been made,' he boomed, to the delight of millions of viewers appalled by the behaviour of the other Apprentice hopefuls who were acting like a swarming gang of playground bullies. 'Sir Alan has made it.' Soon the clip had made its way to YouTube, Raef fan clubs had started to appear on the internet and The Apprentice faithful, of which I am one, had a new hero. All it had taken was a simple moment of compassion; a moment that convinced me that The Apprentice, which sees contestants battle it out for a six-figure job in Sir Alan Sugar's empire, is a show with the stiffest of moral backbones.

People who sneer at reality television, who argue it brings out the worst in its voyeuristic viewers, who insist it provides little more than a gladiatorial stage on which people have little choice but to humiliate, disgrace and hang themselves, are missing the point. What actually happens is that over time the veneers created by the contestants in preparation for the show start to slip away and one by one their true characters emerge. Yes, we watch with glee when some of them are cruelly dispatched, but only those who have lied, twisted and manipulated their way through. The people who have played fair, meanwhile, who have been kind, decent and honest are lauded and cheered in front rooms across the country. That is why Bjayou, a man who was dismissed as comical at the start - following a 'I get on with prince or pauper' gaffe - is now a firm favourite to win.

So what does this tell us? Well, conversations about the programme have begun to take on the tone of an ethical debate. 'The Apprentice generates a moral reaction in the audience,' says one female friend, an economist in her late twenties, as we gather around the television set for our weekly fix. 'We side with the ones who we believe act in a moral way. We turn against those who are bitchy, lie or seem unpleasant.' It is true that each week we find ourselves howling at the television from around 9.45pm, urging Sugar to eliminate the least-loved character - normally the one who we decide has been a little too mean or sly.

If that is the case for us, then surely it is true for many more of the show's wide base of fans, those 7.4 million viewers who tune in. The demographic covers teenagers and the retired, men and women, rich and poor. It is even sparking encouraging discussions among school pupils. One colleague says her children, aged 11 and 13, regularly discuss whether or not the contestants have behaved morally: 'They say "he's lying", "he's bullying" or "he's cheating". They are starting to think you do not have to be nasty and pushy to get ahead. It has definitely made them think in a moral way.'

And it is not just the viewers. Even Sugar, famed for his ruthless nature, seems to be rewarding hard work and honesty this time round. His message in the boardroom is clear: lie, cheat or manipulate and you 'will get fired'. Take the example of Jenny Celerier, who has earned herself a reputation as this series's nasty. When she bribed a Moroccan shopkeeper in an attempt to hamper the other team's chances, Sugar was furious and soon sent her packing. He was equally unimpressed when she appeared to lie in order to make her fellow contestant look bad. But for me and my friends, there is one thing Sugar needs to do - and soon - finally to prove the show's morality.

The self-made millionaire must dispatch the contestant who has been most sneaky and aggressive to date: Michael Sophocles. He is the 24-year-old telesales executive who claimed on his CV that he was a 'good Jewish boy' in order to impress Sugar, before admitting he had no idea what kosher was (he thought it was a Muslim tradition) and crossing himself outside the boardroom. It seems unlikely that such morals were formed in a church, mosque or synagogue, but if Sophocles - Sophocles! - a name once better known as the author of the Oedipus cycle, gets the chop, then there will be many children picking up a sense of right and wrong from, God forbid, a reality television show.

BBC redefines culture

2008-05-19T09:17:00.000-07:00

The BBC is to launch a TV campaign promoting the new series of The Culture Show and its 101st episode, featuring personalities including Boris Johnson, Nigel Havers, Carl Barat and Adrian Chiles discussing cultural issues including EastEnders, sex, coffee, football and binge drinking. In the trail, promoting The Culture Show's switch from early Saturday evening on BBC2 to a new Tuesday 10pm slot for its new series, a range of celebrities and ordinary people give their responses to the question: "What is culture?".

The two minute post-watershed version of the clip features responses from a fisherman at Billingsgate fish market, comedian Adam Buxton, former Express editor Rosie Boycott, presenter Bruce Parry and one of the members of the Cuban Brothers comedy musical act. Chiles, presenter of The One Show and Match of the Day 2, argues that culture is "a bit boring…not as good as drinking beer or watching football".

"To me culture is what's happening in the street… and that's binge drinking," says Buxton, one half of comedy duo Adam & Joe.

Barat, a former member of the Libertines alongside Pete Doherty, and now frontman for Dirty Pretty Things, argues that culture is, perhaps, "the last great British export… it's pretty much all we've got left".

Actor Havers tackles the thorny issue of whether EastEnders can be considered as culture. "EastEnders I don't think is particularly," he confidently begins to assert. "Or, well, it might be actually. That might be some sort of culture."

The Culture Show trail ends with Johnson asking how "pretentious" a response the interviewer is looking for. "Culture is what distinguishes men, human beings, from animals," he says. "How about that. How pretentious do you want me to be?"

Other contributors to the "What is culture?" promo include Kenneth Branagh, Graydon Carter, Jimmy Carr, singer Duffy and the Duchess of York. BBC Radio 4's Today presenter John Humphrys says: "[Culture] can be almost everything except politics and I'm a bit uneasy about contemporary art." In total, 145 responses were filmed for The Culture Show promo, which has been made by ad agency Fallon. The TV campaign will be supported by radio and online promotions.

The Culture Show returns for a new series and its 101st episode on June 3, with items including a report from the set of Ricky Gervais' first feature film, The Side of the Truth. This series of The Culture Show will be filmed in alternate weeks in London and Glasgow. From now on, each series of The Culture Show will alternative with Later Live… with Jools Holland on Tuesday nights, with an extended Friday night repeat at 11.35pm.

You can watch the trailer for the return of BBC2's The Culture Show on June 3, featuring artists, musicians and celebrities including Boris Johnson, Rosie Boycott and Karl Pilkington, here.

Walters to play Mary Whitehouse in new BBC TV drama

2008-05-19T09:11:00.000-07:00

Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner who embarked on a one-woman mission to clean up British television, will be played by Julie Walters in a new BBC drama, it was revealed yesterday. Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will bring to life the battle for morals that raged in the 1960s, the BBC said. Hugh Bonneville will star as Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, the former Director-General of the BBC, whom Whitehouse held mainly responsible for the moral collapse of the country.

The animosity between the two culminated in a bitter fight to broadcast the word “knickers” in the Beatles song 'I Am the Walrus'. Whitehouse was an unknown housewife and teacher from the Midlands when she began campaigning in 1963.

Backed by her loyal husband Ernest (Alun Armstrong), Whitehouse set out to fight a war to stop “filth” entering family homes via the television.

Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story will be broadcast on BBC Two on May 28 at 9pm

Selling the world

2008-05-19T01:30:00.000-07:00

Weekend's TV reviewed: The South Bank Show; Mad Men; The Comedy Map of Britain; Love Soup; Match of the Day Live; Wild China

It’s ITV1 and the two men on the screen are discussing Aristotle and the essays of Montaigne. So yes, it can only be The South Bank Show. Quite how Melvyn Bragg gets away with bucking television trends so heroically, I’m still not sure. Nonetheless, when the result is as good as it was here, your main reaction has to be one of simple gratitude. Bragg was interviewing Gore Vidal, something he did 20 years ago, when he was in his 40s and Vidal was in his 60s. We saw a clip of them as they were. Now Bragg is in his 60s, and Vidal is 82, returning to America after four decades in Italy for what he calls, with characteristic lack of euphemism, “the hospital years”.

Now the last survivor of that generation of great American writers who’d fought in the Second World War (the others included Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut), Vidal did need the odd moment last night to gather his thoughts. Yet, once he had, his fondness and talent for a good scrap proved as stirring as ever. In the end, the effect was like seeing an old prize-fighter who may not be as fast as he used to be, but who can still land a punch with the best of them. Vidal’s targets were wide-ranging – from John Updike to the entire history of Christianity.

After a sticky start in which Bragg pretended to be amused by the old story of Madame de Gaulle and her mispronunciation of the word happiness, Vidal, now 82, hit some sort of aphoristic stride. He confessed that after years of quoting Aristotle he had “broken down and read him”, noted that while he seldom met a boring six-year-old he had never met an interesting 16-year-old and concluded in relation to the Bush years: “In a normal republic I would have probably raised an army and overthrown the Government but we don't do anything so vulgar these days.” Naturally, George W Bush got it in the neck for being, among other things, “literally demented”. But the President’s policy of “perpetual war for perpetual peace” was also placed in its long-standing historical context, which meant an equally thorough pounding for Harry Truman and John F Kennedy. And with that, it was on to homosexuality. Vidal’s novel 'The City and the Pillar' may have shocked even liberal Americans with its suggestion of what their boys really got up to in the army. (“Did you know all hell would break loose?” wondered Bragg last night. “Oh yes,” replied Vidal with some relish.) Nevertheless, he has no time at all for the gay movement – founded, as he sees it, by “some poor little queens” who’ve fallen for the pernicious idea that they’re a separate race.

For Vidal fans, all of this will certainly have had the air of a greatest hits collection, complete with the effortlessly patrician delivery and the epic name-dropping. (Asked about Robert Kennedy, Vidal began his answer, “Jack was very funny about Bobby…”) Needless to say, though, it was none the worse for that – not least because the career-spanning aspect reminded us that even Vidal’s wildest polemics have often turned out to be true. And anyway, think how you’d feel if you went to see The Rolling Stones and they didn’t play their most famous riffs. So while Bragg has hardly changed over those 20 years, Vidal has grown more frail but ever more imperious. He settled in his chair and tried to project his aphorisms stealthily, so they would go unnoticed. But Bragg noticed them. It was a good piece of theatre. I wonder if they'll have another crack at it in 10 years' time. We can but hope.

The attractions of Mad Men (BBC4) are obvious after about five minutes - it's a drama set in the early 1960s, when the world was simpler and less screwed up. But hang on a minute - wasn't it more screwed up? In this episode, there's an office party, and one of the male characters pins a woman down and pulls her skirt up to have a look at her knickers. That's pretty screwed up, isn't it? But then she gets up and they go off, arm in arm. They are smiling. And maybe that's even more screwed up. It's 1963, and the mad men are the ad men of Madison Avenue, in New York. The women are their wives and secretaries. I wondered: why are the women so sexy? Why are they so much sexier than the women in Desperate Housewives and Lost? It's because they conform to the dress codes of their time. They're not allowed to expose much flesh, so they have to be actually sexy instead. Guys are smart, in suits and ties, so a tie at half-mast, or a slouchy walk, actually tells you something. People smoke all the time, which means they don't smoke so hungrily. And they drink all the time, too. When one guy offers his wife a drink, and she turns it down, you know there's a serious problem. I was familiar with these people immediately - I felt the steady hand of American drama.

In last night's episode, everybody hung around in the office to watch the results of the Kennedy/Nixon election battle, a contest that we know finally went Kennedy's way but which everybody at the time expected would go the other way. The ad men want Nixon to win, because they sense a kinship with him. He's crooked. But then it turns out Kennedy is crooked, too - his father bought him a lot of votes. Since election graphics at the time consisted of a man in a studio chalking numbers on a blackboard the election coverage soon came second to eating into the company's liquor reserves and running bets on what coloured panties the secretaries are wearing. When the young woman who has the key to the hospitality cupboard revealed that they are well stocked with crme de menthe, an enterprising account man fills the water cooler with the green stuff and the party really lifts off. I can't tell you how much I hope that someone somewhere once did this. If not, and you can bear to drink crme de menthe, then it may be time for a bit of emulative behaviour. I recommend that you get signed consent before attempting any kind of underwear inspection though.

As the election result starts to become clear, frowns break out on these guys' faces. They are beginning to learn something about the world - that it really can be bought and sold - and we are shown this dawning with a lovely delicacy, as the all-night party turns sour. Meanwhile, the office furniture looks great - the sort of stuff rich people have in their houses these days. Is my sense of nostalgia being manipulated? I don't care. I love it. Troubled Don, the under-boss of the agency and the main guy, was under pressure. Creepy Pete, the ambitious young blade, had discovered that Don's whole life is a lie. He's actually not Don Draper at all, but somebody completely different. I bought this straight away - talk about the steady hand of American drama. Anyway, the point is that these guys are ad men - it's not just Don who's living a lie, it's everybody. They actually believe that being insanely materialistic is good for you. Watching this, you keep thinking: if the world is a worse place, 45 years on, it's these guys' fault.

In the circumstances, the makers of BBC2’s The Comedy Map of Britain could surely get away with a bog-standard anthology of familiar anecdotes and clips. Instead, there’s an imaginatively wide choice of subjects – which in Saturday’s East Anglian episode ranged from Jim Davidson to PG Wodehouse by way of Arthur Smith. Meanwhile, the archive material is, it turns out, carefully selected to illustrate the specific points being made. The choice of interviewees is pretty imaginative too. On Saturday, we met both Dudley Moore’s music tutor (oddly enough called Peter Cork) and Lee Evans’s dry-cleaner, who shared the secrets of removing the man’s famously abundant sweat. There was a nice schoolmasterly turn from Frank Halford, a teacher who’d only ever given full marks for English composition to one pupil: Douglas Adams in 1961. I also enjoyed the city councillor who felt that I’m Alan Partridge “missed a huge opportunity to promote Norwich”.

Alice of Love Soup (BBC One) would be the most irritatingly self-absorbed woman on television - perhaps she is to some people - were it not for some mitigating factors. The first is that she is played by Tamsin Greig, a subtle actor who can do sympathetic and empathetic but won't do pathetic. There is a grace and optimism to her performance even in her character's lowest moments, some of which were plumbed on Saturday in this last episode of the second series. My next plea of mitigation is that at her most dejected, Alice wants to help others, even Cleo and Milly, her co-workers on the perfume counter who have livelier sex lives than she, but not more successful ones. This week she found their male equivalents in a pair of jobbing builders arguing away at the old question of what a woman really means when she says no to your suggestion that you put your hand down her jeans. Forgetting the jigsaw principle of attraction, she was surprised when she brought them together and each party was immediately drawn to the one who wasn't like them at all.

Finally, there is something of the philosopher about Alice - not to the extent of her friend who broke up with a guy when she discovered he was a 16th-century determinist, but to the extent of wondering, as she crosses a road, what is it all about. She argues from the particular (herself) to the general (the entire Universe). On Saturday she was rewarded by a metaphysical resolution to her angst. The ghost of her lover-who-might-have-been, the TV writer Gil who died before they could actually meet, appeared and leant next to her across a country gate. Love Soup is an odder love story than it looks. The writer David Renwick's interest in disability might need examining for instance. Last week we had a TV commissioner with no arms (well at least she couldn't say, “On the one hand we like it, on the other...”). This week a middle-aged neighbour turned out to house a Barbie doll of a wife, perfect in every way except she was paralysed from the nostrils down. The black comedy cuts through the whimsy every time. I don't believe any of its specifics, but, generally, Love Soup is on to something.

The cup final coverage (Match of the Day Live, BBC1) started at lunchtime on Saturday. In the old days, it started just after breakfast. Of course, in the old days, this was football's biggest moment. Now it's a strange entity - not quite as important as a big game in the Premiership, but nevertheless an institution, like the Boat Race or the Varsity Match. This year, the final was between Portsmouth, the eighth-best team in the league, and Cardiff, who are in a lower division altogether; one got the feeling that the best teams had not been trying very hard. Now that you have to pay to watch the Premiership, and much of the Champions League - while you can see the FA cup for free, on terrestrial television - nobody takes it quite so seriously. For John Motson, the commentator, it was almost certainly the last cup final, because ITV has next year's contract. I sat there, listening to Motty's tones, trying to feel some of the old excitement. But I couldn't - not quite. It was a pretty good match, too. I just wish it had felt like a more important one.

Despite the fact that it is a medium that puts a premium on watching, most television is irredeemably literary in its approach. Even sporting events, which you might take as an epitome of dumb spectacle, are busily reworked into dramas by the commentary, as if plot and narrative sequence are indispensable elements of any worthwhile transmission. Natural-history programmes are no exception to this rule, artfully (even deceitfully) often stitching the footage together so that a kind of furry soap results. But Wild China, BBC2's new series, is about as purely spectacular as television is ever likely to get. Its model is not a serial drama or a children's story, but a picture book, and while it comes with a commentary it will be no more necessary to most consumers than the essays are in the National Geographic magazine.

What a picture book it is though, a reminder that wildlife programmes are often likely to provoke an combination of rapture and boredom. Rapture because the images are ravishing and unexpected; boring because there's no particular reason why one should follow another. The page turns and another dazzling full-page illustration is revealed to view, and then another, and then another. Look, here's the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, dancing along a branch in what looks like a pair of ostrich-feather bloomers, its lips smeared a bright pink, like a child that's got at mummy's lipstick. And here's a male Temminck's tragopan, flashing a female from behind a rock with his vivid bib of blue and magenta, a West Ham United football shirt sponsored by his own biological exuberance. Enough, move on, here's a bamboo bat, no bigger than a bumble bee and sharing its home inside a bamboo plant with a squirming cluster of its close relatives.

What links these wonders is not a particular line of argument but a geographical location, the mountains of Yunnan, where climate and geology conspire to create a tropical forest where there really shouldn't be one. And it's absolutely stuffed with creatures marvellously and sometimes self-defeatingly adapted to its particular conditions. The bamboo rat, for example, has worked out a way to tug the younger shoots underground into its burrows, so that if you're in the right place at the right time you'll see the foliage shrinking back into the earth (I suspect the film-makers, not being in quite the right place at the right time, used an offscreen bamboo wrangler). No creature though is as startling in its ingenuity as a mammal indigenous to these parts, not to mention virtually every other habitat on the planet. The bamboo rat can do one thing with bamboo eat it but the local villagers can do hundreds of things with it, including eating it in a piquant Yunnanese sauce and then using it as a pipe for a post-meal smoke. Or, most brilliantly, as a fishing rod for hornets. The Dai people bait a bamboo stick with a locust and use it to distract a hornet, while they tie a small flag of white feather around its abdomen. This then allows them to trail the insect back through the forest to its nest, which can be smoked and broken open for a snack of fresh hornet larvae. They have an ingenious solution to the awkwardness of the local terrain, too, zipping across swollen river gorges on inclined cables, with their livestock dangling beneath them, a set of images that were here edited into a lovely aerial ballet. I have a feeling that the heartland demographic for wildlife documentaries gets a bit restive when the camera cuts away from the flora and fauna to dwell on the humans that live among them, but I have to say they're my favourite animals.

Five of the best FA Cup Final moments...

2008-05-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

There’s only one John Motson, and, with the BBC losing the FA Cup rights to ITV, this could be his last Cup Final appearance. It’s a sad day for us armchair fans – Motty has taken us on a “rollercoaster ride” over the years. So sometimes he makes the odd “Motty-cism”. And sometimes he stretches too far in his attempt to explain – Motty-phors? But, more often than not, he finds the right words, the bon mots, the “bon Motsons”, you could say.

So sit back and take an armchair stroll up Wembley Way with five classic Cup Final commentary moments from Motty and friends, says Chris Condron...

Manchester United v Liverpool, 1977 (2-1)

The year of Motty’s most famous scripted ad lib, “How fitting that a man named Buchan should climb the 39 steps,” a line that proves the two Golden Rules of Commentating, and why the second always takes precedence over the first.
1 Do your research.
2 Know when to keep your mouth shut.

But nearly half the nation missed it because, back in the days of Spangles and Raleigh Choppers, the powers-that-be decided that there wasn’t enough football on the telly, so we had the Cup Final on ITV, too.

Three channels, with the Cup Final on two of them. What’s not to love?

ITV’s own man with the mike was Brian Moore, a man equally capable of both brilliance and, well, talking absolute balls. He teamed up for Cup Final duty here with Jack Charlton, who was the special Statement of the Bleedin’ Obvious correspondent.

Tottenham Hotspur v Manchester City (replay), 1981 (3-2)

It’s easy to mock Motty, but he has the gift of saying exactly what most of us are thinking. If you don’t believe me, go into a Man City pub and shout, “And still Ricky Villa!” in your best Motty. In those four words, Motty articulates the gnawing, inevitable, time-standing-still, “He’s going to go all the way . . .” feeling as the Argentine twists and turns the City defence before slipping the ball under Joe Corrigan to win one of the great Cup Finals.

Coventry City v Tottenham Hotspur, 1987 (3-2)

This one’s got it all. Goals, fairytale stories, more Motty-phors than you could shake a mike at . . . and the “Cov” management duo of John Sillett and George Curtis hugging and gurning like a pair of toby jugs on a massive Ecstasy bender. Oh yes, and ELO’s Mr Blue Sky.

A trio of classic Motty quotes is shoehorned in among the sky-blue madness – none of them meant literally, you hope: “Keith Houchen, the man with the Midas touch in the FA Cup, strikes gold for Coventry.”

“Houchen has written his name all over the competition this season.” “The Sky Blues are sky high.”

Wimbledon v Liverpool, 1988 (1-0)

This game features textbook Motty in his pomp, as the great man delivers the classic commentary one-two – a killer line . . . and an impression of Yoda.

“The Crazy Gang have beaten the Culture Club!” is the perfect example of the commentator’s art. Hardly finger-on-the-pulse from the sheepskin-coated one – Culture Club hadn’t had a No 1 hit in five years – but who would have remembered a reference to Fairground Attraction?

Jimmy Hill neatly sums up Liverpool’s season as “The club that played just one game too many,” before Motty goes all Return of the Jedi in the spring sunshine.

“Champions they are, nobody will deny them . . . but double winners this time they are not.”

Liverpool v West Ham, 2006 (3-3, Liverpool won on penalties)

Another contender for Best Cup Final Ever features Sky’s Andy Gray turning the hyperbole up to 11 and beyond. Though not strictly a commentator – the superb Martin Tyler holds the mike – Andy’s more of a really shouty bloke at chucking out time who’s going to do his prostate a mischief. He explains the effort needed to win a game, albeit in rather Norman Tebbit-esque style: “If you want a goal, you get on your bike.”

