Last night's TV reviewed: The Apprentice; Child of Our Time; Al Capone and the Untouchables; Clarissa and the King's Cookbook; Great British Menu
When the clash of civilisations comes, will it be on the desert plain and feature two armies, fiercely held beliefs and bone-crunching weaponry? Or might it come in a Moroccan souk, and feature Michael Sophocles, “a nice Jewish boy” who turns out to be “half-Jewish”, trying to buy a kosher chicken from a Muslim butcher and have it blessed in the name of Allah? The exchange with the butcher – “Who blesses the chicken?”; “A holy man”; “I have to have that chicken blessed” – was, like much of last night’s The Apprentice (BBC One), funny and very wrong. Perhaps it will be spliced into an al-Qaeda training video.
Staggering ignorance notwithstanding, this was the best/most compulsive/did-they-really-just-do-that? episode yet: the two teams had to buy a list of items supplied by the Chief Growling Gnome. They were supposed to haggle fiercely for the keenest deal although it is hard to imagine anyone in their right mind wanting these things at any price. One was an alarm clock in the shape of a mosque, which woke you with a strident call to prayer. The second was a downright rude cactus. The third was a cowhide, complete with tail. The bone of contention, however, turned out to be that kosher chicken, of which there was no shortage; decapitated before your eyes for added freshness. Michael and Jenny (who had swathed her copper hair in a pink scarf in order to pass as a local) soon found a willing poulterer. He raised his cleaver. The chicken shut its eyes. "Stop! Stop! Stop!" cried Jenny. "I have to have the chicken blessed by someone from the mosque." The chicken opened one eye, hopefully. Michael clarified the position - "religious like this" - and he crossed himself. "Say the word 'Allah'!" "Allah!" said the poulterer affably and chopped the chicken's head off.
It shows how extreme this series has become that what would once have had me punching a cushion – Lee McQueen’s catch-phrase “That’s what I’m talking about” – is subsidiary buzz to the lip-smacking warfare. For all their battle talk, the contestants are strangely meek: Michael bangs on about destroying any foe that dare cast a shadow over his Palm Pilot, but when confronted over a misdemean-our his wounded belligerence is less Gordon Gekko, more Scrappy-Doo.
This week, Jennifer, principally known for being Irish and wearing a hideous shiny mustard blouse, led the losing team. Modelling her approach on their shopping list, Jennifer's team ran around like headless poultry: wild flapping, some blood-spilling and no evidence of higher brain function. She neglected to check the provenance of two tagine pots (tut tut). The Berber bedspread, bought under a ruse that Alex and Claire were unlikely boyfriend and girlfriend, was too expensive. Alex’s tentative grip of French – “ Je voudrais le petit déjeuner” – would have made his fans sigh dreamily. Can the nation get over Alex please: for “brooding hunk” can we substitute “duplicitous whiner”? Jenny (and her python-swallowing-mongoose face) tried, and failed, to bribe a man stringing tennis racquets into not stringing the opposing team’s racquets. Lucinda ran around in an impractical pink pashmina. The drama pounded relentlessly on, until the climactic finale in which two people were fired. Devoted viewers have learnt that nearly every series will also contain the predictable "unpredictable" moment of a double firing.
In the boardroom, Sir Alan was on terrific form, restoring faith in his omniscience after the wrongful smiting of Simon a couple of weeks ago and coming to a slow rolling boil. "Jenny, you are a lady of the world. Slightly older than the people here." Jenny did not take this amiss. She smiled. "It's my birthday, Sir Alan. I'm 36 today." "Congratulations," said Sugar grimly. "Are you telling me you don't know the term 'kosher' is associated with Jewish people?" This, Jenny conceded, was, indeed, the case. Sugar said he was flabbergasted, and turned to Michael, who had described himself on his CV as "a good Jewish boy". Under questioning he wasn't so sure. Sir Alan suggested he judge Michael’s credentials by making him drop his trousers. Racy.
Do you remember the film of a killer whale playing with a seal? Sugar said, "Is it true that you went to a halal butcher and he made a prayer over it. Is that right? Are you having a laugh or what? I don't know why you didn't go the whole hog and find a Roman Catholic priest to take the butcher's confession. It's unbelievable!" Michael protested that he was only half Jewish. At this point I caught sight of Nick's face. He was looking at Sugar as if he had suddenly heard ticking. Nick evidently knew the danger signs because, at this point, Sugar went off like a non-mosque shaped alarm clock. "If any of you are interested in staying in this process, you'd better start opening your mouth. I don't give a shit! I'll fire three of you! I'll fire all bloody five of you! Don't bother me at all! You open your bloody mouth or I'll make some quick decisions now." All five opened their mouths simultaneously and began to blame each other.
Jenny, having confessed that she didn't know there were any Jewish connections to the term, insisted she had ceded to Michael's greater knowledge because of his "Jewish roots", a sly bit of blame-dodging that earned her the Order of the Stubby Finger. Sir Alan fired Jenny for general snakiness ("I think she was a bit of a snake")– and, I reckon, being horrible to Lucinda. The tartan beret will always get you. Jennifer was writhing to escape, first trying to blame Claire (“she’s a Tasmanian devil”) and then Michael for the team’s loss. She said if Sir Alan wanted a liar, meaning Michael, she’d rather not work for him. Bad move: he fired her; his appetite for condign retribution not yet sated. Happily, Jennifer claims to be "the best salesperson in Europe", so we don't need to worry about her future too much. His remark to Michael – that his “overenthusiasm” reminded him of himself at that age – recalled his misty-eyed identification with Syed a few seasons ago. It’s a very weird form of retro-narcissism. Could Margaret have a word?
Nick Hewer couldn’t understand Michael Sophocles’s faith-based ignorance – “I'm a Catholic," whispered Nick to Margaret. "You're a Protestant. We know what kosher is and Michael doesn't! He did classics at Edinburgh." "Edinburgh," said Margaret sadly, "isn't what it was." Now there are eight. One day, instead of consolatory hugs and kisses, fire-ee and survivors will punch one another out by Frances’s desk in reception. Claire says her inner rottweiler is stirring (she’s hardly been a docile labrador). Raef has mutated into the Noël Coward of spreadsheets, dressing-gowned, quiff at full height, and given to lilting soliloquies about “integretaaaay”. A mystery: the contestants’ house seems huge, yet the boys sleep three to a room. It’s either a reverse Tardis or Raef is starting a secret quiff sex cult.
Also on BBC1, Rhianna was worrying about her appearance. “I just don’t like my body-shape,” she explained. “I think I look really fat.” The surprising thing here wasn’t that Rhianna seemed perfectly slim to the rest of us (after all, we’re pretty used to such unnecessary female anxiety on TV by now) but that she was seven years old. Rhianna was speaking in Child of Our Time, the series presented by Professor Lord Robert Winston, which has returned for its latest look at a selection of Brits born in 2000. The subject for the first episode was gender, and the conclusion perhaps won’t have come as a great shock to most parents (or non-parents) watching. Gender differences, it seems, go deep – which is presumably why they’ve proved harder to eradicate than some feminists once hoped.
Early in the programme, the children were faced with an identical drink in two different bottles. Without exception, the girls plumped for the pink one labelled Princess Pop, the boys for the Rocket Pop in its manly blue. All the children but one then claimed that “their” drink tasted nicer. Later, they were invited to dress up in whatever clothes they wanted, and again headed straight for masculinity and femininity in their most traditional forms. For the boys, this meant looking tough – or, more specifically these days, as if they came from South Central LA. The girls opted for a faintly alarming emphasis on glamour, including mini-skirts and fishnet tights.
For Professor Winston, this was proof of how much things have changed in the last few decades. I’m not so sure. On the one hand, celebrity culture is certainly more widespread, and the idea of glamour probably trashier. On the other, I bet a similar experiment in the 1960s would have seen the girls going for the dolly-bird look – and in the 1920s, dressing like flappers. Come to think of it, I’m also not sure about Winston’s wider claim either: that Child of Our Time is a rare example of solid science on prime-time BBC1. There was a scientific point, I’m sure, but there was also an element of “Children Say the Strangest/Funniest Things”, about owning pet frogs and being fat. This BBC version of 7 Up, with the BBC following a bunch of children as they grow up, revealed depressing stuff we probably knew: very young girls want to be thin, boys want to be rich. One on one, girls gossip, boys are silent.
Winston’s point was that in a postfeminist age when most parents proclaim open-minded parenting, the reality is that little boys like things in blue and little girls like stuff that’s pink. Only one boy bucked this trend, but he was bound to grow up interesting – his parents, though separated, still lived in the same house. Despite his dad’s admirable right on-ness, he rode a black bike not a pink one. The programme definitely offers plenty to chew over, and is often good fun. Yet, in the end, those claims to scientific rigour are undermined by its own main quality. It gets such revealing interviews with the children (and their parents) that the participants come across as a group of completely different individuals rather than as a collective example of anything. As a result, most of the evidence we’re given feels firmly in the realm of the anecdotal.
Elsewhere, Clarissa and the King's Cookbook (BBC4) was part of their medieval strand. The cookbook, with recipes by Richard II's own chef, was the first ever written in English. Clarissa Dickson Wright is the antidote to Nigella Lawson. She is bulky and bloodthirsty, amusing and cultivated. "Patience," she said, sitting by an open fire waiting for a watched pot to boil, "is a great virtue for cooks. Not necessarily for chefs." She has also gone further than most television cooks in acknowledging the truth of Nietzsche's remark that there is no feast without cruelty. Where her colleagues tend to pull a neatly trimmed fillet out of the fridge to prepare their dishes, Clarissa has been known to go out and hunt her raw ingredients down before putting them in the pot, and there's something self-consciously defiant about her refusal to blur the connection between meat and animal, in deference to contemporary squeamishness. So I couldn't help but feel that she rather ducked a challenge here, in which she prepared a meal from a scroll of the court of Richard II called The Forme of Cury ("cury" being a way of saying cooking, rather than a chicken tikka with a side of aloo gobi).
There was an opportunity here to really test our sometimes arbitrary demarcations between protected species and edible ones. The scroll includes a recipe for heron, for example, and a recipe for beaver, helpfully categorised as a fish by the clerical authorities to get round the 242 days of the year on which meat was forbidden. Clarissa could even have cooked porpoise in broth, though it's true that the scroll doesn't go into a great deal of detail about technique. You wouldn't forget that in a hurry, would you – a group of medievalists tucking into grilled porpoise. Instead, Clarissa opted for a goose recipe. "Take sage, parsley, hyssop and savory, quinces and pears, garlic and grapes and fill the geese therewith and sew up the hole that no grease come out and roast them well." The result, she declared, was "elegant, expensive and sophisticated cuisine", and I don't doubt that it was to a medieval diner.
Richard II was fastidious, an epicure and a pretty snappy dresser. The sweeping sleeves of his doublet, it is said, were hung with "15 silver cockles and 30 mussels and whelks in silver gilt". Which you might describe as top dressing. Clarissa cooked the goose stuffed with fruit, river fish with sweet-and-sour syrup and pears poached in wine as served to the king. Apparently, one of Richard's feasts cost the equivalent of £58,000 for food and £10,000 for table linen, which might even make a non-dom blink a bit. But in terms of contemporary cuisine, it looked like goose-studded porridge, without any Heston Blumenthal finesse. I wasn't entirely sure about the aigre-doux of fish either, topped with a kind of mulled vinegar and provoking from Clarissa's assembled guests the kind of polite murmuring that all cooks dread.
If you want to see what Richard II might be serving up now you have to watch Great British Menu, which this week reached the South-west England heats. Curiously, the recipes have been getting quite medieval: slices of beef served on a jelly of white wine with chervil and sultanas, and wild pigeon cured in birch-sap wine. But when it comes to plating up, the modern chef can do a lot better than a mess of pottage plopped on to a big slice of stale bread. Chris Horridge – who seems to believe that haute cuisine can cure cancer – serves his food on a roofing slate, while his opponent, Elisha Carter, opts for weirdly morphed bowls.
As food programmes go, Great British Menu isn't bad, breaking away from the kitchen to look at small food suppliers. But it's hard to imagine watching it every day without being driven mad by the redundancy of the format, the way it repeats the fundamental information again and again and again, not to mention coating everything in a gummy sauce of chef rivalry. "They're always arguing, those two!" chuckled Jenny Bond in her infuriatingly mumsy voice-over. Yes, but only because the producers kept telling them to, I suspect, so they could sprinkle more finely chopped banter into the mix.
Finally, something genuinely unexpected did happen on TV last night: after several failed attempts, with Al Capone and the Untouchables Five’s True Story series finally achieved its aim of debunking a piece of received wisdom. Ask most people who brought down Capone, and they’d surely say Eliot Ness, the head of those prohibition-enforcing incorruptibles. In fact, as last night’s documentary showed, the man really responsible was, rather disappointingly, an accountant from Washington. Frank Wilson it was who spent over a year preparing the case that got Capone jailed for tax evasion.
So, why do we think Ness was the hero of the piece? The answer, of course, is Hollywood – which in turn has drawn on the 1957 book Ness “co-authored” with a journalist called Oscar Fraley. (“Don’t get scared if we stray from the facts,” Fraley advised, before adapting Ness’s 21-page memoir into a hugely popular piece of American folklore.) Sadly, Ness didn’t live to enjoy his mythical status. By 1957, ironically enough, he was an alcoholic, who’d met Fraley in a bar and who died at 54, just before the book came out. His death passed unnoticed by every newspaper in Chicago.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
BBC looks at Royle Family return
The BBC has confirmed it is in "early talks" with Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash, the creators of the Royle Family, to bring the hit comedy back for one more special.
Aherne and Cash, who also star in the Manchester-based show alongside Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson, are understood to be working on a new one-off instalment, which could air as early as Christmas. The move will surprise viewers who thought a BBC1 special broadcast in October 2006, titled 'The Queen of Sheba', in which Liz Smith's character Nana died, was the final instalment.
A BBC spokeswoman said: "We are in early talks about a Royle Family special but nothing has been confirmed." She added that no timings had been worked out but that talks were being held with the whole cast, including Aherne and Cash.
The Sun today quoted a friend of Aherne as saying: "Caroline's creative juices are flowing and her scripts will be packed full of humour. Exactly what the storylines will be haven't been revealed, but they are already being eagerly anticipated by some top BBC executives."
The newspaper said it was thought a script could be ready by autumn after Cash's new BBC series Sunshine – in which Aherne will also star – is finished. BBC1's 'The Queen of Sheba' special – the first Royle Family episode in six years - pulled in 7.8 million viewers and a 33% share.
Aherne and Cash, who also star in the Manchester-based show alongside Sue Johnston and Ricky Tomlinson, are understood to be working on a new one-off instalment, which could air as early as Christmas. The move will surprise viewers who thought a BBC1 special broadcast in October 2006, titled 'The Queen of Sheba', in which Liz Smith's character Nana died, was the final instalment.
A BBC spokeswoman said: "We are in early talks about a Royle Family special but nothing has been confirmed." She added that no timings had been worked out but that talks were being held with the whole cast, including Aherne and Cash.
The Sun today quoted a friend of Aherne as saying: "Caroline's creative juices are flowing and her scripts will be packed full of humour. Exactly what the storylines will be haven't been revealed, but they are already being eagerly anticipated by some top BBC executives."
The newspaper said it was thought a script could be ready by autumn after Cash's new BBC series Sunshine – in which Aherne will also star – is finished. BBC1's 'The Queen of Sheba' special – the first Royle Family episode in six years - pulled in 7.8 million viewers and a 33% share.
