Up up and away

Today the idea of a mad loner silently avoiding attention seems like a quaint throwback.

You might think that in this country the reality show has taken over but the recent events over balloon boy across the water show we are lagging behind our American brothers.

As James Poiewiozig writes in Time Magazine

on Oct. 15, America spent an afternoon being literally distracted by a shiny object, watching news choppers chase a silver balloon that we were told carried a presumably terrified 6-year-old boy. When we learned during the coverage that Falcon Heene's family had twice appeared on ABC's Wife Swap, who didn't have the same thought? That if Falcon's parents would open their family life for a reality show, then they might also have planned ... but they wouldn't have, right?

Boxing Day ramblings

Boxing day is always a little of a anti climax.We wait so long for Xmas,then at a blink of an eye.....it's over.In this gap between supplies of food some ramblings

First of all something on last night's Xmas telly.Really was quite bad,the Doctor Who was turgid,70 mins of drivel.Catherine Tate was appalling,you could play guess the punchlines and what about the use of the F-word.Even though it was well past the watershed,how many kids would have been watching at 10.30 on Christmas day?

The only decent thing I have watched,apart from the Dad's army repeats, was the ITV,Xmas at the Riveria(Sky plussed from Xmas eve).A good old fashioned comedy farce,the ashes being put in the turkey and being pecked at by geese was something else).

The papers this morning are predictable,reports on the various speeches of our religious leaders and royal leaders and various tales of shopping sales,online trading etc.Why bother publishing?Give journalists another day off.

Read Allison Martin's piece on Press Gazette on how to survive the graveyard shift

The seemingly never-ending evening will be punctuated by pointless phone calls from drunk people with “World Exclusive” stories about spacecraft in Filey or with a bee in their bonnet about the number of repeats on TV, all of which would fail to make page 83 of a weekly local freesheet. However, these people are to be endured in the spirit of peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.

For a religious perspective at this time of year.check out Steve Borris writing on Xmas day who tells us

Modern Journalism has been typically skeptical, when not outright disdainful, of Christianity. In the movement’s founding work, Liberty and the News, Walter Lippmann declared journalism a new science for a new age when Man had finally come to his senses, no longer believing “that an omniscient and benevolent Providence taught [Man] what end to seek” and that it would now be “blazing arrogance to sacrifice hard-won standards of credibility” to such irrational beliefs

But we should be grateful because freedom of the press was first mooted in Genesis.That's the old testament,not the rock dinosaurs

which established that Man was created in God’s image, bestowing upon individuals a dignity that is not inevitably derived through use of reason alone.

The other purpose of the media in this time between xmas and New Year is to review the last 12 months.Jemima Kiss looks at what created the most traffic on Guardian Media and surprise,surprise it was reality Tv,no fewer than 10/20 entries,fuelled by the Shilpa Shetty episode back in January.

Anyway enough and back to eating and drinking

Thse judge that described Jeremy Kyle's show as "a human form of bear baiting "has in my opinion got the concept of mid morning Tv entertainment spot on.

The judge in the case at Manchester crown court went on to say that he felt the show's producers in setting up the conflict should have been in the dock as well as the defendants

Since its introduction to the Uk's Tv viewers ,this form of viewing is simply degrading.I have often wandered what sort of people willingly subject themselves to this form of publicity and to what end?

Perhaps this ruling will make producers think again?

UPDATE 27TH Sept


Benjamin Beasley-Murray writing in the Times

Time was when you could enjoy a spot of bear-baiting of a morning without having to endure the tut-tutting of the PC-gone-mad brigade. In Elizabethan times, Queenie herself was an ardent fan of the sport, while fighting bears – such as Sackerson, immortalised by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor – were the celebrities of their day.
Now that you have to traipse all the way to Pakistan to get yourself a bit of ursine fisticuffs, the nearest thing here is The Jeremy Kyle Show on ITV

An upbeat Kevin Lygo

So Channel 4 will be undertaking a change in its programming strategy around the 9 o' clock watershed according to Kevin Lygo speaking at the Edinburgh Tv festival

The axing of Celebratory Big Brother is getting all the headlines but it looks as though all the reality and factual entertainment programmes will be on the way out.

As the Channel approaches its 25th anniversary Lygo is surprisingly upbeat claiming that the channel still has a purpose and a personality being undeterred by controversy and determined to air the big issues.

It has been responsible for some of the best comedy and entertainment talent currently in Britain.

The channel has held its proportion of the total viewing figures in the UK against the onslaught of satellite whereas the BBC and ITV have seen theirs fall.

And the channel will continue to take risks and will be stronger for that reason.

Outlining his future plans for 4,he says that it will spend a lot less money on acquired series such as Friends etc as the price increases,investing the money in home grown talent instead.

And as for the 9 o'clock slot besides CBB,the axe will fall on Scrapheap Challenge,Brat Camp,It's me or the Dog and You are what you eat.

It is a lot of airtime to fill,29 hours alone for Celeb BB,and we await its replacement

On X Factor

With thousands of barbeque's cancelled over the weekend it must have surely been the bad weather that led to the opening episode of X Factor pulling in 10.7m viewers(half of the TV Audience) on Saturday night.

I will admit that I was on them although watching it delayed on Sky plus after catching up on the brilliant "Wilde" starring Stephen Fry.

Just what attracts people to the show,I am not sure.It certainly isn't the music,for as the show continues we put up with half rate musicians whose fame will rarely extend past the Xmas single market.

Shrouded in controversy this year,surely nobody believed that the scenes involving the comeback of Luis Walsh were anything other than manufactured.

The heart pulling moment of the singer who found her entry form whilst clearing her dead father's belongings has now been diminished by the fact that she was signed to Pete Waterman 18 years ago.

Maybe we just like laughing at the hopeless cases that are put before the camera including the pensioner that played tunes down her nose.

I wait to see how the viewing figures hold up in the coming weeks

Real life imitating Art ?

Staying with the New Statesmen,Brian Cathcart writes of the amount of column inches that the press are currently devoting to TV.

Emily Parr,The Apprentice,Any Dream will do,Grease is the word,the Diana documentary and the Sopranos have all filled our papers in recent days.

According to Brian,perhaps this is a case of real life imitating art

"One reason, a crude but powerful one, is the belief
among editors that newspapers can't afford not to write about what their readers
are talking about. So it's a sort of tango with the reader into the realm of
stupidity. Another reason, which the columnists are more likely to advance, is
that this is a proxy for reality. What happens between Emily and Charley or
between Alan and Katie may not be real, but it is an acting-out of events that
do happen in the real world, and so it gives everyone a chance to dissect and
understand those events."