Quote of the Week VII: Adrian's Revenge

This week's Quote of the Week, is rather topical, and will be censored for those younger readers.

Anyone in the UK must have been living under a rock if they had missed the public sector strike, followed by an ill-timed joke from Tory posterboy Jeremy Clarkson. There's a debate to be had on whether he was joking (he clearly was), whether he should be fired for it (in an ideal world no, but he should at least suffer the same punishment as Ross and Brand, a precedent set by the BBC) and whether Britain can't take a joke (unfortunately, it's clearly getting to the point where we can't). I don't like Clarkson, I don't enjoy Top Gear and I think he's an arse; but he was clearly just joking.

Anyway, of the back off all this, my friend made the following comment, which made me laugh and I agreed with entirely:

"I always thought Clarkson was a c***, and now everyone will think I'm just jumping on the bandwagon."

Truer and truer.

The Trans-Atlantic Scheduling Conflict

The other day I was talking about Dexter, and I mentioned the (frankly insane) amount of time that it takes some UK TV channels to show American imports. This was something that was fine in the eighties and nineties, because back then, UK fans didn’t really know what was going on with US television anyway, and regardless, there was no other way for them to watch the show, short of having a friend or relative in America video (yes, how dated is this reference now) the show for them, then air mail it over. Even then, it would only work if you had one of those funky VCRs that played both British and American video tapes.

Then came the internet, to be specific dial up internet, giving us Brits access to amazon.com and playusa.com, where, if you had a multi-regional DVD player, you could buy exorbitantly priced American DVDs of your favourites shows, pay the ridiculous shipping charges, and then be ahead of all of your friends whilst they waited months and months for Channel 4 or the BBC to show episodes that had aired in America up to a year before.

But then came illegal downloading and streaming, which was a game changer for the more forward thinking of TV companies. People were no longer content to be months and months behind their American cousins when it came to their favourite shows, and rather than waiting for TV companies to pull their finger out and air the show, they’d just watch it directly online. Sky found a way around this by showing LOST just days after it was aired in the US, ending with them simulcasting the final episode at the same time that it was shown in America. Now Sky Atlantic airs shows like Game of Thrones and Entourage the day after they’re shown in the states, making downloading them illegally impossible to justify. Paramount has followed suit with South Park, and Sky1 looks to be doing the same with Glee.

Not that I ever would justify it. To make it clear, I’m not condoning people downloading things illegally, I’m saying that I understand why they do it. If they pay for a channel like FX, and FX are showing Dexter in six months, why not just download it now? They would have watched it in six months anyway and they’re still paying for the channel, so in theory there are no losers, right? Wrong. And this is what really annoys me about the channels that are stuck in the nineties when it comes to US scheduling; the more people that watch a show when it’s on television, the better the ratings are, and the better the ratings are, the better the advertising revenue is. The more advertising revenue there is, theoretically, the more that channel can invest in shows. And that’s what I don’t understand about TV schedulers. Love or hate internet streaming/downloading, it’s a fact of modern existence. You can’t just close your eyes and wish it wasn’t there. The quicker they air their US imports, the more viewers that they’ll have, and ergo, the more they can charge for advertising slots.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about the practicalities of scheduling, but surely, even if there’s a greater cost to air a show within a week of it broadcasting in the US, that money can be recouped by increased advertising revenue? Maybe I’m just being too logical about it.

Ultimately though, whilst FX holds the rights to True Blood, Burn Notice and Dexter, UK viewers will remain a season behind their American counterparts. I have no idea what Comedy Central is doing with 30 Rock and The US Office, but their scheduling is so all over the place that perhaps they’ve shown the new series of these but just buried them in a midnight slot. God knows, now they’ve bought the rights to Friends that’s all we can expect from them every evening from 6 until 10. Which is their prerogative. I don’t own Comedy Central or FX, and if their owners think the delay appropriate (or more realistically cost effective), who am I to argue? I’m not a TV executive, and so I’m not qualified to make those decisions. Unfortunately though, whilst they are scheduling in this way, I fear that illegal downloading will only become more prevalent.  And downloading TV shows is a gateway crime, which leads to illegal music and film downloads. And sadly, a lot of it could be avoided by smarter scheduling.

But then again, that’s just my opinion.

I can catch them on the radio

Trumping all other film reviews, stage show reviews and my other generally irritating observations on pop culture,  is the fact that last night, whilst listening to the BBC Radio 5 Wittertainment podcast, I heard Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode reading out my review of Fright Night.


You can download the podcast here, it's the Fright Night (02 Sept 2011) one, and I'm about 45-50 mins in.


Fame at last!

No shiznit Sherlozzle

Last weekend I finally sat down to watch “Sherlock” which I’ve heard a number of people, not least of which my brother-in-law Rob, go absolutely mad for. I was somewhat dubious about whether the show would be as good as everyone said, especially as it’s written by the guy who writes Doctor Who, which as I’ve said before I’m not a huge fan of. I know, I know, they’re coming to take away my sci-fi nerd membership card as we speak.

Fortunately for me the series didn’t disappoint. Martin Freeman is an excellent lynchpin as Watson, and Bernard Cumberbatch’s Holmes manages to be both annoying and likeable. It was a good move to keep with the tradition of telling the story from Watson’s perspective, as too much of Holmes would have shifted him completely into the “more annoying than entertaining” camp.

The stories are all gripping, with only the second episode not quite fitting in with the overarching Moriarty storyline (he is mentioned but it feels a little tacked on), but when the storytelling is this good, who cares?

At first the concept of having text messages imposed onto the screen was annoying, but I made my peace with it; only the superimposed street signs during the chase sequence of the first episode annoyed me, as I just felt they were trying too hard to be different. The only other thing that jarred slightly was the music, but only because it felt like they’d lifted it directly from the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes film with Robert Downey Jr from a couple of years ago.

The series as a whole was very entertaining and the series feels a lot like Jonathon Creek, which I’m sure was probably originally based on Sherlock Holmes anyway.

Overall a thoroughly entertaining watch and I’m looking forward to the second season. I only wish the BBC could only make more shows like this and less reality television. Oh well, guess we can’t have it all.