Ronson and the Reverend Death

2008-05-17T04:03:00.000-07:00

The journalist and documentary-maker Jon Ronson has interviewed some, to say the very least, curious characters. Among his interviewees for his 2001 Channel 4 series Secret Rulers of the World, for example, was the conspiracy theorist David Icke, who informed Ronson that the planet was run by a race of shape-shifting extraterrestrial lizards. But Reverend George Exoo may be Ronson’s most perplexing subject yet.

Exoo, who we’ll meet in Ronson’s unsettling documentary Reverend Death (Channel 4, Monday, 10.00pm) is a Unitarian pastor in West Virginia, USA who helps people to commit suicide. Not people who are terminally ill. People who simply don’t want to go on living. He advises them on ways to go about killing themselves: what pills to use and so on. Often he’s present when they go through with it. He says he’s helped more than a hundred people die. Ronson first heard of Exoo in 2002, when a producer friend alerted him to a news story from Ireland. A woman, Rosemary Toole, had been found dead in her Dublin house, and the police believed it was a case of assisted suicide. Their suspect was Exoo, and they applied to have him extradited from the US to stand trial. In Ireland the sentence for assisted suicide is up to 14 years in prison. In the US the law is foggy: assisted suicide is not a crime in 25 of the 50 states.

Exoo’s activities may sound repugnant. But Ronson says that, when he set out to make the film, he intended it to be supportive of Exoo. ‘I was going through a bit of a libertarian phase,’ he says. ‘The Irish prosecutors seemed very draconian. It looked black-and-white to me: surely everybody has the right to end their life. So my first thought was that it would be nice to do something quite positive.’ You couldn’t exactly say that was how it turned out. Ronson found himself repeatedly changing his views about what Exoo does. Some friends of Ronson’s who have already seen the film say they don’t think Exoo comes across at all well. Having seen it myself, says Michael Deacon, I think Exoo’s a creep. But, at least initially, Ronson liked him: ‘He was funny – he had that camp sort of humour, black humour.’

Well, his humour would have to be black, wouldn’t it? In a bit of film that didn’t get used, Exoo drove for six hours through heavy snow to meet a woman called Molly who’d asked him to help her kill herself. Exoo arrived at her house but nobody appeared to be in. So he drove all the way home again. He later learned she’d already killed herself. The pastor’s response to this news, Ronson says, was to look ‘rueful and amused – he’d gone all that way…’ Exoo, Ronson adds, appears not to see any inconsistency in his own beliefs. Exoo is a man of God, yet he’s helping people die. ‘He’s certainly not ashamed of what he does, he’s proud of it,’ says Ronson. ‘He sees himself as Mother Teresa. Consequently he was never worried about telling us any of this stuff. There was only one moment, in 50-60 hours’ worth of filming, where he said, “I don’t want you to use that bit”.’

Ronson may have liked Exoo on a personal level, but, as the documentary shows, the ethics of what Exoo does are, at the very least, problematic. And Exoo isn’t the only one providing this type of ‘service’. Ronson says there’s a ‘euthanasia underground’, and that ‘it’s a complete mess’. Viewers will see how in the film.

Making Reverend Death – which took around six years, on and off – was the most stressful and emotionally draining job Ronson has done: ‘It’s not been enjoyable, really,’ he says. It’s in sharp contrast to his most recently broadcast work: Journey to the Other Side, a documentary about UFOs he made for Radio 4 with the pop star Robbie Williams. "That was a blessed relief, because that was easy," says Ronson. "Part of me thinks that in the end you should just do things that people enjoy, bringing happiness and laughter to the audience instead of misery. Robbie just approached me and said he was a fan of Them [Ronson’s bestselling book about conspiracy theorists] and said, you know, 'Let’s have paranormal adventures like Mulder and Scully.’"

All the same, Ronson is proud of Reverend Death. "I think the film’s big achievement is learning that this kind of euthanasia underground exists and showing how it operates," he says. "There are some above-board “right to die” campaign groups who will secretly refer people to George. If a mentally ill person phones up and says, 'Will you help me to die?', the group will say no. But if they keep phoning back, as mentally ill people are kind of wont to do, the group will say, 'Well, you might want to phone George Exoo…' It’s extraordinary."

Reverend Death is on Monday on Channel 4 at 10.00pm

Calling the tunes

2008-05-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

Ahead of next Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest final, Sir Terry Wogan tells Michael Deacon why poor old Royaume-Uni may never triumph again...

Sir Terry Wogan must have ears of steel. The day before our interview, he watched the videos of every single entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. All 43 of them. It’s a test of endurance that would have reduced Hercules to a sobbing heap, but the BBC’s indefatigable commentator is in cheerful mood. “They say it isn’t over until the fat lady sings,” he says. “So the Portuguese entrant had better be on last. I thought Russia might win this year since Putin’s got nasty and we need the oil. Then I heard the song and thought, ‘...No’.”

He seems particularly amused by the French entry, Divine by Sébastian Tellier. There’s been uproar in France because its entry, for the first time, has English lyrics. The singer, Wogan notes, has a suspiciously large beard and long hair: “You see, he’s having to do it in disguise for his own safety.” Wogan has been providing the BBC’s commentary on Eurovision since 1971 – first on radio, then (since 1980) on BBC1. Next Saturday he’ll be in Belgrade in Serbia to cover the final; on Tuesday and Thursday this week, viewers of BBC3 can watch the semi-finals. These feature all the entrants except the holders Serbia, plus Spain, Germany, France and “Royaume-Uni”, ie the UK. Those four are Eurovision’s biggest financial contributors, so they go straight to the final. You see what integrity the competition has.

It’s hard to imagine Eurovision without Wogan’s dry (but, he says, affectionate) narration: he introduced the presenters of 2001’s contest in Denmark by crying, “Look, it’s Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy.” Wogan is such a Euro-institution that he’s mentioned in this year’s Irish entry, Irelande Douze Pointe by Dustin the puppet turkey: one verse begins, “Drag acts and bad acts and Terry Wogan’s wig.” Wogan, I’m afraid, isn’t impressed: he says it’s daft to do a novelty song, as the joke will be meaningless to viewers “east of the Danube”, and because “you shouldn’t try to be funnier than the contest itself”. The “wig” reference clearly doesn’t delight him either: “That’s old hat,” he says.

Last year, the UK’s representatives Scooch finish 23rd out of 24. Wogan, who thought Scooch were terrible, says our song this time, 'Even If' by Andy Abraham, is “the best we’ve had in years”. But he adds that we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to do much better. “It would be a great result to finish in the top 10,” says Wogan. “Just to try to make up for the UK doing so badly in recent years.” He thinks the chances of a win for the UK – or any country in Western Europe – have become remote since the contest was expanded to include so many new states from Eastern Europe. Moldova, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania... their viewers are bound to vote for each other’s countries. The last winner from the west was Denmark in 2000.

“What we need in the voting is an Iron Curtain,” he says, looking half-serious. “All the big countries in Western Europe – France, Germany, Spain, the UK, San Marino… They should unite just to give one of us a chance.” But even though the block voting frustrates him, he still loves the contest itself. He’s never once considered giving up the job because, he says, there’s always “some silly new thing that makes it worthwhile”. The ridiculousness of the local presenters, for example: one pair of hosts – funnily enough, it was “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy” – spoke solely in rhyming couplets. “A great idea,” says Wogan. “For the first link.”

Then there are the variety acts who perform during the interval. One year, it was a mime troupe. “I was doing it for the radio,” says Wogan. “Can you imagine? Fifteen minutes of clowns miming. Not a lot to talk about.” Thankfully, he always has sustenance to hand. “My producer and I used to have a rule: ‘No drinks until song 12’,” he says. “Now it’s song seven. Anyway, I only have Bailey’s Irish Cream – it’s not an alcoholic drink, it’s a dairy product.”

He’ll be 70 in August, but has no plans to retire: he says he’ll do so only when his family tell him he’s passed his peak, if they say, “Your timing’s half a beat off.” Timing is everything to him. He says he’d quit if Radio 2 were privatised and started running ad breaks: “The adverts would ruin my timing.” But, while he’s adamant that the BBC should never go private, he has his criticisms of it. “The BBC needs to contract,” he says. Contract how? By axing BBC3, say? “There would be a case for that – BBC3, BBC4, perhaps some of the digital radio stations, because the audiences aren’t discernible.”

Which is something you certainly can’t say about Eurovision. Nearly 11million in Britain watched last year’s final. And you can be sure they’ll keep watching, for as long as that warm but withering voice is there to guide them through Royaume-Uni’s latest debacle.

The Eurovision Song Contest 2008 is on BBC1 next Saturday, 24 May, at 8.00pm. The semi-finals are on BBC3 on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, at 8.00pm

Jerry's all gold

2008-05-17T03:12:00.000-07:00

It's 10 years since Seinfeld - Larry David's magnificent sitcom 'about nothing' - ended. Jerry's jeans and trainers combo may have dated, but the lines assuredly have not. Will Dean compiles the best of them...

George: When you look annoyed all the time, people think that you're busy.

George: I'm 33 years old; I haven't outgrown the problems of puberty, I'm already facing the problems of old age. I completely skipped healthy adulthood. I went from having orgasms immediately, to taking forever. You could do your taxes in the time it takes me to have an orgasm. I never had a normal... medium orgasm.
Jerry: I never had a really good pickle

George: I have a bad feeling that whenever a lesbian looks at me they think, "That's why I'm not a heterosexual."

George: Why do they make the condom packets so hard to open?
Jerry: Probably to give the woman a chance to change her mind

George: My father was a quitter, my grandfather was a quitter, I was raised to give up. It's one of the few things I do well.

George: It became very clear to me sitting out there today that every decision I've made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat - it's all been wrong.

George: Someday, before I die, mark my words... I'm gonna tell that woman exactly what I think of her. I'll never be able to forgive myself until I do.
Jerry: And if you do?
George: Well, I still won't be able to forgive myself, but at least it won't be about this.

George: I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all!

George: Maybe if he could see me with some of my black friends...
Jerry: That would be great except that you don't really have any black friends.
[pauses]
Jerry: Outside of us, you don't really have any white friends, either...

George: I just don't see what purpose is it going to serve your going? I mean, you think dead people care who's at the funeral? They don't even know they're having a funeral. It's not like she's hanging out in the back going, "I can't believe Jerry didn't show up."
Elaine: Maybe she's there in spirit. How about that?
George: If you're a spirit, and you can travel to other dimensions and galaxies, and find out the mysteries of the universe, you think she's going to want to hang around Drexler's funeral home on Ocean Parkway?

George: A beautiful, successful, intelligent woman is in love with me and I throw it all away. Now I will spend the rest of my life living alone. I'll sit in my disgusting little apartment, watching basketball games, walking around with no underwear because I'm too lazy to do the laundry.
Jerry: You walk around with no underwear?
George: Ya, what do you do when you run out of laundry?
Jerry: I do a wash.

Mr Ross: I don't think there's any greater tragedy than when parents outlive their children.
George: Yes, I hope my parents die long before I do.

George: Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it.

George: And to think I'd fail at failing...
Jerry: Aw, come on now.
George: I feel like I can't do anything wrong.
Jerry: Nonsense. You do everything wrong.
George: You think so?
Jerry: Absolutely. I have no confidence in you.
George: Well, I guess I'll just have to pick myself up, dust myself off, and throw myself right back down again.
Jerry: That's the spirit. You suck.

George: I don't like when a woman says, "Make love to me." It's intimidating. The last time a woman said that to me, I wound up apologising to her.
Jerry: Really?
George: That's a lot of pressure. "Make love to me." What am I, in a circus?

Kramer: You're wasting your life.
George: I am not. What you call wasting, I call living. I'm living my life.
Kramer: OK, like what? No, tell me. Do you have a job?
George: No.
Kramer: You got money?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have a woman?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any prospects?
George: No.
Kramer: You got anything on the horizon?
George: Uh, no.
Kramer: Do you have any action at all?
George: No.
Kramer: Do you have any conceivable reason for even getting up in the morning?
George: I like to get the Daily News.

George: Oh, see? That's why I don't have cable in my house. Because of that naked station. If I had that in my house, I would never turn it off. I wouldn't sleep, I wouldn't eat. Eventually, firemen would have to break through the door, they'd find me sitting there in my pyjamas with drool coming down my face.

You don't know what you've got till it's gone

2008-05-17T02:56:00.000-07:00

An end to war? Environmentally friendly alternatives to oil? The second coming? No. What the world has been crying out for, apparently, is the return of Gladiators (Sun, 6pm, Sky One), which vanished from our screens eight years ago. I don't recall much protest at the time, writes Charlie Brooker. No one established an emergency helpline or threw themselves under the controller of ITV's car. Not a single leading newspaper ran a wounded editorial lamenting its demise and pleading with God for a revival. There were no dazed crowds of jonesing Gladiators fans wandering the street in a sorrowful funk, dumbly bumping into shop windows without even noticing, quivering in a puddle of tears in the cold and distant grief dimension. Its passing went largely unnoticed. A gentle nationwide shrug rolled across the country like an underfed Mexican wave. Gladiators had passed away, and we, as a nation, moved on.

But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.

Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.

Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.

Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.

Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.

Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.

The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.

Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.

BBC to make on air Burma picture apology

2008-05-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

The BBC is to make an on air apology after admitting that it broadcast a picture yesterday which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

Peter Horrocks, the head of the newly created BBC multimedia newsroom, said the corporation was now reviewing its processes for checking pictures it received following the incident. The still photograph in question was used to introduce a report from inside Burma by correspondent Natalia Antelava on last night's BBC1 10pm bulletin. "This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used," Horrocks wrote today on the BBC news website editors' blog.

The BBC confirmed it would make the on-air apology about the use of the picture on this evening's 10pm BBC1 bulletin. The picture was shown prior to the report in an introduction by 10 O'Clock News presenter Huw Edwards and was used to represent dozens of bodies that Antelava had seen lying on the waterfront of the Irawaddy delta.

Antelava's eyewitness account was broadcast by the BBC after she had left Burma to protect her. The BBC said it had now discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh in Sumatra, Indonesia, following the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004.

"Last night the BBC broadcast a still which we said showed dozens of bodies lying in the waterfront of the Irrawaddy delta," Horrocks said. "We have since discovered that the picture was actually taken in Aceh, Sumatra following the tsunami of 2004. This was a mistake, and we will be correcting it on all BBC output where the still was used.

"The BBC has first-hand evidence from its correspondent Natalia Antelava, who recently travelled in the delta, that there were many bodies in the water a week after the cyclone.

"However the picture we used yesterday to illustrate that truth was itself inaccurate. BBC News apologises for that. We will be reviewing our processes for checking pictures we receive."

Missing Live to return

2008-05-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

BBC1's daytime show Missing Live, which attempts to reunite missing people with their families, has been recommissioned after a successful first run. Recently arrived BBC daytime controller Liam Keelan has ordered a second series of the BBC1 show after the first run managed to reunite 17 missing people with their families.

Fronted by BBC Breakfast's Louise Minchin and Crimewatch's Rav Wilding, Missing Live follows the work of the police and the charity Missing People. Among those found as a direct result of the programme are 50-year-old Paul Hopkins and Chinese pensioner Lin Sinh Luc. The first series ran for four weeks at 9.15am every weekday on BBC1 and concluded today. Guests who appeared on Missing Live included Kate and Gerry McCann and Bob Geldof.

The programme was also praised in parliament when Liberal Democrat MP Susan Kramer and the former Conservative minister Peter Bottomley signed an early day motion recognising Missing Live's "immense value in bringing wider understanding and exposure to the reasons many people go missing, as well as the technology and techniques involved in trying to find them".

During the series, methods used to help find those who have disappeared included age-progression techniques and behavioural recognition cameras. Keelan said: "I had no hesitation in recommissioning Missing Live. Not only has it proved extremely popular with the audience, but it has received praise in the Commons and crucially 17 people have been found. It's exactly the sort of programming that BBC Daytime should be doing."

Missing Live is made by independent producer Leopard Films. Leopard chief executive and Missing Live executive producer James Burstall said: "Missing Live is a truly interactive programme as it has directly asked the British public for help in finding missing persons - and they responded. "This is public service TV at its most compelling best - we've built a two-way relationship with our audience and they have helped us return a number of people to safety. We very much look forward to building this relationship with the BBC1 audience into the future."

Missing People chief executive Paul Tuohy added: "Missing Live has without doubt enabled successful resolutions to cases that might otherwise remain unresolved."

The X Factor vision spells disaster for Brown

2008-05-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

In Hollywood, producers let you know their intentions for a movie script by calling for certain "types". It's pretty euphemistic. Scripts looking for "a Nicole Kidman type" might persuade Naomi Watts to become attached to them. A Renee Zellweger type? You might get that one in Grey's Anatomy. A Lindsay Lohan type? Honey, these days Lindsay Lohan's taking scripts meant for a Lindsay Lohan type. The past year has not been kind.

The practice of managing expectations in this way came to mind this week, says Marina Hyde, when it emerged that Gordon Brown has been approached by the BBC to judge a young talent show called Junior PM, aimed at what its producers describe as "an Apprentice meets Maria/Strictly Come Dancing audience". You couldn't help thinking they were looking for "an Alan Sugar type", and after being rejected by several cheap imitations, eventually sighed: "Well, I suppose we could settle for the prime minister."

And weren't they in luck? Whereas Sir Alan would never have lowered himself to even read the proposal, Junior PM's producers only had to raise it with Hazel Blears for her to take it all the way to a bleeding cabinet meeting. Her special adviser confirmed that the communities secretary intended to raise it "in the margins of cabinet". I suppose we should be grateful it wasn't item one on the agenda at the table around which political titans of yesteryear once sat. But you are formally dared to imagine Barbara Castle turning to Harold Wilson and saying: "Ooh, now, the Beeb has come up with a great idea in which you judge a telly talent contest. Hughie Green's turned it down, so unless Monkhouse fancies it, you should start looking grateful." In fact, it's difficult to decide which is more hilarious: that the running of Britain has now been relegated to the status of a telly prize, or that the BBC thinks the prime minister might actually say yes.

Put delicately, the idea of spending licence payers' money on a Gordon Brown vehicle is up there with Alan Partridge's legendary Monkey Tennis. The entire country knows Gordon is not what you'd call a TV natural. For the past couple of months he has only worn one expression: that of a man watching his legacy being torn down in slow motion. His telly outings already make us squirm in vicarious discomfort; it would be positively excruciating to see him dispensing a Simon Cowell-style verdict on some precocious little horror: "That was the worse post-neoclassical endogenous growth theorising I've seen in the Birmingham auditions ..."

This isn't the Beeb's vision, apparently. "It is a golden opportunity for the PM to gather a youth manifesto and become more popular than Alan Sugar," ran its pitch, and at some level you have to admire the misplaced confidence that Brown can afford to be worrying about the nine-year-old demographic, when his need to appeal to the already enfranchised would seem rather more pressing. "It is a very worthy programme idea," a Blears spokesman insisted, as though the entertainment potential were not sufficiently moribund without a government press officer describing it as "worthy". "The idea is to get more young people interested in politics."

But of course it is, because it is one of the orthodoxies of the age that more young people vote in reality TV elections than in general elections. Complete cobblers, as it goes, though I won't trouble you with the statistics. That said, you'd think our mathlete of a prime minister might be aware of them, because he is absurdly, uncomfortably obsessed with reality TV. Last month he appeared on American Idol, but two years ago he was already outlining his vision of "an X Factor Britain", a comment that managed to combine fatuity, neediness, and a total failure to understand what these kind of talent shows are really about. They don't make dreams come true; they sell you disappointment, which is why every series includes more and more of the episodes focusing on deluded clods auditioning.

And increasingly, doesn't Mr Brown's torment remind you of one of these tone-deaf unfortunates, whose painful progress makes you shriek "How on earth did he think he could do this?", and whom you can hardly bear to watch for the transferred embarrassment? Watching PMQs can feel like intruding on private grief, while the prime minister cannot seem to reverse the perception that he is faintly ridiculous. There is a sort of momentum to it now, where every one of these mooted stunts plays atrociously for him. It's just so easy to turn his gimmicks against him, a fact not lost on the Tories, who not only spent this week's PMQs making jokes about the electorate telling Mr Brown "You're fired!", but gave Strictly Come Dancing host Bruce Forsyth a special ticket to watch proceedings from the gallery. They do like to sledgehammer home a point in Westminster.

Need they even have bothered? The episode barely needed glossing. Everything about Junior PM feels hackneyed, knackered and devoid of ideas - the format, the thinking behind it, but most of all its intended star. As Sir Alan would say: he hasn't got a bladdy clue.

Hollywood private eye faces life in jail

2008-05-17T02:05:00.000-07:00

A self-proclaimed "private eye to the stars", Anthony Pellicano, was found guilty yesterday of 76 counts of illegal activity, including unauthorised wiretapping, intimidation and bribing police in a case that laid bare the seedy side of Hollywood. Pellicano, 64, was found guilty by a jury in a Los Angeles federal court of all but one of the charges brought against him and may spend the rest of his life in prison. Four co-defendants were also found guilty of supporting him in his illegal ventures.

Pellicano acted on behalf of several powerful clients, helping them to avoid criminal prosecutions, deal with messy divorces and secure business deals. In tape recordings played to the court of conversations he had made himself, he told his clients he would make their problems go away for a non-refundable retainer of $25,000 and upwards. All but a few of those clients have never been charged - some received promises of immunity from prosecution in exchange for evidence, others argued that they had no knowledge of his illegal methods.

The case was a culmination of a six-year investigation into Pellicano's practices by the FBI that began in 2002 when a reporter for the Los Angeles Times found a dead fish on the bonnet of her car, the windscreen smashed and a note saying "STOP". The FBI linked the threat to the fact that the reporter, Anita Busch, had been writing unfavourable pieces about Michael Ovitz, a powerful Hollywood agent and former co-president of Walt Disney. Ovitz employed Pellicano to help him deal with two people who were suing his company, as well as with Busch and another reporter.

The FBI investigation unveiled an enormous criminal network deployed by Pellicano on his clients' behalf. He engaged in widespread wiretapping of conversations, including those of Sylvester Stallone. He bribed police and other officials to run illegal database searches of, among others, Gary Shandling of the Larry Sanders Show fame and the Saturday Night Live actor Kevin Nealon.

