Posts matching tags 'tv'
2008/9/18
There is now an Asiavision Song Contest. A company named Asiavision Pte. Ltd. (which sounds like they're based in Singapore) has licenced the Eurovision format, and the inaugural Asiavision Song Contest is expected in mid-2009.
"The format is highly suited to the Asia region and its people who love popular music and have a strong national pride", says Andreas Gerlach, CEO of Asiavision Pte. Ltd. "Asia today is all about competition, economically and politically. The Song Contest is a friendly competition between cultures. Like in Europe, the universal language of music will help to bring people closer together and nurture mutual understanding in the region," Gerlach believes.
The annual song contest is planned to be a six-month regional and national tournament culminating in the Grand Final. The song contest will be distributed in the following countries: China, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macao, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Targeting the most populous region in the world with more than three billion people the show has a potential audience of over 500 million viewers. A number of broadcasters have indicated their desire to be the Host Broadcaster for the first ever Asiavision Song Contest.Australia is notable by its absence from this list, and presumably won't be sending competitors there. I imagine that Australians will continue to watch Eurovision (broadcast on the Sunday after, due to time differences), often having parties to do so. Whether Asiavision will get broadcast there (i.e., whether SBS will pick it up or it'll be confined to some ethnic-interest cable channel) remains to be seen.
2008/7/3
More news has emerged about the remake of the TV series The Prisoner. It's being made by ITV, not Sky One (for whatever that's worth), and promises to "reflect 21st century concerns and anxieties such as liberty, security and surveillance", rather than merely being a vehicle for trashy celebrity sexploitation as was rumoured. Sir Ian McKellen will play Number 2, with Jim "Christ" Caveziel being Number 6. It is not clear whether any of it will be filmed in Portmeirion.
On a tangent: an architect claims that Portmeirion appears three times larger than it actually is, due to its complexity, being what he calls a "fractal town":
"Distances will therefore seem smaller in places where people look at their feet and there is lots of traffic. We can use this to make space from nothing. It would seem that vastly more information is absorbed during a walk in Portmeirion than it is in Manchester."
He said previous studies in the US had indicated that our vision expects the world to be fractal. "This may explain why non-fractal environments such as car parks feel oppressive," he said.
2008/5/30
Obscure television programme of the day: Heil Honey I'm Home!. Produced in Britain in 1990, this was intended to be a rediscovered 1950s US sitcom set in Nazi Germany, and concerned with the domestic life of (a fictionalised) Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and their neighbours, the Goldensteins. The characters are presented in classic 1950s American sitcom tradition; the Hitler character himself comes across as a loud, oafish guy, a sort of Fred Flintstone in Nazi drag, Eva Braun is a traditional housewife, and the Goldensteins are cantankerous schmucks, apparently from somewhere in Brooklyn.
Not surprisingly, the programme turned out to be controversial and was scrapped early; only one episode was ever aired, a low-quality copy of which may be seen here.
(via Charlie Stross) ¶ [no comments]
2007/9/1
As a British TV company prepares a TV series reuniting Enid Blyton's junior crimefighters the Famous Five as middle-aged adults in today's world, the Graun speculates on what it might be like:
Little more is being said about the project, so it remains to be seen how the Five's crime-busting skills will transfer to a post-Jack Bauer world. Perhaps they won't have to hit the ground running and unravel a dirty bomb plot. "If only," thought Dick, "stern Uncle Quentin hadn't been so weirdly secretive about all his science work in the study at Kirrin Cottage ..."
Indeed, rather than the sense that the past is another country, where they do things differently, the reactions to the Famous Five announcement suggests a feeling that the present is another country, a strange land that must be negotiated in a state of permanent anxiety.I wonder whether the new Famous Five concept will take a leaf out of the 24/Spooks playbook and have them save Britain (or at least its idyllic southwestern corner) from the apocalyptic machinations of terrorist cells, armed with the requisite high-tech gadgets. That may be a bit of a stretch, though (even though a Famous Five/24 mashup could be gloriously kitschy). Ruling out terrorists, who could be the villains? Child-abducting paedophiles may be a good choice, as it ties in the childhood-innocence theme inherent in reviving such a concept with a popular fear.
