scandals revealed by bloggers in New Zealand

  • Deborah Hill Cone: Bloggers get more bitter by the day
  • Mostly for the title and reading about scandals revealed by bloggers in New Zealand.

  • Letter From America by Alistair Cooke in New York
  • A complete archive from the BBC of the final five years of Letter From America in transcript and some audio. Here he is on the death of old media in January 2000.

  • Gaby Wood on the US TV phenomenon In Treatment
  • I was having a conversation today about how poorly scheduled television is today and how no one seems to want to take risks. So the BBC decide to bung The Weakest Link on every day before the news in perpetuity in a slot which could accommodate documentaries or new drama neither of which need to be that much more expensive and done well enough would find an audience. Failing that why not an intelligent import like In Treatment which is designed to be stripped across the week and would offer a useful alternative to the chat shows, game shows and rerun detective dramas on elsewhere.

  • Matthew McConaughey’s Next 10 Movie Posters
  • I honestly thought the first one was the spoof -- surely there's no way Jennifer Garner would turn up for something this formulaic -- yet, that's the real one. Which somehow makes the fakes all the funnier.

  • Space-Based Storm Control
  • "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die..."

  • Low-Fi Sci-Fi
  • Inevitably I'd like to see the version for Doctor Who and the Daleks. Might I propose a tall spiral in the shape of the pepperpots, with the title and author around the curved edges?

  • An appreciation of Dexys' "Come On Eileen”
  • "“Eileen” is at once a chantalong fiddle-fuelled novelty, an enduring public pop landmark and the biggest hit of a band whose integrity was dearer to them than fame or sales or, well, anything. It is also, of course, partly a pop record about loving pop records, whose beautiful opening lyrics are some of the most evocative I know."

  • The TV Industry Must Avoid Acronym Hell
  • PVR? DVR? Sky+ed. Freeviewed?

  • Panasonic first with UK Blu-ray recorder
  • Why do I still want one with a VHS player?

  • Very Diff’rent Strokes
  • Bernard Herman scores 80s tv.

  • Film Director Mike Figgis and Tate Liverpool work together on film project
  • "Four works of art from Tate’s Collection will be taken into separate locations around the city, including the hardware store, Rapid, and Liverpool University’s Guild of Students, where members of the public will be invited to talk about the works in these new contexts."

  • Man Plays Simpsons and Star Trek Themes... At the...
  • He's the new wizard of speed and time.

  • Oliver Burkeman on the future of US Republican party
  • Two and a half in months people and he's done more for you than the other guy did in eight years. In the following clip, notice that the reporter from CNN completely fails to ask the most important question. "Do you even know what fascism is?"

    1 comment:

    Rob Buckley said...

    The problems with In Treatment, the first season of which I loved but I haven't yet started on the second season, are:

    a) It was on five days a week and even though each day had a separate patient, there was some interaction between patients (so Blair Underwood bumps into Melissa George, they start dating, and that affects both their sessions), the Friday slot was a review of the week with Byrne's therapist and so you'd get spoiled if you watched it and before you know it, you have a backlog of dozens of episodes (there were about 50 or so in the first season, IRC). It's one of the reasons that the second season of In Treatment is being show two episodes a night for only a few nights each week.
    b) It did crap in the ratings.