The prosecution, which relied on witnesses including Farah Fawcett and Steven Segal, presented the jury with evidence of racketeering and death threats. Prosecutor Dan Saunders portrayed it as a case about illegal behaviour, not glamour and glitz. "This case is about corruption, cheating, greed, arrogance and the perversion of the justice system. It just happened to take place in Hollywood," he said.

Seven people pleaded guilty to charges related to the case before Pellicano's trial began. The most prominent was John McTiernan, director of Die Hard and other action movies, who was heard on tape in conversation with Pellicano during which the detective discussed wiretapping a film producer. Another casualty was Sandra Carradine, the former wife of the Oscar-winning actor Keith Carradine.

Several big names employed Pellicano, but have avoided any charges. Apart from Ovitz, they include the celebrated entertainment lawyer Bert Fields and Brad Grey, the head of Paramount studios. Grey used the services of Pellicano to target the comedian Garry Shandling, who was suing him for $100m. Shandling said Pellicano ran a smear campaign against him.

Meanwhile, the husband of an Emmy award-winning make-up artist was arrested last night, hours after human remains were found in woodland. David Chenery-Wickens, 51, is being questioned by detectives investigating the disappearance of 48-year-old Diane Chenery-Wickens in January. He had previously been arrested on suspicion of her murder and his police bail was extended to May 30 pending further inquiries.

A woman walking her dog found the body in woodland near Little Horsted, Uckfield, East Sussex. Mrs Chenery-Wickens' family has been informed of the discovery. Mrs Chenery-Wickens, who worked on such shows as The League of Gentlemen and Casualty, was reported missing by her husband on January 24.

HBO film about 2000 recount draws protests from Democrats

2008-05-16T17:13:00.000-07:00

Wounds from the Florida recount, still healing for many Democrats, are being ripped open again for some prominent former advisers to Al Gore. They say that a coming HBO film dramatizing the ballot battle after the 2000 election unfairly blames them for the Democrats’ failure to secure the White House.

Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, Recount, was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser. William M. Daley, Mr. Gore’s campaign chairman, who helped to lead the Democratic recount team in Florida, said the film created misperceptions about the Gore team’s decision-making process. Mr. Gore, who oversaw the team from Washington, is largely absent from the film.

Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said. The film, which has its premiere on May 25 on HBO, stars John Hurt as Mr. Christopher, Tom Wilkinson as Mr. Baker, Mitch Pileggi as Mr. Daley and Laura Dern as Katherine Harris, then the Florida secretary of state. Kevin Spacey plays Ron Klain, the Gore lawyer who led the on-the-ground recount effort and through whose eyes much of the action is seen.

As many dramatizations do, Recount includes invented scenes and dialogue. Danny Strong, who wrote the screenplay, said in an interview that while those inventions condensed events, they reflect what actually happened. “The film tries to give the essence of the truth,” he said, and is based on his own research and interviews, as well as on books and newspaper and magazine articles documenting the recount effort.

Dramatizations of historical events, particularly political ones, have frequently given trouble to writers and producers trying to create compelling entertainment. In 2006 ABC made changes to The Path to 9/11 after complaints from former Clinton administration officials that it portrayed them as less than vigilant in their pursuit of Osama bin Laden. CBS dropped plans to show The Reagans, a 2003 mini-series, after Republican and conservative groups protested its portrayal of President Reagan as forgetful and unsympathetic to AIDS victims. (The series was broadcast on Showtime.)

Recount, which has been screened for invited audiences in Washington and New York and will be shown in Florida this week, is inspiring similar protests. “I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” Mr. Daley said. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”

Neither Mr. Christopher nor Mr. Daley has seen the completed film, which has been sent to television reporters and critics for review. Mr. Daley said he requested and was given a draft of the script last year by HBO after filming had begun. Mr. Baker, who has seen the film, said he reviewed a draft of the script before production began and requested changes that were incorporated into the film.

Mr. Christopher said he learned of the film from his tailor, who was asked by the filmmakers to reproduce one of Mr. Christopher’s suits. He said he offered to review the script but never received one. The New York Times gave him a transcript of the scenes in which his character appears. “I was stunned by the excerpt,” he said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”

The film portrays Mr. Christopher as blocking attempts by other Gore advisers to rally protesters and to take the fight over disputed ballots to court. He is depicted as backing away from confrontation during a meeting with Mr. Baker, seeking compromise and negotiation as the Republicans prepare for war. The portrait stands in stark contrast to Mr. Baker’s. This is largely because the film is edited to jump directly from scenes in which Mr. Baker prepares the Bush team for “a street fight,” giving directions about where to stage protests, to scenes where Mr. Christopher counsels caution and calls for an “orderly process” without protesters. That characterization of Mr. Christopher has some support. Accounts published in The New York Times in 2000 characterized Mr. Christopher as urging caution and a disciplined approach to the recount.

Early reviews of Recount have been positive. Writing on huffingtonpost.com, Jeffrey Wells calls it “a thoroughly engaging, first-rate political drama.” But, he added, “I can’t see how this film won’t be seen as having done serious damage to the reputation” of Mr. Christopher, whom Mr. Wells says is portrayed “as one of the great all-time wimps.” Mr. Strong disputes that characterization. “It was our goal to show him as a noble statesman who held a deep concern at how the rest of the world would be negatively affected if the United States was not able to handle a disputed election in a non-violent manner,” he said.

The film is Mr. Strong’s first produced screenplay. Also an actor who appeared for four seasons on Gilmore Girls, Mr. Strong said he focused his book research on four works by reporters who covered the 36 days between the election and the Supreme Court decision that ended the recount. Mr. Strong gave several people depicted in the film the opportunity to review the script before filming began. Among them, he said, was Mr. Klain, who oversaw much of the day-to-day activity in Florida after Mr. Christopher returned to California for a family matter.

Mr. Klain said the film “gets the big things right,” but faults its portrait of Mr. Christopher. “He was as intense and vigorous an advocate for Vice President Gore as anyone there,” Mr. Klain said. Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley were interviewed by the film’s creators only after filming began. Mr. Christopher said he was told that scenes involving his character had already been filmed; Mr. Strong denied that, saying the scenes were to be filmed that day. Mr. Strong confirmed that Mr. Christopher offered to review the script but, he said, he decided not to send one. “I didn’t feel comfortable sending it to him because I didn’t feel that he was being totally candid in our interview,” Mr. Strong said. “He wasn’t as forthright with me as other people I’ve interviewed.”

Mr. Strong also said that the film did not intend to pin the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on anyone. In a later interview, though, he said Mr. Christopher and Mr. Daley “wanted to concede from Day One.” He said that conclusion was supported by one of his primary sources, “Too Close to Call,” a book by Jeffrey Toobin, who served as a consultant on the film. In it Mr. Toobin argues that by the end of the first week, both Mr. Daley and Mr. Christopher were “making the case for surrender.”

The director of Recount recently gave an interview about his HBO docudrama on the Florida recount, in which he discusses how you know you’re funny and the difficulties of running for office...

As the director of “Meet the Parents” and other hit comedies, you adopt a surprisingly sober tone in your coming film, “Recount,” which takes us back to the 36 days in the autumn of 2000 when the results of the presidential election remained disputed in Florida. Have you shown the film to Al Gore?

He has not seen the film as far as I know.

It stars Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, the lawyer for the Democrats. Has Klain seen the film?

He likes it. It’s kind of painful for the real people to relive it. It’s painful for everybody to relive. Particularly the Democrats who are involved in it. They always say, “Can’t you change the ending?” That’s always the joke.

I thought the film was very fair, except, perhaps, that the actors who play the Democratic operatives are more physically appealing than the Republican operatives.

That’s interesting. I think Tom Wilkinson, who plays James Baker, is a very handsome man.

He’s kind of beefy, though. Laura Dern, who plays another key Republican, Katherine Harris, is smothered in pancake make-up.

People get nervous when they’re thrust into the public eye. There was a rumour that someone told Harris that when you’re on TV, your make-up washes out so don’t be shy with those eyelashes and with that lip colour.

You give dimpled chads great prominence in this film, as opposed to hanging chads.

The hanging chads get a few close-ups too. Hopefully we’ve put punch-card machines into permanent obsolescence, because they really are just unacceptably primitive.

As the director of all three Austin Powers films, you resisted turning Recount into a comedy. It’s not a comedy at all.

No, no one in Recount says, “Yeah, baby, yeah.” There are no zinger catch phrases.

You and Mike Myers are rumoured to be working on a fourth Austin Powers film, but nothing has emerged since Goldmember in 2002.

Whenever I talk with Mike, we talk about it. The pressure is always there. But the script should earn its existence. It has to be really funny.

It sounds as if you have standards.

I try. The standard in comedy is so much easier because, like, is that going to be funny or not? You can usually tell.

What do you make of the fact that Austin Powers and Borat — you produced Borat — are both regressive male personalities in pursuit of bimbos?

I don’t disagree.

Are you like that, too? Are you trying to live in the mojo zone?

I think men are obsolete to some extent. I was going to do a film called "Used Guys" about a future where women run the world because they finally figured out that men are poisoned with testosterone and shouldn’t be allowed near anything sharp or explosive.

What did your father do for a living during your childhood in Albuquerque?

My dad is a retired engineer. He used to work for Sandia National Laboratories.

Was he helping to develop nuclear power?

He worked on aspects of that. But he worked in energy research and other things as well. He couldn’t talk about the work he did.

So he was an Austin Powers-style international man of mystery.

An Albuquerque man of mystery.

When did you leave New Mexico?

I went to Stanford to be a lawyer, and I really thought I might go into politics.

You do sort of look like a governor.

I get confused with City Councilman Bobby Shriver sometimes. People literally come up to me in Santa Monica, and he’s told me the same thing.

Maybe you have a future in politics.

I’m not equipped. I have terrible stage fright.

Home-grown, everyday sadism

2008-05-16T17:01:00.000-07:00

If Ellen Page ever worried that her roles in Juno and Smart People would too securely set her image as a feisty know-it-all, she chose well to appear in An American Crime, a film that manages to wrench all the placid innocence from her bones, writes Gina Bellafante. The movie, which appeared at the Sundance Film Festival last year and which made its debut on Showtime on Saturday, calls for none of her verbal wood chopping. Indeed, it demands a listless opposite, turning Ms. Page’s body into a cadaver long before her character becomes one, speaking to us softly, phlegmatically and from the grave. Ms. Page is all dreamy, spectral passivity; she mesmerizes. But so much is done to her that it is hard to know what she is actually doing.

Children are victimized so frequently on television these days — the babies left in Dumpsters on Law & Order: SVU, the boys or girls raped or chained up on Medium — that we may think we’ve become inured to depictions of such abuse. But An American Crime is such a shocking study of the will to defile, so forensic in its details, that it arrives as an act of vengeance against our habituation.

Based on the true story of Sylvia Likens, a teenage girl in Indianapolis in 1965 who found herself subjected to cruelties any adjectives applied here would only cheapen, the film almost begs us to look anywhere else. Her parents, carnival workers, leave her and her younger sister in the temporary care of a local laundress named Gertrude Baniszewski. Sylvia is burned, bruised, beaten and sodomized, the horrors magnified by the viral quality of her steward’s sadism. Before long, it isn’t merely Baniszewski drawing the blood, but her lot of vacant-looking children and a whole neighbourhood of young novices bored into violence.

Tommy O’Haver, the film’s director and co-writer, tips us to its agenda in the economy of his title. Sylvia had the misfortune to be born to parents who were comfortable leaving her with a stranger, but she also had the bad luck to grow up in a time and a place where ignorance was understood as its own brand of wisdom. The 1960s haven’t yet sounded the nation’s social alarm clock. Images of Vietnam flicker on television sets (Mr. O’Haver gives us President Johnson making a speech about General Westmoreland) but no one in an Indianapolis of church picnics and girl-group pop is paying heed.

Sylvia’s community, we learn, did nothing to save her. An older neighbour of Baniszewski’s, in cheap make-up that she seems to think will dignify her, had a faint hint of what was going on, but testifies at Baniszewski’s murder trial that she simply couldn’t judge a hard-working woman who seemed to be struggling. Despite all the visual terror in An American Crime, the single most disturbing moment is aural: Sylvia explaining in post-mortem voice-over, quite matter-of-factly, that her parents kept working, leaving her younger sister behind again, after the trial, this time with a local district attorney.

Mr. O’Haver understands the inexplicable nature of horrors like this one and he never panders to our reductive wish for clear answers. Gertrude Baniszewski, portrayed brilliantly by Catherine Keener, was clearly a woman who struggled: she had respiratory problems, multiple children with different men and virtually no money. But Mr. O’Haver doesn’t redeem her with a more extensive biography, a litany of whatever deeper mistreatments she surely endured. Ms. Keener takes on the role as if she were built on a skeleton of rusty needles. Looking at her, we know plenty. Baniszewski hates the purity of Sylvia, a quality she can neither reclaim for herself nor bequeath to her daughters, whose young lives already seem destined for similar miseries.

An American Crime is the most brutal evocation of wrongdoing to appear in quite a while; it is hardly a pleasure to watch. But it is also one of the best television movies to appear in years.

What time is prime time?

2008-05-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

This week, the television upfronts — in which the broadcast networks present their schedules to advertisers — opened with a mystery. Who stole six million viewers? That’s the number who were watching prime time television last May, a month affectionately known as “sweeps,” but have disappeared this year, according to the overnight Nielsen ratings. Each of the major broadcast networks, save for Fox, has seen its audience decline this season. The ratings for hit shows like American Idol and CSI have approached record lows.

Where some of last May’s 44 million viewers went is not a mystery, according to the networks. The writers’ strike this winter deflated the ratings and accelerated the flight of viewers to cable channels. But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favoured by advertisers are in decline, writes Brian Shelter.

The mystery, then, is what the networks should do now. Brad Adgate, research director of the advertising agency Horizon Media, said that advertisers were paying attention to the changes. “Part of the reason why advertisers buy television is because of its immediacy,” Mr. Adgate said. As more consumers time-shift their viewing, “there becomes less of a difference between ads in magazines and ads on television.” Broadcast television remains the dominant medium for advertising, as the $9 billion upfront market attests, but its prime-time audience is gradually shrinking. Time-shifting has cushioned the declines, but in ways that are trickier to measure and pitch to marketers. With on-demand options available in more households than ever, networks have no choice but to adapt.

For starters, the prime-time schedules crafted by television programmers might become less important with each passing year. David Wolf, a senior executive with the consulting firm Accenture’s media and entertainment practice, said that “must-see TV” — the long-time slogan for of NBC’s Thursday night line-up — might become a television relic. “The days of the ‘line-up’ are numbered,” Mr. Wolf said. In other words, with fewer viewers watching linear over-the-air television, networks can’t assume that a heavyweight lead-in like Dancing With the Stars will keep viewers watching all the way to the late local news, a pattern that has helped networks introduce new shows.

It may also mean that matching up programmes becomes less important, or at least less potentially damaging. Last fall’s powerhouse Thursday at 9 p.m. match-up — ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy versus CBS’s CSI versus NBC’s The Office — was a scheduling move influenced by time-shifting. All three shows are popular among the young, up-scale viewers who record and stream shows most often. “I think that scheduling decision would have been a lot harder to make in a non-DVR world,” said a senior network executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about the issue. “It would have been more of a zero-sum game then.”

Many of the top-rated broadcast shows now have 20 percent to 25 percent ratings gains when DVR viewing is calculated. In urban areas, the gains are even greater. In Los Angeles, fully half the 18- to 49-year-old viewership for some shows, including The Office and another NBC sitcom, 30 Rock, happens on a time-shifted basis. Some viewers shift their viewing only slightly, overlapping shows scheduled later in the evening.

Of 20 shows time-shifted most often, only one (Medium) is on at 10 p.m. As appointment viewing wanes, hit franchises — ones that viewers will record or watch online each week — become even more important. “As a result of time-shifting, the biggest shows are getting bigger and some of the smaller shows are getting negatively impacted,” the senior television executive said. At a series of upfront presentations this week, the networks are likely to discuss the dizzying number of new ways to watch television. Last week, for example, the General Electric unit NBC started streaming some episodes to the Apple iPhone, and Microsoft added show downloads to its online store.

The availability of television shows online has become widespread surprisingly quickly. Some series are viewed millions of times a week via free, advertising-supported streaming Web sites like Hulu, Veoh and Fancast (and the network sites themselves). DVRs and online streams offer “a fairly large library of content available on an on-demand basis,” said Amy Banse of Comcast Interactive Media. The Hills, the most popular show on Viacom’s MTV, is a leading example of the shift. Comparing television ratings with online streams is imprecise, but the audience for the series soars when on-demand options are factored in. Since the show returned on March 24, premiere episodes have averaged 3.7 million “live” viewers on Monday nights. Almost a million more viewers have watched each episode using DVRs. On the Internet, episodes and excerpts have been streamed another 32 million times. Some overlap undoubtedly exists, as some fans watch the episode both on TV and online. But every viewing is another advertising opportunity for MTV.

Streaming is particularly popular among younger viewers, who are able to sample shows they would otherwise miss. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, the CW decided last month to stop streaming the teen drama Gossip Girl on its Web site and steer viewers to the television broadcast in an effort to bolster its over-the-air ratings. Stephanie Savage, an executive producer, said she worried that the move would alienate viewers. After all, each episode put online had been streamed hundreds of thousands of times. “There were a lot of question marks,” she said.

But executives at the CW, a joint venture between a Time Warner unit and the CBS Corporation, were pleased with the results when the ratings rose slightly in late April, Ms. Savage noted, and the episodes are still for sale for $1.99 each at Apple’s iTunes store, where they regularly rank No. 1.

Cable operators offer yet another on-demand option. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the country’s two largest cable providers, are increasingly promoting their video-on-demand platforms, which are mostly associated with movies and premium programming. One-third of United States households now have on-demand capabilities, and Comcast said its platform recorded more than 300 million video views in March, up 50 percent over the previous year. But of all the time-shifting technologies, digital video recorders are the most popular. One in four American households now uses a digital video recorder to time-shift shows and skip commercials, up from about 15 percent last May. The broadcast networks experienced a 60 percent rise in recorded viewing this season. Last year, in recognition of the growth of DVRs, many television networks converted to a new ratings metric for buying and selling ad time that includes shows watched within three days of the broadcast.

For networks, the DVR is a friend and an enemy: “the classic frenemy,” said Alan Wurtzel, the head of research for NBC. While they enable viewers to watch more hours of television, they hurt the rate of commercial recognition, as about half of all commercials are skipped in time-shifting modes. “Honestly, if I could wish away the DVR, I would,” Mr. Wurtzel added. “But I can’t. It’s growing.”

Time Warner is trying a half-measure: letting viewers start an episode any time during the hour of its broadcast. “I’d like to see this get to the point where we have so much content that consumers can actually plan their lives around knowing that they don’t have to plan their lives,” said Peter C. Stern, the executive vice president for product management at Time Warner Cable.

McCain and Schrute are the dream ticket

2008-05-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

John McCain was ridiculed last month after he claimed to be a devoted viewer of the MTV soap opera The Hills. More than a few sceptics suggested that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee could not be serious. Mr. McCain seemed to set himself up again last Wednesday when, in an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, he jokingly proposed Dwight Schrute, the sycophantic character on the NBC sitcom The Office, as his running mate.

“That is pandering of the highest degree,” Mr. Stewart quipped. But Mr. McCain’s fondness for The Office seems sincere. The next day he seemed slightly star-struck upon meeting B. J. Novak, a writer and actor on the show, at a gala sponsored by Time magazine. Mr. McCain started rattling off the details of Dinner Party, a recent episode that he apparently enjoyed and remembered.

Mr. McCain explained that he used a Comcast service to record the shows. (An aide reminded him that it is called a digital video recorder.) Mr. Novak said the staff of The Office was very excited by the endorsement. “It really meant a lot to us,” he told Mr. McCain.

Presidential candidates long ago learned the power of pop culture, but this year they seem to be leaning particularly hard on it. In the days leading up to the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, both Democratic candidates appeared on Late Show With David Letterman with duelling Top 10 lists. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 10 reasons to love America included No. 6, “TiVo,” and Barack Obama’s 10 surprising facts included No. 10, “My first act as president will be to stop the fighting between Lauren and Heidi on The Hills.”

Then there is Mr. McCain, who has appeared on The Daily Show more than any other guest (14 times and counting). At the Time gala, Mr. McCain said he also watched Lost on ABC and The Tudors on Showtime. He didn’t mention The Hills.

Take my wife. Please. I’ll take yours.

2008-05-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

When the television series Swingtown has its US premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighbourhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.

Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street. Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But Swingtown, a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like Murder, She Wrote and Touched by an Angel defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — Swingtown is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself, suggests Jacques Steinberg.

Swingtown was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. Swingtown, then, is something of a trial balloon.

One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on Without a Trace, the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to Swingtown, would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.

“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who green-lighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”

In setting the tone for Swingtown, its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for The OC and Jericho) and Alan Poul (a principal director of Six Feet Under) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of The Wonder Years, the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

While Swingtown does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in Swingtown. And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fuelled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.

When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto Swingtown. One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favoured and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.) Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighbourhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”

In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages. “A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.

Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.” He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.

With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart. “Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.” Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”

In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as Swingtown, Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks. Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on Six Feet Under. HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because Big Love, which is about polygamy and was already in production, and Tell Me You Love Me, a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.

But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.) “I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”

Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’” There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite. “I think we’re able to be more ground-breaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said. Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”

What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than NYPD Blue had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s. Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.

“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including NYPD Blue and, recently, 30 Rock. “It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said. Ms. Henson added she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”

None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in Deadwood and Six Feet Under on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of Coupling, a sex-obsessed comedy. The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of Melrose Place, though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.

Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark. “Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit. “My wife,” Tom says, a smile broadening on his face, “is going to love you.”