After all, these days, the one where Five Go To Smuggler's Top would result in a presumably fatal shooting by chaps whose contraband is grown in Afghanistan, with no comeback from our old friend PC Gone Mad, the porphyric local bobby, who ... No, that's not right. But handled well, the updated Famous Five promises to be the most challenging of TV delights.
2007/7/13
The BBC's "edgy", yoof-oriented BBC Three channel, has revealed six new drama series due to be screened later this year:
Being Human, from Touchpaper TV and Doctor Who writer Toby Whithouse, follows three co-habiting flatmates. One is a vampire, one is a ghost and the other a werewolf.
Mrs Inbetweeny tells the story of siblings who are brought up by their pre-op transsexual aunt Emma from America.
Phoo Action is a kung fu live action drama set in 2012 London, which is in the grip of mutant criminals. Terry Phoo and Whitey Action - the first a Buddhist cop and the second an anarchist - step in to save the day.
W10 LDN, from Noel Clarke and Kudos, looks at the lives led by a group of young teenagers on a housing estate in West London.The last one sounds like they're trying to jump on the Lily Allen cool-street-hip-hop bandwagon, which could possibly sell. But Phoo Action?
(via James) ¶ [4 comments]
2006/12/7
Not that long after al-Jazeera launched its defiantly postcolonial English-language news channel, another player is entering the market; France 24 will be a 24-hour news channel, funded by the French government and a French private TV network, and broadcasting in French and English (with Spanish and Arabic to be added later).
France 24 can be viewed through its web site (if you have Windows Media installed), and will be available on cable TV. Its mission is, in its own words, "to cover worldwide news with French eyes"; the channel insists its editorial policy will be independent of the French government (though, in either case, you'd expect them to say so).
2006/11/21
Cory Doctorow argues that high-definition television might kill special-effects-heavy blockbusters, by amplifying the way that Moore's Law keeps increasing audience expectations and making last year's special-effects extravaganza look like so much cheese:
It's a good reason to go to the box-office, but it's also the source of an awful paradox: yesterday's jaw-dropping movies are today's kitschy crap. By next year, the custom tools that filmmakers develop for this year's blockbuster will be available to every hack commercial director making a Coke ad. What's more, the Coke ads and crummy sitcoms will run on faster, cheaper hardware and be available to a huge pool of creators, who will actually push the technology further, producing work that is in many cases visually superior to the big studio product from last summer.
It's one thing for a black-and-white movie at a Hitchcock revival to look a little dated, but it's galling -- and financially perilous -- for last year's movie to date in a period of months. You can see what I mean by going to a Lord of the Rings festival at your local rep-house and comparing the generation-one creatures in Fellowship of the Ring to the gen-three beasts in Return of the King.Where does HDTV come into this? Well, until now, yesteryear's blockbusters could make back some of their mammoth production costs on the long tail of DVD rentals and TV licensing; thanks to the inherent poor quality of TV, consumers were more forgiving of their dated effects. With HDTV, this may not be so, and the long tail may be decimated, making mega-blockbusters uneconomical to produce.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ [1 comment]
2006/7/31
Cult 1970s BBC comedy troupe The Goodies, who recently reissued some of their shows on DVD and did a successful tour of Australia (where, thanks to the ABC's buying of their show, they are a national institution), are now doing a UK tour, starting off with a show at the Edinburgh Festival.
The show is a mixture of reminiscences, clips from the shows, new sketches and their chart hit song, "The Funky Gibbon". Then there are the recordings of Oddie, 65, "who we can switch off at any moment". Among the sketches is one about the Goodies' invention of Ecky-Thump, a Lancastrian martial art, at which a man in Scotland died laughing when it was originally broadcast. "We'll have medics on hand," Brooke-Taylor said.