Obituary: Bernard Archard
The actor Bernard Archard, who has died aged 91, established a forbidding presence as Lt Col Oreste Pinto, a character based on a real-life wartime counter-espionage interrogator, in the BBC television series Spycatcher (1959-61), writes Gavin Gaughan. Tall and angular, with receding hair and a prominent chin, he became a regular authority figure and inquisitor, though not in leading roles.
Archard was born in Fulham, London, where his parents were mayor and mayoress; his father was also a jeweller. He won a scholarship to Rada (1938-39), and an early stage role came as Orsino to Jessica Tandy's Viola in Twelfth Night at the Regent's Park open air theatre. During the second world war, he was a conscientious objector, and was sent to work on land owned by the Quaker movement. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, in a production of the Glyndebourne Children's Theatre, he met fellow actor James Belchamber, who was his partner for nearly 60 years.
Making his way around regional repertory, Archard worked at Chesterfield with Margaret Tyzack and at Sheffield with Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis and Patrick McGoohan; like many, he believed McGoohan to be a truly great actor, and they worked together again in a couple of episodes of McGoohan's 1960s TV series Danger Man.
In the mid-1950s, Archard and Belchamber ran a touring repertory company, based in Torquay, with Hilda Braid among its players. They also collaborated on the book and lyrics for Our Jack, a musical based on Walter Greenwood's The Cure For Love, in 1960. Nevertheless, by 1959 Archard was thinking about emigrating to Canada with Belchamber. He postponed his trip to appear in a TV medical drama, then again to do Treason (1959), a Sunday-night play about the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Unknown to him, this rush of work resulted from a plan by writer-producer Elwyn Jones to demonstrate his suitability for Spycatcher.
Masterminded by Robert Barr, Spycatcher was also produced in the documentary manner, to the extent that Archard was not given billing in the Radio Times until some time into the run. Unlike later, action-orientated spy series, Pinto's half-hour cases, sometimes little more than two-handers, were based on true stories. The debriefing of wartime refugees afforded many opportunities for Archard's incisive qualities. One episode saw him get the desired answers from a suspect by throwing darts at a photo of Hitler.
Running for three seasons, the series brought Archard much recognition; he was wryly amused about receiving "two direct offers of marriage and about a dozen oblique ones". Although half of the episodes still exist, it has never been revived. Nonetheless, when on a continental tour of My Fair Lady in 1983, Archard's presence in Amsterdam caused excitement - Pinto having been Dutch.
He was proud of his role as a magistrate in Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, in the West End in 1977, with Glynis Johns. Anthony Shaffer's mocking The Case of the Oily Levantine, at the same venue, Her Majesty's Theatre, two years later, was less successful. However, a full-scale theatrical disaster came with Peter O'Toole's Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. Archard played Duncan; he had previously been Angus in Roman Polanski's film version, in 1971.
In the film version of Dad's Army (1971), Archard was a regular general dismissing Captain Mainwaring as a "damn bank clerk!" He was in several of the popular Edgar Wallace B-movies, as well as John Huston's playful The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); he and Huston had a mutual friend in Deborah Kerr.
He was the Duke of Wellington in Number 10 (YTV, 1983), an anthology series depicting prime ministers. For publicity purposes, the actors who took the roles were photographed with Margaret Thatcher; Archard was not impressed by her, but then, he had been a lifelong Guardian reader. He also played a government figure in Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach's controversial film derived from the John Stalker inquiry.
After retiring in his early 80s, Archard lived contentedly in Somerset with Belchamber, who survives him.
Bernard Joseph Archard, actor, born August 20 1916; died May 1 2008
Archard was born in Fulham, London, where his parents were mayor and mayoress; his father was also a jeweller. He won a scholarship to Rada (1938-39), and an early stage role came as Orsino to Jessica Tandy's Viola in Twelfth Night at the Regent's Park open air theatre. During the second world war, he was a conscientious objector, and was sent to work on land owned by the Quaker movement. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1948, in a production of the Glyndebourne Children's Theatre, he met fellow actor James Belchamber, who was his partner for nearly 60 years.
Making his way around regional repertory, Archard worked at Chesterfield with Margaret Tyzack and at Sheffield with Paul Eddington, Peter Sallis and Patrick McGoohan; like many, he believed McGoohan to be a truly great actor, and they worked together again in a couple of episodes of McGoohan's 1960s TV series Danger Man.
In the mid-1950s, Archard and Belchamber ran a touring repertory company, based in Torquay, with Hilda Braid among its players. They also collaborated on the book and lyrics for Our Jack, a musical based on Walter Greenwood's The Cure For Love, in 1960. Nevertheless, by 1959 Archard was thinking about emigrating to Canada with Belchamber. He postponed his trip to appear in a TV medical drama, then again to do Treason (1959), a Sunday-night play about the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. Unknown to him, this rush of work resulted from a plan by writer-producer Elwyn Jones to demonstrate his suitability for Spycatcher.
Masterminded by Robert Barr, Spycatcher was also produced in the documentary manner, to the extent that Archard was not given billing in the Radio Times until some time into the run. Unlike later, action-orientated spy series, Pinto's half-hour cases, sometimes little more than two-handers, were based on true stories. The debriefing of wartime refugees afforded many opportunities for Archard's incisive qualities. One episode saw him get the desired answers from a suspect by throwing darts at a photo of Hitler.
Running for three seasons, the series brought Archard much recognition; he was wryly amused about receiving "two direct offers of marriage and about a dozen oblique ones". Although half of the episodes still exist, it has never been revived. Nonetheless, when on a continental tour of My Fair Lady in 1983, Archard's presence in Amsterdam caused excitement - Pinto having been Dutch.
He was proud of his role as a magistrate in Terence Rattigan's last play, Cause Celebre, in the West End in 1977, with Glynis Johns. Anthony Shaffer's mocking The Case of the Oily Levantine, at the same venue, Her Majesty's Theatre, two years later, was less successful. However, a full-scale theatrical disaster came with Peter O'Toole's Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980. Archard played Duncan; he had previously been Angus in Roman Polanski's film version, in 1971.
In the film version of Dad's Army (1971), Archard was a regular general dismissing Captain Mainwaring as a "damn bank clerk!" He was in several of the popular Edgar Wallace B-movies, as well as John Huston's playful The List of Adrian Messenger (1963); he and Huston had a mutual friend in Deborah Kerr.
He was the Duke of Wellington in Number 10 (YTV, 1983), an anthology series depicting prime ministers. For publicity purposes, the actors who took the roles were photographed with Margaret Thatcher; Archard was not impressed by her, but then, he had been a lifelong Guardian reader. He also played a government figure in Hidden Agenda (1990), Ken Loach's controversial film derived from the John Stalker inquiry.
After retiring in his early 80s, Archard lived contentedly in Somerset with Belchamber, who survives him.
Bernard Joseph Archard, actor, born August 20 1916; died May 1 2008
Brit shows dominate Rose D'Or awards
British programmes including Skins, The IT Crowd and Kombat Opera Presents ... dominated the annual Rose D'Or entertainment awards in Switzerland last night, winning five of the eight coveted Golden Roses.
E4's teen drama Skins, made by Company Pictures and Stormdog Films, won the Golden Rose for best drama, with BBC1's second series of The Street, made by Granada Productions, given a special mention. The BBC's Kombat Opera Presents ..., made by Avalon Television, won the Golden Rose for comedy as well as being named best programme of 2008. Channel 4's Strictly Bolshoi, made by Ballet Boyz Productions, scooped the Golden Rose for arts documentary; while The IT Crowd, made by Talkback Thames, won the sitcom Golden Rose.
The entertainment Golden Rose went to BBC2's Hider in the House, made by Dutch production company Eyeworks. There was also British involvement in the gameshow Golden Rose, with the UK-based distributor Sony Pictures Television International's American format Power of 10 taking the gong.
The other two Golden Rose awards for performing arts and reality went to Swiss and Dutch broadcasters respectively. Comedian Peter Serafinowicz was also named best entertainer for his self-titled BBC1 show. The honorary Rose went to NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios co-chairman Ben Silverman. Last night's awards, which were announced at the 48th Rose D'Or festival in Lucerne, were chosen from 402 programmes entered from 34 countries.
E4's teen drama Skins, made by Company Pictures and Stormdog Films, won the Golden Rose for best drama, with BBC1's second series of The Street, made by Granada Productions, given a special mention. The BBC's Kombat Opera Presents ..., made by Avalon Television, won the Golden Rose for comedy as well as being named best programme of 2008. Channel 4's Strictly Bolshoi, made by Ballet Boyz Productions, scooped the Golden Rose for arts documentary; while The IT Crowd, made by Talkback Thames, won the sitcom Golden Rose.
The entertainment Golden Rose went to BBC2's Hider in the House, made by Dutch production company Eyeworks. There was also British involvement in the gameshow Golden Rose, with the UK-based distributor Sony Pictures Television International's American format Power of 10 taking the gong.
The other two Golden Rose awards for performing arts and reality went to Swiss and Dutch broadcasters respectively. Comedian Peter Serafinowicz was also named best entertainer for his self-titled BBC1 show. The honorary Rose went to NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios co-chairman Ben Silverman. Last night's awards, which were announced at the 48th Rose D'Or festival in Lucerne, were chosen from 402 programmes entered from 34 countries.
Out of the Blue switched to BBC2
Neighbours replacement Out of the Blue is being switched from BBC1 to BBC2 less than a month after it premiered because of disappointing ratings. BBC1 commissioned the 130-episode series, set in the resort of Manly, Sydney, from local Australian producer Southern Star Entertainment after it lost Neighbours to Channel Five. However, the expensive Australian soap, which launched last Monday, April 28, and airs at 2.10pm on BBC1 on weekdays, is being moved to BBC2 from May 19.
Out of the Blue launched with 1.2 million viewers. By yesterday its audience had dropped to 700,000. Despite inheriting 1.4 million from BBC1's long-running daytime drama Doctors, Out of the Blue was beaten by ITV1's 60 Minute Makeover, which drew 900,000 viewers.
Although ratings are lower than the 2.4 million viewers who used to tune into Neighbours at lunchtimes, the BBC is not under the same commercial pressures as ITV to axe or shift underperforming shows.
Out of the Blue centres on a group of thirtysomething friends who return to their home town for a high school reunion only for the celebrations to be curtailed when one of the group is murdered. The show is produced by an experienced team, including John Edwards, whose credits include The Secret Life of Us, and stars Home and Away's Charlotte Gregg and Heartbreak High's Katherine Hicks.
Such has been the anticipation surrounding the series that Australian broadcaster Network Ten, the home of Neighbours, has snapped up the rights to air it locally. When the commission was announced in November, Jane Tranter, the BBC fiction controller, called it "an ambitious project that we think will break new ground, at the same time as providing daytime audiences with a compelling and intriguing watch".
Out of the Blue does not air in Neighbours' previous slot of 1.40pm - Doctors now occupies that - but it was widely seen as BBC1's answer to the departure of Neighbours, which switched to Channel Five in February after more than 20 years on the corporation's flagship network.
ITV1 stuck with The Royal Today - a daytime spin-off from The Royal - which debuted with 2 million viewers and grew audiences after it launched in January.
The BBC admitted it is switching Out of the Blue to BBC2 for ratings reasons. Initially the Australian slot will be replaced in the 2.10pm slot by long-running US detective drama Diagnosis Murder before the BBC tests out some other new shows and genres.
A spokesman said: "The BBC often looks at scheduling across its portfolio of channels to ensure that we have the best mix of programming to suit the needs of the audience. Out of the Blue is a bold and original commission for BBC daytime with its compelling mix of human drama and its intriguing murder mystery set in a stunning location. The afternoon slot on BBC1 which the series had been in is very competitive and by moving the show to BBC2 we hope it will find a stronger home."
Out of the Blue launched with 1.2 million viewers. By yesterday its audience had dropped to 700,000. Despite inheriting 1.4 million from BBC1's long-running daytime drama Doctors, Out of the Blue was beaten by ITV1's 60 Minute Makeover, which drew 900,000 viewers.
Although ratings are lower than the 2.4 million viewers who used to tune into Neighbours at lunchtimes, the BBC is not under the same commercial pressures as ITV to axe or shift underperforming shows.
Out of the Blue centres on a group of thirtysomething friends who return to their home town for a high school reunion only for the celebrations to be curtailed when one of the group is murdered. The show is produced by an experienced team, including John Edwards, whose credits include The Secret Life of Us, and stars Home and Away's Charlotte Gregg and Heartbreak High's Katherine Hicks.
Such has been the anticipation surrounding the series that Australian broadcaster Network Ten, the home of Neighbours, has snapped up the rights to air it locally. When the commission was announced in November, Jane Tranter, the BBC fiction controller, called it "an ambitious project that we think will break new ground, at the same time as providing daytime audiences with a compelling and intriguing watch".
Out of the Blue does not air in Neighbours' previous slot of 1.40pm - Doctors now occupies that - but it was widely seen as BBC1's answer to the departure of Neighbours, which switched to Channel Five in February after more than 20 years on the corporation's flagship network.
ITV1 stuck with The Royal Today - a daytime spin-off from The Royal - which debuted with 2 million viewers and grew audiences after it launched in January.
The BBC admitted it is switching Out of the Blue to BBC2 for ratings reasons. Initially the Australian slot will be replaced in the 2.10pm slot by long-running US detective drama Diagnosis Murder before the BBC tests out some other new shows and genres.
A spokesman said: "The BBC often looks at scheduling across its portfolio of channels to ensure that we have the best mix of programming to suit the needs of the audience. Out of the Blue is a bold and original commission for BBC daytime with its compelling mix of human drama and its intriguing murder mystery set in a stunning location. The afternoon slot on BBC1 which the series had been in is very competitive and by moving the show to BBC2 we hope it will find a stronger home."
Fat kids and fatwas
Last night's TV reviewed: Age of Terror; Jesus Camp; Too Fat to Toddle; Natural World
Who can remember 7/8? Where were you that day in 1998 when al-Qaeda bombed the American Embassy in Nairobi and killed more than 200 people? And for a bonus point, who recalls that the same day another dozen were murdered in a parallel attack in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania? I suspect that on that remote August Friday ten years ago, you, like me, were instead salivating at the prospect of Bill Clinton, mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, becoming the first sitting president to testify to a grand jury. As Peter Taylor told us in the last, excellent episode of his Age of Terror (BBC Two), Lewinsky would prove no more than a salacious footnote to history. Osama bin Laden was the real thing: history itself.
Taylor is not among those who doubt that al-Qaeda really exists as a terrorist network or that bin Laden is its leader. Nor does the journalist John Miller. He interviewed bin Laden in May 1998, shortly after he had issued a fatwa against the West. Miller sceptically asked when the first attack was likely. “Oh, you will see the results of this fatwa in the next several weeks,” an aide assured him.
“This was a warning in lights but few saw it at the time, including myself,” Taylor admitted. Not that Taylor was transfixed by the President's love life - having reported on Northern Ireland for 30 years, he was much more interested in the climax to the Irish peace talks. Equally, whatever the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's mind was on, it was not al-Qaeda. When her ambassador in Nairobi, Prudence Bushnell, wrote warning that her embassy was an easy target and, indeed, they had had word of a plot, she got no reply.
