Archive for the 'media' Category

The Eleventh Doctor

Published
by
blogmywiki
on April 4, 2010
in BBC, Doctor Who and TV
. 0 Comments

Well, of course I loved it. Matt Smith is great, he clearly ‘gets’ it - maybe playing it a little too much like David Tennant, but I’m not complaining. The Avengersesque rural England (ok, Wales pretending to be England) was a treat. Steven Moffat didn’t let us down, cheeky thing that he is. Amy Pond as a kissogram was a really, really sneaky ruse. But I think he got away with it. Just. (I was enjoying it in Freeview HD, but that’s another story. Really the detail is quite extraordinary… every fibre…)

Steven Moffat is a cheeky monkey

Ahem.

Yes, anyway. My only niggle… there had to be one… was a surprising one. I’d have told the story a bit differently at the start. I understand they need a bit before the main titles, but I didn’t like the Tardis out of control flying over London, even if it was making a point that they don’t ‘do’ London any more. It could have started with the Tardis crash landing in the garden, Amy’s reaction to it, drawn out a bit more - until eventually, just before the main titles… the Doctor appears from the box.

Also, the idea of Amy growing up with this possibly-imaginary friend called the Raggedy Doctor, the psychiatrists, her friend playing games with her, is such a good one, I cannot believe Steven Moffat didn’t make more of it. It’s thrown away in a few lines of dialogue. How delicous would it have been to spend the first 15 or 20 minutes with Amy growing up, no-one believing her, maybe without us even seeing the new Doctor at all until he reappears? Maybe we will come back to this story and the superb Caitlin Blackwood who played the young Amy - and is in real life the cousin of Karen Gillan. She almost acted everyone else off the screen.

Steven Moffat is coming to your living room

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 24, 2010
in BBC, Doctor Who and TV
. 0 Comments

New Doctor Who on the way and its new presiding genius - Steven Moffat - has given a nice interview to The Guardian. He’s the man behind The Empty Child and Blink, which is not the best episode of Doctor Who ever; it is the best piece of TV ever. Full stop.

Amongst gems in this interview are the line “all we writers really want to do is write a script, toss it over a wall and go out with strippers” and the revelation that in the last episode of the new series “practically everything” happens - “some of it twice”.

I can’t wait.

Best free iPhone apps

Published
by
blogmywiki
on March 10, 2010
in Apple, TV, internet and literature
. 3 Comments

   Captain Haddock

The shame of it… I had my brain surgically removed by a very nice man in the shop and he gave me a shiny new iPhone 3GS in exchange. In case you’ve not heard of the iPhone, it’s a bit like an iPad only it is not only conveniently pocket-sized, but all models come with 3G internet access and it includes a camera and something called a telephone. This is a point-to-point mobile voice telecommunication technology that, due to high take-up, could give Skype a run for its money.

Anyway, get an iPhone, you got to get apps. Five days in, here are my favourite free ones:

Gorillacam - camera that includes a spirit level, zoom, self-timer, time-lapse, anti-shake mode etc.

BBC iPlayer - I got confused by this as it’s not an app, it’s not in the Apple App Store - it’s a web page. But the iPlayer works on the iPhone!

Calendar - okay, this is built-in, but it syncs beautifully with iCal on my Hackintosh and my Google calendar.

iCarRadio lite - it’s an internet radio app. Not sure why you’d pay for a radio app when this seems to work just fine.

Stanza - free eBook reader. Lovely.

FileApp - allows you to get stuff on your iPhone like Word documents and browse them. Needs a computer on the same wireless LAN as the iPhone and an FTP client on the computer. It does not allow you to transfer files by USB (to be fair I think Apple do not allow this). But it’s free and it works.

TVCatchup - like the iPlayer, this is a web site not an app: http://iphone.tvcatchup.com. It allows you to watch live Freeview-type TV. Brilliant! Already used this to catch the top of Newsnight while snoozing.

I also bought my first two commercial apps this morning - the rather stupidly-named iSaidWhat?! (it’s marketed as a toy but is infact a sound recorder and editor) and The Grauniad. The Grauniad app is nice but I was listening to their tech podcast happily on my way to work, about two thirds of the way through, needed to snap a photo and then went back to The Guardian and I seemed to have to start downloading it again - so I’d have been better off downloading the podcast in iTunes and using it as an iPod…

Gaggle and Boxee

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 28, 2010
in TV, internet, media and music
. 0 Comments

Today I am mostly playing with the BBC iPlayer, Flickr and YouTube on the free Boxee media centre software on my netbook and listening to Gaggle… and yes, thank you very much to the person who said I should stick to Pixie Lott. You know who you are…

Perfect Lives

Published
by
blogmywiki
on February 26, 2010
in TV, Uncategorized, media and music
. 0 Comments

Channel 4 used to show stuff like this - Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD - even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.

Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.

Lauren Laverne on BBC 6Music

Published
by
blogmywiki
on December 10, 2009
in BBC, music and radio
. 0 Comments

This made me laugh out loud. So lovely to have mornings back again on 6Music… sigh. And I had that Holly Johnson in my studio a few weeks ago. I was sitting there playing out most of ‘Two Tribes’ on 5Live thinking - hang on, this is a speech network, we shouldn’t be doing this - with a big grin on my face.

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?

Published
by
blogmywiki
on November 6, 2009
in TV, children, family life, media, music and nostalgia
. 0 Comments

Sesame Street is 40 years old, and I did wonder this morning why my children can’t see it. Could this PBS show that aims to reach out to so many people, not be on free-to-air TV in the UK?

But it’s not on Sky. It’s not on Nickelodian. It’s not on TV at all in mainland Britain. I’m stunned.

I love Sesame Street for its humour, its colour… and the fact that it taught me to read before I went to school. And count to 10 in Spanish.

Gowing up in North Somerset was good for something: apparently HTV showed it before anyone else.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8340141.stm

Just a joke

Published
by
blogmywiki
on July 19, 2009
in cinema
. 0 Comments

I deleted Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from my PVR, but bits of it keep re-appearing.

The moon is a she unless it’s a he

Published
by
blogmywiki
on June 18, 2009
in cinema and literature
. 0 Comments

It has been suggested that I and a colleague may have now become the Pete and Dud of our office. Tragically I have to admit that Doug probably makes a better Peter Cook than me, although that means he has to go through a couple of bitter divorces and spend his twilight years pretending to be a Swedish fisherman, while I have to develop a club foot and bed a succession of nubile young women. It’s a work in progress.

Anyway, the other day he was on top form. Somehow we were talking about languages which give nouns gender and he said that the moon is not always female - the closer to the equator you get the more likely the moon is to be male. I was amazed by this. “You could write a book about it” he said, generously offering me his idea, “one you get for Christmas with a fake old-style leather cover. Could even be a film. KENNETH BRANAGH is COPERNICUS!”.

Genius, up there with Andy’s “Robert Plant and the Seedlings” line. You read it here first. Hollywood here we come.

Fused

Published
by
blogmywiki
on May 14, 2009
in cinema
. 0 Comments

This is an excellent little film…