Posts Tagged ‘tv’

After an extensive hiatus, in which it was basically ended but then it turned out that none of the actors really had much to do, Red Dwarf returned with a ninth series in 2009 with Back to Earth. It was disappointing.

Thankfully, when it returned for a full six episode series in 2012, it was much improved. Instead of trying some kind of clever, existential plot, they just made six episoded of The Dwarf, as if nothing had changed. The result is that it worked! Six more classic episodes added to the series, without ruining the legacy.

The Simpsons has entertained the world for a quarter of a century. Star Trek has become one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the 20th century. But there is one TV franchise that has arguably eclipsed them all. That franchise, is Miami Vice creator Dick Wolf’s Law & Order.

While other glitzy shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation focused on solving exciting crimes and interpersonal relationships, one man had the vision to predict that what people really wanted, was a show about the paperwork, procedure and bureaucracy of the justice system.

It’s interesting then, that so many people may not have heard of Law & Order, even fewer will have watched an episode – at least in comparison to The Simpsons, which everyone ever has seen.

But the figures don’t lie. In terms of longevity, Law & Order has provided a staying power that is arguable unmatched by anything else the TV studies of the United States have ever produced.

The Simpsons has produced 24 seasons, with no spin off shows. Even if you throw in Futurama, that only takes them to 28.

Star Trek produced three original series, seven of The Next Generation, seven of Deep Space Nine, seven of Voyager and five of Enterprise, as well as one animated series – giving them a total of 30.

Meanwhile, the Law & Order franchise has produced…

• Law & Order (20 series)
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (14 series and counting)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (10 series)
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury (1 series)
• Law & Order: LA (1 series)

That makes a total of 46 seasons, with SVU still going, and that isn’t counting Law & Order: UK which has been going since 2009, and similar versions in Paris and Moscow as well.

No, he hasn’t announced another documentary.

But he has done what some might consider the next best thing – and produced not one, but two lists of documentaries that he thinks are awesome. I haven’t checked any of them out yet, but I plan to. You can find the lists here and here.

Having been struck down with the flu most of last week, I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed, watching Jonathan Creek.

It’s actually not that old, the first episode was broadcast in 1997, but it’s certainly starting to show its age. Floppy disks, VHS cassettes, an age before you could and would look up everything on the internet – it feels like a historial drama now. Not to mention that the first few episodes weren’t even in widescreen.

It also left me with a very torn feeling – I don’t want to move out of the city but at the same time, I now have a strong desire to live in a windmill. Tough call.

I’m also very pleased to see that they are making a brand new episode of Jonathan Creek, that will appear this Easter as a one off feature length episode!

Just need a new Louis Theroux documentary now and it will be the best Easter ever…

I’ve started using a spare computer monitor as a TV in my bedroom so that I could hook it up to my laptop and stream programmes onto a bigger screen when I wanted to.

However, it’s irritating having to cable everything up, so I purchased an Apple TV to stream directly to it. So far my experience has been on the whole positive, with a few drawbacks.

Set up was reasonably easy, and now I have it up and running, on both my laptop and my iPad I am able to select AirPlay mirroring and begin mirroring my screen onto my TV; it also sends the sound.

That said, not everything works perfectly. Here is how it looks so far:

• Videos in iTunes mirror though there doesn’t seem to be a volume control I can activate from the iPad
• TVCatchUp mirrors but without any volume control
• BBC iPlayer mirrors from my iPad, and lets me control the volume with the iPad volume control
• 4od blocks mirroring from my iPad
• NFL GamePass mirrors from my iPad and lets me control the volume
• Sky Go blocks mirroring from my iPad

It is worth noting that even though Sky think they’re being clever by blocking AirPlay mirroring on the iPad, I can just open up the video stream in a browser on my desktop, full screen it and AirPlay mirror my entire laptop screen.

The built app apps for Apple TV are pretty useless though. They don’t have any apps for iPlayer, 4od, GamePass or Sky Go (and even if they did, I can only have two devices on Sky Go anyway), so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much with my Apple TV than mirroring a different device to it.

It would certainly be nice if I could use it as a standalone box to watch things on, but until they open it up for third party apps, I can’t see me getting much use out of it that way.

Having heard another talk about the BBC’s technology side on Sunday, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be a pretty awesome place to work.

While they don’t perhaps have the funds that private sector organisations do, I guess I assumed that being a public institution that would be large and lumbering, risk adverse and slow to react.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, they use Scrum. Scrum is an agile methodology used for developing software in the real world (ie, a world where the client is always changing their mind). But they don’t just use it for software – they use it for managing projects right across the business.

Secondly, they’re really up on technology. The speaker on Sunday was telling me about how they had developed an open source project for parsing Gherkin – a lot of software developers might not even know what Gherkin is!

They’ve also previously developed their own JavaScript library, which was a contender alongside jQuery and Prototype (you know, before everyone accepted jQuery was the best, but then everyone realised you could actually just use selectors and not load any library at all).