Of all the missed opportunities, the most amazing was a plot hatched by the CIA to kidnap bin Laden before his first assault. Clinton rejected the option in case bin Laden died in the attempt and the US got accused of assassination. According to the CIA man who would have headed the operation, there would have been little chance of that. They were so keen not to harm bin Laden that the CIA built an ergonomically comfortable chair for the outsize terrorist, padded his shackles, and fretted over whether the duct tape that would have gagged him might harm his beard.
As to who remembers, the painful answer that Taylor did not flinch from giving was the survivors: the blinded Ellen Bomer, of the department of commerce at the embassy; Moses Kinya, of the agricultural office, who had half his head ripped away; Naomi Kerona, a Kenyan trade development officer, so mentally scarred that she says she now lives an existence that is neither dead nor alive; and Bushnell, who learnt to “howl” in the privacy of her shower each morning before she returned to work. “It was a message we chose not to listen to because we were tone-deaf to terrorism at the time,” she told Taylor with barely suppressed fury.
Now, does anyone remember 9/11?
If I have a caveat about this series - and perhaps it is no more than an idea for another - it is that Taylor does not spend much time looking for the political motives of terror, the roots of fanaticism. In Jesus Camp (Channel 4) the documentary-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachael Grady certainly found a breeding ground for extremism in an evangelical summer camp in North Dakota aimed at enlisting children into the army of Christ. Kids On Fire is run by Pastor Becky Fischer, a "pentecostal children's minister". The children aren't actually burnt, but they will be later, if they don't do what Becky - and Jesus - says. They learn that Darwin was wrong, that liberals are wrong, and that abortion is very, very wrong, even though most of these kids are far too young to understand what evolution, liberalism or abortion are. And Harry Potter is wrong, too. I had no idea. "Warlocks are enemies of GOD! And had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to DEATH," the Pastor screams at her young congregation.
Becky seemed to be in the grip of a minor category error here, but then the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction is obviously not an indispensable requirement in this field of work. She is a wild holy roller who is proud of her ability to induce low-level psychosis in children after spending only a few minutes in their presence. "Moments later, they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God," she said, her voice gilded with wonder. Here youngsters aged 7 to 11 are told that it is their destiny to campaign against abortion (handy-sized plastic foetuses are passed round), and that a graven image of George Bush deserves their blessing. Becky is trying to reclaim America from the devil, and she's using kids because they're so open, and so "usable" in Christianity.
The devil's not making it easy for her though - it's not just the heathen lies these kids are being taught in school, with all the usual temptations; he's actively interfering with Becky's work. Before one meeting, she has to pray for all her conference equipment. "We speak over the PowerPoint presentations, all of the video projectors, and we say, 'Devil, we know what you like to do in meetings like this!'" I hate that, don't you? When Satan gets inside the PowerPoint? So annoying.
More absurd scenes included ten-ton Becky deriding America's youth for its reluctance to fast, her asking God's blessing on a temperamental speaker system, and a project in which children were encouraged to smash pottery (it represented big government, I think). To be particularly relished, however, was the camp's guest star. Anti-abortionist Pastor Ted Haggard, a confidant of George Bush, turned mid-oration on the cameraman and snarled: “I think I know what you did last night. If you sin me $1,000 I won't tell your wife.” He had already opened his lecture with the zinger: "You know a third of your friends could be here tonight...but they never made it." His congregation of solemn campers looked mildly baffled at this brain-twisting notion, but he had nothing to worry about. By the end, they were reduced to the same state of babbling, weeping hysteria that appeared to be the goal of all the prayer meetings. The good pastor, a caption later informed us, had since resigned as head of the National Association of Evangelicals amid allegations of methamphetamine use and of paying a male prostitute for sex. Perhaps there is a God.
Some of the children were lovely, including a chatty little nine-year-old called Rachel who plans to open an evangelical nail bar because she thinks that people will be susceptible to the Holy Spirit while they're having their cuticles massaged. It seemed sad that she should be consigned to a lifetime of pious bigotry and Christian dancercise, but she may be saved yet. So it is funny, but also it's not funny. Because most these people really are tonto. And there are lots and lots of them. And every day there are a few more.
One in four British children is now Too Fat to Toddle (ITV1), apparently. So they waddle. Waddlers, they're known as. What's the problem? Well, there is a problem - they get bullied and called "fatty" at school. And then they die of heart failure and diabetes. Not much of a life. So Paul Gately, "Professor of Exercise and Obesity" at Leeds Metropolitan University, is sorting them out. He goes for quite a direct approach, along the lines of: your kid is fat because she eats too much, and she doesn't do any exercise (basically, you're a crap parent). And it seems to work, after the initial tears as the realisation of crap parenting sinks in. Maybe there is too much sensitivity when it comes to weight, and people should hear it straight. I was a bit confused about one little girl's BMI being "quite literally off the scale, at 27.2". Is 27.2 not on the scale? And if not, how do they know what it is? Anyway, that's a minor quibble, in what was actually a more sensible programme than its title suggests.
And I think there might just be a defence for the title of Too Fat to Toddle, which otherwise would surely go down as the most cretinously thoughtless bit of programme-naming for months, a gift to the playground bullies that the programme itself identified as one of the burdens of childhood obesity. The defence, which I warn you now is not terribly convincing, runs something like this: the biggest problem for those suffering from childhood obesity isn't their genetic inheritance or the quality of their diet or the fact that they get breathless just picking up a television remote control (though all these are a problem), it's the fat content of their parents' heads.
The film itself offered conclusive evidence of this fact when Gately visited several families to find out what might lie behind their children's excessive weight. In Scotland, he watched as Teighan, a six-stone five- year-old, and her mother, Sonya, did their weekly shop. Into the basket went a large tub of low-fat cheese spread. "Who eats that?" asked Paul. "Teighan," replied Sonya. "I would give her that if she felt that she was a wee bit peckish before dinner." And the cold meat? "The cold meat would be for a sandwich at bedtime." Or take Dawn, who thinks that her daughter, Grace, is genetically doomed to health-threatening podginess. "She can't do nothing about it," she said ruefully. "She's going to be exactly like me. I look at a cream cake and I've put a couple of pounds on before I've even eaten it."
So, given that self-delusion and ignorance are more obesogenic than deep-fried Mars bars, it's quite important to get some basic education in front of the parents of the one-in-four pre-school children who are now overweight. How best to do this, though? Are they likely to watch a programme called "Too Dim to Say No" or even one straightforwardly marketed as educational? No, the thinking seems to have been, but if we offer them the prospect of sniggering at someone else's children they might tune in for long enough to learn something.
The good news is that Too Fat to Toddle was immeasurably better than its name, and that, with one exception, the cluelessness of parents isn't irremediable. All of the parents here loved their children, felt considerable distress at the thought they might be harming them by over-indulgence and went away from a three-day training session with some basic common sense typed out and stuck into ring binders, so that they knew what to do when imagination failed. The exception, incidentally, was Rami, who flatly refused to believe that his children were overweight and funnelled chocolate and sweets into them behind his wife's back. When the families reconvened for a weigh-in, it was clear that all of the other fat-heads had lost much of their cerebral flab, but Rami was still wobbling around the place convinced that loving your children means abdicating your parental responsibilities rather than taking them on. "They're still kids," he said. "Maybe when they grow up, they will look after themselves, they will lose weight."
So apart from the main participants being under five, Too Fat to Toddle was a standard reality diet-show. The parents were generally mystified as to why their offspring were so overweight – until an expert appeared and pointed out that the children ate far too much and didn’t take any exercise. The parents then responded with astonished gratitude to this insight and vowed to mend their ways. The rest of programme was duly devoted to two main activities. It praised to the skies the wisdom of the expert and then showed us, sometimes rather touchingly, how well most people did. From five-year-old Edden, mind you, we got a different indication as to why the child-obesity statistics are so high. According to the Government guidelines, Edden’s Body Mass Index officially makes her obese. By all other criteria, including her appearance, she’s nothing of the sort.
As we know, Stephen Fry does like his bears – which is presumably why Natural World (BBC2) was able to bag him as the narrator for a documentary on the South American spectacled kind. From there, it wisely gave him plenty of purple prose to get his diction round. (“In the mist of the Andean cloud forest, there’s a shy, mysterious beast…”) Luckily too, Fry was happy to go along with the programme’s idea that because Paddington was from Peru, he must have been a spectacled bear as well – rather than say, a fictional character made up by a writer with no obvious commitment to zoological accuracy.
The spectacled bear, so called because of the markings on its face, is the only surviving bear in South America. Now there aren't many of these elusive creatures left. They mooch about in the forests, climbing trees in search of marmalade. And when they venture up on to the high Andean plains, they put on duffle coats and Wellington boots. Actually, I think the programme's whole Paddington connection is being slightly overdone. Edward Bond, his creator, originally had his bear coming from Africa, until his editor pointed out there weren't any bears in Africa, so it was changed to Peru. But I don't think Paddington was especially modelled on spectacled bears - he didn't have the facial marking for a start, and he certainly didn't rip cows to shreds. Still, it seems to be amusing Stephen Fry, who's doing the commentary, and who seems to think he is narrating Paddington. Either that or he thinks that everyone who watches Natural World is seven years old.
We were also promised “staggering revelations” which would overturn everything we thought we knew about spectacled bears. Even for those of us who thought we knew nothing, this sounded pretty tempting – and although the revelations were a long time coming, they did raise some interestingly awkward questions about the whole nature of conservation. The programme, in fact, unfolded like an old-fashioned detective story. The opening sections were devoted to slightly dull scene-setting – but also threw in a red herring: a careful study from 40 years ago which decided that, give or take the odd termite, spectacled bears are vegetarian. Only then did the bodies begin to pile up.
You see it seems they may not eat marmalade sandwiches at all, but dead cows instead. Here's one, turning over a rotting carcass in the river, and gorging on the dead animal's belly. Eurgh. And it gets worse - it seems the lovely spectacled bear, which was always thought to be a docile vegetarian (by naturalists as well as children), doesn't just eat the cows, it kills them too. It jumps on their backs, then clumsily rips the skin from the poor animals' shoulders before dragging them off for a slow and horrible death. And it's not just cows they eat, but tapirs, too - funny snuffly things. Murderers.
The claims by local peasant-farmers that spectacled bears kill their cattle have long been dismissed by the conservation establishment as pure anti-bear prejudice. Unfortunately, it now seems they might be true. Nobody has yet filmed a bear in the act of murder. They have, though, found dead cows with suspiciously ursine marks on them, dead cows being eaten by bears and bear-claw marks on the trees close to the corpses. (This last clue, incidentally, provoked Fry’s worst line of the night: “Is this where little Paddington sharpened his marmalade spoons into a butcher’s knife?”)
All of which sounded fairly conclusive to me. The trouble is that, if spectacled bears are exposed as killers, the farmers might understandably want to shoot them. In the circumstances, most of the conservationists we met snapped into politically-motivated denial, except for Isaac Goldstein. To his credit, Andean bear expert Goldstein took the bear-related equivalent of George Orwell’s line on the Communist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War: that the truth, however inconvenient, must be told. (As with Orwell too, this hasn’t made him very popular with his former comrades.) Less bravely, the programme couldn’t quite bring itself to agree – variously arguing that we still don’t know whether the bears kill anything, that they’re lovely anyway and that it’s the peasants’ fault for having cows in the first place.
Who can remember 7/8? Where were you that day in 1998 when al-Qaeda bombed the American Embassy in Nairobi and killed more than 200 people? And for a bonus point, who recalls that the same day another dozen were murdered in a parallel attack in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania? I suspect that on that remote August Friday ten years ago, you, like me, were instead salivating at the prospect of Bill Clinton, mired in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, becoming the first sitting president to testify to a grand jury. As Peter Taylor told us in the last, excellent episode of his Age of Terror (BBC Two), Lewinsky would prove no more than a salacious footnote to history. Osama bin Laden was the real thing: history itself.
Taylor is not among those who doubt that al-Qaeda really exists as a terrorist network or that bin Laden is its leader. Nor does the journalist John Miller. He interviewed bin Laden in May 1998, shortly after he had issued a fatwa against the West. Miller sceptically asked when the first attack was likely. “Oh, you will see the results of this fatwa in the next several weeks,” an aide assured him.
“This was a warning in lights but few saw it at the time, including myself,” Taylor admitted. Not that Taylor was transfixed by the President's love life - having reported on Northern Ireland for 30 years, he was much more interested in the climax to the Irish peace talks. Equally, whatever the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's mind was on, it was not al-Qaeda. When her ambassador in Nairobi, Prudence Bushnell, wrote warning that her embassy was an easy target and, indeed, they had had word of a plot, she got no reply.
Of all the missed opportunities, the most amazing was a plot hatched by the CIA to kidnap bin Laden before his first assault. Clinton rejected the option in case bin Laden died in the attempt and the US got accused of assassination. According to the CIA man who would have headed the operation, there would have been little chance of that. They were so keen not to harm bin Laden that the CIA built an ergonomically comfortable chair for the outsize terrorist, padded his shackles, and fretted over whether the duct tape that would have gagged him might harm his beard.
As to who remembers, the painful answer that Taylor did not flinch from giving was the survivors: the blinded Ellen Bomer, of the department of commerce at the embassy; Moses Kinya, of the agricultural office, who had half his head ripped away; Naomi Kerona, a Kenyan trade development officer, so mentally scarred that she says she now lives an existence that is neither dead nor alive; and Bushnell, who learnt to “howl” in the privacy of her shower each morning before she returned to work. “It was a message we chose not to listen to because we were tone-deaf to terrorism at the time,” she told Taylor with barely suppressed fury.
Now, does anyone remember 9/11?
If I have a caveat about this series - and perhaps it is no more than an idea for another - it is that Taylor does not spend much time looking for the political motives of terror, the roots of fanaticism. In Jesus Camp (Channel 4) the documentary-makers Heidi Ewing and Rachael Grady certainly found a breeding ground for extremism in an evangelical summer camp in North Dakota aimed at enlisting children into the army of Christ. Kids On Fire is run by Pastor Becky Fischer, a "pentecostal children's minister". The children aren't actually burnt, but they will be later, if they don't do what Becky - and Jesus - says. They learn that Darwin was wrong, that liberals are wrong, and that abortion is very, very wrong, even though most of these kids are far too young to understand what evolution, liberalism or abortion are. And Harry Potter is wrong, too. I had no idea. "Warlocks are enemies of GOD! And had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to DEATH," the Pastor screams at her young congregation.
Becky seemed to be in the grip of a minor category error here, but then the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction is obviously not an indispensable requirement in this field of work. She is a wild holy roller who is proud of her ability to induce low-level psychosis in children after spending only a few minutes in their presence. "Moments later, they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God," she said, her voice gilded with wonder. Here youngsters aged 7 to 11 are told that it is their destiny to campaign against abortion (handy-sized plastic foetuses are passed round), and that a graven image of George Bush deserves their blessing. Becky is trying to reclaim America from the devil, and she's using kids because they're so open, and so "usable" in Christianity.
The devil's not making it easy for her though - it's not just the heathen lies these kids are being taught in school, with all the usual temptations; he's actively interfering with Becky's work. Before one meeting, she has to pray for all her conference equipment. "We speak over the PowerPoint presentations, all of the video projectors, and we say, 'Devil, we know what you like to do in meetings like this!'" I hate that, don't you? When Satan gets inside the PowerPoint? So annoying.