Both Brooke-Taylor and Garden, 63, admit they are not sure who their audiences will be in Edinburgh, but if it goes well there is a chance of a national tour. Garden seems slightly nervous. "In Australia there was this great fan base. In this country, nobody has seen the show for 25 years," he said. For anyone under 40, features included a rip-off of King Kong with a kitten on the Post Office Tower, and the Goodies' bicycle for three. The show routinely attracted audiences of up to 14 million.(14 million? Wasn't that the entire population of Australia at the time? Presumably they mean in Britain during the 1970s.)
2006/3/21
Recently, soul singer and celebrity Scientologist Isaac Hayes resigned from the cartoon South Park (in which he did the voice of the Chef) because he couldn't stomach its disrespect for religion. Curiously, Hayes had no problems with the show's repeated lampooning of Christianity, Judaism, the Catholic Church, the Mormons or other faiths, but only found it unconscionable to continue with the show after it turned its guns on Scientology.
The episode in question, which apparently also casts aspersions on Superclam Tom Cruise's sexuality (being gay is against Scientologist teachings, because L. Ron Hubbard wasn't gay, and as such, homosexuality is a defect caused by thetans or engrams or somesuch), has been dropped from US cable TV channel Comedy Central, apparently after Cruise threatened to refuse to promote an upcoming film of his, which is being released by Comedy Central owners Paramount/Viacom. To which the show's creators have issued a reply:
"So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!"That sound you can hear is the anguished, frenzied snapping of millions upon millions of enturbulated clams.
And some fans have launched a petition urging Comedy Central to reinstate the episode, and promising to boycott all of Cruise's films until this is done.
And it seems that the South Park people have found a new actor to play the Chef. I imagine that there were enough Barry White soundalikes on the talent market to find one who can do the job and doesn't have any religious objections to doing so.
And it seems that the South Park people have found a new actor to play the Chef. I imagine that there were enough Barry White soundalikes on the talent market to find one who can do the job and doesn't have any religious objections to doing so.
Update: If this post (thanks, Peter!) is correct, Hayes didn't quit South Park, but had been incapacitated by a stroke since mid-January, and hadn't issued any statements at all concerning South Park; which means that someone else spoke on his behalf. The plot thickens...
2005/11/20
It looks like they're remaking The Prisoner. The new series is not going to be set in Portmeirion and is not going to have "the arty 'pop' feel of the original". Given that the remake is being done by Sky One, (News Corporation's mass-entertainment network and "the chavs' favourite channel" according to media troll and self-styled chav Julie Burchill), we can probably expect something between 24-style patriotic action thrillers and celebrity-sexploitation reality TV; in other words, unsubtle, lowbrow, cheap and of little interest to those who liked the original series.
(via /.) ¶ [1 comment]
2005/10/23
A copy of the Nathan Barley DVD showed up in the post today. At first glimpse, it's pretty good; it has the six episodes plus a variety of deleted scenes, galleries of much of the artwork (SugaRAPE covers, gig posters (the one with "DVD Pausing Wankers" or something similar was amusing) and mockups of T-shirts worn by fashion victims), and all the TV Go Home "Cunt" columns that gave rise to the Nathan Barley character. It didn't have a video of Bad Uncle or Flesh Police that I could find, but you can't have everything. And it did have some junkie-choir footage (of them doing a version of Grandmaster Flash's White Lines, like a Pete Doherty-fronted Polyphonic Spree) in the extras menus. There's also a Shockwave-ish DVD-ROM section, and it's all Region 0.
The DVD comes in a posterised, Designers Republic-referencing cover, the inside of which contains the disc and a small, thick black booklet:
Look familiar? Yes, they're ripping off the look of Banksy's Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall and Existencilism (there's even a page with the heading "Websistentialism"), down to the cocky soundbites and autobiographical paragraphs in Courier. In fact, every page that's not comprised of material from the series is a textbook Banksyism. Not that they try in any way to hide this:
2005/7/17
It looks like there's a Nathan Barley DVD coming out in late September. (It's only Region 2, btw; I have no idea whether this series has made it outside of Britain.) I wonder what extras it will have.