Where a little awkward whimsy can take you

2008-05-16T09:54:00.000-07:00

As if by decree, the fans who came to Town Hall in Manhattan on a Tuesday night to see the comedy-music duo Flight of the Conchords arrived in pairs, one with glasses and one without. Among them were two sisters, Janice and Erica Jim. Seated in a front row, Erica (with glasses) was holding a hand-painted sign, shaped like a hot dog, bearing the band’s name, while Janice (without) toted a bag of tacky sweatshirts. (Both items were elaborately specific references to the Flight of the Conchords television show.)

The sisters expected a more animated audience — maybe people in costume? — but were still excited to be among the more clued-in members of the crowd. “It’s a nice little secret,” said Janice Jim. “If you know about them, you know about them.” It was an appropriately low-key reception for a low-key band, reports Dave Itzkoff. Its two laconic, hirsute New Zealanders — Jemaine Clement (glasses, sideburns) and Bret McKenzie (no glasses, beard) — are emblematic artists for an age of diminished expectations. On their HBO series they play a novelty pop-music team striving to make it big — or medium, or small — on the New York scene, and they muddle through performances at tiny, mostly empty clubs and airport lounges. In real life they are big enough that their two shows at Town Hall sold out almost immediately, yet small enough that they can inspire ritualistic loyalty in their fans.

When Flight of the Conchords was first shown on HBO last summer, it was a modest hit, infrequently drawing more than 1 million viewers an episode. In a post-Sopranos, post-Sex and the City era, however, the hip but little-seen show delivered badly needed buzz for the cable channel. Unlike the recent HBO misfire John From Cincinnati, which drew more scrutiny (and more viewers), Flight of the Conchords was renewed for a second season, though no date has yet been set.

Similarly, the band’s new album, also titled Flight of the Conchords (Sub Pop), sold only 52,000 copies in its first week when it was released last month, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But measured by the ever-constricting yardstick of the music industry, that was enough to make it a success; Flight of the Conchords made its debut at No. 3 on the Billboard chart, placing it ahead of new releases by more, shall we say, omnipresent acts like Ashlee Simpson.

On Tuesday, following a stand-up set by Todd Barry, a comedian whose deadpan delivery was drier than an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement took the stage, seated on stools, acoustic guitars on their laps. Their unrepentantly Caucasian efforts at funk, soul and R&B often pretended to address a specific topic or tell a single story, but wandered off on comedic tangents: a plea for social justice becomes a rant about the high cost of sweatshop-produced sneakers; a conversation between two ex-lovers veers into a critique of the Weekend at Bernie’s movies.

Between songs the two men bantered with self-conscious, Bob Newhartesque clumsiness, often about the clumsiness of their banter. (When Mr. McKenzie lamented feeling “out of kilter,” Mr. Clement asked, “What kilter are you usually in?”)

Though most of their music was created for the stage show, the songs came across more vividly on the HBO series, where they provided the soundtracks for music videos and fantasy sequences. (It’s hard to hear The Prince of Parties without thinking of the “Magical Mystery Tour”-style LSD trip that it accompanied on the television show.) Still, most audience members laughed along, even when they knew the punch lines that were coming.

“They’re not even trying, it’s so natural how awkward they are,” said Jennifer Gardiner, an appreciative fan (no glasses) who had come to the show with a friend, Crissi Bariatti (glasses). Both women were gazing adoringly at merchandise bearing the likenesses of Mr. Clement and Mr. McKenzie.

Nothing makes Flight of the Conchords more flustered than the opposite sex. When, in songs like “Ladies of the World,” they drool lustily over all manner of women — Caribbean, Namibian, amphibian — the facetiousness is obvious. Their outlook on male-female relations is more accurately reflected in the satirical slow jam “Business Time,” in which sex is merely a mechanical activity, something to do on a Wednesday night when there’s nothing good on television.

And sometimes sex is best avoided altogether. After boasting about their kissing skills, they performed “A Kiss Is Not a Contract,” which includes the lyric, “Just because you’ve been exploring my mouth/Doesn’t mean you get to take an expedition further south.”

There probably should be limits to the intimacy between the performers and their fans. During lulls between songs, when Mr. McKenzie and Mr. Clement were not bantering, audience members were relentless in shouting out titles of songs they wanted to hear, whether they were actual Flight of the Conchords tunes or the perennial Free Bird. When these requests went unheeded, they shouted the names of characters from the television show.

“Where’s Murray?” someone asked, referring to the hapless band manager played by the comedian Rhys Darby. “Murray’s not here,” Mr. Clement replied. “Murray’s doing a movie. But we’re here.” Apparently there are associates of Flight of the Conchords more famous than the band itself. “Murray blew up,” Mr. McKenzie said.

As terrifying as your real life

2008-05-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

Aside from some of the more banal horrors of reality programming, Medium has nothing to rival it as the most frightful hour on television, says Ginia Bellafante. The series, which stars Patricia Arquette as an earnest telepath (Allison Dubois) who lends her powers of premonition to Phoenix law enforcement, has been a quiet success on NBC for four seasons, receiving some of its highest ratings in recent months as the show has delved further into the human capacity for selfishness and intimate depravities.

Medium creates a mood of gothic foreboding from the first few seconds of its opening credits. Its score recalls the tense chords of a Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, and the accompanying graphics look like the dark and unequivocally right answers to a Rorschach test — mutating hands and faces and evocations of dripping blood. Life in the 21st century provides so many opportunities to terrify us that popular culture has generally seemed enfeebled in its efforts to compete. Over the past decade, as movies have been less frequently consumed in the vulnerable territory of public space, the idea that they might possess the power to scare and undo us has become something of joke, rolfing the horror genre almost entirely into a satire of itself. And if television has been increasingly adept at producing anxiety (24, Lost, Jericho), it has rarely elicited anything resembling sensory fear.

Created by Glen Gordon Caron (and existing at a significant tonal distance from Moonlighting, his other great contribution to television), Medium can be genuinely hard to endure, especially at home, alone, late at night (it is shown at 10 p.m. on Mondays), without wondering whether you should check behind the bedposts for sadists and other wack jobs. Something terrible has always just happened, or is about to, and the viewer bears the apprehensive weight of Allison’s foreknowledge, having witnessed the violently detailed dreams that disrupt her sleep almost every other nocturnal hour. (No one has ever needed a regular prescription of Ambien more.) Sometimes Allison’s forecasts can keep a rape or a killing from occurring. Mostly, though, Allison receives random images in the night — a woman, for example, fighting with her husband in a hotel room in France — only to learn, usually the next day, that someone who looks like the person she dreamt about has disappeared, which propels her toward the evidence that allows the authorities to solve the case. The woman in France, Allison intuited, had been abducted by her embittered ex-husband and then psychologically tortured in a re-creation of the honeymoon suite in Paris that the couple had stayed in years before.

Medium borrows from the conventions of classic horror the idea that real nightmares result from arbitrary or misplaced trust. The camera lingers on the faces of victims in waiting as they put their faith in attackers whose malevolence they cannot yet see. An episode shown in the US early this year revolved around the killing of a little boy, supplying the single most chilling moment on television in quite a long while: a smiling child watched as a man, shot from the waist down, slowly kicked off his shoes and danced to “Rapper’s Delight” in front of him. The little boy had followed his kidnapper out of a toy store, lured by a marionette slung over the man’s back and lost to his father’s distracting business call on his cellphone.

Work, on Medium, has been implicated as a distinctly dangerous pastime more than once. At the end of last US season Allison’s husband, Joe (Jake Weber), an aerospace engineer, and his colleagues were held hostage at gunpoint by a fired employee who, dying of cancer, demanded millions of dollars in compensation for the loss of his health insurance and other benefits. Medium is so committed to the grim realities of middle-class life that it is a paranormal show that very often doesn’t feel like one. This season Joe has no job at all: it’s a tough economy, and he has found it impossible to find another. Allison’s credit cards are declined at a grocery store; her eldest daughter hasn’t gotten her allowance in weeks. Indian call centres operating on behalf of lenders phone the Dubois household constantly, and the bills keep falling, one on top of the other.

When Medium isn’t terrifying us with images of children about to be sodomized and killed, it is unsettling us with its belief that all of our systems and institutions essentially fail us. Families are fragile, and sons kill fathers. Charitable organizations are bilked by greedy maniacs. Journalists are sleazy and operate on falsehoods. (Last season Allison befriended a woman she thought was an out-of-towner looking for company, only to discover, after it was too late, that the woman was a reporter seeking to expose the Phoenix district attorney’s reliance on her unorthodox services.)

And, of course, what does it say about the skills of the show’s police officers and prosecutors that they depend so heavily on the musings of a psychic mother of three? It says that they just cannot hack it with their blood samples and clues and shoe leather. Allison’s notions are almost always infallible, but information isn’t. The scariest message from Medium, says Bellafante, is that we only have our instincts to guide us.

Voilà (sort of)!

2008-05-16T08:31:00.000-07:00

So what’s on the block at the 'upfronts' this month? Could it be the future of television? asks Virginia Heffernan...

Every spring since the early ’80s, the lavish presentations known as the upfronts have been a propaganda jamboree for the TV business. What began as a network trade show for ad-world elites has evolved, thanks to industry one-upmanship, into a bacchanal of variety shows hosted by the networks and staged before standing-room hordes at places like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre.

In the midst of extravagant audiovisuals, musical numbers, comedy sketches, pricey giveaways and celebrity appearances, the networks divulge their fall prime-time schedules — the sitcoms, dramas, game shows and reality programmes that are broadcast between 8 and 11. They settle with great fanfare industry nail-biters like “Will Fox cede the Thursday 8:30 hammock time slot to NBC?” The audience for this arcana includes reporters and prospective advertisers, who sit rapt for an hour or two and then mill around at swanky after-parties, hoping to glimpse Kiefer Sutherland and sounding off about how dumb or weird the presentations were.

And the upfronts are kind of dumb. They are overblown tributes to a bygone style of salesmanship, and from the point of view of advertisers, they are almost pointless. In the old days, execs from Ralston Purina, say, would attend exclusive in-studio screenings of CBS pilots so they could be sure to place Puppy Chow ads during shows that featured dogs. But today, when media buyers can screen shows online and study a network’s demographics and ad platforms, the upfronts function chiefly as an ostentatious corporate week on the town.

They are a sight to see: the ad world squealing over small-screen stars, small-screen stars conversing knowingly with network accountants and alpha executives donning big shoes and clown noses, begging for ad dollars while flanked by high-flying guys and dolls. (Think Aretha Franklin, the Who, Mary J. Blige, Chris Rock, Eli and Peyton Manning, Jerry Seinfeld, Tyra Banks, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey.) The whole spectacle has got to be one of the most embarrassing, astonishing, confusing, wondrous collisions of American sensibilities you’ll ever see.

Or it was. For decades. When TV was a business of winners. But winning streaks must end. Having so long excoriated themselves as a nation of zombie-eyed TV addicts — they average six hours a day, the old studies always showed — Americans cannot seem to face the fact that we have sobered up. But it’s true: many of us seem to have shut off the networks, at least in prime time. Instead, we watch DVDs, DVRs, on-demand, online and niche cable channels. We also do other things. No one knows what, exactly, but it’s evidently less quantifiable than watching TV. (One suggestive statistic: Americans watched 10 billion videos online in the month of February alone, according to the comScore Video Metrix service.)

To people who work in television, this development is known as “the viewer plunge.” Last spring at the upfronts, a chilling number was widely whispered: 2.5 million fewer people were watching NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox than had in spring 2006. TV executives repeatedly reassured ad buyers that everything was A-O.K., but they also took to kitchen-sinking to explain away the plunge. Daylight Savings Time had come too early. Everyone was using TiVo and the Internet. The rating system is unfair. The war. The economy. The toxins. The bees. But things were going to be great in ’08.

And then came the writers’ strike. Combined with the viewer plunge, it was like the Depression and the Dust Bowl — a double whammy for television and its audience. The strike “orphaned” viewers (as the jargon has it) without their favourite shows, which gave viewers a reason to leave network television entirely. And they did. Sayonara. According to The Hollywood Reporter, most returning shows lost between 10 and 30 percent of the viewers they had before the strike, when ratings for the networks were already low.

It’s not immediately clear what all this means for the upfronts. How do you celebrate your wedding anniversary the year that divorce is imminent? Do you drink alone? Toast to old times? “It’s going to be much more like a meeting,” Mike Shaw, the president of sales and marketing for ABC, said, referring to this year’s upfronts, on an advertising panel at the Harvard Business School in February. He cited, as one reason for this change, the fact that the writers’ strike compressed the time available for producing pilots. Still, the writing is on the wall: the good times are over. The ABC gang will show up at Lincoln Center but offer some kind of “streamlined” corporate presentation and no party. Sounds like fun.

Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, which is trailing closely behind the three other big networks, seems equally chastened. At the same event in February, he declared that NBC would be “much more realistic and much more honest” in its presentation of programming to advertisers. (NBC has resolved to make shows faster, cheaper and year-round, meaning they won’t make and summarily kill the usual huge number of sample shows.) Fox, which still has a bona fide, if recently weakened, hit in American Idol, planned its upfront as usual, but with no surprises or dramatic unveilings. Finally, CBS did a programming and advertising presentation. No party.

"I’m not going to any upfronts this year," says Heffernan. "I’ll miss them: I’ve loved every minute of the cuckoo shows in the past, and I’ll probably never get to see those mongo entertainers at such close range again. At the upfronts I always learned something too about what the American people want: heartwarming dramas, women’s stuff, sports, heroism, complex characters, real people, guilty pleasures, eye candy, names they can trust, ambiguous villains, simple comedies, hipster hipness, good old-fashioned values, edginess, upscaleness, satire, science fiction, girls, boys, Latinas, crime procedurals, urban sitcoms, aspirationalism, a way to express their anger."

Closing credits. Colour bars. Static. For decades, what Americans want has been something that could be piped into a television screen. What if it’s not any more?

Dollhouse comes to life

2008-05-16T06:38:00.000-07:00

Joss Whedon, the scribe who birthed Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel and swore off the small screen after Firefly was cancelled, is part of the Fox family again, reports Maria Elena Fernandez...

Whedon's Dollhouse was officially unveiled yesterday as part of Fox's line-up at a presentation in Manhattan. The drama is about an illegal house of men and women whose memories and personalities have been wiped out so that they can be hired to be anyone and do anything. It stars Eliza Dushku (Faith from "Buffy"), who unintentionally served as the inspiration for the idea. It will air in mid-season.

Describing their initial meetings with Whedon, Fox President of Entertainment Kevin Reilly and Gary Newman, chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, used terms not often heard from powerful executives regarding pitches. "He had me at 'hello,'" Reilly said, admitting that the first time Whedon visited the network, "I was kinda drunk with the surprise of it all. He laid out the whole concept, but I think it was one of those things where I heard every other word of it."

"I don't quite know what to liken it to," Newman said. "He pitches as if he's thinking of it for the first time. There's an extemporaneous nature to it, which keeps you kind of riveted. You have to listen really carefully because the wicked and clever asides are non-stop."

Q & A with Joss Whedon, writer, producer and director:

Is it true that this idea came to you over lunch with Eliza Dushku?

Eliza had made the deal at Fox and we got together to talk about her ambition, her management, her opportunities, because I've always felt that she's a huge star. Plus, she's a friend.

But I was trying to get a movie off the ground, Goners. Wonder Woman had already crashed and burned. Goners they had already lost control of the instruments, but who knows? So things were not that auspicious, but I was working it. Not shunning television but not intending to come back. But as we discussed Eliza's predicament, I started giving her some ideas about what I thought she would need: a genre show so she could be political without being partisan; an ensemble show so she didn't have to be in every scene. And I thought about it for a bit and then literally went, oh, curse word, I just came up with the show and the title. And it was the title that I knew I was doomed. Because if you have the title, you know it's right. And that's just bad.

When we really discussed the whole thing, she said, "You're talking about my life. In my life, everybody tells me who they want me to be while I try and figure out who I am." And that spoke to me. I agreed that I'll write and maybe oversee the pilot. So I went home and said, "Honey, I'm sorry, I accidentally agreed to a Fox show at lunch."

That was some lunch. What did you eat?

The Gouda pizza with shrimp at the Ivy [at] the Shore. Eliza still looks around the set and goes, "That's all the Gouda pizza." Back then, I was all hopeful about it. Now I'm exhausted about it. That pizza's ruined my life.

Recently you had decided to become more of an independent filmmaker. Why?

I was lucky for a while. I got a lot of breaks, including the brief existence of the WB and UPN. So I got to do things my way, which is a rare privilege in television. Then I had [Firefly], and, for the first time, I was not under the radar anymore, which meant they would give me everything I wanted. Except a full order. So it was a heartbreaking experience, and the only way to resurrect the show was to make a movie [Serenity] out of it.

And your fans loved it.

People loved it but not so many people that they asked me to make another. I had scripts and offers, and three years later I seemed to be running in place. It was harder for me to write, and partially because I was adjusting to having a family. But it was also the movie-making process. In movies, they really will question everything. Sometimes that makes it better and sometimes that makes it die in development hell or filled with notes. And notes that you can practically see floating around the screen.

How long after your lunch with Eliza did Fox offer you the opportunity to make a guaranteed seven episodes?

One week. This just felt right. Fox understood the show, and they've continued to prove that that is the case. I've pitched shows to people who didn't and they made them anyway, and that didn't go so well.

Then I went into a state of blank panic. Oh, wait, all of my writers have jobs. So I went upstairs and I laid out seven notebooks, and every night I'd go up and put my seven notebooks all in a row, and I'd look and see what do we need to get from here to here. I even had to take them to New York. I thought, oh, I'd just rip off the page. 'No, you can't rip off the page. You'd kill the magic.' So I brought them to Kevin Reilly and I laid them out on his coffee table, and he said, "This is great. I love all of them." I said, "Great. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm on strike." And for the entire strike, I did not think about Dollhouse. Occasionally, I would get a feeling.

How could you stop yourself from thinking?

I had a lot of other things on my mind. Like the strike.

And the Internet musical you've been doing?

Eventually. At first I was just really working the problem because the strike was a very serious issue and one that I don't feel we resolved adequately. I reached out to the people in Silicon Valley, like everyone else, and said, if you will finance something, I will put it together. I will shoot it tomorrow. I will make something so low-budget that will look so good. That deal still isn't made. It took so long. But I wanted to get out there and create jobs and tell stories, and really explaining to people that there really is another way. Well, I found out that wasn't it. And that ate up a lot of my time. So I thought maybe something smaller. "Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog" was something I'd thought of before to do as an audio podcast so I could write some songs. I thought it would make a nice little piece -- three 10-minute segments. Maybe find a way to monetize it. And I got my brothers involved. So we all wrote it together, the four of us, and then Neil Patrick Harris, who is a buddy, agreed to star in it. And that was our dream because he's got the greatest singing voice and he's a brilliant actor. And Nathan Fillion agreed to star in it as the villain. And Felicia Day agreed to star in it. And when we came back, Fox said instead of 3 1/2 months to write a script and a few months of prep time, we're shooting [Dollhouse] in two months. And we hadn't even fully broken an episode.

And I had "Dr. Horrible" to shoot two weeks from then and no line producer for that. It was a time of work. The thing is, I wasn't going to abandon or short-shrift either project. You just can't. You can't put something out there with your name on it that isn't the most wonderful you can make it. I also had the comic books that I should have written during the strike, but I didn't. Apart from being sick, I really have no excuse, and they all hate me now. And they should.

When will "Dr. Horrible" launch?

We're dropping in the last effects and colour- timing it right after upfronts, and then I'll be talking to people about how we can put it out. I would like to monetize it so I can not only say, 'Look, I can tell stories,' but people can be paid.

How are you balancing being a writer, producer and director?

After the first day, we were in this tiny cramped apartment, which I had scouted. The actors would do three lines and we'd have to move the camera. It was a nightmare. I was like, I forgot how to do this. You get a big apartment and you make it look tiny. I'm away from my family. This footage is terrible. It's over. Bury me. People who know me know that's probably not the first time I've said that. But it always feels like the first time. And I really thought, I've blown it. What am I doing? Where are my children? What's going on? I'm dizzy.

Directing is my way of creating the style, of relating to the actors and dialing in what their characters are. For me to be doing that as an executive producer over another director's shoulder isn't fair to them. And I happen to be one of my favourite directors. I'm not the best, but I'm just easy to get along with. I agree with almost everything I say. I won't do it the whole season. I have to be home and I have to get the scripts out on time. It's going to be a new skill that I'm learning.

Do you feel more pressure because it's a big network?

No. I feel the same pressure I always feel, which is all the pressure in the world. My name is on it. It's a story. My name now means something to people that it didn't before. But I still tried my hardest when it didn't.

I'm sure when you became a writer you didn't think viewers would be this familiar with your name. Do you like it?

There are not two parts to that answer. I like it. I'm sorry. I'm superficial.

Do you ever sense that nowadays fans feel like they really know you because they have more access?

If somebody comes up to me, it's because they're moved by something I'm moved by. I've never taken a job I didn't love. And, yes, I am including Waterworld. I didn't love it at the end, but what a good idea. So when somebody's coming up to me, or they're writing, they're in the same space I am in. I write for fanboy moments. I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. I write to do all the things the viewers want too. So the intensity of the fan response is enormously gratifying. It means I hit a nerve. Dollhouse might not. Dollhouse might make them go, "What else is on?"

Carry on carving

2008-05-16T01:26:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: The Artful Codgers; Magnetic North; Flipping Out: Israel's Drug Generation

There’s nothing quite like a story in which the posh and the pretentious get duped by the wily underdog. The Artful Codgers (Channel 4) delivered just such a true-life tale in splendid style, recounting the sometimes baffling, occasionally hilarious and generally bizarre circumstances in which a lowly Bolton family ran a 17-year crime spree, making and selling fake art works and antiquities to museums, galleries and private collectors around the world. The fact that two, George and Olive Greenhalgh, were in their eighties when they were caught last year only added to the piquancy. As did knowing that their ingenious self-taught son Shaun, 47, had single-handedly painted, sculpted and smelted the fakes in a tiny wooden shed in the garden of their council house.