More absurd scenes included ten-ton Becky deriding America's youth for its reluctance to fast, her asking God's blessing on a temperamental speaker system, and a project in which children were encouraged to smash pottery (it represented big government, I think). To be particularly relished, however, was the camp's guest star. Anti-abortionist Pastor Ted Haggard, a confidant of George Bush, turned mid-oration on the cameraman and snarled: “I think I know what you did last night. If you sin me $1,000 I won't tell your wife.” He had already opened his lecture with the zinger: "You know a third of your friends could be here tonight...but they never made it." His congregation of solemn campers looked mildly baffled at this brain-twisting notion, but he had nothing to worry about. By the end, they were reduced to the same state of babbling, weeping hysteria that appeared to be the goal of all the prayer meetings. The good pastor, a caption later informed us, had since resigned as head of the National Association of Evangelicals amid allegations of methamphetamine use and of paying a male prostitute for sex. Perhaps there is a God.
Some of the children were lovely, including a chatty little nine-year-old called Rachel who plans to open an evangelical nail bar because she thinks that people will be susceptible to the Holy Spirit while they're having their cuticles massaged. It seemed sad that she should be consigned to a lifetime of pious bigotry and Christian dancercise, but she may be saved yet. So it is funny, but also it's not funny. Because most these people really are tonto. And there are lots and lots of them. And every day there are a few more.
One in four British children is now Too Fat to Toddle (ITV1), apparently. So they waddle. Waddlers, they're known as. What's the problem? Well, there is a problem - they get bullied and called "fatty" at school. And then they die of heart failure and diabetes. Not much of a life. So Paul Gately, "Professor of Exercise and Obesity" at Leeds Metropolitan University, is sorting them out. He goes for quite a direct approach, along the lines of: your kid is fat because she eats too much, and she doesn't do any exercise (basically, you're a crap parent). And it seems to work, after the initial tears as the realisation of crap parenting sinks in. Maybe there is too much sensitivity when it comes to weight, and people should hear it straight. I was a bit confused about one little girl's BMI being "quite literally off the scale, at 27.2". Is 27.2 not on the scale? And if not, how do they know what it is? Anyway, that's a minor quibble, in what was actually a more sensible programme than its title suggests.
And I think there might just be a defence for the title of Too Fat to Toddle, which otherwise would surely go down as the most cretinously thoughtless bit of programme-naming for months, a gift to the playground bullies that the programme itself identified as one of the burdens of childhood obesity. The defence, which I warn you now is not terribly convincing, runs something like this: the biggest problem for those suffering from childhood obesity isn't their genetic inheritance or the quality of their diet or the fact that they get breathless just picking up a television remote control (though all these are a problem), it's the fat content of their parents' heads.
The film itself offered conclusive evidence of this fact when Gately visited several families to find out what might lie behind their children's excessive weight. In Scotland, he watched as Teighan, a six-stone five- year-old, and her mother, Sonya, did their weekly shop. Into the basket went a large tub of low-fat cheese spread. "Who eats that?" asked Paul. "Teighan," replied Sonya. "I would give her that if she felt that she was a wee bit peckish before dinner." And the cold meat? "The cold meat would be for a sandwich at bedtime." Or take Dawn, who thinks that her daughter, Grace, is genetically doomed to health-threatening podginess. "She can't do nothing about it," she said ruefully. "She's going to be exactly like me. I look at a cream cake and I've put a couple of pounds on before I've even eaten it."
So, given that self-delusion and ignorance are more obesogenic than deep-fried Mars bars, it's quite important to get some basic education in front of the parents of the one-in-four pre-school children who are now overweight. How best to do this, though? Are they likely to watch a programme called "Too Dim to Say No" or even one straightforwardly marketed as educational? No, the thinking seems to have been, but if we offer them the prospect of sniggering at someone else's children they might tune in for long enough to learn something.
The good news is that Too Fat to Toddle was immeasurably better than its name, and that, with one exception, the cluelessness of parents isn't irremediable. All of the parents here loved their children, felt considerable distress at the thought they might be harming them by over-indulgence and went away from a three-day training session with some basic common sense typed out and stuck into ring binders, so that they knew what to do when imagination failed. The exception, incidentally, was Rami, who flatly refused to believe that his children were overweight and funnelled chocolate and sweets into them behind his wife's back. When the families reconvened for a weigh-in, it was clear that all of the other fat-heads had lost much of their cerebral flab, but Rami was still wobbling around the place convinced that loving your children means abdicating your parental responsibilities rather than taking them on. "They're still kids," he said. "Maybe when they grow up, they will look after themselves, they will lose weight."
So apart from the main participants being under five, Too Fat to Toddle was a standard reality diet-show. The parents were generally mystified as to why their offspring were so overweight – until an expert appeared and pointed out that the children ate far too much and didn’t take any exercise. The parents then responded with astonished gratitude to this insight and vowed to mend their ways. The rest of programme was duly devoted to two main activities. It praised to the skies the wisdom of the expert and then showed us, sometimes rather touchingly, how well most people did. From five-year-old Edden, mind you, we got a different indication as to why the child-obesity statistics are so high. According to the Government guidelines, Edden’s Body Mass Index officially makes her obese. By all other criteria, including her appearance, she’s nothing of the sort.
As we know, Stephen Fry does like his bears – which is presumably why Natural World (BBC2) was able to bag him as the narrator for a documentary on the South American spectacled kind. From there, it wisely gave him plenty of purple prose to get his diction round. (“In the mist of the Andean cloud forest, there’s a shy, mysterious beast…”) Luckily too, Fry was happy to go along with the programme’s idea that because Paddington was from Peru, he must have been a spectacled bear as well – rather than say, a fictional character made up by a writer with no obvious commitment to zoological accuracy.
The spectacled bear, so called because of the markings on its face, is the only surviving bear in South America. Now there aren't many of these elusive creatures left. They mooch about in the forests, climbing trees in search of marmalade. And when they venture up on to the high Andean plains, they put on duffle coats and Wellington boots. Actually, I think the programme's whole Paddington connection is being slightly overdone. Edward Bond, his creator, originally had his bear coming from Africa, until his editor pointed out there weren't any bears in Africa, so it was changed to Peru. But I don't think Paddington was especially modelled on spectacled bears - he didn't have the facial marking for a start, and he certainly didn't rip cows to shreds. Still, it seems to be amusing Stephen Fry, who's doing the commentary, and who seems to think he is narrating Paddington. Either that or he thinks that everyone who watches Natural World is seven years old.
We were also promised “staggering revelations” which would overturn everything we thought we knew about spectacled bears. Even for those of us who thought we knew nothing, this sounded pretty tempting – and although the revelations were a long time coming, they did raise some interestingly awkward questions about the whole nature of conservation. The programme, in fact, unfolded like an old-fashioned detective story. The opening sections were devoted to slightly dull scene-setting – but also threw in a red herring: a careful study from 40 years ago which decided that, give or take the odd termite, spectacled bears are vegetarian. Only then did the bodies begin to pile up.
You see it seems they may not eat marmalade sandwiches at all, but dead cows instead. Here's one, turning over a rotting carcass in the river, and gorging on the dead animal's belly. Eurgh. And it gets worse - it seems the lovely spectacled bear, which was always thought to be a docile vegetarian (by naturalists as well as children), doesn't just eat the cows, it kills them too. It jumps on their backs, then clumsily rips the skin from the poor animals' shoulders before dragging them off for a slow and horrible death. And it's not just cows they eat, but tapirs, too - funny snuffly things. Murderers.
The claims by local peasant-farmers that spectacled bears kill their cattle have long been dismissed by the conservation establishment as pure anti-bear prejudice. Unfortunately, it now seems they might be true. Nobody has yet filmed a bear in the act of murder. They have, though, found dead cows with suspiciously ursine marks on them, dead cows being eaten by bears and bear-claw marks on the trees close to the corpses. (This last clue, incidentally, provoked Fry’s worst line of the night: “Is this where little Paddington sharpened his marmalade spoons into a butcher’s knife?”)
All of which sounded fairly conclusive to me. The trouble is that, if spectacled bears are exposed as killers, the farmers might understandably want to shoot them. In the circumstances, most of the conservationists we met snapped into politically-motivated denial, except for Isaac Goldstein. To his credit, Andean bear expert Goldstein took the bear-related equivalent of George Orwell’s line on the Communist atrocities in the Spanish Civil War: that the truth, however inconvenient, must be told. (As with Orwell too, this hasn’t made him very popular with his former comrades.) Less bravely, the programme couldn’t quite bring itself to agree – variously arguing that we still don’t know whether the bears kill anything, that they’re lovely anyway and that it’s the peasants’ fault for having cows in the first place.
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Teenage kicks: How Gossip Girl is changing TV
A teenage drama set in New York's exclusive Upper East Side has become the hottest thing in showbusiness – and is changing the way the world watches television. As Britain falls under its vacuous spell, Stephen Foley explains how a soap about over-privileged rich kids turned into the talk of the town...
They've been filming Gossip Girl across from the offices of The Independent's New York bureau, and we're excited. The Palace hotel on Manhattan's Madison Avenue is where Serena van der Woodsen, the show's Venus-in-skinny-jeans, is living with her mother while their uptown apartment is being given a high-class makeover. The hotel, of course, is owned by the Bass family, whose over-privileged teenage son Chuck has a whole suite to himself.
Now, I must confess that we've not caught a glimpse of either of them so far. But we're on the blogs waiting for the latest sightings, and might even be willing to travel – all in the interests of journalistic research, of course – to the Upper East Side, where most of the action is set. Alternatively, we'd pop into the Palace for a light lunch and slip upstairs for a bit of corridor stalking. Or at least, we might if Gossip Girl were real life, the Van der Woodsens and the Basses weren't made-up characters, and the Palace wasn't really owned by someone else entirely.
It's difficult to unpick reality from fiction when discussing Gossip Girl, a television show that has got New York's gossips in even more of a lather than Sex and the City did in its heyday. For those who haven't cottoned on yet, the show – like the wildly successful teen book series on which it is based – follows a gaggle of exclusive private-school kids from the ultra-monied Upper East Side as they fall in and out of love, as they plot, scheme and bitch, and as they work their way through the hottest of the city's bars, music venues and designer labels. It is New York as a sort of candy store, for them and for the viewer.
In the US, Gossip Girl is currently the hottest thing on television, watched by the sexiest demographic and feted by an industry which believes that – in the ways it has been shot, created and marketed – it showcases the future of television. In the UK, it is fast becoming a cult; indeed, ITV2 yesterday screened six straight hours of the show, allowing viewers to catch up with every episode screened so far.
For those who are now addicted to Gossip Girl, it's a time-consuming pursuit. Because it is not just a matter of tuning in for an hour a week; it's also a matter of diving head-first into a whole world, played out on the internet, where the characters and the people behind them are hard to separate, and where updates come not just in one-hour chunks every week, but in excited blog posts and "sightings" of the characters and the actors flashed to us 24/7.
In other words, the TV show presents a typical teenage world in this age of social networking, web-enabled camera phones and absolutely no privacy whatsoever. Josh Schwartz – the show's producer, whose previous hit The OC was just as full of unblemished youngsters and aspirational backdrops, but never quite made it out of cult status – seems to have a genuine mega-hit this time, and one that will see him hailed as the world's hottest and greatest TV boss; the man most in tune with the zeitgeist.
For now, though, Schwartz's hit is also scaring the hell out of television executives. To them, Gossip Girl is a glimpse of tomorrow's world. And – for the men in suits who have for years controlled the world's greatest mass-market communication tool – it looks a bit like anarchy. The show's narrative is told through the eyes of the eponymous, always anonymous "Gossip Girl" – a blogger in the midst of its well-heeled characters, who relays the what-they're-wearing, who-they've-been-kissing details about their lives with an eyebrow arched as high as ours.
In the show, Gossip Girl is silkily voiced by Kristen Bell, star of Veronica Mars, but she exists in various forms on the net, too, on promotional sites run by The CW, a young-and-hip new TV channel that first commissioned the series in the US, and by other major broadcasters who have since picked up the show. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, as blog begets blog begets blog, and numerous fan-sites spring up. There are places to dissect the latest bitchy outpourings from Blair Waldorf, Serena's friend and rival. There are places for discussing the real lives of the programme's stars – for OMG-ing about how Chace Crawford, who plays son-of-a-banker Nate Archibald, has dumped American Idol winner Carrie Underwood by text message and been seen about town with Rumer Willis, spawn of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.
There are places to discover that Lydia Hearst, a scion of a real-life rich family, is shooting a future episode of the show. Places to gossip about whether Blake Lively and Leighton Meester have fallen out over who is the bigger star, mirroring the rivalry between Serena and Blair over who is queen bee at school. There are places to score each new episode for how "real" or "fake" it is compared to the real lives of New York's most privileged teenagers. Even the stars have blogs. Michelle Trachtenberg, the former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star who turns up as an evil blast from Serena's past, was burbling on on the Cosmopolitan website recently about how fabulous it was to be picking out the Jimmy Choo booties, the Ya-Ya jacket and the Tom Ford shades to be worn by her character – and about her own line of jewellery, available nationwide soon, natch.
And there are places, too, to report where the actors are filming, dining and partying, since they are fast becoming some of the hottest young properties in the business. They are regular fixtures in the newspaper gossip columns and on celebrity websites such as Gawker, which plots sightings on a New York City map. A publicist for the show recently tried placing an item in the New York Post's must-read diary column, Page Six, about Leighton Meester and a "hot male companion" dining together at a fashionable restaurant, and Page Six snapped it up. Publicising a TV show with a little well-placed gossip about its stars is hardly new, of course. Page Six hacks are pretty long-suffering when it comes to tip-offs from desperate public relations execs. The Meester-Lively rumours echo the "Desperate Housewives stars hate each other" chatter that was heard when that soap first started sudding. The difference with Gossip Girl is that this time, with this audience, and in this era of constant communication, the gossip is feeding on itself.
Yet, for all the excitement, magazines are only belatedly starting to put the stars on their covers, eight months after the programme first aired in the US. It has been a slow-burning hit. Why so slow? The answer lies in another problem that sets fact against fiction. The viewing figures for this show are not real. For months, the real viewing figures have been understating the impact of Gossip Girl among teenagers. And the reason for that is that teenagers are not watching it on TV. They are watching it on websites.
The CW streamed the early episodes of the show on its website – before the writers' strike – for watching whenever people wanted. Gossip Girl addicts are also paying to download it to watch on their iPods and mobile phones at their convenience. Whisper this, but they are also downloading it using file-sharing software, neither paying for it nor having to sit through commercials, nor having to sign up to be spammed by advertisers. Take a quick look at a file-sharing website and it is quickly clear that Gossip Girl is among the most popular shows being swapped by users, often ranking No 1. On iTunes, Gossip Girl accounts for 15 of the top 100 TV show purchases in its latest US chart, and all six of the episodes available in the UK store are ranked in the top 30 there.
The CW was pretty confident that it had found a flagship show that would establish its new network, founded in 2006 and designed to appeal to advertisers, who positively salivate over reaching the teenage and twentysomething demographic. But The CW's viewing figures have actually been worse on average this year than in the channel's debut year. Gossip Girl managed a measly 3.5 million viewers when it premiered, and the following week there were a million fewer. It has been the same story in the UK, where Gossip Girl debuted on ITV2 on 28 March. That first show averaged fewer than 300,000 viewers, some 30 per cent below the level the channel might expect for its time slot. Because the channel hopes that it still has a slow-burn success on its hands, yesterday it ran one of those "new viewers start here" sessions that digital channels can use to reignite interest, sweeping away its bank holiday schedule to run the first six episodes back to back.