(via 
trashbat) ¶ [no comments]
2005/6/20
Well, that was a cracker of a way to end a season of Doctor Who. Dalek cultists? Who would have thought. Even if it did seem like a bit of a deus ex machina.
Anyway, David Tennant will have a tough act to follow as the next Doctor, given how good Ecclestone's grinning-nutter-with-heart was.
2005/6/16
Surprise of the day: large-screen TVs use more current than the smaller ones. Wal-Mart America's love affair with the jumbo plasma screen has resulted in massive increases in electricity consumption, calling on some to compare the TVs to that other emblem of the divinely-sanctioned and non-negotiable American lifestyle, the SUV. The fact that a lot of people leave the TV on 24 hours a day as a psychological security blanket probably doesn't help.
(Though is anybody really surprised that large TVs use a lot more current? Electricity consumption would, I imagine, be a function of the square of the screen size, meaning that even small increases in size result in large increases in power consumption. Which, also, is probably one of the reasons why small, wimpy-looking laptops have about twice the battery life of the larger, more-impressive-looking ones.)
(via Make) ¶ [4 comments]
2005/3/26
I just watched the first of the new Doctor Who series. It was amusing enough, with plastic dummies controlled by an alien consciousness hiding under a London landmark trying to take over the world. (It is apparently a Welsh production, though the story was all centred in London.) They may have been a little too eager to please, peppering the script with one-liners and quips, sometimes at the expense of plausibility. Anyway, Christopher Eccleston, in his short-cropped, leather-jacketed Northern English geezer guise, made a decent enough Doctor, and Billie Piper is the First Chav Assistant. (Why did they name her Rose, when Tracey or Mandy or something similar would have been a more appropriate name?)
Interestingly enough, the BBC are milking this cow as far as they can; right after the show, the lottery announcement had one of the announcers hitching a ride in on the TARDIS.
2005/2/22
Last night, Murdoch cable channel Sky One aired a programme titled Chavs, a documentary of sorts, written and presented by Julie Burchill, on chav culture. I tuned in to see if it was going to be interesting or insightful, shedding any light on this phenomenon. It turned out to be more an op-ed piece, with Burchill, ever the contrarian, proudly hoisting the Burberry flag, declaring herself to be a chav and accusing those who have a problem with chav to be classist snobs.
Burchill's arguments hinged on one assumption: that chav and working-class culture were synonymous. (A piece of background: Burchill is the most self-announcedly "working class" public figure since Damon Albarn.) By her reasoning, all cultural figures of note from Mozart to the Mods were chavs, and the anti-chav camp only had horsy aristocrats and the likes of Prince Harry among them. Oh, and wearing in-your-face quantities of gold jewellery bought on QVC, drinking cheap lager and smoking like a chimney are just wholesome working-class ways of enjoying life, and those who would begrudge them that are hateful snobs and/or resentful of those who made it without middle-class privilege.
The fatal flaw in Burchill's argument is in the definitions; she plays fast-and-loose with what she means by "chav", switching between it meaning any happily working-class person at any time in history and the loutish subculture it commonly denotes. She also whitewashes the meaning to fit her argument, not mentioning the pseudo-criminal posturing (i.e., the combination of baseball caps and hooded tops, initially worn by muggers to avoid identification by CCTV cameras, now part of inner-city youth uniform) that's part of chav (or, indeed, the recent finding that 1 in 4 teenage boys is a serious or habitual offender), and sweeping things like drunken violence and football hooliganism under the carpet. It's not surprising that chav can start to look defensible and even pluckily admirable when you airbrush out all the negative parts of it.
Chavs was more of a snappily-edited tabloid opinion piece than anything else, and was also light on analysis, preferring to stick to simple assertions and soundbites. For example, while it asserted that the Mods of the 1960s were chavs (that is, if one ignores the difference between sharply-tailored suits and tracksuit pants), it failed to point out the one deeper connection between the two movements, i.e., that both appropriated (images of) black American culture (the Mods with soul and the "White Negro" ideal, and the chavs with their adoption of bling-bling and thug posturing from commercial gangsta rap).