By the time the law caught up with the Greenhalghs they had made about £1m from fake antiquities. The Queen went to Bolton to admire Shaun's 3,000-year-old figurine of Tutankhamun's sister, a shining young girl whose thin silk dress rippled over her body like water. Shaun made her in three weeks with tools bought from B&Q, and Christie's valued her at £500,000. Shaun's Romano-British boar hunt sold for £93,000 and was the pride of the British Museum. Shaun's Gauguin faun ("£18,000 to you, squire!") appeared on TV in a documentary by Waldemar Januszczak.

The high point of their success was the sale of the "Amarna Princess" to the Bolton Museum for more than £400,000. This was purportedly an Egyptian figurine– damaged, but still a graceful object. George span a Tess of the d'Urbervilles yarn about a well-off family fallen on hard times, and all this art having been inherited. George had an auction catalogue by way of provenance (Olive had bought that second-hand). He told the museum that a dealer had valued it at £500, but if they didn't want to pay that he would use it as a garden ornament. The psychology behind this approach was simple but effective, his apparent ignorance and indifference apparently working as guarantees of authenticity. Bolton passed the statue on to the British Museum for appraisal. The curator who did the appraising was interviewed here, explaining somewhat gracelessly that he had worked on the assumption the statue had a "cast-iron" provenance, and it wasn't his job to check. The statue was passed as genuine, the National Heritage Fund stumped up most of the cash, and everybody was delighted. Some cringe-making archive footage showed a Bolton curator crowing to news cameras over the acquisition of this "masterpiece".

There were red faces all round for the experts and auction house valuers who’d gone into ecstasies over these items, many of which got sold on by dealers for vastly more than the Greenhalghs ever saw. An example of this was the figure of a faun, supposedly by Gauguin, which they sold for £18,000 but for which a Chicago museum later paid around $125,000. To be fair, most of the connoisseurs were happy to put their hands up and grin shame-facedly at the camera. Art critic Januszczak even suggested that rather than blame the experts for being duped it is Shaun Greenhalgh’s ingenuity that should be celebrated. And the real culprits here, surely, are an education system that misses a talent such as his, and an economic system that doesn't find him gainful employment. The diversity of Shaun’s work – ranging from Roman silverware, paintings and sculptures by artists as dissimilar as Lowry, Thomas Moran and Barbara Hepworth – marks him out as one of the great craftsman forgers. Yet like much else in this entertaining but quite superficial account, questions regarding motive went unanswered.

The film dovetailed police interviews, amused or bemused experts and dramatised excerpts of Shaun in his shed and George in his perky little pork-pie hat. George was a con man. He had demanded and received medals for every engagement in the second world war, a period he had, in fact, passed peacefully in prison as a deserter. But Shaun, whose big, bewildered face haunts you, was the genuine article, a brilliant, self-taught artist. He had left school at 16, never had a job, never had a lesson in art. "Bit boring, aren't I?" he said to the police. He seems to have educated himself by mining that long-neglected mother lode, libraries. Among the brawn-coloured marble pillars of the John Rylands Library, in specialist books rarely lifted from inaccessible shelves, he read about lost masterpieces such as the Gauguin's ceramic faun, which vanished in the 20s. Only one sketchy sketch remained and Shaun recreated it from that ("Just show it me. I'll do it").

Twice in 20 years the Art Squad were alerted to the Greenhalghs' activities. When I say alert ... admittedly, they were undermanned, and it's a long way to Bolton. If anything, the whole affair showed that the art world isn't quite as cosy as you might think. If people had been talking to one another, the Greenhalghes could never have carried on. But while Shaun was doing the hard work and George was doing the hard sell, it all went as sweetly as a wedding bell. Shaun's versatility was astonishing. He could work in metal, ceramics, pastels, oils and stone, and George had a plausible personal explanation for every piece. "When Colonel Hardcastle died his housekeeper gave them to me mother," or "I'm related to a famous Irish poet and he gave it me grandma." When Shaun carved massive Assyrian panels, George could not carry them so Shaun took them to London himself. He left a Sennacherib battle scene with the British Museum, who found him strangely withdrawn ("I have no friends. I never go out. I find people difficult to deal with"), and two others with Bonhams. But Bonhams consulted an Assyrian expert, a very jolly, slightly pompous Richard Falkiner, who came down like a wolf on the fold. "I pride myself - I hope with justification - on knowing a bit about these Assyrian reliefs. My immediate reaction was 'Don't make me laugh!' I went on to my magic lantern, I believe they are called computers, and I got maps up of the area, and I thought, 'People like that, living there, don't have Assyrian reliefs, do they?'"

People like that ... living there ... When the Art Squad (an entertaining concept in itself) finally arrived in Bolton, they found a council house crammed with people and proof. Two of Tutankhamun's sisters shared a cupboard with old shoes. Shaun, who was 47, shared a tiny bedroom with his brother, his mother and his aunt in conditions described as “appalling”. George, of course, had the master bedroom. When the police asked George why none of the money had been spent, he said, "In that drawer I've six pairs of socks I've never worn." They were living in a poverty-stricken time warp. Doctor Who would have been taken aback. Nobby, a neighbour, said, "They were like ghosts. You saw them here, and saw them there, and then they'd disappear back into their own world." It felt cold, as though a cloud had covered the great joke.

In recordings of police interviews, the family seethed with resentment – Sean at an art world he had barely encountered, Olive at dealers who were, she said, making a tidy profit on their handiwork (a nice piece of criminal logic). At their trial this year, George turned up in a wheelchair ("He were never in a wheelchair before the court case," said a neighbour). He was spared prison on the grounds of age and infirmity, him being an old soldier with two enemy bullets in his brain. Shaun took the blame and got both barrels. Four and a half years. "There'll be something done about it, don't you worry," said George, speeding away in his wheelchair, and, for once, it was the truth. The Old Codgers, directed by a Nick Hornby, is the something that was done. As the credits rolled, it was possible only to conclude that the Greenhalghs did it because they could. And, having seen a mere 10 or so accounted for here, to wonder where the remainder of the estimated 120 great fakes they’ve made have got to. Shaun's neighbours speculated on those many undiscovered Greenhalgh masterpieces and raised their pints to the Bolton Wonder: "Carry on carving!"

You won’t see trailers for Magnetic North (BBC Two). But the BBC should be proud of this beautifully directed, intelligent series about the concept and landscape of “the North”, presented by Jonathan Meades. Meades, formerly a writer and restaurant critic for The Times, is brainy, scabrous, mischievous and impossible to pigeonhole: a fizzing anomaly in today’s landscape of banality-spouting idenitkit presenters.

He started his journey in the bare beachside town of Kuhlungshorn on the German Baltic coast. You knew Magnetic North was going to be special because Luke Cardiff (credited with “photography”) and the director Francis Hanly immediately evoked the open skies and barren beaches that Meades would later lyrically describe. The presenter was introduced, not chirruping away aiming at the lowest common denominator, but in suede shoes and rumpled blue suit and shades, immediately defining – in toff scattergun – the idea of North against the idealised South, which was characterised by “dreams of speedboats, exuberant vines, guiltless hedonism”. The spirit of the North, in contrast, was contrary, misanthropic: “To be northern is to be forever ill at ease with oneself”. In the French department of Nord, Meades mouthed heartily the words of Pierre Bachelet’s Les Corons: “The north was back to backs/The earth was made of coal.” Coal was smeared all over his face as he stalked in front of slag-heaps.

Meades somehow made his essay as elegant on television (an inelegant medium, especially around big ideas) as it would have been in print. In Flanders he looked at Gothic architecture and tossed out wonderful musings on herring: the predominant foodstuff for thousands of miles around, he noted that road builders in Flanders said the first layer of top soil held the bones of First World War servicemen, the second herringbones. Meades is as engaged with art as he is food, so went from pickled, soused and fermented herring to the meanings of northern art, revealing the likes of Bosch revelled in the surreal, dark, artificial and gloomy – under Bosch’s brush, “Heaven was a doggers’ paradise”.

Meades identified that northern churches were the first to strip out the amulets and excesses of organised religion and in their place a Gothic template was installed – all gargoyles and outer carvings. The paintings that first capture these stripped-down churches show buildings whose first function – as realised on the canvas with images of people talking or laughing – was not necessarily worship. The naughty North, you see. Meades was a wonderful guide: dragged up (but somehow not too stupidly) as a monk, he showed us the history of brewing. He asked one off-licence worker which favourite beer he would drink before he died. With Hogarth’s Gin Lane as a backdrop, Britain’s love affair with intoxification was sketched.

He makes no capitulation to television: he thinks and speaks densely. If you lose him just remain pleasurably bamboozled. It’s fun to see him on the balcony of his ivory tower holding forth, because a moment later he’s in the red light district of Hamburg, neon light flashing across his omni-worn sunglasses, advancing the case of a city that brazenly celebrates the sex trade. For those few who favour rain and gusty winds over summer warmth, mountains over beaches, and deathly wide and bracing open spaces (in Norfolk, northern England, or northern Scotland) with their biting winds and open vistas, this was an absorbing, wonderful half hour. Sparkling, thought-provoking, constantly challenging the accepted view, Meades seemed at times inspired, at others deranged. The only thing he never was, thank heaven, was obvious.

Flipping Out: Israel's Drug Generation was a drifting, melancholy film about a whole world I'd never heard of: the Israeli diaspora in India. Every year, hordes of young Israelis, discharged after their three years' compulsory military service, take their demob money and head for the subcontinent to get out of their heads. Quite a few have mental breakdowns, brought on by loneliness, bad trips and, the director, Yoav Shamir, wanted us to think, guilt over their experiences in the occupied territories (he found one ex-soldier prepared to endorse that view, another who seemed puzzled). Shamir followed Hilik Magnus, a former secret-service agent, who has spent his life searching for and retrieving the damaged. The most arresting episode happened in sound only, out of reach of the cameras, as Magnus tried to persuade one young man, apparently convinced he was some kind of messiah, to accompany him home. "Look," the messiah told him, "with all due respect, I'm the most important person for humanity just now." But isn't that what most of us think when we're young?

Fox presents...

2008-05-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

Fox, the American Idol network, announced its new schedule on Thursday of this 'upfronts' week. The network comes from a position of strength: It will once again win the US season in viewers ages 18 to 49, and, in what could represent a sea change in broadcast television, Fox has also wrested the most-watched title away from CBS, as was anticipated by media analysts in March. Its two most high-profile new projects are Fringe, from Team J.J. Abrams, and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. Fringe, and indeed the entire Fox "fall" line-up, will make its debut in late August. (Prison Break will kick off the Fox season Aug. 25; a two-hour Fringe will premiere the next night.)

The network has high hopes that Fringe will prove a big success. It is the story of an F.B.I. special agent (played by Anna Torv) who is called upon to investigate a mysterious Boston plane crash. For assistance, she seeks out a brilliant scientist who has the disadvantage of having been institutionalized for the previous two decades. Dollhouse, from Joss Wheedon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will appear mid-season and is a science-fiction drama about a nefarious organization that inserts new identities (like those of a concert pianist or brain surgeon) into the minds of unwitting victims.

On a decidedly lighter note, the network has also picked up a comedy called The Inn, in which Jerry O’Connell works at a hotel catering to a wealthy clientele. Among its directors is Jason Bateman, a star of Arrested Development and the film Juno.

Later in the year, Fox is expected to introduce two animated series: Cleveland, a spinoff of its Family Guy, and a series that has variously been known as Sit Down and Shut Up and Class Dismissed, about staff members in a dysfunctional high school in a fishing town. That series was created by Mitch Hurwitz, who created Arrested Development; Mr. Bateman is to provide one of the voices.

Unlike ABC, CBS, NBC and CW, all of which have announced their fall schedules, Fox is operating from the vantage point not only of first place in the ratings but also as the only broadcast network to add viewers this year in the demographic category of most interest to advertisers. Accordingly, American Idol, the most popular show on television, will be back on Fox next year, as will two other highly rated reality shows, Moment of Truth and Hell’s Kitchen, and the dramas House and Bones.

As usual, Fox announced its schedule in two separate parts because of "Idol." What will be different in this coming season, assuming there are no strike disruptions or other disasters, will be the return of 24 -- the Kiefer Sutherland-led adventure series will come back to the airwaves for the first time since spring of 2007. On Thursday, the network announced the air date of the two-hour 24 prequel (Sunday, Nov. 23) and also "Day 7" of the veteran show, which suffered a creative downturn in its sixth season after an Emmy-winning run in its fifth, will come back to Fox in January. It will be in its regular 9 p.m. Monday slot, with Dollhouse as its lead-in. The return of 24 will compensate for the loss of the Super Bowl in early 2009 — which it exploited to great effect this year.

Also returning to Fox are ’Til Death, the comedy starring Brad Garrett that is completing its second season, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a spin-off of the Terminator movie series that made its debut this season.

Other notes: Back to You, Canterbury's Law, New Amsterdam and The Return of Jezebel James have indeed been cancelled, as previously reported. Unhitched, the Farrelly brothers comedy, can now be added to that list as well. The failure of Back to You, a comedy featuring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton had been among the most anticipated this year but never quite caught on.

And also check out below that the "Idol" results show is, at least for now, going back to a half-hour after a season in which viewers seemed to begin tiring of the singing competition for the first time.

FOX PRIME-TIME SCHEDULE: FALL 2008 (All times Eastern/Pacific)

MONDAY
8-9 p.m. TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES
9-10 p.m. PRISON BREAK

TUESDAY
8-9 p.m. HOUSE
9-10 p.m. FRINGE

WEDNESDAY
8-9 p.m. BONES
9-9:30 p.m. 'TIL DEATH
9:30-10 p.m. DO NOT DISTURB (working title, formerly "The Inn")

THURSDAY
8-9 p.m. THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
9-10 p.m. KITCHEN NIGHTMARES

FRIDAY
8-9 p.m. ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A 5th GRADER?
9-10 p.m. DON'T FORGET THE LYRICS!

SATURDAY
8-8:30 p.m. COPS
8:30-9 p.m. COPS
9-10 p.m. AMERICA'S MOST WANTED: AMERICA FIGHTS BACK
11 p.m.-midnight MADtv
Midnight-12:30 a.m. TALKSHOW WITH SPIKE FERESTEN

SUNDAY
7-8 p.m. THE OT (NFL post-game)
8-8:30 p.m. THE SIMPSONS
8:30-9 p.m. KING OF THE HILL
9-9:30 p.m. FAMILY GUY
9:30-10 p.m. AMERICAN DAD

FOX PRIME-TIME SCHEDULE: BEGINNING JANUARY 2009 (All times Eastern/Pacific)

MONDAY
8-9 p.m. DOLLHOUSE
9-10 p.m. 24

TUESDAY
8-9 p.m. AMERICAN IDOL
9-10 p.m. FRINGE

WEDNESDAY
8-9 p.m. HOUSE
9-9:30 p.m. AMERICAN IDOL Results Show
9:30-10 p.m. TBA Comedy

THURSDAY
8-9 p.m. HELL'S KITCHEN
9-10 p.m. SECRET MILLIONAIRE

FRIDAY
8-9 p.m. BONES
9-9:30 p.m. 'TIL DEATH
9:30-10 p.m. DO NOT DISTURB (wt)

SATURDAY
8-8:30 p.m. COPS
8:30-9 p.m. COPS
9-10 p.m. AMERICA'S MOST WANTED: AMERICA FIGHTS BACK
11 p.m.-midnight MADtv
Midnight-12:30 a.m. TALKSHOW WITH SPIKE FERESTEN

SUNDAY
7-7:30 p.m. COMEDY ENCORES
7:30-8 p.m. COMEDY ENCORES
8-8:30 p.m. THE SIMPSONS
8:30-9 p.m. KING OF THE HILL (January) / SIT DOWN, SHUT UP (wt) (spring)
9-9:30 p.m. FAMILY GUY
9:30-10 p.m. AMERICAN DAD (January) / THE CLEVELAND SHOW (wt) (spring)

CBS presents...

2008-05-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

Last year at this time, CBS executives said they were looking to stir things up by taking a chance with unorthodox shows like Viva Laughlin, a musical casino drama. The series lasted just two episodes before it got yanked. At Wednesday's CBS upfront press breakfast, there was no talk of edgy programming. Instead, network officials said they were seeking to balance their veteran procedural-heavy schedule with comedies and more character-driven series.

"We want to get back to great shows," said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment. "We want to get shows that we know have the legs and have the potential to run." CBS, which is likely to finish this season as the second-most-watched network, behind Fox, and is in a race with ABC for second place among adults ages 18 to 49, picked up two comedies and three dramas for the fall.

"Overall, the real goal of the schedule this year was balance -- balance of comedy, balance of drama," said Kelly Kahl, the network's scheduling chief. "Stability is important to us . . . But you also need to refresh your schedule and get some new product on the air."

One of CBS' biggest moves is on Wednesday nights, when it's trying to carve out a new comedy block by pairing The New Adventures of Old Christine with Project Gary, a sitcom that stars Jay Mohr as a recently divorced dad trying to move back into the dating world. The network is also hoping to solidify its Monday comedy lineup with the addition of Worst Week, which centres on a bumbling magazine editor (Jericho's Kyle Bornheimer) whose efforts to impress his girlfriend's parents repeatedly lead to disaster.

CBS also added two new procedurals, but executives stressed that the shows, series in which the main story is resolved by the end, are more character-driven than its forensic series usually have been. "If we're going to evolve the form, we had to try some new tones and some new styles," Tassler said. The Mentalist stars Simon Baker (Smith, The Devil Wears Prada) as a one-time fake psychic now working as a detective with the California Bureau of Investigation, cracking cases through sheer intuition and infuriating his colleagues along the way.

In Eleventh Hour, based on a British series, Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist, John Adams) plays a biophysicist who is called on by the government to investigate scientific calamities. CBS' third new hour-long show, The Ex List, is a comedy based on an Israeli program. Elizabeth Reaser of Grey's Anatomy plays a successful thirtysomething who is told by a psychic that she has only a year to find her future husband, whom she has already dated in the past.

Tassler said the network is continuing to develop pilots for mid-season, and has already picked up one new drama that will premiere then. Harper's Island is a mystery about a group of wedding guests on a secluded island off the coast of Seattle who, one by one, are murdered. "Ten Little Indians and Scream," Tassler summarized.

They say it helps to have friends in high places, but sometimes not so much. When CBS announced its line-up, Shark was not on it. It did not matter, apparently, that actor James Woods and CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves have been friends for many years: Woods' first TV series is gone. But the highly energetic actor isn't taking it too hard, though he admits he'd like a better understanding of why CBS broke up with him. "We're a little baffled by the decision, but we're very supportive," Woods said Tuesday. "None of us can figure out quite why. But we have no bad feelings. This show did an enormous amount for me personally. We all won doing the show."

Woods said he and the cast and crew were "very saddened" that the show didn't continue but were trying to be positive. "I think probably the strike was as devastating to our future as it was to many other shows," he said. "It seems, in retrospect, not to be a very fruitful endeavour for a lot of people to be on strike. But particularly on us because our time slot had been moved against football for the first half of the season. And then we should have emerged and shown our strength in the second half of the season when the strike happened, so we never got a chance to prove our mettle." As in all breakups, the key is acceptance and moving on. Woods is ready. "I've been offered a couple of movies, and I'm very excited about that," he said.

A familiar tune pounded through the speakers inside the CW tent Tuesday evening: Da na na na. And everyone knew what it meant. The new 90210 era is upon us. Although we didn't get to see a trailer -- it hasn't been shot -- we did get treated to a promo shot modelled after the original title sequence. The West Beverly High gang posed and frolicked: Shenae Grimes, Tristan Wilds, AnnaLynne McCord, Dustin Milligan, Jessica Stroup and Michael Steger. Exactly what would you expect of them when you hear "Da na na na." Fun. Sexy. Intriguing. But no one, strangely, got more applause than the actress who plays the drunk granny, Jessica Walter. As the promo ended, the crowd was warned by the 90210 tagline: "You wanna live in the ZIP, you gotta live by the code."

Finally, the Disco era is officially dead. That was the word from Univision's upfront on Wednesday at Frederick P. Rose Hall near Central Park. One of the Spanish language station's signature shows, "Sabado Gigante," is getting a makeover for the first time in its 40-plus-year history. Next fall's show "El Neuvo Sabado Gigante" (The New Giant Saturday) will have its content and style updated from 1974 to 2008, according to the show's creative forces. It's "going to be more gigantic than ever," said the show's creator and host, Don Francisco, who announced the modernizing move. He didn't stay long enough to dish how.

Later, Univision's chief operating officer, Ray Rodriguez was equally reluctant to offer details about the revamping of the game show/variety show/talk show. "It's top-secret stuff," he said. "We are starting with a clean slate. Don Francisco wanted to do this. We think it will give us more opportunities for advertisers and other demographics." The show will have a new digital-friendly look to appeal to the Internet generation and have a faster pace, Rodriguez said. "A more modern look. A little more Internet looking."

CBS' fall schedule:

MONDAY

8:00-8:30 p.m. THE BIG BANG THEORY

8:30-9:00 HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

9:00-9:30 TWO AND A HALF MEN

9:30-10:00 WORST WEEK

10:00-11:00 CSI: MIAMI

TUESDAY

8:00-9:00 p.m. NCIS

9:00-10:00 THE MENTALIST

10:00-11:00 WITHOUT A TRACE

WEDNESDAY

8:00-8:30 p.m. THE NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE

8:30-9:00 PROJECT GARY

9:00-10:00 CRIMINAL MINDS

10:00-11:00 CSI: NY

THURSDAY

8:00-9:00 p.m. SURVIVOR

9:00-10:00 CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION

10:00-11:00 ELEVENTH HOUR

FRIDAY

8:00-9:00 p.m. GHOST WHISPERER

9:00-10:00 THE EX LIST

10:00-11:00 NUMB3RS

SATURDAY

8:00-9:00 p.m. CRIMETIME SATURDAY

9:00-10:00 CRIMETIME SATURDAY

10:00-11:00 48 HOURS MYSTERY

SUNDAY

7:00-8:00 p.m. 60 MINUTES

8:00-9:00 THE AMAZING RACE

9:00-10:00 COLD CASE

10:00-11:00 THE UNIT

Hands off the Doctor Who knitting circle

2008-05-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

Where is the Time Lord when you need him? A faceless behemoth is bent on crushing an innocent earthling and Doctor Who is nowhere to be found, reports Lucy Mangan. To add insult to injury the earthling is a dedicated Whovian. So dedicated, in fact, that Mazzmatazz (as the 26-year-old blogger is known) has for some time been posting knitting patterns on the internet to show others how to recreate, through the medium of cottonwool and yarn, cuddly versions of the villainous Ood and Adipose aliens from the current BBC series. The BBC, however, has taken exception to this since someone tried to sell one of her patterns on eBay. This, the broadcaster evidently felt, represented a clear and present danger to the £800m a year its commercial arm makes through its intellectual property and merchandising rights every year and it has unleashed its lawyers on her.

