Television

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Watching this clip from Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe, if you ignore the contextual news snippets you could have been forgiven for thinking it was thrown together yesterday, rather than last year.

Of course, the chance that anyone in the media would have listened to it is virtually nil, given that it just wants to draw in more readers/viewers: however, even now, in the aftermath of the Whitehaven shootings, the papers, in particular, have demonstrated that they’re willing to veer once again on the side of acrimoniously bad taste in order to flog their outmoded rags.

They’re known as the vulture press for a good reason. While I’m not pretending for any moment that the Whitehaven massacre was a minor event, as Brooker mentioned in the above video, blanket coverage only serves to turn this murdering twat into a nihilistic antihero – and, as far as the media’s concerned, it’s a great way to sell more papers.

There’s a longer discussion of these at Enemies of Reason (incidentally, one of my favourite blogs about the dead-tree press) but my attention was drawn to this one: specifically, how absolutely fucking horrid it was.

The headline in question

It’s physically sickening to think that an editor greenlit that: someone, presumably a well-educated human being, thought it was perfectly acceptable, less than twenty-four hours after a lone gunman senselessly murdered twelve innocent people, to be printing photographs of his fucking family.

Oh well, it’s not all doom and gloom – hey, look! On the side! That’s Kelly fucking Brook, in a bikini! Hah, the presence of her tits almost makes the voyeuristic murder-porn on the left acceptable. (or not, in case your sarcasm detector’s got dandelions stuck in it).

Need we need any more evidence that the dead-tree press should be left to rot? No.

Will people continue to read it? As long as there are gullible people who actually find this sort of thing acceptable, yes. Sad, but true.

What's the difference between Nick Griffin and Hitler? A bullet in the cranium. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Mrmurrey)

What's the difference between Nick Griffin and Hitler? A bullet in the cranium. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia user Mrmurrey)

Well, despite the best attempts of Unite Against Fascism, Commander Arsewipe Supreme Nicholas “Adolf” Griffin of the British Fascist C**thive has appeared on Question Time.

Nick Griffin‘s appearance was, to put it simply, a complete and utter car crash. I was initially rather disappointed he wasn’t being faced by Diane Abbot, Shami Chakrabarti, Richard Dawkins and Iain Dale… but the panel (even Jack Straw and Baroness Warsi) gave him an utter kicking. Even David Dimbleby caught him with his trousers down.

Bonnie Greer, in particular, was incredibly strong, and it was particularly wonderful to see her, as a black person, being so cool and collected and calmly destroying his arguments. However, Griffin certainly did a lot of the work for the panel, by being more gigglesome than a Loose Women presenter in what appeared to be an attempt to appear like a “normal” member of the panel.

Griffin certainly wasn’t destroyed by the incident, but he was certainly dented. Of course, he’s now spinning for his life by claiming the BBC put him against a “mob”, but that’s just his usual tactic.

Either way, Nick Griffin has demonstrated himself with his cringeworthy performance to be the demented fuckwit that he is… however, UAF were a boon to his defence with their attempts to breach Television Centre.

Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to have stolen much of the programme’s thunder: even the Daily Express‘s front page today called Griffin a “disgrace to humanity”. (The Daily Mail, of course, took the opportunity to blame it on the BBC.)

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I haven’t really been watching the BBC’s new science show, Bang Goes the Theory, but after hearing both positive and negative comments about it I decided to watch Episode 1 on the iPlayer.

446bang

From left to right: Dr. Yan Wong, Jem Stansfield, Liz Bonnin and Dallas Campbell

At first, things didn’t look good. The person who appeared to be the show’s frontman, a man called Dallas Campbell, who I’ve never heard of, introduced the show with a hyped-up monologue that was in no way reminiscent of MythBusters. (A quick examination of Campbell’s biography indicates he’s an actor and writer. Oh dear. No scientists?)

After the titles, we’re thrown into what looks like something between Battersea Power Station and an overgrown untidy shed. We then learn this is the studio, where we see a presenting style that seems like an uneasy mix of Top Gear and Blue Peter. Only Campbell, Jem Stansfield and Liz Bonnin (the latter two of whom, I’m told, are scientists) are present in the studio, as allegedly, the fourth presenter, Dr. Yan Wong (who apparently wrote a book with Richard Dawkins) has an intellect “too big to fit into the studio”. (In short, that means he’s the roving reporter, whose job it is to mingle with the Great Unwashed and show the public that science isn’t as shit as science class makes it out to be.)