It was also interesting to note that The Sun now has a "Chav and Proud" logo on its pages. It looks like the anti-anti-chav-backlash-backlash is beginning.
2005/2/20
I just watched an episode of Nathan Barley. It's rather amusing; a sitcom set among a bunch of obnoxious coolsie wide-boys in some trendy part of London. They run in-your-face web sites and magazines (there's one named RAPE, which may or may not be a reference to Vice, present employers of Jim "Answer Me!" Goad), rap Streets-style over distorted beats, either take lots of drugs or act like it, wear ridiculous clothes and generally go around being insufferable twats to all concerned. It's written by Chris Morris, who also did controversial satirical TV series Brass Eye and wrote the lyrics to Stereolab's Nothing To Do With Me.
2005/2/1
Following on from the fact about John Garden, a few more Goodies-related items. Firstly, the the second DVD compilation comes out in the UK in two weeks (there's an official launch in London's Prince Charles Cinema on the 12th), with Australia following on 3 March, and will include, among others, Radio Goodies and Sarth Efriker. Apparently a third DVD set is also in the works, on the strength of sales of the first set, so if your favourite episode isn't in the first two sets, it may well be there.
Secondly, Tim, Graeme and Bill are doing a Goodies tour of Australia, playing gigs on the East Coast (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra) in early March. Australia seems to be the world leader in Goodies fandom, being more fond of the series than Britain (case in point: you can get Goodies T-shirts on Brunswick St., though you won't find them amongst the Michael Caine/Vespa/Atari/random-sexual-innuendo T-shirts all over Camden and Carnaby St.). I'm hoping, though, that they do some London shows at some stage, if only for the city's population of Australian expats.
2004/12/13
I just watched the season 3 finale of Spooks. Quite tense and topical, and once again showing that no character's too important to be killed off (literally, metaphorically, or by having their head deep-fried, as the case may be). It tied into the whole idea of the terrorist as auteur, though I won't say any more about it for the benefit of those not in the UK.
It wasn't a cliffhanger, though. I wonder if this means that there won't be another season.
Update: One of the BBC digital channels just aired a making-of documentary on season 3; for the most part, it was an excuse to recut highlights from the past season with Franz Ferdinand and the Scissor Sisters in the background, interspersed with interviews with cast members talking about how they see their characters and actual former MI5 agents (including David Shayler) talking about how inaccurate the depiction of their former occupations is. According to it, season 4 is being filmed now.
2004/11/1
Munster Beat, an exotica-tinged dance/electro remake of the 1960s monster TV comedy. (via MeFi)
2004/7/22
Unsatisfied with their portrayal in Russian TV serials, several Russian Mafia members have shot their own.
The program, called Spets, was shot by Vitaly Dyomochka, the owner of a shady car market who was sentenced several times for his activities. Everything in the show is designed to be genuine, with gangsters playing their own roles. Only the police are played by professional actors.
2004/6/23
Every year, thousands of Britons come to Melbourne for one purpose: because some TV soap was filmed here.
Liverpudlian backpacker Chris, 23, and her travelling companions are star-struck after a close encounter with the actors. "It's stupid 'cause in Liverpool, you meet the Brookside (UK soap) actors and loads of footballers and you're not arsed at all. Give them a wave and head back to the bar. "But here, it's like, f---ing hell, it's Karl Kennedy, let's give him a kiss wicked."
Countless tour buses (both the official one and clandestine ones organised by pretty much every backpacker hostel in Melbourne) make their way to the sprawl of Vermont South, laden mostly with young Britons keen on seeing Pin Oak Court, better known to them as Ramsay St. Which probably pisses off the actual non-soap-character people who live in those famous suburban houses:
In recent years, minor intrusions like doorknocking fans looking for Harold Bishop, have given way to drive-by hoons and light-fingered memento hunters. Since the early 1990s, a Grundy-employed security guard has been on nightly duty, blocking unauthorised access to the street from 8pm to 7am. But this did not deter one amorous young couple found intertwined in a rather intimate position on Harold Bishop's front lawn one night about five years ago.