The readiness of giant corporations to confuse an excess of enthusiastic fandom with an insidious commercial threat is not heartening. The existence - suddenly revealed to the wider public - of a Whovian knitting community, however, is. The briefest of searches reveals that there are people out there engaged in Tom Baker scarf knitalongs, swapping encouragement over those tricky colour-changing points at a woolly Dalek's "shoulders", sharing patterns for K-9 tissue holders, knitted Tardises (Tardii?), and even a truly resplendent version in cream and red wool of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor.

The question of why Doctor Who, traditionally the seizer of techno-geek imaginations, should have been so readily embraced by the crafty set probably has as many answers as there are Tardis-knitters. For some it will simply have to do with the pleasure of recreating easily recognisable iconic items. For others, the innate humour of juxtaposing intergalactic technology and/or cosmic villainry with such homespun domestic skills. And for others, as one blogger points out, it will have something to do with the fact that the average Whovian and the average knitter tend to have a lot of time hanging heavy on their hands. Even heavier soon, of course, if the BBC has its way.

Obituary: Ivan Dixon

2008-05-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

For most people, Ivan Dixon, who has died of kidney failure aged 76, was the black guy in the TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes, set in a German PoW camp during the second world war. From 1965 to 1970, He played Sergeant James "Kinch" Kinchloe, the communications specialist frequently ordered by Colonel Hogan (Bob Crane) to encode messages. Although rather less dominant than some of the other leading characters, Kinch took part in most of the group's schemes to outwit their Nazi captors. More significant, however, was that Dixon, who "didn't really enjoy being Sergeant Kinchloe", was one of the first African-American actors to play a leading character in a popular sitcom who was not an underling.

It was but a small victory on the road to equality, and there seemed nothing in the likable portrayal of Kinchloe to suggest that Dixon was a radical figure. Yet, by the time he took the role, he had already broken through several race barriers and would subsequently go on to break through even more. In 1959, Dixon appeared in Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking drama A Raisin in the Sun, the first Broadway play by a black woman and the first to be directed on Broadway by a black man (Lloyd Richards). It ran for 538 performances, and for the first time black audiences came to Broadway to see a play about themselves. Dixon played Joseph Asagai, the Nigerian exchange student who tries to persuade the daughter of the family to embrace a "back-to-Africa" philosophy.

Almost the complete Broadway cast of the play, including its star, Sidney Poitier, were retained for the slightly toned-down 1961 film version. Dixon had become friends with Poitier when they appeared together as Mau Mau fighters in Something of Value (1957). Dixon then supported Poitier in Otto Preminger's movie Porgy and Bess (1959), and played his brother in A Patch of Blue (1965). Dixon also acted as Poitier's stunt double in The Defiant Ones (1958).

He was born in Harlem, the son of a grocery store owner. He graduated in drama from North Carolina Central University in 1954, and three years later appeared on Broadway, playing three roles in Cave Dwellers, the William Saroyan play about the theatre, followed by A Raisin in the Sun. Dixon then found plentiful employment in television series such as Perry Mason, The Defenders, Dr Kildare and The Twilight Zone, before making Nothing but a Man (1964), the film of which he was proudest.

In it, he played a railroad worker in the deep south, facing racial injustice and seeking to escape the demands of marriage and fatherhood, not wishing to repeat the mistakes his own father committed. The film, directed by German-born Michael Roemer, was a straightforward depiction of black life in the US, with Dixon's honest portrayal one of its great strengths.

After his four-and-a-half-year stint on Hogan's Heroes, Dixon directed television shows, starting with a couple of episodes of the Bill Cosby Show, before gradually widening his net to include The Waltons, The Rockford Files, and Magnum PI. He also directed a blaxploitation thriller Trouble Man (1972). In a way, he had learned from Poitier how to tread the fine line between black aspirations and white anxieties, although Dixon overstepped the line when he directed the inflammatory The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973).

The film concerned the first black CIA agent (Lawrence Cook) who, after five years of menial assignments, quits and uses the skills he learned about terrorist tactics to organise black and Latino teenage gangs into guerrilla outfits to bring instability to American cities. "You really wanna mess with whitey," he tells them. "I can show you how." One of his methods was to gain access to white establishments. "Remember, a black man with a mop, tray or broom in his hand can go damn near anywhere in this country, and a smiling black man is invisible."

The film, which Dixon also produced - after managing to raise nearly all of its $1m budget from black investors - explained that it "expressed everything that I felt about race ... I had tried only to depict black anger, not to suggest armed revolt as a solution." Yet, inevitably, the distributors pulled the film after two weeks under pressure from the FBI. For all the film's deficiencies, The Spook Who Sat by the Door remains one of the few uncompromising representations of black armed resistance in the US.

Dixon went on to direct far less incendiary material for television and appeared in a few films, notably Michael Schultz's funny and funky Car Wash (1976) as the wise ex-con trying to run his business in the midst of chaos.

He is survived by his wife of 52 years, a daughter and a son.

Ivan Dixon, actor and director; born April 6 1931; died March 16 2008

Channel 4 to show DiCaprio documentary

2008-05-15T11:55:00.000-07:00

Channel 4 is to broadcast The 11th Hour, the polemical documentary about the environment fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the documentary, which the channel will transmit on May 25, leading scientists, environmentalists, politicians and activists advance the argument that the Earth is facing environmental disaster, and ask what can be done.

Notable figures featured in The 11th Hour include professor Stephen Hawking, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai speak about global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction and the depletion of the oceans' habitats. The film also calls for restorative action to change global human activity through technology, social responsibility and conservation.

It lays responsibility for the warming of the planet mostly on the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere and also makes the claim that not since a meteor hit the planet 55m years ago have so many forms of life become extinct. The film, narrated and produced by DiCaprio, was written and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners. It received critical praise when it premiered at the Canned Film Festival last year, with Times film writer James Christopher describing it as "brilliant and terrifying".

However, it also attracted some criticism, with former Greenpeace member Patrick Moore branding the film as "Hollywood hype" in an article for the Vancouver Sun. Channel 4 has bought the UK broadcast right to the documentary from Hollywood studio Warner Bros. Warner Home Video UK has also scheduled a DVD release of the film for June.

Channel 4 funding squabble escalates

2008-05-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

The chairman of the BBC last night warned the government not to treat the licence fee as a "back pocket" that could be raided for cash and criticised Channel 4's campaign for public money, saying it risked turning it into "BBC5". Sir Michael Lyons, who has maintained a low profile of late, used a speech at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London to wade into the debate over the future of public service broadcasting. He said the viewer risked being left behind as it was captured by "those wanting quick fixes for short-term problems or seeking tactical advantages for particular interests" and warned it was too important to be left to "civil servants, industry bigwigs or regulators".

The former Birmingham city council chief executive also hit out at the media regulator for coining the phrase "excess licence fee" to describe the extra £150m a year the BBC had been handed to facilitate the digital switchover until 2012. Ofcom's chief executive, Ed Richards, has suggested the money could be used in future to fund public service programming from other sources without harming the BBC. But Lyons said the excess licence fee was a "myth" that "doesn't exist". By the time the fund had been spent, the licence fee would be up for review again, he said.

He rejected many of the ideas put forward in the wake of the recent publication of phase one of Ofcom's public service broadcasting review, speaking out against the idea of handing a proportion of the BBC licence fee to rivals to help maintain plurality. "The licence fee is not a back pocket for government or regulators or anyone else for that matter. It is not a spare pot of cash, a contingency fund, to be raided every time there is a cause, however worthy, with a hole in its balance sheet and a media flag attached," he said.

Lyons repeated the often made point that breaking the BBC's link with licence fee payers would damage their support for public service broadcasting. But he also argued that handing public money to Channel 4 "could actually weaken rather than cure the patient". The broadcaster, which recently delivered a well-received redrawn public service remit in its "Next on 4" vision, has been arguing it will need up to £150m in public funding in order to provide competition to the BBC following digital switchover in 2012.

In a carefully worded attack on the idea, Lyons warned that the additional regulatory scrutiny that would come with public money could fatally undermine Channel 4's unique role and purpose. The public would want assurances that "new monies won't simply leak into higher salaries for onscreen talent - and, indeed, for offscreen executives - with knock-on effects across the industry," he said. "Put bluntly, the question is this: Who gains if the effect of well-meaning regulatory intervention is to turn Channel 4 into BBC5?"

The chairman of the BBC Trust, who after taking over from Michael Grade last year immediately had to deal with the fallout from a series of trust scandals that rocked the corporation and a divisive round of cuts, said the debate should be far broader than simply considering how to prop up Channel 4. Lyons also slapped down the notion that the BBC Trust, designed to oversee management and act as the voice of licence fee payers, should act as the body through which a proportion of the licence fee could be redistributed. "To those who offer the trust the prospect of translating itself into Of-PSB, we say: thanks, but no thanks."

Meanwhile, the Channel 4 chief executive, Andy Duncan, has said he is fed up with rival broadcasters "squabbling" over the issue of his organisation's future funding. Duncan said he wanted to concentrate instead on the urgent need for Channel 4 to find a solution to its funding shortfall through the Ofcom public service broadcasting review. His comments, made today at the Westminster Media Forum seminar on Ofcom's PSB review, will be seen as a thinly veiled swipe at BBC Trust chairman Michael Lyons, who criticised Channel 4's campaign to secure new sources of public funding and the idea of top-slicing the licence fee in a speech last night.

Lyons warned that the additional regulatory scrutiny that would come with public money could fatally undermine Channel 4's unique role and purpose. Duncan said: "I am fed up with petty competitors squabbling and [the] closed body language from some organisations." He added that Channel 4 had already reached financial breaking point. "We are cutting programme budgets as we speak," Duncan said.

He avoided commenting directly on Lyons' speech or which potential funding option Channel 4 favoured, focusing instead on hammering home the urgent need to find a workable solution. "We can have debate and discussion but we need action," he said. Duncan added that a solution needed to be put in place for the estimated funding shortfall of up to £150m a year that Channel 4 will soon face, before events overtake the broadcaster and the UK public lose the high quality programming and public service content it offers.

"We need to make sure a British stamp remains culturally on what we do. This generation need to solve this or we are in danger of losing it," he said. "Through Ofcom, let's have a debate and work it out quickly… the pros, the cons… and find a joined-up solution." Channel 4 has been arguing that it will need up to £150m in public funding in order to provide competition to the BBC following digital switchover in 2012. Channel 4 has maintained that it receives a form of public funding via the spectrum it is allocated and that some form of monetary funding to replace this loss is needed.

Duncan also told the Westminster Media Forum seminar today that although the deal Channel 4 had struck with independent producers' trade body Pact in 2006 over digital media rights had been "ultimately very constructive", it would need revising. "We need ongoing negotiations with Pact [but] we don't want to turn the clock back. We need to evolve the current terms as content goes online," he said.

Alex Graham, chief executive of independent producer Wall to Wall, which makes Who Do You Think You Are?, responded at today's event by saying that when Channel 4 controlled digital distribution it "made very little money indeed" from exploitation. Graham added that Channel 4 had done quite well out of the 2006 deal and it was a "total myth" to think that going back to previous terms of trade would solve the broadcaster's funding problems.

Kangaroo targets autumn rollout

2008-05-15T11:09:00.000-07:00

Kangaroo, the internet TV joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4, is set to launch this autumn. The ITV chief operating officer and finance director, John Cresswell, speaking as ITV's first quarter-results for 2008 were published today, said the partners were hoping it would launch in September or October. Previously executives from the three Kangaroo backers had said it would go live by the end of the year.

Cresswell said that the BBC's outgoing director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield, who will join Kangaroo as chief executive on July 1, would review the service when he joins and that there would be a be a beta launch before a full rollout. "It is going really well. Ashley's appointment is fantastic. With all new technical launches, you always have a soft launch before you unveil the whole thing," he added. It is about making sure that when the consumer gets to it, it won't fall over. No one wants a Terminal 5 online. We are pretty confident."

Speaking about ITV, Cresswell said the broadcaster's global content business would continue to work fine without its head, Dawn Airey, who stunned the broadcaster in late April by quitting to join Channel Five after only eight months. ITV announced today that the global content division had increased its first-quarter revenues from £41m in 2007 to £58m in 2008. "We will move on. We enjoyed working with [Dawn] but she has chosen to do something else. We have a really strong team in place. We move forward," Cresswell said.

He also reiterated the target for ITV Productions to secure 75% of ITV1's commissions, something Airey had previously described as "pretty remote". "In terms of our published targets and how people are remunerated, the targets are to grow the business and double the revenues [to £1.2bn by 2012]," he said. "75% is an ambition. I would love to get them as much of ITV's programme budget as I can and that is their target to get as big a market share as they can."

Cresswell said ITV was looking for further acquisitions to boost its global content business, following today's deal to buy Scandinavian independent producer Silverback in a deal worth £14m - with a cash consideration of £5.2m. ITV today told the City that its results for the first quarter of 2008 had seen revenue boosted by 3% year on year to £492m, with net advertising revenue also up slightly at 2%, although revenue from its broadcasting operation fell by about 2% to £409m for the period.

"We started the year well in all parts of the business," Cresswell said. "We are mindful of the economic context in which we are operating in but our business is in better operational shape than it has been for some years." He added that ad revenues were flat year on year - ahead of a wider UK TV market expected to be down 1% - which was a "good achievement compared to the market". "One of the really important things is that more people are watching commercials on ITV1 than they were last year," Cresswell said. "In a fragmenting world, we are very pleased with that."

He also revealed that the new ITV director of television, Peter Fincham, who took up his role on Monday, had been in contact with presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, who found themselves caught up in the phone-in scandal that rocked the broadcaster last year. "Peter Fincham has been in touch with Ant and Dec and to reassure them of our support for them," Cresswell said.

Elsewhere, the ITV chairman, Michael Grade, today fended off shareholder attacks on his recent bonus, which was paid out when the share price was near an all-time low. Grade, who was paid nearly £2m in his first year as ITV's executive chairman, urged investors at the company's annual general meeting to be patient as he pushes through a multi-year turnaround plan. Although Grade said his overhaul was already bearing fruit, shareholders raised questions over ITV's share price, which has almost halved over the past 12 months.

One shareholder questioned Grade's dual role as chairman and chief executive - something which contravenes usual corporate governance practice - and accused him of hypocrisy for taking a bonus worth almost £1m last year. "Last year I stood up here and supported you in the dual role of chairman and chief executive against my conscience," the shareholder told Grade. "After supporting you, I decided not to put money in the bank but to buy more shares. I bought more shares, today those shares are down by 40%," he added. "You got £2m, that is hypocrisy. £2m for downturn at the company."

Another shareholder made a similar attack on Grade's pay. "This board is no more making the grade than did [Charles Allen," said the investor, referring to Grade's predecessor and also bemoaning losses incurred from phone-in scandals. "I think your performance is shoddy and unsatisfactory," he concluded, to some applause and shouts of "well said" from other shareholders.

Grade responded that his board was just eight months into a five-year turnaround plan and that he had never said an overhaul could be achieved overnight. "It's a plan that I think you need to take a view on in a few years' time," he said. "The first target we set was to improve the on-screen performance and I think we have done that very, very well," Grade added. "We are now outperforming our peers in the sector. We have to translate that into increased earnings and hopefully that will ultimately be reflected in an improved share price, but it's not a short-term project. We have a lot of work to do, all of that work is in hand now. Hopefully we will begin to get back to growth in 2009. So please judge us over the long-term," he said to widespread applause.

Grade added that the business was "in real decline" when the new management team took over and that he had made clear when he joined last year that there was "no silver bullet" to sort out its problems. Overall, he sought to emphasise that a recovery had already started, saying: "This business is in better shape today in terms of performance and trading than it has been for years."

Answering questions about Grade's pay, Baroness Usha Prashar, the chairman of the ITV remuneration committee, said his package was "market competitive" and reflected the need to keep someone with the right skills for to turnaround the business. Grade said it would be inappropriate for him to comment on his own pay.

Finally, the first chairman of ITV plc, Sir Brian Pitman, has announced he is to retire from the board of the commercial broadcaster. Pitman, who is 78 and named in the annual Guardian/RTF boardroom pay report as one of the oldest non-executive directors in the UK, has been on the ITV plc board since 2004. He became chairman of the broadcaster when ITV plc was formed from the merger of Carlton and Granada and moved to a non-executive director role when Michael Grade joined as chairman and chief executive at the start of 2007.

Pitman, who officially stepped down today following ITV's annual general meeting in London, was previously a non-executive director of Carlton Communications from March 1998 and is also a former chairman of Lloyds TSB. Despite his age, he was floated as a possible chairman of Northern Rock if Virgin had been given the go-ahead to take it over earlier this year.

Michael Grade, the executive chairman of ITV, said: "On behalf of the board and shareholders I would like to thank Sir Brian for his contribution since the merger establishing ITV and wish him continuing success in his business interests elsewhere."

'We're not for profit'

2008-05-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

In her first national newspaper interview, Freesat's managing director tells Owen Gibson about the challenges of launching the service - and why she hasn't ruled out a pay-TV service if viewers want it...

For a project that has been pretty low on the radar, she is perhaps an apt frontwoman. For just as ITV and the BBC hope Freesat will stealthily become a major player in the post switch-over digital landscape, so its managing director Emma Scott has proved an unsung hero of the free-to-air digital success story of the past five years. While former BBC director general Greg Dyke and marketing chief Andy Duncan took some credit for the success of Freeview, now in more than 14m homes, Scott was a central player. "Emma was definitely one of the key people behind the launch of Freeview," says Duncan, now chief executive of Channel 4. "She drove through a lot of the day to day operational stuff when there was a lot to do in a short space of time. She is very energetic, very focused, very good at making things happen."

Ironically, the Freesat idea has taken some time to happen. When it was first mooted five years ago, Dyke was riding the crest of a wave at the BBC and Charles Allen was working on the ITV merger. Since then a combination of regulatory drift and uncertainty from manufacturers and retailers about whether the idea made commercial sense left some questioning whether it would ever get off the ground. In the period it has taken to give birth to Freesat, the quietly unassuming Scott herself has had two children while continuing to work at the BBC.

Freesat is run as a separate not-for profit company, with ITV and the BBC as its joint shareholders. Each will contribute £3m a year and put their onscreen marketing muscle behind the project. Clearly nervous in her first national newspaper interview, Scott says: "We're very honest. We're not for profit, we're not in it to make money for my shareholders and people appreciate the concept of that." She will direct operations, and head a lean team, from the company's headquarters just off Oxford Street. In pride of place last week was a huge television pumping out Freesat channels in glorious high definition, while her team valiantly battled with their hangovers following the previous day's launch.

Scott says ITV's decision to break free from Sky and broadcast an unencrypted signal to all viewers two and a half years ago and plans to launch the BBC's HD [high definition] service were critical in making Freesat a viable proposition. The latter served as a commercial spur to the all-important retailers and manufacturers. There was one major factor that gave the Freesat concept renewed momentum: it soon became clear that with sales of HD-ready plasma sets soaring, it was an obvious way of delivering free-to-air programmes in high definition. In turn, that excited the retailers and manufacturers, who saw it would help them sell even more kit. "There are these 9.6m sets, they're selling incredibly fast. They've got predictions of something like 39m by 2012. And there's nothing to watch on them," says Scott.

With high definition broadcasting not possible on Freeview until after switchover, and then only on four channels, Freesat also provides a useful rationale for the BBC's investment of licence fee money in a format only hitherto available to those who could pay for it. The BBC and ITV will offer high definition broadcasts from launch, with more expected to follow. The other major target constituency is the rump of people who live in an area where they can't receive Freeview prior to digital switchover, still some 27% of the population, and don't want to take up Sky's own free satellite proposition. "There are a lot of people out there who still can't get more than four channels. For them, it's like Freeview all over again," says Scott.

The model follows the Freeview template. For £49 (for a standard box) or £120 (for an HD version), plus £80 for a satellite dish and installation, Freesat viewers will have access to around 200 subscription-free channels by the end of the year. Chris Anderson, the Wired editor in chief whose 'The Long Tail' became required reading for doom-laden media executives in 2006, will soon publish his new book Free, all about the rise of "freeconomics". Scott is a fully paid-up believer. "It's a bit like pay-as-you-go phones. There are all these people in this country who actually don't want to pay subscriptions," she says. Sky executives argue that, in a world where the BBC's commercial arm is about to launch a video-on-demand service and the web opens up all kinds of other possibilities for paid-for content, the old distinctions between pay TV and free-to-air are fast disappearing.

The unspoken rationale for Freesat is to give ITV and the BBC some control over their own destiny in the post-switchover world and not leave it in the hands of rival platforms such as Sky. "Freesat is a free platform and we want people to understand that. If we find there is an interest in pay TV services as a supplemental, then we'll address it," says Scott.

ITV has already sparked a spat that is eerily reminiscent of the handbags more than five years ago when Sky Digital first launched and ITV withheld its main channel in order to try to boost take-up of the ill-fated ITV Digital service. And we all know how that ended. ITV says that Sky is refusing to pay the going rate for its HD content and so will launch it exclusively on Freesat. Sky counters that it offered to help with start-up costs but is under no obligation to pay extra for a service that will ultimately become the standard broadcasting format, accusing ITV of depriving its 465,000 HD subscribers of its content.