TV bosses hope against hope that making shows available on the web will build new income for them, whether it be from ads alongside video streaming or actual money in the bank from viewers who buy it on iTunes. The risk is that the internet will do to television what it has done to the music industry – that is, decimate it. For now, the industry is facing both ways – and is nervous as hell. The CW prompted an outcry from fans by saying it would stop streaming new episodes on its website, in an attempt to force them to make an appointment to view with the channel itself.
As for how ITV2 will fare, who knows? There are already plenty of British Gossip Girl addicts who can't wait for the show to be dribbled out weekly on TV and iTunes, and who watch the US episodes on the web, or file-share the shows as they are ripped off US television and swapped using BitTorrent. "The show is a new beast," Josh Schwartz said in a magazine interview. "It shows that the old system of measuring audiences isn't relevant when it comes to a show like this, which is for this kind of audience. It's affecting Gossip Girl radically right now, but in the next two years it's going to have a radical effect on all of television. It's incumbent on all the networks to figure out how to measure that. Otherwise, it's just going to look like they're losing viewers when, actually, they're not."
The change in viewing habits is starting to be mirrored across the industry, in the diverse range of programmes aimed at commercially attractive young audiences. "We can't stick our heads in the sand," said Bruce Rosenblum, the head of the Warner Brothers Television Group, last week. "My 20-year-old daughter and her friends are watching One Tree Hill and Pushing Daisies, but not on television. They're watching on laptops and cellphones. Here's the interesting part – to them, that is television."
Rosenblum was speaking at the launch of a whole new web venture, called the TheWB.com. The WB was the old channel that was subsumed into The CW two years ago, and the resurrected brand on the net will show a mix of old shows (including The OC and Friends) and new commissions – including, they hope, a music show being developed by Gossip Girl's Schwartz. The shows on TheWB.com will, of course, be available at any time of the day or night, whenever viewers choose to click on them. Yes, it's anarchy out there. Rosenblum called it an "evolution", but he might have put an "r" in front of that. TV executives have been resisting putting genuinely new content on the web, filling up new sites and services such as Hulu and Joost with classic programmes and bitty, low-budget niche nonsense. But the dawn of full-length TV on the web is cracking.
Bobby Tulsiani, who researches digital media for Jupiter Research in New York, says that broadcasters have to get out of old habits if they are to reach the Gossip Girl generation. "Experiences that limit content to particular time windows or number of episodes will continue to frustrate mainstream consumers," he says. A majority of people would still rather watch their favourite shows on a TV set, but it's a slim majority, and young people are already switching. About 15 per cent of all internet users are happy to watch full-length TV shows on the net, Jupiter says. A vastly bigger percentage than that already watch shorter clips, since YouTube – initially just a ghastly 24-hour version of You've Been Framed – grew up and went mainstream.
"While consumption of full-length TV shows has been limited in past year, the genre may finally be ready for 'internet prime-time'," Tulsiani said. And as Gossip Girl heralds – and as the excitable teenage fans outside The Independent's offices and at all the other filming locations will attest – soon, all the time will be prime time.
They've been filming Gossip Girl across from the offices of The Independent's New York bureau, and we're excited. The Palace hotel on Manhattan's Madison Avenue is where Serena van der Woodsen, the show's Venus-in-skinny-jeans, is living with her mother while their uptown apartment is being given a high-class makeover. The hotel, of course, is owned by the Bass family, whose over-privileged teenage son Chuck has a whole suite to himself.
Now, I must confess that we've not caught a glimpse of either of them so far. But we're on the blogs waiting for the latest sightings, and might even be willing to travel – all in the interests of journalistic research, of course – to the Upper East Side, where most of the action is set. Alternatively, we'd pop into the Palace for a light lunch and slip upstairs for a bit of corridor stalking. Or at least, we might if Gossip Girl were real life, the Van der Woodsens and the Basses weren't made-up characters, and the Palace wasn't really owned by someone else entirely.
It's difficult to unpick reality from fiction when discussing Gossip Girl, a television show that has got New York's gossips in even more of a lather than Sex and the City did in its heyday. For those who haven't cottoned on yet, the show – like the wildly successful teen book series on which it is based – follows a gaggle of exclusive private-school kids from the ultra-monied Upper East Side as they fall in and out of love, as they plot, scheme and bitch, and as they work their way through the hottest of the city's bars, music venues and designer labels. It is New York as a sort of candy store, for them and for the viewer.
In the US, Gossip Girl is currently the hottest thing on television, watched by the sexiest demographic and feted by an industry which believes that – in the ways it has been shot, created and marketed – it showcases the future of television. In the UK, it is fast becoming a cult; indeed, ITV2 yesterday screened six straight hours of the show, allowing viewers to catch up with every episode screened so far.
For those who are now addicted to Gossip Girl, it's a time-consuming pursuit. Because it is not just a matter of tuning in for an hour a week; it's also a matter of diving head-first into a whole world, played out on the internet, where the characters and the people behind them are hard to separate, and where updates come not just in one-hour chunks every week, but in excited blog posts and "sightings" of the characters and the actors flashed to us 24/7.
In other words, the TV show presents a typical teenage world in this age of social networking, web-enabled camera phones and absolutely no privacy whatsoever. Josh Schwartz – the show's producer, whose previous hit The OC was just as full of unblemished youngsters and aspirational backdrops, but never quite made it out of cult status – seems to have a genuine mega-hit this time, and one that will see him hailed as the world's hottest and greatest TV boss; the man most in tune with the zeitgeist.
For now, though, Schwartz's hit is also scaring the hell out of television executives. To them, Gossip Girl is a glimpse of tomorrow's world. And – for the men in suits who have for years controlled the world's greatest mass-market communication tool – it looks a bit like anarchy. The show's narrative is told through the eyes of the eponymous, always anonymous "Gossip Girl" – a blogger in the midst of its well-heeled characters, who relays the what-they're-wearing, who-they've-been-kissing details about their lives with an eyebrow arched as high as ours.
In the show, Gossip Girl is silkily voiced by Kristen Bell, star of Veronica Mars, but she exists in various forms on the net, too, on promotional sites run by The CW, a young-and-hip new TV channel that first commissioned the series in the US, and by other major broadcasters who have since picked up the show. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, as blog begets blog begets blog, and numerous fan-sites spring up. There are places to dissect the latest bitchy outpourings from Blair Waldorf, Serena's friend and rival. There are places for discussing the real lives of the programme's stars – for OMG-ing about how Chace Crawford, who plays son-of-a-banker Nate Archibald, has dumped American Idol winner Carrie Underwood by text message and been seen about town with Rumer Willis, spawn of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore.
There are places to discover that Lydia Hearst, a scion of a real-life rich family, is shooting a future episode of the show. Places to gossip about whether Blake Lively and Leighton Meester have fallen out over who is the bigger star, mirroring the rivalry between Serena and Blair over who is queen bee at school. There are places to score each new episode for how "real" or "fake" it is compared to the real lives of New York's most privileged teenagers. Even the stars have blogs. Michelle Trachtenberg, the former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star who turns up as an evil blast from Serena's past, was burbling on on the Cosmopolitan website recently about how fabulous it was to be picking out the Jimmy Choo booties, the Ya-Ya jacket and the Tom Ford shades to be worn by her character – and about her own line of jewellery, available nationwide soon, natch.
And there are places, too, to report where the actors are filming, dining and partying, since they are fast becoming some of the hottest young properties in the business. They are regular fixtures in the newspaper gossip columns and on celebrity websites such as Gawker, which plots sightings on a New York City map. A publicist for the show recently tried placing an item in the New York Post's must-read diary column, Page Six, about Leighton Meester and a "hot male companion" dining together at a fashionable restaurant, and Page Six snapped it up. Publicising a TV show with a little well-placed gossip about its stars is hardly new, of course. Page Six hacks are pretty long-suffering when it comes to tip-offs from desperate public relations execs. The Meester-Lively rumours echo the "Desperate Housewives stars hate each other" chatter that was heard when that soap first started sudding. The difference with Gossip Girl is that this time, with this audience, and in this era of constant communication, the gossip is feeding on itself.
Yet, for all the excitement, magazines are only belatedly starting to put the stars on their covers, eight months after the programme first aired in the US. It has been a slow-burning hit. Why so slow? The answer lies in another problem that sets fact against fiction. The viewing figures for this show are not real. For months, the real viewing figures have been understating the impact of Gossip Girl among teenagers. And the reason for that is that teenagers are not watching it on TV. They are watching it on websites.
The CW streamed the early episodes of the show on its website – before the writers' strike – for watching whenever people wanted. Gossip Girl addicts are also paying to download it to watch on their iPods and mobile phones at their convenience. Whisper this, but they are also downloading it using file-sharing software, neither paying for it nor having to sit through commercials, nor having to sign up to be spammed by advertisers. Take a quick look at a file-sharing website and it is quickly clear that Gossip Girl is among the most popular shows being swapped by users, often ranking No 1. On iTunes, Gossip Girl accounts for 15 of the top 100 TV show purchases in its latest US chart, and all six of the episodes available in the UK store are ranked in the top 30 there.
The CW was pretty confident that it had found a flagship show that would establish its new network, founded in 2006 and designed to appeal to advertisers, who positively salivate over reaching the teenage and twentysomething demographic. But The CW's viewing figures have actually been worse on average this year than in the channel's debut year. Gossip Girl managed a measly 3.5 million viewers when it premiered, and the following week there were a million fewer. It has been the same story in the UK, where Gossip Girl debuted on ITV2 on 28 March. That first show averaged fewer than 300,000 viewers, some 30 per cent below the level the channel might expect for its time slot. Because the channel hopes that it still has a slow-burn success on its hands, yesterday it ran one of those "new viewers start here" sessions that digital channels can use to reignite interest, sweeping away its bank holiday schedule to run the first six episodes back to back.
TV bosses hope against hope that making shows available on the web will build new income for them, whether it be from ads alongside video streaming or actual money in the bank from viewers who buy it on iTunes. The risk is that the internet will do to television what it has done to the music industry – that is, decimate it. For now, the industry is facing both ways – and is nervous as hell. The CW prompted an outcry from fans by saying it would stop streaming new episodes on its website, in an attempt to force them to make an appointment to view with the channel itself.
As for how ITV2 will fare, who knows? There are already plenty of British Gossip Girl addicts who can't wait for the show to be dribbled out weekly on TV and iTunes, and who watch the US episodes on the web, or file-share the shows as they are ripped off US television and swapped using BitTorrent. "The show is a new beast," Josh Schwartz said in a magazine interview. "It shows that the old system of measuring audiences isn't relevant when it comes to a show like this, which is for this kind of audience. It's affecting Gossip Girl radically right now, but in the next two years it's going to have a radical effect on all of television. It's incumbent on all the networks to figure out how to measure that. Otherwise, it's just going to look like they're losing viewers when, actually, they're not."
The change in viewing habits is starting to be mirrored across the industry, in the diverse range of programmes aimed at commercially attractive young audiences. "We can't stick our heads in the sand," said Bruce Rosenblum, the head of the Warner Brothers Television Group, last week. "My 20-year-old daughter and her friends are watching One Tree Hill and Pushing Daisies, but not on television. They're watching on laptops and cellphones. Here's the interesting part – to them, that is television."
Rosenblum was speaking at the launch of a whole new web venture, called the TheWB.com. The WB was the old channel that was subsumed into The CW two years ago, and the resurrected brand on the net will show a mix of old shows (including The OC and Friends) and new commissions – including, they hope, a music show being developed by Gossip Girl's Schwartz. The shows on TheWB.com will, of course, be available at any time of the day or night, whenever viewers choose to click on them. Yes, it's anarchy out there. Rosenblum called it an "evolution", but he might have put an "r" in front of that. TV executives have been resisting putting genuinely new content on the web, filling up new sites and services such as Hulu and Joost with classic programmes and bitty, low-budget niche nonsense. But the dawn of full-length TV on the web is cracking.
Bobby Tulsiani, who researches digital media for Jupiter Research in New York, says that broadcasters have to get out of old habits if they are to reach the Gossip Girl generation. "Experiences that limit content to particular time windows or number of episodes will continue to frustrate mainstream consumers," he says. A majority of people would still rather watch their favourite shows on a TV set, but it's a slim majority, and young people are already switching. About 15 per cent of all internet users are happy to watch full-length TV shows on the net, Jupiter says. A vastly bigger percentage than that already watch shorter clips, since YouTube – initially just a ghastly 24-hour version of You've Been Framed – grew up and went mainstream.
"While consumption of full-length TV shows has been limited in past year, the genre may finally be ready for 'internet prime-time'," Tulsiani said. And as Gossip Girl heralds – and as the excitable teenage fans outside The Independent's offices and at all the other filming locations will attest – soon, all the time will be prime time.
US TV: the hits and misses of a turbulent season
Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...
We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.
But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.
Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.
It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.
Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.
The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.
Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...
We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.
But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.
Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.
It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.
Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.
The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.
Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...
'Too loud' TV ads to be banned
The days of having to dive for the remote control to turn down noisy TV commercials look to be numbered, with new rules set to be introduced banning excessively loud ads. Guidelines on sound levels will be introduced into the TV advertising code on July 7, stating that "advertisements must not be excessively noisy or strident".
The move to tighten rules governing the sounds levels in TV ads comes after the Advertising Standards Authority received more than 100 complaints in 2007 from viewers complaining that some commercials were too loud.
"Often the problem arises because the audio files used in the ads have been compressed, making quieter sounds more pronounced or 'punchy'," said the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for writing the TV ad code. "The result is that ads can sound subjectively louder than the programmes around which they appear."
To guard against this the new BCAP guidelines will state, specifically, that the "maximum subjective loudness of advertisements must be consistent and in line with the maximum loudness of programmes and junction material".
The body has held a full public consultation on the issue with the aim for the new rules to "provide more certainty for broadcasters" and minimise the annoyance "that can be caused to viewers".
"BCAP were acutely aware of the frustration that excessively loud or seemingly noisy ads were causing consumers," said a spokesman for the Committee for Advertising Practice. "The consultation has taken account of their concerns and will ensure a level playing field across all ads in the same commercial break. This should help prevent consumers having to turn down the volume during ad breaks."
The move to tighten rules governing the sounds levels in TV ads comes after the Advertising Standards Authority received more than 100 complaints in 2007 from viewers complaining that some commercials were too loud.
"Often the problem arises because the audio files used in the ads have been compressed, making quieter sounds more pronounced or 'punchy'," said the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice, the body responsible for writing the TV ad code. "The result is that ads can sound subjectively louder than the programmes around which they appear."
To guard against this the new BCAP guidelines will state, specifically, that the "maximum subjective loudness of advertisements must be consistent and in line with the maximum loudness of programmes and junction material".
The body has held a full public consultation on the issue with the aim for the new rules to "provide more certainty for broadcasters" and minimise the annoyance "that can be caused to viewers".
"BCAP were acutely aware of the frustration that excessively loud or seemingly noisy ads were causing consumers," said a spokesman for the Committee for Advertising Practice. "The consultation has taken account of their concerns and will ensure a level playing field across all ads in the same commercial break. This should help prevent consumers having to turn down the volume during ad breaks."
BSkyB eyes £600m offer for Virgin's cable channels
BSkyB is considering a £600m bid for Virgin Media's cable channels, which include Bravo, Living and Challenge, according to City sources. The satellite operator would also buy the Virgin channels that broadcast under the UKTV banner, including Gold, History and Drama. Investment bank Goldman Sachs is advising Virgin on a sale and a decision is said to be not far off.