In two years on the job, Forster, 33, has witnessed some bizarre sights, such as the Newcastle (UK) rugby players who posed for photographs outside the Scullys' house with their daks down. "Another fella posed for a photo where he appeared to be urinating in the Kennedy's letterbox," he says.
Meanwhile, fellow Brit backpacker, Ole, 21, who arrived in a friend's car, is about to depart with some old roof tiles he found stacked next to a wheelie bin. "I'm in desperate need of money so I'm going to try and sell them to fans on eBay," he says.
(Somebody should probably tell Lonely Planet about this; the Melbourne section of their book on Australia doesn't even mention Vermont South, instead pointing out sights like the Old Melbourne Gaol, the Botanic Gardens, Puffing Billy and cosmopolitan inner-city areas which aren't home to popular TV soaps.)
2004/6/10
2004/5/30
A fan site for Canadian children's/teen-splatter-fetishists' TV show You Can't Do That On Television. The presence of a "fan fiction" link is a little worrying...
2004/1/10
A US man is suing his cable TV company, on the grounds that they made him smoke and drink, caused his wife to gain weight and turned his children into "lazy channel surfers" by giving his household free cable. Timothy Dumouchel of West Bend, Wisconsin wants either US$5,000 or three computers and a lifetime supply of free internet service as compensation. It's reassuring to see that someone's taking charge of their life. (via Techdirt)
2003/8/8
Silicone-enhanced pop puppet Britney Spears may soon have her own TV talk show. Funny, that; some time ago I speculated that, in 2015 or so, "Britney" would be the highest-rating talk show in America. Jennifer Lopez is also planning one, which sounds like it could well be Ali G without the irony.
2003/6/15
Four years ago, the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, founded as a Buddhist sanctuary and acting as the model for the fictional Shangri-La, became the last nation to introduce television, giving Rupert Murdoch's Star TV the rights to broadcast imported entertainment programming to its citizens. Consequently, the crime rate skyrocketed:
"Until recently, we shied away from killing insects, and yet now we Bhutanese are asked to watch people on TV blowing heads off with shotguns. Will we now be blowing each other's heads off?"
The marijuana that flourishes like a weed in every Bhutanese hedgerow was only ever used to feed pigs before the advent of TV, but police have arrested hundreds for smoking it in recent years. Six employees of the Bank of Bhutan have been sentenced for siphoning off 2.4m ngultrums (£40,000). Six weeks before we arrived, 18 people were jailed after a gang of drunken boys broke into houses to steal foreign currency and a 21-inch television set. During the holy Bishwa Karma Puja celebrations, a man was stabbed in the stomach in a fight over alcohol. A middle-class Thimphu boy is serving a sentence after putting on a bandanna and shooting up the ceiling of a local bar with his dad's new gun. Police can barely control the fights at the new hip-hop night on Saturdays.
2003/5/28
I've just heard that the ABC is showing In the Realm of the Hackers, a local documentary about two hackers/crackers from late-1980s Melbourne, their exploits and the law's pursuit of them, tomorrow (Thursday) night at 10PM. I saw this in the cinema earlier this year, and can recommend it.
2003/5/19
After reading the comments about BeTh's boat-naming dilemma, my mind turned to the question of why there wasn't a DVD of cult 1970s comedy series The Goodies. The theories I've heard about this included (a) that it's considered too racist/sexist/politically incorrect for this enlightened age, (b) that Tim/Graeme/Bill would rather the public forgot about their youthful indiscretions, or that (c) no archival footage of the series survives, with decaying VHS tapes recorded off the telly being the only remaining record of this series.
So I decided to do a Google search for "the goodies" dvd, and lo and behold, it appears that there is now a Goodies DVD, with 8 episodes. And it's region 0 too, for those still trapped under the jackboot of the MPAA.
(It doesn't seem to have the pirate radio episode, alas, but you can't have everything. Maybe if enough people buy this one, they'll release more episodes.)
2003/1/31