Running to the restaurant

Every now and then the BBC Jobs website includes details of an upcoming programme. Not too long ago a vacancy for a researcher for The One Show revealed that it would be running 50 weeks a year when it returns. The latest is a position for a “‘Location Runner” on something called… Read more

Celebration

The speech given by the announcer heralding More4′s presentation of Harold Pinter’s play Celebration couldn’t have been more disheartening. Read more

“There is lots of nostalgia on the site”

Off The Telly was mentioned in The Guardian’s The Guide today: “Rallying against the BBC’s attempts to “sex up” Ski Sunday, bothered by the scheduling of Doctor Who and still angry over the axing of the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club 30 years ago, this is for people who take unserious TV seriously.”

The year of skipping

The slow way. The bizarre tradition of serial dramas and sitcoms is the attempt to mimic real life even though they’re clearly set in some alternate reality; so the ensemble cast of The West Wing, ER, Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, Friends, Babylon 5, even Alias, drift onward on a yearly basis for the length of their run, as we watch five to 10 years in the life of the characters, countless Christmases and birthdays. Read more

Here is a photograph of various people looking at something over our right shoulder

Further to Graham’s post about the Comic Relief launch yesterday, PopJustice has photographs.

“Big cheers for the first blue”

For the very interested, here is a full game report for yesterday’s jackpot episode of Deal or no Deal?: Read more

“I can assure you this worked perfectly in rehearsal”

It’s somewhat exciting to see Tomorrow’s World being used to highlight BBC’s technology reporting at the top of a BBC press release. Despite the parodying of Look Around You and the messing about with the format in later years, I still think of it fondly as it was the cornerstone of my viewing when I was growing up and really did seem like a weekly window into the future. As this wikipedia entry shows, they were often really, really accurate. TV Cream has a history of the show, with pictures. Read more

2006

Advancing years take away from us what we have inherited and give us what we have earned. Our relationship with television is a forever-burning example of this; the longer we feel we’ve hung around pouring our time and energy into watching it, the more we feel not merely blessed but actually owed an increasingly rarefied quality of enjoyment in return. Read more

This Life’s farewell tour

The Independent have a detailed report from the set of the new episode of This Life which they’re suggesting will be broadcast at Christmas time. Annoyingly, it’s very spoilery, and the kind of thing you’d want to save until you’ve seen the episode so that everything is a surprise - as I suggested here part of the fun of the episode will be discovering what has happened the gang since the mid-’90s. But if you cover up the first column, the second is a good discussion of the flavour of the new episode if not the details and why now seemed like the right time [via].

Some ordinary Joe

The Stage is reporting Kudos, the independent production company behind, Spooks, Hustle and Life On Mars has  been commissioned by ITV1 to create a new drama.  Read more

Like a…

Matthew’s comments on Lead Balloon are, at least for me, a sobering demonstration of how not everyone can agree on the quality of a programme. He’s correct in saying that it has had generally favourable reviews, although this is what I wrote on my own blog the night of the first episode, after banging my head against a table trying to come up with something longer: Read more

See you CITV

PM are reporting (I’m just listening to it now) that ITV have confirmed their decision to close Granada Kids which means they will no longer be producing new ITV children’s programmes, and have cancelled all commissioned shows from independents which includes My Parents are Aliens. Read more

More Miles to go

It had been rumoured as early as last year, but now the BBC have released information about plans for a 10 year reunion episode of Amy Jenkins’ This Life - although little has been said other than the whole original cast will be returning and some plot details: Read more

Reader, I Married Him

One of the criticisms of the documentaries that accompanied the BBC’s Big Read event was that, in places, the autobiography of the celebrity advocates overshadowed the books they were championing. Read more

Soap survivors

In recent years there haven’t been any truly innovative soap formats. Read more

Nothing exciting ever happens here

About 10 minutes ago all hell broke loose in the National Lottery studio. Read more

Howard returns

One of the joys of the web is that it allows televisual figures, who have loomed large in your past then seemed to disappear, to re-emerge and actually explain what they’ve been up to. Read more

I am a number

Being possibly the only science-fiction genre television watcher to have only seen one episode of The Prisoner, and with only a passing idea of what the series is about, I’m slightly non-plussed that Christopher Eccleston would decide to do only one series of Doctor Who before falling headlong into the starring role of Number Six in a revival of Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s series. Read more

The Chatterley Affair

On Sunday night, during the closing credits of the programme which proceeded a timely rerun of Ken Russell’s once controversial adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the announcer reminded the viewer that it featured, “Joely Richardson… and Sean Bean… and Sean Bean’s bottom”. Read more

The Apprentice

During last week’s episode of The Apprentice, two particular personalities were highlighted. Jo and Syed found it hard to make a good impression, simply because their estimation of what they needed to do and say, and what was actually required, were so wide of the mark. Read more

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