It is understood that BSkyB, controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, wants all the channels, which means Virgin Media would have to buy BBC's 50 per cent share of the UKTV content business. Its programmes include Spooks, Planet Earth and Casualty
Whether the BBC can be persuaded to part with its stake remains to be seen. Last month, there were reports that the corporation was looking to buy Virgin Media's share of UKTV, but was struggling to find private equity support.
Virgin Media, in which Richard Branson holds a £240m stake, said in February that year-on-year losses increased from £88m to £163m, as a result of higher interest charges. Virgin Media's new chief executive, Neil Berkett, who took over from Steve Burch, said the company was concentrating on improving its broadband offering and reducing 'churn' - the number of customers leaving.
Early in 2007, the cable company lost many customers after Sky blocked Virgin Media from accessing its channels in a row over charges. The Branson-sponsored company has received takeover approaches from a number of private equity firms, including Providence and KKR.
It is understood that BSkyB, controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, wants all the channels, which means Virgin Media would have to buy BBC's 50 per cent share of the UKTV content business. Its programmes include Spooks, Planet Earth and Casualty
Whether the BBC can be persuaded to part with its stake remains to be seen. Last month, there were reports that the corporation was looking to buy Virgin Media's share of UKTV, but was struggling to find private equity support.
Virgin Media, in which Richard Branson holds a £240m stake, said in February that year-on-year losses increased from £88m to £163m, as a result of higher interest charges. Virgin Media's new chief executive, Neil Berkett, who took over from Steve Burch, said the company was concentrating on improving its broadband offering and reducing 'churn' - the number of customers leaving.
Early in 2007, the cable company lost many customers after Sky blocked Virgin Media from accessing its channels in a row over charges. The Branson-sponsored company has received takeover approaches from a number of private equity firms, including Providence and KKR.
Euro 2008 to rule TV slots - despite England's absence
Football widows and widowers hoping for unrestricted access to the TV this summer due to the failure of the home nations to qualify for Euro 2008 are in for a shock. ITV and the BBC are bracing themselves for complaints next month when live matches will dominate prime time despite the absence of any domestic interest.
Thanks to the legislation under which major international football tournaments are reserved for broadcast on free-to-air television, they must all be shown live and in full on the main channels of the rights holders. Only when they are scheduled to show two matches at the same time can they move one to a digital channel.
Between June 7, when the tournament kicks off with joint hosts Switzerland playing Czech Republic, and the final on June 29, the two channels will show 27 live games on BBC1 or ITV1, plus a further four on the digital channels BBC3 and ITV4. Of those, 23 will kick off at 7.45pm in the middle of prime time, necessitating the rescheduling of soaps and other shows. On June 7, for example, ITV's prime-time Saturday night schedule will be dominated by Portugal v Turkey. And on Thursday June 12, EastEnders will make way for Austria v Poland on BBC1.
Scheduling requirements have already caused problems for ITV, which provoked complaints last month when it dropped the second episode of the US import Pushing Daisies to shoehorn nine episodes into eight weeks before the tournament started. The decision annoyed many viewers who had been looking forward to the heavily trailed show, which stars the British actor Anna Friel.
Pushing Daisies follows Ned, a man with the ability to bring the dead back to life. Friel plays his childhood neighbour and the object of his first crush, who is resurrected by Ned. An ITV spokesman said the station bought dramas in six or eight parts, adding: "Unfortunately, given the high-profile nature of the 9pm Saturday slot, we only have eight windows at the moment."
Last time England failed to qualify for a major tournament, the 1994 World Cup in the US, most games kicked off outside prime time. But both broadcasters are confident that viewers will tune in and that excitement will build, citing the familiarity of British audiences with many of Europe's top players thanks to expanded coverage of the Champions League and the fact that many of the biggest stars ply their trade in the Premier League.
They point to a combined audience of 20.5 million for the last World Cup final between Italy and France and suggest that the lack of home interest will allow for a different take on the tournament. "There won't be the swell of optimism that there has been at previous tournaments, which is a shame. It's a big blow that England aren't there. But there is enough quality there for a very exciting football tournament," said BBC pundit Alan Shearer. "It just goes to show how lucky we are to have the likes of Torres, Fàbregas and Ronaldo in the Premier League and be able to watch them every week."
But ITV, already counting the cost of £10m to £12m in lost advertising revenue due to England's failure to qualify, could lose out further if peak-time audiences are hit and has scaled back its plans. It will have commentators and reporters on the ground in Austria and Switzerland but anchors Steve Rider, Matt Smith and Craig Doyle will host the games from a studio in the UK. The BBC, meanwhile, will send a full team, including Steve McClaren, the former England manager who lost his job after failing to qualify for the tournament, who has been signed up as a co-commentator by Radio 5 Live.
Uefa has been looking into the possibility of challenging the "crown jewels" list that reserves all matches in European championships for free-to-air broadcasters. While it accepts that games involving the home nations and the latter stages should be reserved for terrestrial free-to-air television, it would like to open up the earlier rounds to more bidders.
Thanks to the legislation under which major international football tournaments are reserved for broadcast on free-to-air television, they must all be shown live and in full on the main channels of the rights holders. Only when they are scheduled to show two matches at the same time can they move one to a digital channel.
Between June 7, when the tournament kicks off with joint hosts Switzerland playing Czech Republic, and the final on June 29, the two channels will show 27 live games on BBC1 or ITV1, plus a further four on the digital channels BBC3 and ITV4. Of those, 23 will kick off at 7.45pm in the middle of prime time, necessitating the rescheduling of soaps and other shows. On June 7, for example, ITV's prime-time Saturday night schedule will be dominated by Portugal v Turkey. And on Thursday June 12, EastEnders will make way for Austria v Poland on BBC1.
Scheduling requirements have already caused problems for ITV, which provoked complaints last month when it dropped the second episode of the US import Pushing Daisies to shoehorn nine episodes into eight weeks before the tournament started. The decision annoyed many viewers who had been looking forward to the heavily trailed show, which stars the British actor Anna Friel.
Pushing Daisies follows Ned, a man with the ability to bring the dead back to life. Friel plays his childhood neighbour and the object of his first crush, who is resurrected by Ned. An ITV spokesman said the station bought dramas in six or eight parts, adding: "Unfortunately, given the high-profile nature of the 9pm Saturday slot, we only have eight windows at the moment."
Last time England failed to qualify for a major tournament, the 1994 World Cup in the US, most games kicked off outside prime time. But both broadcasters are confident that viewers will tune in and that excitement will build, citing the familiarity of British audiences with many of Europe's top players thanks to expanded coverage of the Champions League and the fact that many of the biggest stars ply their trade in the Premier League.
They point to a combined audience of 20.5 million for the last World Cup final between Italy and France and suggest that the lack of home interest will allow for a different take on the tournament. "There won't be the swell of optimism that there has been at previous tournaments, which is a shame. It's a big blow that England aren't there. But there is enough quality there for a very exciting football tournament," said BBC pundit Alan Shearer. "It just goes to show how lucky we are to have the likes of Torres, Fàbregas and Ronaldo in the Premier League and be able to watch them every week."
But ITV, already counting the cost of £10m to £12m in lost advertising revenue due to England's failure to qualify, could lose out further if peak-time audiences are hit and has scaled back its plans. It will have commentators and reporters on the ground in Austria and Switzerland but anchors Steve Rider, Matt Smith and Craig Doyle will host the games from a studio in the UK. The BBC, meanwhile, will send a full team, including Steve McClaren, the former England manager who lost his job after failing to qualify for the tournament, who has been signed up as a co-commentator by Radio 5 Live.
Uefa has been looking into the possibility of challenging the "crown jewels" list that reserves all matches in European championships for free-to-air broadcasters. While it accepts that games involving the home nations and the latter stages should be reserved for terrestrial free-to-air television, it would like to open up the earlier rounds to more bidders.
Australians do give a XXXX over Ramsay's kitchen expletives
As the country that taught the cricketing world how to sledge, Australia has not been known for its sensitivity to bad language. Swearing, at least among friends or colleagues, is part of the everyday vernacular. But the country seems to be losing its sense of humour over the expletive-filled outbursts of Gordon Ramsay on his reality television shows which are being shown on prime time TV. Yesterday Australia's Catholic church became the latest to complain, saying that the chef's shows should be taken off air or moved to a later time slot.
Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen are broadcast three nights a week in Australia at 8.30pm and 9.30pm, when many children have yet to go to bed. One episode recently featured the Michelin-starred chef using the F word more than 80 times and the C word twice. The bad language has already prompted calls for the country's broadcasting code of conduct to be reviewed. "There can be no excuse for vilification of this sort. We conclude that this episode should never have been aired on Australian television," the church in the southern city of Adelaide said in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry which is investigating standards in television.
Schools and parents groups have also lodged complaints, with the principal of one Melbourne school advising parents to ban their young children from watching them. Lesley McCarthy of Flemington Primary School said bad language in the playground had increased since the British chef's shows have been showing on TV. "It's a really big concern," she said. "If the children see one of their heroes in the media swearing, then they think it's OK. It's the same with our football stars."
Australia's Channel Nine is broadcasting the programmes and says it has no plans to move them to a later time slot. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares has become the station's number one hit. A bi-partisan parliamentary inquiry is hearing evidence on the frequency and use of swearing on Australian television and whether tighter regulation is needed. Currently, swearing is permitted on Australian TV if it is deemed important to a storyline.
Ramsay, who is due to open a restaurant in Melbourne at the end of the year, has already declared that he is scaling back his use of swearing in the kitchen and encouraging his staff to do so too. He also has his supporters in Australia. The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties said any attempts to interfere with the programmes would be a restriction of free speech. "Not everyone is offended by coarse language," the council said in its submission to the inquiry.
Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen are broadcast three nights a week in Australia at 8.30pm and 9.30pm, when many children have yet to go to bed. One episode recently featured the Michelin-starred chef using the F word more than 80 times and the C word twice. The bad language has already prompted calls for the country's broadcasting code of conduct to be reviewed. "There can be no excuse for vilification of this sort. We conclude that this episode should never have been aired on Australian television," the church in the southern city of Adelaide said in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry which is investigating standards in television.
Schools and parents groups have also lodged complaints, with the principal of one Melbourne school advising parents to ban their young children from watching them. Lesley McCarthy of Flemington Primary School said bad language in the playground had increased since the British chef's shows have been showing on TV. "It's a really big concern," she said. "If the children see one of their heroes in the media swearing, then they think it's OK. It's the same with our football stars."
Australia's Channel Nine is broadcasting the programmes and says it has no plans to move them to a later time slot. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares has become the station's number one hit. A bi-partisan parliamentary inquiry is hearing evidence on the frequency and use of swearing on Australian television and whether tighter regulation is needed. Currently, swearing is permitted on Australian TV if it is deemed important to a storyline.
Ramsay, who is due to open a restaurant in Melbourne at the end of the year, has already declared that he is scaling back his use of swearing in the kitchen and encouraging his staff to do so too. He also has his supporters in Australia. The New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties said any attempts to interfere with the programmes would be a restriction of free speech. "Not everyone is offended by coarse language," the council said in its submission to the inquiry.
Jones to appear in BBC Dickens drama
Ruth Jones, star and co-creator of hit BBC3 comedy Gavin & Stacey, is to turn her hand to drama by appearing in the BBC's adaptation of Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. The period drama, which tells the story of the Dorrit family and the rich array of characters they meet on their way from rags to riches and back again, is being written by veteran screenwriter Andrew Davies, whose most recent project was Sense and Sensibility.
Jones, who made her name in the BBC3 comedies Little Britain and Nighty Night, will play "colourful character" Flora Casby, the childhood sweetheart of Arthur Clennam, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Little Dorrit, which is being billed as one of BBC1's highlights for the autumn, will air in the same soap opera format as Bleak House, the BBC's last major Dickens adaptation in 2005. An hour-long launch episode will be followed by 14 half-hour instalments.
Jones, who wrote Gavin and Stacey alongside James Corden, is also appearing in BBC1's forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is also writing a Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.
Mackenzie Crook, who shot the fame in The Office and stars in current movie release Three and Out, has also signed up to Little Dorrit. He plays office raconteur Harris, while Being Human's Claire Foy will take the lead as Amy Dorrit.
Tom Courtenay will play her father, while James Fleet, whose credits include The Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral, will star as Amy's uncle, Frederick Dorrit. Amanda Redman has also been signed up, playing Mrs Merdle, while Lord of the Rings' Andy Serkis will appear as French villain Rigaud. Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman will also appear as Tattycoram.
Filming on the drama begins this week and will continue throughout the summer in locations in and around London, Buckinghamshire, Kent and Herefordshire. Made in-house by the BBC, Little Dorrit will be executive produced by Sense and Sensibility's Anne Pivcevic with Lisa Osborne producing.
Kate Harwood, head of BBC series and serials, said: "We are very proud to be presenting this wonderful line up of cast who will be bringing to life one of Dickens' broadest range of characters in a gripping, witty and touching script by the inimitable Andrew Davies. Part murder mystery, part love story, and wholly entertaining, Little Dorrit promises to be an autumn treat."
Jones, who made her name in the BBC3 comedies Little Britain and Nighty Night, will play "colourful character" Flora Casby, the childhood sweetheart of Arthur Clennam, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Little Dorrit, which is being billed as one of BBC1's highlights for the autumn, will air in the same soap opera format as Bleak House, the BBC's last major Dickens adaptation in 2005. An hour-long launch episode will be followed by 14 half-hour instalments.
Jones, who wrote Gavin and Stacey alongside James Corden, is also appearing in BBC1's forthcoming adaptation of Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is also writing a Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.
Mackenzie Crook, who shot the fame in The Office and stars in current movie release Three and Out, has also signed up to Little Dorrit. He plays office raconteur Harris, while Being Human's Claire Foy will take the lead as Amy Dorrit.
Tom Courtenay will play her father, while James Fleet, whose credits include The Vicar of Dibley and Four Weddings and a Funeral, will star as Amy's uncle, Frederick Dorrit. Amanda Redman has also been signed up, playing Mrs Merdle, while Lord of the Rings' Andy Serkis will appear as French villain Rigaud. Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman will also appear as Tattycoram.
Filming on the drama begins this week and will continue throughout the summer in locations in and around London, Buckinghamshire, Kent and Herefordshire. Made in-house by the BBC, Little Dorrit will be executive produced by Sense and Sensibility's Anne Pivcevic with Lisa Osborne producing.
Kate Harwood, head of BBC series and serials, said: "We are very proud to be presenting this wonderful line up of cast who will be bringing to life one of Dickens' broadest range of characters in a gripping, witty and touching script by the inimitable Andrew Davies. Part murder mystery, part love story, and wholly entertaining, Little Dorrit promises to be an autumn treat."
Fiona Bruce is the face of BBC HD as Freesat is launched
A free-to-view satellite television and radio service from the BBC and ITV is being launched across the UK today. Freesat will be available to 98 per cent of UK homes, including those that cannot receive Freeview, which is broadcast via terrestrial transmitters and aerial.The new service will initially feature more than 80 television and radio channels, expected to rise to 200 by the end of the year. It will also broadcast the Olympics, Wimbledon and the Euro 2008 football championships in high definition (HD) this summer. Viewers will be able to watch HD programming without paying a subscription. Customers will have to make a one-off payment of £150 for a digital box, satellite dish and installation and viewers will need an HD-ready television to view high-definition programmes.