"Sky will do what they want to do. We have to work alongside Sky in the satellite space," responds Scott, carefully. "Sky is a pay-television subscription service and their primary aim is to deliver value to their shareholders through driving subscription income. Their core offering is around sport and movies. If that what's you want, that's brilliant. The free market is very different and I don't think that's a core market for Sky."

Michael Grade and Mark Thompson, together on a platform for the first time since the former left the latter in the lurch at the BBC, were last week keen to point out the potential of the internet port on the rear of the sophisticated boxes. A version of the BBC's iPlayer could be delivered to Freesat viewers "within months". As the first digital TV service to launch in the wake of the explosion in broadband access in this country, it could be the "holy grail" device that links the broadband pipe to the television set, Scott believes. As a product of the BBC's sprawling policy unit (other alumni include Ed Richards and James Purnell), Scott spent several years working on special projects such as a broadband local news service. For someone who has spent that much time wading through internal BBC policy papers, she is refreshingly direct and plain speaking.

More immediately, ITV and the BBC's digital ambitions will now be at the mercy of Saturday staff in Argos, one of four retailers to stock Freesat. An inability to actually install the kit bedevilled the ITV Digital era. What will the reaction be when the first person falls off their roof trying to fix a Freesat dish themselves? "You know what, the British public aren't stupid," says Scott in a matter-of-fact manner, peering through her thick-rimmed glasses. "They're quite used to people coming around and installing things."

At launch, the channel line-up looks rather patchy. All the major terrestrials and their spin-offs are present and correct (or at least will be once Five, ever late to the party, sorts out its rights issues). But the likes of the Overseas Property Channel and Wedding TV don't exactly get the pulse racing. But Scott promises around 200 by the end of the year, including the cream of other free-to-air channels already featured on Freeview, plus some exclusive offerings and more HD content. "Freeview will become the new analogue. You've got to pay at the other end of the spectrum with great choice and premium movies. We see Freesat sitting in the middle, offering more channels, more flexibility, more HD. It just offers more choice in the market for consumers," she says, the simplicity of her analysis belying the complexity of the market.

Apparently the first Freesat boxes were flying off the shelves last week, with some stores sold out by Friday. But longer term success will depend on whether it has left it too late to establish a foothold in a world where the range of options for receiving TV content has already multiplied several times over since the launch of Freeview. We are heading for a mixed post-switchover ecology where a household might have Sky on their main set, a Freesat box in the dining room, the iPlayer running on a PC in the study and a Freeview box in the bedroom. But as the terrestrial broadcasters jostle to retain their relevance in the post-switchover world, this little-known unshowy individual could become a pivotal force in British broadcasting.

Brook to dish out justice as Dirty Dancing judge

2008-05-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

Former Big Breakfast presenter Kelly Brook has been signed up by digital channel Living to become a judge on its Dirty Dancing inspired reality series. Brook will help find the next Johnnie and Baby from the hit 1980s movie in the second run of Dirty Dancing: The Time of Your Life, replacing Jennifer Ellison, who was a judge on last year's series. Living's Dirty Dancing show was filmed at the original location of the film in Virginia, with the winners securing a year-long contract with dance agency Bloc. The show, made by Granada Entertainment, is one of Living's key series for the summer season.

Living's summer lineup will also include the six-part Pop Goes the Band, made by ITV Productions, which will see music acts reunited and given plastic surgery to restore them to their "former glory". The bands, who have not yet been named, will then play a reunion gig for their friends, family and fans. Pop Goes the Band is to be executive produced by Natalka Znak and Richard Cowles, whose previous credits included ITV hit I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. A range of D-list celebrities including the Cheeky Girls and Yvette Fielding will star in their own reality shows in the six-part Living With ..., which will see them followed by cameras in their homes and private lives.

Living, which is owned by Virgin Media TV and run by former ITV controller of entertainment Claudia Rosencrantz, will also attempt to recreate the buzz that surrounded Sky One's Ibiza Uncovered with a new take on life on the Balearic island in observational documentary series Ibiza, made by Original Productions. Diet on the Dancefloor, made by independent producer Mentorn, will see overweight people attempt to lose weight by taking part in a Strictly Come Dancing-style contest.

Former pop star Lisa Scott Lee will return to the realms of reality TV following her MTV series in Extreme: Skinny Celebrity Mums 2, made by Target, in which she bemoans the pressure put on celebrity mums to lose weight. She will be seen illustrating the fact by posing for a photoshoot in a skimpy bikini with her new baby. The channel has also secured the rights to US drama Lipstick Jungle, starring Brooke Shields, and hit Grey's Anatomy spin-off Private Practice.

The slippery nature of truth

2008-05-15T00:59:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: The Girl in the Box; Storyville: My Israel; Storyville: The Battle for Jerusalem; The Apprentice; Desperate Housewives

Hitchhiking across California in the Seventies, a young woman called Colleen Stan found herself on the outskirts of a town called Red Bluff. She turned down two lifts because she wasn't sure about the look of the drivers, but then a young couple drew up, the woman nursing a baby, and Colleen made her first big mistake. She climbed in. A little later, when the car stopped at a petrol station and Colleen paid a visit to the bathroom, she made her second, which was even bigger. She ignored the inner voice, which was telling her that there was something not quite right about the man. When she climbed back into the car, he drove to the edge of town and pulled a knife on her, forcing her to lock her head into a specially constructed box, lined with insulating foam to muffle the sound of her screams.

I don't suppose you'd be in a condition for dispassionate analysis at such a moment, but if you were, I think you'd recognise that the box was a very bad sign, evidence that your attacker hadn't just got carried away in the heat of the moment but had everything planned. And so it proved. Cameron Hooker, an apparently inoffensive type, was bringing to fruition a carefully calculated scheme to acquire a female slave, and doing it with the acquiescence of his wife, who was keen that someone else take up the burden of satisfying Hooker's obsession with torture and bondage. The deal was simple. As long as Hooker didn't sleep with Colleen, he would be allowed to keep her in the basement and torture her from time to time.

As Five's film The Girl in the Box made clear, Hooker didn't just want someone who had to be chained up. He wanted a mental captive, too, a woman reduced to a state of unquestioning obedience. So, after applying Rumsfeldian tactics of sensory deprivation, stress positions and sexual abuse, Hooker began to train Colleen up to a greater liberty. He told her that he belonged to a shadowy group called the "Company", which, should she make any attempt to escape, would track her and her family down and kill them all. Broken by her regular beatings and torture sessions, Colleen believed him. In the end, Hooker's control was so effective that he was able to let her go to work at a nearby motel and even visit her family, who had assumed that she'd either been murdered or had joined a cult. Even this was at Hooker's whim, though. And when he became bored, Colleen spent nearly three years in a coffin-shaped box underneath Hooker's waterbed, emerging only for a few hours a day. Hooker's young daughters had no idea that she was even in the house.

Eventually, for some reason, Hooker's wife spilled the beans, at which point Colleen escaped and Hooker was arrested and charged with kidnap and multiple rape, the only problem for the prosecution being Colleen's solo excursions and the fulsome love letters that she'd sent to Hooker under her slave name, a symptom of complete psychological dependency that Hooker's defence team immediately enlisted as evidence of consent. Tellingly, the jury didn't find it remotely difficult to believe that a man would do something so outlandish and cruel, only hesitating over the possibility that a woman might not immediately flee when she had the chance. Fortunately, they grasped what enthusiasts for torture – both psychopathic and governmental – cannot, which is that it reduces its victim to a person quite incapable of discriminating between truth and fiction, or between their own interests and those of their tormentor.

Quite a lot of Israelis presumably view Yulie Cohen Gerstel as just such a person, so disturbed by aggression that she has lost sight of the self-preserving duty of enmity. Storyville: My Israel was the raw and far from resolved story of Gerstel, who was one of the crew of an El Al flight ambushed on their bus in Central London in August 1978. The attack left two of her colleagues dead and Gerstel with shrapnel in her arm. One of the terrorists, Fahad Mihyi, was captured and given four concurrent life sentences. The man who helped him died in the assault. Gerstel, now a film-maker and active in the Israeli peace movement, decided it was time for a personal gesture of reconciliation. She wanted to forgive Mihyi, wrote to him in Dartmoor Prison and then began working for the freedom of the man who once tried to kill her.

Many of her fellow Israelis thought she was nuts. On a talk show, she was confronted by a woman who had lost her daughter in a Palestinian terrorist attack. “My whole life has been destroyed,” she wept. Later the two women met and their positions had not changed. “What would I not do to hold her,” the woman said. Gerstel cried with her, but remained resolute. Her letters to Mihyi were cautious though inquisitive: why had he done what he had done? He said he was weak and impression-able as a young man. She believed him and wrote a letter to the parole board recommending his release. The former terrorist did not want to be filmed (though his restrained, intelligent letters were read out) and the film, frustratingly, did not make clear what happened next – was he released, where was he now, did they meet again? A Sun report in 2005 revealed he had been refused parole in 2001 and was being let out of jail every day to work as an assistant to a Halal butcher in Newport.

My Israel was a kind of accumulated diary of this enterprise, as well as a portrait of Israel today, and Gerstel's own deeply conflicted journey from proud member of the Israeli armed forces to patriotic dissident. The programme followed her as she tried to re-establish contact with her ultra-Orthodox brother, now estranged, and her relationship with her daughters after the breakdown of her marriage. Her parents lost their home and health, the hatred of Israelis towards Palestinians was evident in an ugly brouhaha at some kind of peace rally. Her belief in love endured, a stubborn corrective to the politics of hatred and division swirling around her. It was a strange, compelling film, mostly distinguished by a sense of pain, whether it was that of the Israeli mother whose daughter had been killed in a terrorist attack or of Gerstel herself, as she heard her father confess that he participated in the killing of Palestinians fleeing from Beersheba, unable to say for sure whether they were fighters or civilians. It was a portrait of a society simmering with rage and fear, and it was impossible to tell where one emotion stopped and the other began.

The Storyville credits always open with a matchbox dropping into an open-topped car. The gentleman in the car, wearing training shorts, seems surprised when it flutters into his hands – ah good old Storyville, quirky, never know quite what to expect, a welcome original among all the reality shows around it. The second instalment last night, The Battle for Jerusalem (BBC4), unexpectedly dealt with the battle itself in a couple of sentences. In May 1948, the Jordanians bombarded the Jewish area of the city. Nine days later, the Jews surrendered and left as refugees. The rest of the programme then focused on how the battle was seen in the West. Life magazine, for example, ran the headline “Arabs Sack the Holy City” over photographs by John Phillips, an Israel supporter whose pictures were thought to be the sole record of what happened.

The Battle for Jerusalem therefore started out as a slow and revealing analysis of the work and motives of Phillips, who shot those amazing portraits of displaced Jews and looting Arabs in 1948 when the Arab Legion gained control over the Old City. Last night’s documentary, however, tracked down photos by Ali Za’Arur, an Arab photographer who had taken pictures of the same battle. His family went to the archive office, and after much rambling on the director’s part, found pictures which showed, among other things, that refugees also came in the opposite direction, as newly homeless Palestinians fled to Jerusalem. The programme then introduced us to some doughty old guys on both sides, none of whom gave many signs of being willing to rethink their long-held positions.

So if you didn’t know the wider historical context of that battle – the trajectory and underpinnings of the Arab-Israeli war and its consequences, for example – this documentary wasn’t going to help you. The Battle for Jerusalem assumed far too much knowledge on the viewer’s part, then lapsed into lazy, unfocused mush when it shifted attention to Za’Arur. When an Israeli film-maker discussed a film he had made about the battle years later, his reminiscences weren’t that interesting either. The emotional punch, even a basic focus, was lacking. There was still no point to the stories and no explanation of the events. What The Battle for Jerusalem proved is the unsurprising fact that the Israelis and Palestinians disagree about their supposedly shared history. Yet, precisely because this was so unsurprising, the portentous accompanying commentary on the slippery nature of truth felt like a rather cumbersome way of spelling out the fairly obvious. This was an attempt at documentary Rashomon and it didn't really work.

Always a programme to use London landmarks well, The Apprentice (BBC1) last night opened in the church of St Bartholomew the Great. As the religious music swelled and the remaining eight contestants did their best not to look bleary-eyed, Sir Alan Sugar marched in with his latest task. The teams had to select some wedding dresses in London and flog them at the National Wedding Show at the NEC. At first, it looked as if this could be an atypical episode in which every utterance of the remaining octet of dead-eyed, venal, pig-ignorant, amoral freaks did not flay you to your very soul, as they divvied up the task of inspecting dresses and choosing A.N. Other product almost amicably.

Of course, this soon plunged all eight into what I believe sociologists call “a gendered space”. To the presumable dismay of any old-school feminists watching, most of the women instantly turned shiny-faced with excitement. The blokes had to fall back on a spot of cunning pretence; gamely attempting to disguise the fact that they felt themselves adrift in a sea of indistinguishable satin and tulle concoctions. Michael Sophocles in particular was thrilled with his performance. "I feigned interest very well. That's what I do for a living. I can pretend I'm passionate about the most insignificant thing. And pull it off with an effortless charm." The ability to say this kind of thing without a hint of a flicker of a suggestion of a smile, or indeed a scintilla of charm, effortless or otherwise, would in any other context mark him out as a sufferer with a rare pathology who should be taken away and studied in a secure area. Only in the rarefied conditions of The Apprentice is he allowed to continue roaming free.

Even so, Michael’s project manager, Helene Speight, decided to go for a range of coloured dresses, which at £900 were around a third the price of the Ian Stuarts. Not only that, but as the woman in the shop clinchingly noted, both Jordan and Jodie Marsh got married in non-white. Claire and Raef for Team Alpha chose the designer creations and thrilled by the alliance forged by the Alpha pair with such a high-end name, the lady who sold the diamante bridal lingerie that both teams wanted to stock chose Alpha. Ian Stuart's response to the impending juxtaposition was not recorded. Team Renaissance were left, therefore, with wedding cakes. £600-a-pop wedding cakes. Alas, the good people of Birmingham know the price of marzipan and stayed away in droves. Those foolish enough to stop by risked being bludgeoned to death by Michael and Sara's sales tactics. "It's only on offer today ... You'll regret it if you don't," Michael warned one, his effortless charm appearing to desert him. "It's your bloody wedding!" he told another, who wanted to ring her fiancé to find out what he thought of cupcakes. "These people are dumdums!" he muttered incredulously as she fled in a mixture of anger and fear. "They don't know what they're doing!"

For a while in the NEC, Team Renaissance looked like they had made good decisions. Sadly, though, the price of the Ian Stuarts meant a late surge of three sales of them was enough for Lucinda Ledgerwood’s Alpha team to triumph. To be honest, this wasn’t a vintage Apprentice episode. For one thing, in a rare and unwelcome development, nobody made a huge comic cock-up. For another, when Helene, Michael and Sara Dhada were left to battle it out for boardroom survival, it didn’t really matter too much which of them was fired – because none stood a chance of winning anyway.

Still, Sir Alan’s decision to dispatch only Sara to the waiting taxi will surely have fed the suspicion that he’s being kind to Michael. Last week, he grew almost misty-eyed as Michael’s endless bluffing (to use the polite word) seemed to remind him of a thrusting young shaver by the name of Alan Sugar. Last night, his failure to sack the man provoked the unusual sight of Nick Hewer looking aghast, as if he thought his beloved boss had made an error of judgement – or worse, gone a bit soft. Sara, however, who had finished the day all but punching people in the throat to get them to hand over a deposit, Sir Alan found less persuasive. "If I'd been the recipient of a sales pitch that was anything like what you're doing now, I'd have pushed your head in the bloody thing," he snarked. "You go off like a machine gun." And like a machine gun, she was fired. Only seven are left. I need pills.

Perhaps I can get some from Mike Delfino. Currently, they're the only thing
getting him through life with Susan in Desperate Housewives (Channel 4), and one can only say that one does entirely understand. The woman is a congenital idiot. Can't cope with gay neighbours, can't cope with contraception and now can't cope with daughter Julie having a pierced boyfriend. So she sets her up with a nice pre-med student who turns up on the doorstep, who is actually Mike's drug-dealer. Whoops again, you arrant, multi-vested fool.

This results, eventually, in all the doctors in Wisteria Lane blackmailing each other in order to get Mike a new prescription. In the meantime, Andrew leaves home to let Bree and Orson bond with the baby, prompting an almost touching scene in his new apartment in which he thanks his mother for all she's done for him. Carlos is trying to persuade Gaby they should go to the police about, y'know, killing her husband. Gaby, who is to matters of conscience what Michael Sophocles is to self-effacing understatement, declines to unbuden herself to the authorities. Victor then washes up on the beach, not dead and not, as he claims, amnesiac, but bent on avenging himself on his tiny wife. I suggest setting her in Lucite, Victor, and wearing her as a badge forevermore.

All this and more, however, is entirely eclipsed by the arrival of Lynette's long-lost stepfather who turns out to be . . . Richard Chamberlain! Richard flipping Chamberlain! I haven't been this delighted since Barbara Stanwyck pitched up in Dynasty. He looks 10 years younger than he did in The Thornbirds, moves like Baryshnikov and has the waist of a 12-year-old girl. On this evidence, I would suggest we all head for Drogheda immediately. The preservative effects of the pure outback air are truly incredible.

Seinfeld- 10 years on

2008-05-14T03:51:00.000-07:00

On May 14, 1998: There were riots in Indonesia. Cannes was under way. The Dow had made up for some losses. Continental slashed airfares. And later that night, Frank Sinatra died at 82. But for most Americans - at least the 79 million people who watched - one memory endures. A perfect storm of hype and unmet expectations, the Seinfeld finale - that silly trial scene, remember? - remains a watershed moment in popular culture reports Verne Gay.

Why? Reasonable question.

Other hits have gone in the intervening years, such as Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond. Cultural Solomons such as Entertainment Weekly devoted many issues to them, as well. Plus over those years, we survived the reality boom, then endured it. The sitcom was declared dead, and the drama reborn. The Internet gathered force, then revolutionized TV (and everything else). YouTube rose while the networks declined. With the lone exception of The Simpsons, most everything on TV changed (and changed completely), but Seinfeld's last day still seems like yesterday.

Here's why: Seinfeld was often an indisputably great situation comedy and, as the years wore on, continued to wear well - a welcome fate denied other titans in the quest of rerun eternity (such as, say, Friends). Then, there was and is the ubiquity. If you are American and have never actually seen Seinfeld, then you don't actually own a TV. Estelle Harris (who played George's mother, Estelle Costanza) said in a recent interview, "It's getting more and more popular because there's a whole new generation that has become interested in the show from the repeats. Younger and younger people are stopping me on the streets, all races, creeds and colours, saying, 'You're just like my mother.'"

"Luck" is another word you hear from veterans of the show, as if the normally malevolent gods of prime time were on a nine-year lunch break over those years, ensuring its survival. "I guess I felt really lucky, but I also felt like part of a family, which happens when you're on a show for so long," says veteran stage and TV actress Liz Sheridan, Jerry's "mother," Helen. "It didn't surprise me that we were so successful because we were so good."

Spike Feresten, host of Fox's TalkShow, and long-time Seinfeld scribe, says of the enduring appeal: "I think it's kind of something Jerry and Larry always believed - that making someone laugh is a very powerful experience, and if you can do that consistently, then they will love you because there's not a lot that they're laughing about in their own lives. It could be as simple as that."

But a decade's a decade, and while Seinfeld is forever trapped in TV amber, the lives of the principles are not. Here's what has happened to our four heroes over the years - with a quick assessment on just how well they've used their precious time...

Jerry Seinfeld- Yeah, he's done pretty much next to nothing. Oh, sure - there was some movie about bees, and he got married and fathered three children. Some stand-up here and some stand-up there. But it's been so nothing that he worked the joke into his routine. ("Everybody says to me, 'Hey, you don't do the show any more. What do you do?' I'll tell you what do I do: nothing.... Well, let me tell you, doing nothing is not as easy as it looks ... because the idea of doing anything, which could easily lead to doing something, would cut into your nothing, and that would force me to have to drop everything.")

So nothing. Bee Movie (which he co-wrote with Feresten) was a hit. His first love, the club circuit - a road through hell for the unfamous, and an invitation to snotty critics to say, "See - he's not that funny" for the famous - has been good to him as well. At 54, his reputation remains mostly intact. Rumours of another show on NBC seem to go down in flames reliably every year (he made a funny cameo on 30 Rock's season opener this year), and someone during the open mike part of a recent performance asked about a small-screen reprisal: "No. I'm old, I'm rich and I'm tired."

One of the most skillful "retirements" in show business history - Carsonesque, almost. The chances of producing another show as good as Seinfeld are (about) one in 1.987 billion; so why bother? He continues to do what he loves (stand-up) and he does a good bee, too. Seinfeld - of course - can afford to be picky-choosy: The vast residual windfall was largely denied his three co-stars, who were effectively forced to start a second act.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus- Go ahead - you create one of the most memorable female characters in TV history (Elaine Benes) and then step away from it. Possible? Maybe, but you'd probably have to have to star in and produce (on your own dime) a big-screen version of "Clytemnestra." Louis-Dreyfus, instead, has done what she does best - TV comedy. The Adventures of Old Christine may - or may not - get picked up by CBS this week (though there's speculation ABC may grab it). Over the past 10 years, Louis-Dreyfus has had three major TV roles - Ellie Riggs, in the short-lived Watching Ellie; Maggie Lizer (briefly), in Arrested Development; and, of course, spunky single mother Christine (and she appeared on Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Otherwise, she's doing the hardest job of all - raising two sons, 16 and 11. (She's married to TV writer Brad Hall.)

Louis-Dreyfus was stuck with the tired old label/cliche, "The Seinfeld Curse," by the press for most of the decade until she scored the lead actress/sitcom Emmy in 2006. Then, the scarlet letter magically melted away. Was it ever fair? Not really. "Ellie" was a good show - innovative, sometimes funny - and even featured a before-he-was-famous Steve Carell. Ditto "Christine." No one ever expected "Seinfeld Redux." Or should have.