After a brief introduction, we’re shown the first pre-recorded segment, a film that begins by talking about CCTV, and how incredibly easy it is to fool a CCTV operator by changing clothes and walking with somebody else inside a building. OK… not so much science so far.

We’re then shown the University of Southampton’s project for measuring someone’s “gate” (that is, their posture and stride that is unique enough to act as a fingerprint.) Put simply, it’s a long tunnel with coloured blocks on the walls, and an array of cameras all feeding into a computer. Hurrah. Now we’ve actually got some science involved.

Initially, this didn’t look hopeful either. Before Campbell makes his first proper walk down the lane to register his gate with the system, he plays the fool and does it as if it were a cat walk. I didn’t laugh. It wasn’t funny. And then, as a voiceover explained how the system worked, we saw some terminal output that looked like it was specifically designed to show how “hi-tech” this system was.

However, when the system recognises Campbell’s and Bonnin’s gate, it turns out this terminal output flying past is in fact the output of the program, as demonstrated when it outputs a table of the closest matches. This pleased me. It wasn’t visuals for visuals’ sake.

However, before we leave, Campbell can’t help acting like an utter pillock again by doing another walk down the lane, jumping up and down, impersonating a breakdancer, and generally making you feel like throwing rotten tomatoes at the television screen.

The next film featured Jem Stansfield building a vortex cannon to ‘blow a house down’. Starting with scale models, cheering when it works… hmm… reminds me of something And, typically, it’s broken partway through to be continued later in the programme.

J. Craig Venter. Image courtesy of <a href=

J. Craig Venter. Image courtesy of Public Library of Science

The next film we’re shown sees Bonnin (so far my favourite out of the presenters) heading out to interview J. Craig Venter. Yes. Seriously. And she even mentions the scientific controversy and the ethics behind it.

The interview takes place aboard Sorcerer II and she discusses artificial lifeforms with Venter in an informative and interesting interview. Venter even mentions the word scalable – THIS IS PRIME TIME BBC1!

And then, it all comes tumbling down as they link out of the film with Campbell saying, in his annoying and patronising voice, “that was such an interesting film.” Ugh. He’s a pain.

We’re then shown a segment with the roving reporter, Dr. Yan Wong, who shows the public how to fry an egg in a paper container. Am I the only one who’s noticed his resemblance to Jimmy Carr, but with glasses? It’s his habit of raising one eyebrow when talking. It’s suspicious.

Yan presents an informative, if somewhat frivolous film, saturated, of course, with completely uninformative vox pops from the public. “Ugh… that doesn’t look edible,” one woman says. As if I care.

I should make it clear here: I don’t have a problem with humour in science programmes, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of the science. The vox pops seemed unnecessarily frivolous. And then, a word from Campbell, who complains that he recently bought an expensive frying pan and now realises he shouldn’t have bothered. Brilliant. Not.

And finally, we see the end of the big film, with Jem allegedly blowing down a house of bricks (in reality, slightly demolishing a small wall of bricks that aren’t even cemented together) using his vortex cannon. The whole thing plays out like a poor remake of MythBusters. True, Jem doesn’t have the same “piss you off” factor as Campbell, who desperately needs to cut back on the infantile humour, but the point where he alone cheered as the wall slightly collapsed was rather disappointing. Common sense would dictate that you would turn it into a “spectacle” – i.e. have the whole presenting team there. And also, at some point, I swear he said they were trying to get the right mix of explosive to air, before explaining what “the right mix” was. Seriously. We know. We’re not stupid.

Overall, Bang Goes The Theory wasn’t too bad, but it needs several things fixing:

  • Liz Bonnin needs to be at the helm. She’s the perfect presenter. Also, the Top Gear presenting style needs to be improved – the format doesn’t work for every programme (just remember how they butchered Gardener’s World with such a style.)
  • Dallas Campbell needs to cut back on the poor humour. I’m sure he’s a relatively competent presenter, but infantile jokes just irritate the audience. He arses around like a student.
  • For god’s sake, the big experiments have to stop being such rip-offs of MythBusters.

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