It is not the first subscription-free satellite system on the market, Sky has been offering 200 channels, including BBC and Luxe HD, via its own Freesat service since October 2004. The satellite broadcaster already operates 18 HD channels and is planning to increase this to around 30 next year. Ofcom is expected to restrict the number of HD channels carried by Freeview to four, which makes Freesat an attractive option for ITV and the BBC to increase their HD offering.
The BBC's media correspondent, Torin Douglas, said the BBC and ITV were hoping their new service would also increase interest in HD television. Millions of people have already got HD-ready television sets. Emma Scott, the managing director of Freesat, stated: "Today is a landmark day for digital TV in the UK - the launch of a new digital satellite service which brings free HD programmes to everyone. With more than 9.6 million HD-ready televisions already sold in the UK, but only a tiny fraction of those who own them currently able to receive HD programmes, there's a big opportunity for Freesat to lead the way in introducing the UK to high definition viewing." In a separate interview, Scott told BBC Radio 5 Live: "It's only homes that really don't have a clear line of sight to the satellite that can't get it, or certain listed buildings. But unlike Freeview, you can receive Freesat across the country, which means that in those areas that at the moment can't get access to free digital television this is the first time that you can get free digital TV."
Freesat is therefore targeting two main demographics: households that have already snapped up the HD-ready TV sets; and the 27% of UK households that are currently unable to get digital terrestrial TV service Freeview. Even after digital switchover is complete it is estimated that around 13% of households will only be able to access around half of the channels on Freeview. Freesat has a total annual budget of £6m, funded by ITV and the BBC, of which an undisclosed amount will be spent on marketing the service to consumers. The BBC Trust has said Freesat is guaranteed to remain subscription-free. Set-top boxes will be available from high street retailers, who will also arrange installation.
Further details of the television and radio service have also been unveiled today by Michael Grade, the chairman of ITV, and Mark Thompson, the Director-General of the BBC. The BBC HD channel will be available immediately, with ITV HD launching exclusively on Freesat at a later date. Mark Thompson stated: "With the launch of Freesat, all the BBC's digital channels, including BBC HD, will now be available to all licence fee payers wherever they live and however they choose to access them. This means they will have yet another way to watch a fantastic range of BBC output, from landmark dramas and world class documentaries to national events and live sport." Michael Grade added: "We will launch our HD service with an unrivalled lineup of premium football including the FA Cup, England internationals and UEFA Champions League from next season. Now everyone in the UK can experience the benefits of digital television: more choice of channels, interactivity and the extraordinary picture quality of HD."
Mark Thompson outlined further ambitious plans for Freesat, including offering access to on-demand programming via broadband TV services such as iPlayer and Kangaroo. Speaking at the press launch of Freesat, Thompson said the service was aiming to swiftly offer viewers broadband internet access through an in-built ethernet connection in set-top boxes. "The long-term goal of Freesat is to connect to broadband and the internet [to make] services such as the iPlayer and Kangaroo accessible through boxes like this," he added.
Thompson said that offering broadband access via Freesat boxes, something that BSkyB is also aiming for with its Sky+ personal video recorder boxes, marked "something new in satellite broadcasting in this country" that would be available to all households. A senior executive at Freesat confirmed that the plan was to offer broadband access via an ethernet connection within "months".
Freesat has been pitched as a potential rival in some respects to Sky, which offers subscription and free satellite services, and its long-term plans and customer acquisition strategy. Michael Grade said that as its high definition channel would be available via Freesat the broadcaster would not necessarily now need to do a deal to offer the network via Sky's digital satellite service. "ITV HD won't be available on Sky at the moment," Grade added. "We are a commercial organisation and won't give it to Sky for nothing."
However, Thompson said that Freesat was "not intended in any way to compete with BSkyB's central proposition". He stated: "Freesat represents a new choice out there in the market and more choice. Sky is pretty expensive and it is possible for many to switch to free satellite at a lower price … [Sky's] free proposition has not been front of mind to date." Emma Scott confirmed that while the service currently had no capability to offer subscription services it would be "considered in the future". "It is fundamentally a free platform," she added.
Channel Five is expected to join Freesat in the near future, once programming rights issues had been resolved. For now the service will features BBC, ITV and Channel 4 networks. Grade said that Freesat, which was originally mooted to launch in 2006, "represents the final piece in the UK digital TV jigsaw".
"Freesat is absolutely complementary to the UK's most popular [digital] platform Freeview," Grade said. "Every house can have access to free-to-air digital TV and we are confident it will be a huge success." Thompson said that Freesat would "make a real difference" in achieving the BBC's aim of transmitting its high quality programming to licence fee payers across the UK on its new HD channel. "We are moving as fast as we can to get our crown jewels in HD all onto Freesat," he said.
The Sky chief operating officer, Mike Darcey, criticised ITV's decision not to make ITV HD available on Sky. He said: "ITV want to have their cake and eat it. On the one hand, they are claiming to champion HD for all, while on the other, they are deliberately withholding free-to-air content from almost half a million Sky HD homes. This is neither in viewers' interests nor in keeping with ITV's 'HD for all' posturing. All in all, this is curious behaviour for a public service broadcaster."
The BBC is marking the launch of its new high definition TV channel with an ad promoting the improved picture quality on offer featuring newsreader Fiona Bruce as an action hero. Bruce is seen diving athletically to save a falling vase that has just been valued at £2m by an Antiques Roadshow expert.
The BBC HD ad, developed by ad agency Fallon and produced by Red Bee Media, opens with what appears to be a typical episode of Antiques Roadshow with a man and woman who are told their vase is worth £2m. It is then accidentally catapulted into the air and the scene spirals into a chain reaction of events that sees antiques destroyed and a car flying through a brick wall and bursting into flames. As the car explodes Bruce is seen diving clear and then spectacularly catching the vase and saving the day.
The campaign aims to promote the improved picture quality of TV programmes delivered via HD using the strapline "TV goes cinematic". It includes 40-, 65- and 95-second versions of the promotional trail as well as a radio ad.
Viewers of the BBC HD channel and cinema-goers across the UK will be the only people to see the 95-second version of the promo. The BBC HD channel broadcasts for four hours a day, from 8pm until midnight on weekdays and six hours a night on weekends, with some flexibility to extend hours "during key live events". The BBC Trust gave approval for the HD channel last year.
As the number of BBC programmes shot in HD increases the channel will build to a nine-hour schedule by around the end of 2009. Aside from programming including coverage of the Olympics, the Euro 2008 football championship and Wimbledon, other output includes drama, factual and entertainment programmes such as Glastonbury, the Proms, Strictly Come Dancing, Torchwood, Heroes and Gavin & Stacey.
The BBC HD channel is available on Sky, Virgin Media and via newly launched Freesat – the ITV and BBC joint venture free-to-air service, unveiled today.
Trilby- a mundane life
Last night's TV reviewed: Legends: Christina – a Medieval Life; Val Doonican Rocks; Am I Normal?; Generation Sex; Coronation Street; Shrink Rap; Placebo
If you think we’re living in bureaucratic times now, then Christina – a Medieval Life (BBC4) brought reassuring news that it could be worse. You could be living in the early 14th century. In those days, everything you owned was carefully entered in official records, and strict laws applied to the most innocuous-seeming of activities. Anybody trying to bypass Mick, the local miller, for example, by grinding their own corn would have their grinding stones confiscated –sometimes to make a new patio for the local abbot. And naturally their crime would be recorded too.
Seven hundred years later, of course, this mania for bureaucracy has turned out to be invaluable. As a result of it, historian Michael Wood could here give us an extraordinarily vivid account of how even some of the poorest people lived. So we're in the early 14th century, in the village of Codicote in Hertfordshire, trying to piece together the life of the unfortunately named peasant Christina Cok, born around 1285. Wood, in special manuscript-handling gloves, pores over the Codicote court book, searching for any reference to her. A court book may be a useful tool to the historian, but it's actually a fantastically boring thing - simply a record of who paid how much tax for what. But it's from 700 years ago, so that makes it fantastically interesting. Christina's father, Hugh, had to work the landlord’s fields along with those he rented from him. Even so, by consulting some of the 175km of shelving in the National Archives, Wood established that Hugh managed to double his tax liability in only 30 years of backbreaking toil. (By 1307 it was 13¾d.)
I am imagining Wood if he had been born 700 years later, and was making a film about now. A film about my life perhaps - Trilby: A 21st-Century Life. Here he is, in his special gloves, delicately holding my bank statement, and beaming with excitement. "On May 5 2008, Trilby spent £24.99, a fairly sizable sum in those days, at PC World." Then he heads off to the National Archive, still in his special gloves, to dig out an ancient copy of the PC World catalogue to see what I might have spent my £24.99 on. (An ink cartridge, if you're interested. And if you're wondering why Wood didn't just go online, that's because the internet ate itself in the late 22nd century, at the time of the great flood.)
Anyway, back to the past. The Christina device doesn't really work, because there simply isn't enough about her in the court book. Her father, Hugh Cok (I bet the lads in the village called him Huge after a few mugs of nettle ale), pays this amount of tax in this year. Then he hands over his holdings and tenements to his daughter Christina. At a time when women’s finances were especially precarious, he set her up with a stall in Codicote market, where peasants were taking their first steps towards economic freedom by selling their surplus. Many years later, Christina was able to give her own daughter, Alice, a shop to run – which, because medieval maps were so scrupulous, we know was on the site of today’s As You Like It Chinese restaurant. When Christina died her death duty was her sow, worth four shillings.
I can see the idea - to personalise history, give us non-medievalists something to get a handle on, using a young woman's story as an easy way into the complexities of medieval life. But I'm just not really getting a sense of this lady from her tax receipts. To be honest, I wasn't even that sad to hear she was dead. She was in her 60s after all, a bloody good innings in those days. Still, Christina’s life also served as a springboard for Wood to make several and often surprising wider points. It seems, for instance, that medieval peasants not only had some rights, but knew them well enough to prosecute their landlords (sometimes even successfully). The Great Famine of 1315-6, we learned, was caused by catastrophic – and presumably not man-made – climate change.
In the circumstances, it was impossible not to share Wood’s awed excitement at finding all this stuff written down so clearly. Nonetheless, he didn’t just stick to official documents. We also got medieval poems, protest songs, graffiti, cookbooks and even a medieval gag (about, as it turns out, what thieves millers are). These duly added to the stirring sense that we were dealing here with people not only real, but also unexpectedly recognisable.
And Medievalists, it turns out, are a funny lot. There were plenty of them to enjoy in last night's programme. There's Cathy Flower-Bond, a historian, cooking a pot of kale-flavoured cracked-grain porridge over an open fire in her adobe hut. John Roberts, a woodsman, chops faggots. The aptly named Jo White-Brewster stirs her ale with a wooden paddle. The ploughman, who should be called Piers but is actually a Chris, yokes up his oxen, ready for work. And Michael Wood bounds happily between them, testing the porridge, sniffing in the ale fumes, drooling over the Luttrell Psalter and other old manuscripts. These are people who are only truly happy when fully immersed in the distant past and they were fascinating. The end result was yet another example of BBC4 at its considerable best.
Legends: Val Doonican Rocks first appeared on BBC4 too – but last night was given a welcome transfer to BBC2. Anybody hoping for a work of crunching revisionism will, I suppose, have been disappointed. The nearest the programme came to controversy was when an Irish academic argued that Delaney’s Donkey and Paddy McGinty’s Goat are uncomfortably close to stage Oirishry. (This was then put to Val, who cheerfully agreed.) Otherwise, the consensus from everybody interviewed is that beneath that unflaggingly nice exterior, the man is unflaggingly nice.
Faced with this awkward fact, the documentary would perhaps have been within its rights to become a bit dull. Instead, it managed to combine its obvious affection with a sharp awareness of how much Val’s career was entwined with postwar Irish history – and with a type of showbusiness that’s now long gone. (One surprise here was to be reminded that Val remained a TV fixture until 1990.) Yet, in keeping with its subject, it did this without ever straining for effect. After all, as one critic once put it, “The great thing about being Val Doonican is that you know you’re not going to lose your voice.”
In popular psychology, two adjectives are always being popped before the word “behaviour”. The first is “inappropriate”, and the second is “challenging”. They are both irritating because they are actually just euphemisms for “bad”, which would be the mot juste were not the psychiatric classes allergic to moral judgments even when a moral judgment is exactly what is needed. Anyhow, Dr Tanya Byron, the Trisha Goddard of clinical psychology, went easy on “inappropriate” in the final part of Am I Normal? (BBC Two) but couldn't stop herself being “challenged” by, as the programme's subtitle put it, Sex. She was meeting some “extraordinary and challenging” people: a cottager, a dogger and a paedophile. She was, she told us, additionally “challenged” by leaving her “clinical environment”, otherwise known, I suppose, as her clinic, to meet them.
Although every child is taught in sex education classes not to snigger, there was something very funny about seeing the doctor in these non-clinical environments. The first was Clapham Common men's loos, a “beautiful Victorian pissoir”, commended by her interviewee, Tim Fountain. Tim is a sex addict who would have some 5,000 notches on his bedpost if he did not prefer carrying on at my local convenience. The challenge to Tanya was that during their frank chat, blokes kept coming in for a slash, at which point Tanya and Tim would have to leave. Tim told of his first sexual encounter - he was 14, in a Bradford bus station loo - and Tanya held her nose, not with distaste but in response to an odour from a nearby cubicle. After Tim's description of his proclivities, I would have thought such blameless activity a breath of fresh air.
“Let's say it is a bright, sunny day and we are off dogging,” said Tanya, trying out her to-camera patter. Dogging got its name from men who told their wives they were going out to walk the dog when they were actually heading for a beauty spot to watch other people have sex in their cars. Tanya tried very hard not to prejudge Nick Malloy, a dogger by day, a professional stripper by night. He said that Stan Collymore had a lot to answer for. She thought his mother, who had prevented Malloy becoming a professional sportsman, probably had more. As usual in this diligent but disappointing series, Byron could not quite muster an argument but ducked and dived around several. She reminded us that homosexuality was once considered perverted, talked to a ten-year-old beauty queen who flirted with judges, and interviewed the author of 'I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido', who was either a victim of “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” or an honest woman.
Then came Tanya's greatest challenge: Lindsay Ashford, a paedophile, who - if one closed one's eyes to a disgusting-sounding website that he has since closed - seemed to deal with his perversion in an exemplary way, namely by not acting on it. Byron nevertheless gave him a hard time for fantasising about a law that would allow him to have oral sex with seven-year-old girls. It struck me that these days we deal with the range of human sexuality rather well by having established-in-law the principle that what consenting adults do in private is their own affair. It is psychologists who confuse matters.
Actually, I'm a bit depressed about my own sex life after stumbling across Generation Sex (Fiver). I don't do any daisy-chaining or snowballing, pegging or spidermanning. There's all this exciting stuff going on, that absolutely everyone is doing, apparently. Except me. I don't even have a "fuck buddy", for God's sake. Who, in 2008, doesn't have a fuck buddy? Christina probably had one, way back then. She'd call in on Mick the Miller, for her oats, so to speak. Nothing heavy, just a roll in the chaff, then back to the fields. It would be in the court book, if the court book were more interesting. In truth, I'm less depressed, now that I've Googled some of these people who are telling me they're doing all this stuff, all these so-called "journalists", "comedians", "reality TV stars", "actors" and "socialites". You're all just horrible, desperate people who'll say anything to get on TV. I bet some of you don't even do half of it. Makey-uppy people, makey-uppy TV. Still, if anyone out there fancies a new f ... no, maybe this is the wrong forum for that.