Jason Alexander- In some ways, this has been the most fascinating post-"Seinfeld" life; it's a spin-the-dial career, and where you stop ... well, who knows! He's guest-judging on Bravo's dance show, "Step It Up" - bizarre - while there have been a few dozen cameos, starring roles, and other assorted turns on the tube (including Curb Your Enthusiasm), along with a handful of movies since 1998. His two TV sitcoms both flopped - ABC's 2001 Bob Patterson (he played a motivational speaker) and CBS' 2004-05 Listen Up (he played a sportswriter, based on The Washington Post's Tony Kornheiser). He's started a stand-up career (recently toured in Australia), and the Tony Award winner has also returned to the stage: He's artistic director of the Los Angeles-based Reprise Theatre Company, which produces four musical revivals per year.

A career track suggesting both an adventurous spirit and an insecure one. Another possibility: He doesn't know exactly what he wants to do; Seinfeld - or at least the DVDs - gave Alexander the financial security blanket needed to escape George, but he's squandered some of that. The job at Reprise, however, may well be the best move of all. There's hope still for the abundantly talented George ... er, Jason.

Michael Richards- was first out with a major sitcom - The Michael Richards Show - in 2000. It was burdened by expectations and the inevitable critical blow-back that "it'll never be as good." And hardly was. The show was cancelled after six episodes, and the "Seinfeld Curse" began. Richards did some credited voice work (for Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie) and there were rare cameos. He also worked on the comedy circuit, but the Nov. 20, 2006 Laugh Factory tirade ended it. That performance - a blowtorch of rage and racial epithets - was captured on a cell phone, and Richards' career seemed over. He disappeared into the Far East, where a reporter for the Los Angeles Times caught up with him: "That night, when I was insulted and disrupted, I lost my heart; I lost my sense of humour. I've retired from that." He's back and in production on a major studio animated release, Cat Tale.

Richards stared down the biggest challenge of any actor - how to get beyond the character that made you - then seemed to back off. His The Michael Richards Show character was part Monk, part Cosmo and reinforced the quandary. After the Laugh Factory incident he tried the recovery program (hired big-league P.R. firm, etc.) but remains somewhat radioactive.

Larry David (co-creator and voice of George Steinbrenner)- Three words - Curb Your Enthusiasm. Alone among all, he's the one to create a post-Seinfeld classic.

Phil Morris (Johnnie Cochran-esque lawyer Jackie Chiles): Full and busy career on the tube, including appearances on JAG, NCIS and Smallville.

Heidi Swedberg (Susan Biddle Ross, George's fiancee): Guest shots in such shows as ER and Without a Trace.

Estelle Harris (Estelle Costanza, George's mother): Voiced Mrs. Potato Head in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, due in 2010. Has appeared on Disney Channel's The Suite Life of Zach and Cody and in movies; heavily involved in charity work.

Jerry Stiller (Frank Costanza, George's father): Father-in-law Arthur Spooner in The King of Queens (1998-2007) plus roles in movies such as Zoolander, with son, Ben.

Liz Sheridan (Helen Seinfeld, Jerry's mother): Wrote book on her long-ago love affair with James Dean, and is shopping a screenplay based on that memoir.

John O'Hurley (J. Peterman): Winning Dancing With the Stars will probably be his legacy, not his role as Elaine's boss.

Barney Martin (Morty Seinfeld, Jerry's father): Died in 2005.

Len Lesser (Uncle Leo): Played Garvin on Everybody Loves Raymond.

Patrick Warburton (David Puddy, Elaine's boyfriend): He's been everywhere: NewsRadio ... The Emperor's New Groove ... The Tick ... Less Than Perfect ... Kim Possible ... Family Guy ... Rules of Engagement.

Seinfeld was a sophisticated sitcom that wowed America - so why did it never quite catch on in the UK? asks Dan Worth...

Ten years ago tomorrow, 75 million Americans sat around their televisions - the third largest audience of all time - to witness the end of one of the greatest comedies of the 20th century. Seinfeld was a phenomenon in the US and was so successful NBC were prepared to offer Jerry Seinfeld $5m per episode to continue - the cast of Friends were earning "just" $1m per episode at the height of their success.

But in the UK Seinfeld never caught on and for a show that was built around the inextricable frustrations of modern life, often coupled with righteous indignation - personified by the ever put-upon George Costanza - this seems strange. Especially when we seem to pride ourselves on such traits.

Erratic late-night scheduling on BBC2 certainly didn't help and perhaps now in the age of Sky+ Seinfeld would have thrived, but successful shows usually overcome such things to find an audience. Perhaps the shallow nature of the characters and the nihilism inherent in the show, which led to its label "a show about nothing", turned British audiences off. But when you consider the success of almost every other US import to these shores there is one noticeable difference - resolution.

While Scrubs has JD's constant voiceovers to bring episodes to a conclusion, Frasier had the story arc of Niles and Daphne to follow alongside lessons for Frasier, and Friends continually showed the characters maturing and learning at the end of each episode, Seinfeld purposefully did the opposite. Episodes frequently ended in situations that were immediately forgotten at the beginning of the next, the characters starting with a clean slate once again, having learned nothing from their experiences. Larry David, the show's co-creator, famously insisted on a strict "no hugging, no learning" rule on set and in one episode Kramer (Jerry's neighbour against whom all other wacky next-door neighbours pale in comparison) tells Jerry, "You know the important thing is that you learned something," only to be rebuffed, "No I didn't!"

It seems striking that while The Office, our defining sitcom of the 21st century so far, gave us an out-of-character happy ending with Tim and Dawn together and David Brent having at least not embarrassed himself on a blind date, Seinfeld ended with the four main characters, not married, not successful, not even happy, but sitting in prison about to start a one-year jail sentence. When it comes to comedy, perhaps we Brits are less sophisticated than we like to think.

BBC to drop parliament TV for Olympics

2008-05-14T03:40:00.000-07:00

Digital TV channel BBC Parliament's audience share is usually so small that it barely registers in the Barb ratings, but the service will get a boost this summer when the corporation ditches the politicians and replaces them with Olympics coverage.

The BBC has confirmed that it is to withdraw the BBC Parliament channel from the Freeview digital terrestrial TV service for the duration of the Beijing Olympics in August on order to replace it with action from the games. BBC Parliament's Freeview capacity will be used to "enhance" the quality of the interactive TV streaming the BBC is planning to use for the Olympics, which take place between August 8 and 24. This will mean that viewers accustomed to the channel's in-depth coverage of parliamentary committee hearings will instead be introduced to the delights of a myriad of minor Olympic sports.

The BBC said that as all the UK's parliaments and assemblies will be in recess during August, using the channel for Olympics coverage would make the best use of its capacity during a busy sports period. BBC Parliament has previously filled its summer schedule with repeats of big political and state events such as coverage of old general elections and last year Princess Diana's funeral, to mark the 10th anniversary of her death.

The BBC is due to officially unveil its Olympic coverage plans next month, but the event is expected to dominate the main BBC outlets including BBC1, BBC2 and BBC Radio 5 Live. However, coverage is not expected to leak on to BBC3 or BBC4.

The BBC will launch a number of specialised Olympic "red button" interactive streams, which it has previously used during major sporting events including the 2004 Athens Olympics. These interactive services will be broadcast on some of the DTT spectrum normally used by BBC Parliament.

The move to commandeer BBC Parliament on Freeview is because of the limited amount of spare spectrum. The channel will continue a normal service on the Sky satellite TV and Virgin Media cable TV services where there is more spectrum capacity. "The BBC is making full use of our channel capacity during the parliamentary recess to bring the best possible coverage of the Olympics," a BBC spokesman said.

BBC management had to ask the BBC Trust for permission to change BBC Parliament's content for the Olympics. The trust gave permission at its monthly meeting in March, saying a public value test was not required. But the trust added that if any of the UK's parliaments or assemblies were reinstated during the Olympics the normal BBC Parliament service should be resumed.

BBC Parliament's ratings are usually so low that individual programmes often do not register in the audience data published by research body Barb. However, it posted an average weekly reach - the number of people watching at least three consecutive minutes - of 437,000 viewers for the week ending April 27. For the week ending August 12 last year, it posted an average weekly reach of 258,000.

BBC3 to air Manchester music comedy

2008-05-14T03:36:00.000-07:00

BBC3 controller Danny Cohen has commissioned a comedy series about a fictional Manchester record label starring Ralf Little and Johnny Vegas. Called Massive, the new six-part series follows Danny, played by Royle Family star Little, and Shay, played by Carl Rice, a star of the current BBC3 comedy Scallywagga, who form a new label called Shady Records.

Vegas plays Shay's father in the comedy, which is currently filming in Manchester and will be broadcast on BBC3 this autumn. The cast also includes Paul Kaye, Philip Jackson, Christine Bottomley, Lorraine Cheshire, Joel Fry, Steve Furst, Craig Parkinson, Beverley Rudd, Faye McKeever, Joanne King, and Craig Parkinson.

"En route they pluck a girl band from the obscurity of Superb'uns cake shop, get sued by Eminem, get lost in the Pennines - where they find the new Oasis - and get involved in a scam involving a Macedonian prostitute called Zora who has a revolutionary way of making shish kebabs," a BBC spokeswoman said.

The series is being made by BBC Comedy North, the department run by the corporation's creative head of comedy, Kenton Allen, and has been written by Damian Lanigan, a former member of the 1980s band The Twentieth Legion. Massive's producer is Jim Poyser, whose writing credits include episodes for Shameless. The director is David Kerr, who recently worked on BBC comedy That Mitchell and Webb Look. Allen is executive producer.

Allen said: "Massive combines Ralf Little and Johnny Vegas with a terrific supporting cast and Damian Lanigan's vivid scripts about rock'n'roll lifestyles on a Primark budget. It's shaping up to be a unique comedy treat for this autumn on BBC3." The series was commissioned by Cohen and Lucy Lumsden, the BBC controller of comedy commissioning.

The perils of friends in high places

2008-05-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

Last night's TV reviewed: The World’s Tallest Women and Me; Gordon Ramsay’s F Word; Abortion: the Choice; The Truth About Property: A Solid Investment?; What Happened Next?

Future historians specialising in TV humbug of the early 21st century could do worse than to make a careful study of The World’s Tallest Women and Me (Channel 4). At the start, presenter Mark Dolan had the nerve to say “In the 21st century, you’d think the freak show was dead” – which only goes to show that he hasn't watched much television recently; since countless programmes still bring the dubious joys of the geek show and the carny into our living rooms, including Balls of Steel (presenter, one Mark Dolan). Of course, Dolan knows perfectly well that the freak show isn't dead and that he's done more than most men to keep its thrills alive. But he needs to position himself rather carefully for what he's engaged in now, which is tracking down extraordinary people in the privacy of their homes and pretending to care about their problems while the camera gets some clear shots for the gawpers back home. It's sort of freak-stalking, and having to show his face while doing it makes Mark so uncomfortable that the series might better have been titled "Travels with an Uneasy Conscience".

There's nothing wrong with a bit of gawping among consenting adults, of course, provided the gawpees are treated with respect, as they usually are in the proliferating TV freakshow genre. But few things could have been less respectful than Dolan's fatuous insistence that he had "different motives" for staring at these women's limbs. He began with very tall women, partly, I suspect, because he's very tall himself and so reckoned that his suggestion that this is an exercise in fellow feeling might be a little more plausible. At any rate, he alternated between giving us the chance to stare at these women, claiming to have misgivings about this, and claiming to have banished those misgivings by realising his interest wasn’t voyeuristic but deeply caring. And just to add a more minor level of humbug, he also did that weird telly thing of pretending to set off on his “journey” without knowing where it might lead or whom he might meet along the way.

Dolan began by dropping in on a convention for the Central Arizona Tall Society. There, he arrowed in on Ellen Bayer, who at 6ft 10in was able to indulge him in what he claimed was a long-cherished dream: to be able to hug a woman taller than he is. Other men want more than hugs, it seems. At the same event, Dolan met a man who claimed he made around a million dollars a year with a website devoted to Amazonian woman. Ellen, a teacher, makes some extra money by posing on such sites. Dolan, of course, didn’t approve of such fetishism. In order to make sure, though, he spent quite a while at one of her photo shoots, and showed us some racier examples of the same tragic exploitation of tall women. Ellen agreed to take Dolan shopping for very big clothes. What she did not agree to, however, was the sight of his cheeky face peering over the door when she was in the middle of getting changed. "I'm not looking south," he grinned. She struck some innocuous poses for him in the racks of the local outsize-garment store, suggesting that there must also be a fetish niche for homely giants in beige cardigans.

Ellen wasn't really what Dolan was after, though, huggable as she was. She was tall, but not the tallest, so after a brisk pantomime of on-the-spot research, he travelled across country to pester Sandy Allen. He apparently heard of Sandy for the first time in Phoenix – even though she’s been trading as the world’s tallest women for years, and has appeared in several TV documentaries. "I want to get to know her, and hear her story," he told us, on his way to meet 7ft 7in Allen, who uses a wheelchair and suffers from depression. So as he headed off Dolan duly went for some more pseudo-agonising. On the one hand, he definitely wanted to get to know Sandy as a person. On the other, he couldn’t deny that he wouldn’t be interested in getting to know her as a person if she wasn’t seven-foot seven. “I guess I’m going to have to live with the guilt,” he concluded (which, I suspect, won’t be an enormous struggle).

Unfortunately his charmlessly ingratiating manner - like a young gambler buttering up his rich, dying granny - got him nowhere. "Now where's the leggy blonde?" he trilled, on entering her hospital room for their second meeting. "Hello darling! How are you?" Then he kissed her (Dolan kisses everyone, whether they like it or not) and wheeled her out to answer all his questions about how unhappy she is. To be fair, Sandy, notionally the world's tallest living woman, didn't look as if she really minded being pestered, visits from gauche British comedians being about as good as it gets in terms of male attention. The loneliness of all these women gave Mark another opening for a bit of face-saving solemnity, though you couldn't help but wonder whether Sandy hadn't set her sights a bit high. She wanted, she said, a man whose shoulder she could lay her head on, which narrowed the field somewhat when it came to prospects.

Then Mark jetted off to China, where he delivered a pair of handmade shoes the size of a baby's bassinet to De-Fen Yao, a Chinese woman who turned out to be a bit taller than Sandy. Again, Dolan pretended to have heard of seven-foot nine-inch woman purely by chance. Again, he was “very conscious” that she might not want to be visited – before visiting her. "I couldn't help but feel that we'd created some kind of sideshow here," muttered Mark, as De-Fen's neighbours lined up to stare when she was coaxed into the open, with the help of a £800 sweetener, for an upright photo-opportunity. “They’re just looking at her like some bizarre object,” he tutted. (So, what did he think last night’s viewers were doing?) Yet, instead of, say, taking her back inside, he then fitted her with her new shoes to the entirely predictable titillation of the gawpers. One hopes that Sandy doesn't find out about her demotion, incidentally, since the one silver lining in her rather bleak existence was the belief that she was a living superlative. The only thing worse than being the world's tallest woman, on the evidence of this stubbornly melancholy film, would be being the world's second tallest.

Last night's television made for particularly depressing viewing. The new series of Gordon Ramsay’s F Word (Channel 4) served to confirm a strange fact: the man is now so established as a “character” that he only has to be rude to somebody for them to fall about as if they’d been on the receiving end of an epigram by Oscar Wilde. (Examples last night included “Get the fuck out of my kitchen” and the particularly witty “You look like a sack of shit.”) Where his language and tantrums in Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares are work in a noble cause- the improvement of provincial restaurant cooking- this show, back for a fourth attempt to identify a coherent format, is a horrible programme, gratuitously ill-mannered, chaotically assembled and obsessed with celebrity, particularly the chef's. “Now shove off out of my kitchen,” he didn't quite say to fellow-camera hogger Geri Halliwell in the obligatory, generally unpalatable celebrity love-in slot.

Halliwell and her truly nauseating Spanish meatballs were the guests and Ramsay, whose emotional age descends towards single figures in these shows, was keen to prove that his own recipe was superior and received its vindication among the diners at his notional restaurant with anything but magnanimity. "I like writing and creating," said Geri, wrist-deep in mince and sherry. She said at Christmas her family competed to see how many they could eat. “So how many balls at one time have you had in your mouth?” he asked. She threw a gobbet of meatball at him. Nonetheless, Gordon’s attempts to be jovial are still more convincing than his attempts to take an interest in people. Last night, Halliwell had one sentence to explain how she’d conquered her years of bulimia. “By being honest about it,” said Geri. “That’s amazing,” replied Gordon in a voice firmly suggesting he was already bored with the whole business. Her moving confessional took 20 seconds. Then she fucked off.

Halliwell is a B-list celebrity and presumably glad of the gig. The C-list Peters family, whose members include a Corrie chippy and a Shameless barmaid, looked pleased as punch too to be ordered about Gordon's kitchen, although their weakest member, Kenny, was bullied so much he ended up doing a Frank Spencer impression to pacify his master. He tried his inadequate best, with the rest of her family, to make souffle, rose-water cream and spiced monkfish for 50 people. "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!" Gordon explained to him patiently after another cock-up. "Burnt potato! Not good enough!" Poor Kenny took Ramsey's obvious scorn for human weakness rather well.

Janet Street-Porter, who once had credibility as a journalist, was rechristened Janet Street-Pensioner and made to rear some calves as punishment for not having had children of her own; “Expectant Mother” flashed a caption as she went to market to buy them. But saddest of all was seeing James Corden, Smithy in Gavin and Stacey, playing the celebrity game, eating, blindfolded, unidentified cuts of Chinese food (ooh, er, chicken feet) and spewing them into a bucket before his overweight family. This is Gordon Ramsay's C Word - as in celebrity for one thing.

If the BBC had set out to make a season of anti-abortion documentaries it could not have done much better than with the Bare Facts season currently running on BBC Two. On Monday night in Teen Mum High we visited a school for pregnant schoolgirls each of whom was opposed to abortion and seemed to be blossoming under the twin demands of motherhood and academe. Last night's Abortion: the Choice showed all the emotional trauma of having a termination and precious little of the gift of life it can give back to women.

In interviews with the women the documentary followed, guilt, shame and denial all came up like boxes to be ticked. The one woman, a 25-year-old middle-class actress, who claimed to be at ease with her choice, failed to convince us. A sequence at the end showed a woman in great distress being counselled post-operatively, although it was obvious her real pain concerned her unresolved grief over her husband's death five years before. The session was followed by a sequence of a beautiful balloon being let go over a park. Flying up to heaven to join all the little foetuses, I suppose.

Elsewhere, more gloom about the housing market. The second part of BBC Two's canny The Truth About Property titled A Solid Investment? concluded that it wasn't. To demonstrate the point our presentable presenters Andrew Verity and Jenny Scott interviewed a gloomy woman in Newton Aycliffe scraping the walls of a house worth less than she bought it for, an English couple whose luxury villa in Spain was about to be bulldozed to make way for a railway, and a desperately sad husband and wife in Skipsey whose house had fallen into the sea.

In a reworking of Dragons' Den, Scott took a thirtysomething called Lucy into a warehouse to pick apart her decision to put £20,000 down on a buy-to-let flat that would one day be her pension. Wodges of cash were slapped in front of her and then taken away again (capital gains, inflation etc.). The nest egg might end up worth all of £142,000. In the long run, we were told, shares will make you more money than property. But where, pray, are the perky programmes about the stock market?

Finally, What Happened Next?, in which the subjects of past fly-on-the-wall documentaries are revisited, was beautifully summed up in a late remark from George, the ex-driver/manager of the Global Village Trucking Company, a hippie rock band whose communal life in a Norfolk cottage gave the viewers of 1973 something to tut and marvel at. "At the time, I thought of myself as being not particularly good-looking but very, very clever... and then looking back at the film, I had the opposite impression. I thought, 'Oh... I was better looking than I realised at the time, but so stupid.'" You and me both, George, and a lot of others besides, I suspect.

Not that the film was bitter or disillusioned. Indeed, much of its pleasure lay in the way that most of the members of the band had diverted their youthful idealism and contempt for the Man into far more conventional channels, even, in the case of Jeremy Lascelles, into becoming the Man himself, as CEO of Chrysalis Records. Some had stayed true to hippie ideals – Kanga, the roadie, now lives at the Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education – while others had simply given them a good scrub up. Dave and Danielle, last seen sitting naked in a bath in a cottage with mildewed walls and a scrofulous thatch, were interviewed in a glacially white modern kitchen, but plausibly suggested that their life with their children was a commune by other means. You might not envy them for having to live like that in the first place, but having memories this fond and unperturbed is surely a gift.

Weinstein Co. goes down to Fraggle Rock

2008-05-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

The Weinstein Co. is taking Fraggle Rock to the big screen! Jim Henson's classic series will become a live-action musical, directed by Hoodwinked! director Cory Edwards. The original show premiered on HBO in 1983 and ran five seasons.

The Weinsteins, determined to get more cozy and "family-friendly" recently, are probably banking on a blockbuster opening, since the first three seasons were recently released on DVD to big sales. According to Variety, "core characters Gogo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red [will be taken] outside of their home in Fraggle Rock, where they interact with humans, which they think are aliens."

There will apparently be puppets and humans in the show but when we first heard this story, we couldn't help but wonder which actors would play the puppets. We think Carrot Top would make a good Red. And former Hobbit Sean Astin might make a good Wembley. That kind of movie might send kids screaming from the theatre.

The deal furthers the relationship between TWC and the Hoodwinked! creative team. Edwards is re-teaming with Hoodwinked! co-writer Tony Leech on the animated alien adventure Escape From Planet Earth, on which Leech is making his directing debut.

Edwards is separately developing a live-action feature adaptation of Cedar Fair's Halloween Haunt franchise, designed to be shot in 3-D by Kerner Optical and produced by Davis Entertainment, Dave Phillips and Tracey Edmonds. That picture is looking for a backer. "One of our main priorities when we first launched the Weinstein Company was to feature a broad range of family-friendly franchises like Fraggle Rock, " Weinstein said.