Not to mention the pioneering work with iPlayer. They launched iPlayer in 2007 – that is five years ago! I can’t really remember a time before iPlayer now, but I don’t think there was many other people doing it at the time. Not to mention that they also have iOS and Android apps available for it too.

In reality, the BBC is no lumbering institution at all – it’s an fast moving, agile, technology-savvy organisation that must be amazing to work at.

I got Sky Go so that I could watch the live Formula One and NFL. I pay for NFL GamePass but unfortunately even though I’m paying a lot of money for it, they still black out any games that Sky Sports are showing.

Overall, I’m disappointed.

Firstly, I can only put it on two devices. Now I have loads – a laptop, a phone, a work computer, a tablet, all of which I would like to use it on depending on situation. But I can’t, because I can only register two devices.

Secondly, they have disabled display mirroring, so I can’t plug my iPad into a TV and watch it on there. It’s just stupid though, because I can just plug my laptop into a TV and do it that way, so they’re not stopping anything.

Streaming has worked quite well though. I was able to stream last Sunday night’s NFL with only a few stops for buffering and it looks pretty good on my 27″ screen.

Recently, BBC Three began showing World Series of Dating. It’s a trash TV as it sounds – there are four booths each with a different girl in it, and male constants come on and attempt to date them for as long as possible – if the girl gets bored she will hit the buzzer in the middle of the table and that constant will be out.

Despite it’s lack of any intellectual value however, I’ve found myself strangely addicted. Perhaps because it got me through a long night of illness when there was nothing else on at 5am in the morning and I now associate warm memories with it, but it’s actually intriguing for some reason.

However, I think I’ve figured out the reason why. There is a fine line between “doesn’t take itself too seriously” trash TV and incredibly clever parody, and I now suspect that the show lies slightly past said line.

I could have accepted the fact that one of the girls on the show is called Bambi – it’s a silly name but the reality of our modern society is that it is entirely plausible that someone would call their child that. And if someone did, they would almost certainly wear too much fake tan and end up being on a show like World Series of Dating, so that doesn’t strike me as contrived.

However, given the constant references to this being the British version of the show, something didn’t really fit there. It didn’t seem like a show that would be popular with the American market and a quick Google search confirmed that the show is an entirely original creation here in Britain.

That means that Rob Riggle never presented the US version of WSOD, nor did Bentley Kalu ever referee it. Indeed, Poppy Weathers isn’t even a real person, she is played by Thaila Zucchi, an actor who I’ve never heard of because her acting consisted of an appearance on Big Brother 8 as fake house mate, a show which I stopped watching after it ran out of original ideas (ie, I didn’t watch the second series onwards).

Having these fake back stories and fictional hosts, takes it over the line from comedic trash television to clever parody – and that’s why it’s OK for me to enjoy it 😉 . We can safely take the high ground pointing out to those who claim it’s intellectually defunct that “they simply don’t get it.”

Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a one off 30 minute comedy by Ricky Gervais entitled “Derek”.

I only heard about the controversy in passing before the show, with some people claiming that it was mocking people with learning difficulties. How you make that decision before you’ve even watched it I’m not sure quite sure, though I suppose you could base it, albeit badly, on the short trailers that Channel 4 had been broadcasting.

In the end, I didn’t find it offensive at all. Or funny really. Karl Pilkington had a few good lines in there but overall, it was reasonably humour free. It was however, incredibly moving. Well worth a watch.

We make some pretty shocking television in Britain. For those who live elsewhere, they see what the US has sent them – shows like Friends, Scrubs and CSI, and think “yeah, that United States really make some kick ass television.” Then they look at the programmes we export and find such titles as X-Factor and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.

Both those shows were created in the UK and both have been hugely successful in franchising to the rest of the world.

It’s therefore easy to look at the shows we have managed to export, while our true gems like The Office and Sherlock simply get re-made by the US, missing the genius of the people behind the original series which made it so great in the first place, not to mention the best television we put out, shows like Horizon and Human Planet being largely ignored, and become depressed about our success in selling our output to the rest of the world.

But there is one show which has successfully gone out into the big wide world and carved out an international relationship. Top Gear. And why not? It’s a fantastic TV show.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Top Gear. Its reinvention in 2002 was a stroke of genius – time after time people say “I love Top Gear! I’m not interested in the cars, but the rest of it is brilliant.” That’s the genius, especially with the specials, it’s a really cool travel documentary about three friends that happen to be driving cars at the time.

Even those that do object to the show are usually only objecting to the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is one of the most offensive people on TV at the moment. Granted, he does say a lot of inappropriate things but then his TV personality is set up to be controversial – he is a man who is paid to have strong opinions.

As a result, the British version of the show is one of the most watched TV shows around the world. It has readily topped the list of most downloaded TV shows, indeed in 2007 it was the second most downloaded show of the entire year, beaten only be Heros and topping Lost, Prison Break, 24 and Family Guy, the most popular shows coming out of the US at the time.

Add to that the spin-off franchises which exist in Australia, the United States, Korea, China and Russia and you have one of the most popular TV shows currently produced in the UK.

Of course, for a rather differing opinion, you might want to check out Stewart Lee’s opinion.