Anyway, one of the immutable laws of soaps is that in episodes screened on bank holidays, at least eight characters will casually allude to it being a bank holiday. Soap episodes are recorded more than a month in advance, which places regulars at the Rovers Return, like their counterparts at the Queen Vic, at a serious disadvantage when it comes to discussing the latest developments in news and current affairs, such as Manchester United reaching the European Cup final or Boris Johnson becoming mayor of London.
That's why everyone in Coronation Street (ITV) last night kept telling everyone else that it was a bank holiday, reinforcing the illusion that their universe is perfectly parallel to ours. Despite the fact that it was a bank holiday, Ashley "Ah know it's a bank 'oliday" Peacock opened his butcher's shop. His biological father, the late, lamented Fred Elliott, would have been proud of 'im. I say, he would have been proud of 'im. Fred had a verbal quirk inspired by the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn. He used to repeat, loudly, almost everything he said. "Be 'appy, I say be 'appy." Those were his last words.
Fred was a colourful character of the type that used to abound in Coronation Street but is now becoming scarce, like the red squirrel. One of the few remaining is the marvellously prissy Norris Cole, and yesterday he was on fine form in Ashley's shop, where at 10am he was the first customer, on account of it being a bank holiday. His mother, he told Ashley, had been a paragon of household economy. "She used to save all the nub ends of toilet soap and squash them down into a new bar of perfectly good soap." A wistful pause. "Bit on the slimey side, colours got merged." Then a proud smile. "Ooh, she knew about thrift, my mother. Discarded underpants... first a duster, then a dishcloth, then a floor cloth." Ashley had listened politely, but couldn't resist teasing. "Don't tell me, then you ate 'em?" he said. "Ooh, get away," said Norris.
Never mind the abortions, the arson and the adultery, it is dialogue like this that has set Coronation Street apart since the days of Ena Sharples and Martha Longhurst. Sir Cliff Richard once said that he gave up eating lunch on the day in 1964 that Minnie Caldwell referred to "that chubby Cliff Richard". There's the power of soap, longer lasting than even Norris Cole's mother managed to contrive. Speaking of long-lasting, let me add homage to Betty Williams, the former Betty Turpin, played by Betty Driver. She was pulling pints behind the bar of the Rovers last night, looking exactly as she did in 1994, 1983 and 1975. Afterwards I looked her up on the internet. She'll be 88 this month, the very definition of an old trouper.
Another octogenarian actor popped up on Shrink Rap, being interviewed by the clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly. This was Tony Curtis, who was ageing as well as Betty Driver until he had pneumonia last year and fell briefly into a coma. Now he looks terrible, like the young Tony Curtis made up with prosthetics to look 150. For those of us who grew up watching him punch thin air in fights with international jewel thieves in The Persuaders, let alone those who saw him first time round in The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot, it was a sad spectacle. But it was an affecting interview. One day, 12-year-old Bernie Schwartz, growing up in the Bronx, told his younger brother Julius not to hang around with him. Julius followed a marching band instead, was hit by a truck and killed. Bernie was sent by his parents to identify the body. Later, Bernie became Tony Curtis, but in his heart, more and more, he's just Julius Schwartz's big brother.
Placebo was a comedy pilot set in a hospital, where a drug to ease anxiety is being tested on male volunteers. It was Only When I Laugh with lots of swearing, and jokes about acne, urine, erections, Ann Widdecombe and penis seepage (one man wanted to know whether penis seepage means that your penis seeps, or that you seep penises). A series will almost certainly follow.
If you think we’re living in bureaucratic times now, then Christina – a Medieval Life (BBC4) brought reassuring news that it could be worse. You could be living in the early 14th century. In those days, everything you owned was carefully entered in official records, and strict laws applied to the most innocuous-seeming of activities. Anybody trying to bypass Mick, the local miller, for example, by grinding their own corn would have their grinding stones confiscated –sometimes to make a new patio for the local abbot. And naturally their crime would be recorded too.
Seven hundred years later, of course, this mania for bureaucracy has turned out to be invaluable. As a result of it, historian Michael Wood could here give us an extraordinarily vivid account of how even some of the poorest people lived. So we're in the early 14th century, in the village of Codicote in Hertfordshire, trying to piece together the life of the unfortunately named peasant Christina Cok, born around 1285. Wood, in special manuscript-handling gloves, pores over the Codicote court book, searching for any reference to her. A court book may be a useful tool to the historian, but it's actually a fantastically boring thing - simply a record of who paid how much tax for what. But it's from 700 years ago, so that makes it fantastically interesting. Christina's father, Hugh, had to work the landlord’s fields along with those he rented from him. Even so, by consulting some of the 175km of shelving in the National Archives, Wood established that Hugh managed to double his tax liability in only 30 years of backbreaking toil. (By 1307 it was 13¾d.)
I am imagining Wood if he had been born 700 years later, and was making a film about now. A film about my life perhaps - Trilby: A 21st-Century Life. Here he is, in his special gloves, delicately holding my bank statement, and beaming with excitement. "On May 5 2008, Trilby spent £24.99, a fairly sizable sum in those days, at PC World." Then he heads off to the National Archive, still in his special gloves, to dig out an ancient copy of the PC World catalogue to see what I might have spent my £24.99 on. (An ink cartridge, if you're interested. And if you're wondering why Wood didn't just go online, that's because the internet ate itself in the late 22nd century, at the time of the great flood.)
Anyway, back to the past. The Christina device doesn't really work, because there simply isn't enough about her in the court book. Her father, Hugh Cok (I bet the lads in the village called him Huge after a few mugs of nettle ale), pays this amount of tax in this year. Then he hands over his holdings and tenements to his daughter Christina. At a time when women’s finances were especially precarious, he set her up with a stall in Codicote market, where peasants were taking their first steps towards economic freedom by selling their surplus. Many years later, Christina was able to give her own daughter, Alice, a shop to run – which, because medieval maps were so scrupulous, we know was on the site of today’s As You Like It Chinese restaurant. When Christina died her death duty was her sow, worth four shillings.
I can see the idea - to personalise history, give us non-medievalists something to get a handle on, using a young woman's story as an easy way into the complexities of medieval life. But I'm just not really getting a sense of this lady from her tax receipts. To be honest, I wasn't even that sad to hear she was dead. She was in her 60s after all, a bloody good innings in those days. Still, Christina’s life also served as a springboard for Wood to make several and often surprising wider points. It seems, for instance, that medieval peasants not only had some rights, but knew them well enough to prosecute their landlords (sometimes even successfully). The Great Famine of 1315-6, we learned, was caused by catastrophic – and presumably not man-made – climate change.
In the circumstances, it was impossible not to share Wood’s awed excitement at finding all this stuff written down so clearly. Nonetheless, he didn’t just stick to official documents. We also got medieval poems, protest songs, graffiti, cookbooks and even a medieval gag (about, as it turns out, what thieves millers are). These duly added to the stirring sense that we were dealing here with people not only real, but also unexpectedly recognisable.
And Medievalists, it turns out, are a funny lot. There were plenty of them to enjoy in last night's programme. There's Cathy Flower-Bond, a historian, cooking a pot of kale-flavoured cracked-grain porridge over an open fire in her adobe hut. John Roberts, a woodsman, chops faggots. The aptly named Jo White-Brewster stirs her ale with a wooden paddle. The ploughman, who should be called Piers but is actually a Chris, yokes up his oxen, ready for work. And Michael Wood bounds happily between them, testing the porridge, sniffing in the ale fumes, drooling over the Luttrell Psalter and other old manuscripts. These are people who are only truly happy when fully immersed in the distant past and they were fascinating. The end result was yet another example of BBC4 at its considerable best.
Legends: Val Doonican Rocks first appeared on BBC4 too – but last night was given a welcome transfer to BBC2. Anybody hoping for a work of crunching revisionism will, I suppose, have been disappointed. The nearest the programme came to controversy was when an Irish academic argued that Delaney’s Donkey and Paddy McGinty’s Goat are uncomfortably close to stage Oirishry. (This was then put to Val, who cheerfully agreed.) Otherwise, the consensus from everybody interviewed is that beneath that unflaggingly nice exterior, the man is unflaggingly nice.
Faced with this awkward fact, the documentary would perhaps have been within its rights to become a bit dull. Instead, it managed to combine its obvious affection with a sharp awareness of how much Val’s career was entwined with postwar Irish history – and with a type of showbusiness that’s now long gone. (One surprise here was to be reminded that Val remained a TV fixture until 1990.) Yet, in keeping with its subject, it did this without ever straining for effect. After all, as one critic once put it, “The great thing about being Val Doonican is that you know you’re not going to lose your voice.”
In popular psychology, two adjectives are always being popped before the word “behaviour”. The first is “inappropriate”, and the second is “challenging”. They are both irritating because they are actually just euphemisms for “bad”, which would be the mot juste were not the psychiatric classes allergic to moral judgments even when a moral judgment is exactly what is needed. Anyhow, Dr Tanya Byron, the Trisha Goddard of clinical psychology, went easy on “inappropriate” in the final part of Am I Normal? (BBC Two) but couldn't stop herself being “challenged” by, as the programme's subtitle put it, Sex. She was meeting some “extraordinary and challenging” people: a cottager, a dogger and a paedophile. She was, she told us, additionally “challenged” by leaving her “clinical environment”, otherwise known, I suppose, as her clinic, to meet them.
Although every child is taught in sex education classes not to snigger, there was something very funny about seeing the doctor in these non-clinical environments. The first was Clapham Common men's loos, a “beautiful Victorian pissoir”, commended by her interviewee, Tim Fountain. Tim is a sex addict who would have some 5,000 notches on his bedpost if he did not prefer carrying on at my local convenience. The challenge to Tanya was that during their frank chat, blokes kept coming in for a slash, at which point Tanya and Tim would have to leave. Tim told of his first sexual encounter - he was 14, in a Bradford bus station loo - and Tanya held her nose, not with distaste but in response to an odour from a nearby cubicle. After Tim's description of his proclivities, I would have thought such blameless activity a breath of fresh air.
“Let's say it is a bright, sunny day and we are off dogging,” said Tanya, trying out her to-camera patter. Dogging got its name from men who told their wives they were going out to walk the dog when they were actually heading for a beauty spot to watch other people have sex in their cars. Tanya tried very hard not to prejudge Nick Malloy, a dogger by day, a professional stripper by night. He said that Stan Collymore had a lot to answer for. She thought his mother, who had prevented Malloy becoming a professional sportsman, probably had more. As usual in this diligent but disappointing series, Byron could not quite muster an argument but ducked and dived around several. She reminded us that homosexuality was once considered perverted, talked to a ten-year-old beauty queen who flirted with judges, and interviewed the author of 'I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido', who was either a victim of “hypoactive sexual desire disorder” or an honest woman.
Then came Tanya's greatest challenge: Lindsay Ashford, a paedophile, who - if one closed one's eyes to a disgusting-sounding website that he has since closed - seemed to deal with his perversion in an exemplary way, namely by not acting on it. Byron nevertheless gave him a hard time for fantasising about a law that would allow him to have oral sex with seven-year-old girls. It struck me that these days we deal with the range of human sexuality rather well by having established-in-law the principle that what consenting adults do in private is their own affair. It is psychologists who confuse matters.
Actually, I'm a bit depressed about my own sex life after stumbling across Generation Sex (Fiver). I don't do any daisy-chaining or snowballing, pegging or spidermanning. There's all this exciting stuff going on, that absolutely everyone is doing, apparently. Except me. I don't even have a "fuck buddy", for God's sake. Who, in 2008, doesn't have a fuck buddy? Christina probably had one, way back then. She'd call in on Mick the Miller, for her oats, so to speak. Nothing heavy, just a roll in the chaff, then back to the fields. It would be in the court book, if the court book were more interesting. In truth, I'm less depressed, now that I've Googled some of these people who are telling me they're doing all this stuff, all these so-called "journalists", "comedians", "reality TV stars", "actors" and "socialites". You're all just horrible, desperate people who'll say anything to get on TV. I bet some of you don't even do half of it. Makey-uppy people, makey-uppy TV. Still, if anyone out there fancies a new f ... no, maybe this is the wrong forum for that.
Anyway, one of the immutable laws of soaps is that in episodes screened on bank holidays, at least eight characters will casually allude to it being a bank holiday. Soap episodes are recorded more than a month in advance, which places regulars at the Rovers Return, like their counterparts at the Queen Vic, at a serious disadvantage when it comes to discussing the latest developments in news and current affairs, such as Manchester United reaching the European Cup final or Boris Johnson becoming mayor of London.
That's why everyone in Coronation Street (ITV) last night kept telling everyone else that it was a bank holiday, reinforcing the illusion that their universe is perfectly parallel to ours. Despite the fact that it was a bank holiday, Ashley "Ah know it's a bank 'oliday" Peacock opened his butcher's shop. His biological father, the late, lamented Fred Elliott, would have been proud of 'im. I say, he would have been proud of 'im. Fred had a verbal quirk inspired by the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn. He used to repeat, loudly, almost everything he said. "Be 'appy, I say be 'appy." Those were his last words.
Fred was a colourful character of the type that used to abound in Coronation Street but is now becoming scarce, like the red squirrel. One of the few remaining is the marvellously prissy Norris Cole, and yesterday he was on fine form in Ashley's shop, where at 10am he was the first customer, on account of it being a bank holiday. His mother, he told Ashley, had been a paragon of household economy. "She used to save all the nub ends of toilet soap and squash them down into a new bar of perfectly good soap." A wistful pause. "Bit on the slimey side, colours got merged." Then a proud smile. "Ooh, she knew about thrift, my mother. Discarded underpants... first a duster, then a dishcloth, then a floor cloth." Ashley had listened politely, but couldn't resist teasing. "Don't tell me, then you ate 'em?" he said. "Ooh, get away," said Norris.
Never mind the abortions, the arson and the adultery, it is dialogue like this that has set Coronation Street apart since the days of Ena Sharples and Martha Longhurst. Sir Cliff Richard once said that he gave up eating lunch on the day in 1964 that Minnie Caldwell referred to "that chubby Cliff Richard". There's the power of soap, longer lasting than even Norris Cole's mother managed to contrive. Speaking of long-lasting, let me add homage to Betty Williams, the former Betty Turpin, played by Betty Driver. She was pulling pints behind the bar of the Rovers last night, looking exactly as she did in 1994, 1983 and 1975. Afterwards I looked her up on the internet. She'll be 88 this month, the very definition of an old trouper.
Another octogenarian actor popped up on Shrink Rap, being interviewed by the clinical psychologist Pamela Connolly. This was Tony Curtis, who was ageing as well as Betty Driver until he had pneumonia last year and fell briefly into a coma. Now he looks terrible, like the young Tony Curtis made up with prosthetics to look 150. For those of us who grew up watching him punch thin air in fights with international jewel thieves in The Persuaders, let alone those who saw him first time round in The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot, it was a sad spectacle. But it was an affecting interview. One day, 12-year-old Bernie Schwartz, growing up in the Bronx, told his younger brother Julius not to hang around with him. Julius followed a marching band instead, was hit by a truck and killed. Bernie was sent by his parents to identify the body. Later, Bernie became Tony Curtis, but in his heart, more and more, he's just Julius Schwartz's big brother.
Placebo was a comedy pilot set in a hospital, where a drug to ease anxiety is being tested on male volunteers. It was Only When I Laugh with lots of swearing, and jokes about acne, urine, erections, Ann Widdecombe and penis seepage (one man wanted to know whether penis seepage means that your penis seeps, or that you seep penises). A series will almost certainly follow.
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