This show, was pretty good. But there was some misses. At least for me. The whole bit with the robotic tv host… big miss there. The bit with Sherlock Holmes really didn’t work for me either. The BBN news bit was also a bit odd, although the ending made me laugh.
Some real hits in the show though. The Cillit Bang parodies were spot on, and the ‘how to get married’ scene was really good. I quite liked the Big Brother parody too.
It looks like a promising show though.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
I was watching The Simpsons on Channel 4 today, and they played the special Channel 4 Simpsons ident:
It occurred to me just how amazingly clever most idents are. Not only that, but underrated. Every day, these play out before countless programs, but we don’t really ‘watch’ them as such, because it’s just filler as far as we’re concerned.
Channel 4 have this whole range of wonderful idents:
Which again, I think are just great. In a matter of seconds, they do something visually very compelling, yet at the same time, it’s ‘reinforcing the brand’, to use a bit of marketing lingo. I’m glad the days of a static channel logo are gone. I always rather enjoyed the old idents BBC Two used with the little animated/robot numeral doing all sorts of silly things on screen. BBC One has also had some quite nice stuff. I remember MTV2 (back when it was worth watching) had some incredibly nice idents. They were visually very simple, and oddly, were tied in closely with the website. As I recall, the same company did them.
I started thinking about the lead-ins BBC News 24 use as bits of filler, with the count downs.
This one is great. It shows both the stories, and the making of the stories.
This one is just great. NOTHING HAPPENS!!! There’s a countdown, and then that’s it! I watched it, and yet at the end of it I was still hooked into it. The music builds, and I’m watching this countdown expecting something to happen, even though I know full well it’s just the ident, and I’m watching it on YouTube! Quite impressive I think.
Of course, this one is probably the best:
Personal Video Recorders are wonderful things. You bung stuff into the programme guide, and it goes off and records things for you. Next thing you know, there’s a ton of things to watch.
The trouble I’m having, is that at the moment there’s plenty of new series starting up, which I’m recording, but in the three hours or so I have in the evening between dinner and going to bed, I just don’t seem to manage to watch them all! So my weekends are taken up with trying to watch things to catch up. I’m not complaining though – I’d rather have a load of stuff worth watching, than all those channels having nothing on.
The real killer is films. I record a few of those, and there’s a good day’s worth of TV watching to do. Keeps me occupied though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NScqmL5EQY
From a TV show called Mega Moves (or Monster Moves, Huge Moves or Impossible Moves, depending on where you are). A church was being moved in Iowa, and followed for the TV show. The producers decided to do something different, and did this.So cool!Article about it here too.
For the record, I tried posting the video on this page, but it screwed up the layouts. Something else to fix then!
The BBC have this little article about Channel 4 making a documentary whereby they take some members of a pygmy tribe, and see how they cope living in London. It’s a reversal of the usual method of dropping some random urbanite into the wilderness with some ancient tribe and seeing how they cope.
A nice idea, I first thought, but as I mulled it over more, I realised it is going to be on Channel 4. If it was Discovery, National Geographic or the BBC making it, it would be a worthwhile programme. Channel 4 are probably likely to do their usual thing of making the show 50% worthwhile, and then doing some other totally stupid things. Stupid OBVIOUS things. So, my current bets for the silly things they’ll try and make their pygmies do are:
I could be wrong about this – I hope I am – but Channel 4′s documentaries aren’t exactly known for being all that great. Then again, it could be worse. It could be Channel 5.
I got this in an email newsletter from Paramount Comedy. It’s a small collection of shorts Paramount tend to whack in when there’s some slack in the schedules. I saw them a while ago and they really are very funny. I hoped they’d end up online so more people could see them. So now they are! Go watch them!
When I first saw them I thought they were real bits of film, but having seen them all together it’s obvious that it’s two possible actors who know what’s going on. I wonder if they were originally filmed to be doing something else, or something. Either way, I like these!
The phone company Three seem to outdo themselves with wierd adverts. They certainly seem to ‘work’, as I’m not only talking about them, but linking to them on my blog, and I get no money for this.
It’s just such a wierd advert. As is this one. They’ve got a whole ‘other world’ quality to them, and a very wierd style that I like. I prefer the current crop over the older animated ones with the homicidal little creatures; they were a bit too wierd in my mind.
Yup… I have to admit it. I’ve been watching a lot of Spongebob Squarepants lately. Yes, really. Stop laughing.
Seriously though, it’s one of those cartoons, like Animaniacs or Rocko’s Modern Life which is for more than just kids. There’s certainly plenty of slapstick and sillyness for kids to enjoy, but I can’t help but feel a lot of the jokes would pass kids by, but adults get them and laugh anyway. I love how the show mixes the odd bits of ‘live’ video with the animation too, sometimes in the same scene, other times flicking back and forth. It’s a nice concept, and it works well. The characters are good – there’s a depth to them that many other cartoons miss.
I saw The Spongebob Squarepants Movie the other day too, and was pleased to see it was basically a long normal episode – often when something is made into a film it loses something, but the movie was just as funny.
It really is great. Go watch it now!
I got Season 3 of Scrubs on DVD the other day. I’ve been watching it every day before I go to bed. I’m on the second disk (of four) at the moment, and I’ve been noticing random corruption. On my ‘proper’ DVD player (i.e. one of the ones plugged into the TV… yes, I have two) it would corrupt and lock up. For a moment I though it was the DVD player, seeing as how it’s about four or more years old now, and it gets used every day. I’d be a bit miffed if it was, as it’s a damn good player (Pioneer DV-444 for those who care).
Anyway, I decided to try the disk in the PC as well, just to check. Of course, I had no idea where specifically it had done it, so I had to scoot through a few episodes to find a place I vaguely recalled seeing it. Luckily I found it, and so it seems the disk is faulty.
I thought I’d try sending it directly back to Buena Vista (the distributors) and getting them to replace it. The UK site has a email link, which I dutifuly sent my little complaint to. I immediately received a bounced reply – no reason for it, it just came back. It looks like I’m going to have to send it back to play.com, which means sending the whole lot back. I don’t want to do that until I’ve watched them all now, so it’ll have to wait a week or two.
On another note, I’ve been trying to find a way to send an eMac I’m selling to somebody. All the main delivery companies, such as Citylink, UPS, Parcelforce, Fedex, et al, seem quite happy to take your business if you are a business customer with an account, but if you want to send a one-off package (as I do) then forget it. From what I can see, only Citylink seem to have a fairly open-ended process which has a ‘this is a one-off’ tickbox. Citylink’s new website is almost useless, and gives next to no information, even though they are the cheapest. Oh well!
Ordinarily, I’m no fan of TV dramas, tending to aim for the comedies more. Now and then, there’s something that crops up that catches my attention, and I find myself watching intently. Life On Mars is a new BBC drama about a Manchester policeman, only with a twist. The lead character Sam Tyler (played by John Simm) is your average Detective Inspector. His ex-girlfriend and colleague is snatched by a muderer he’s trying to track down. Hearing that she’s been taken, he takes an emotional drive, which leads to him being run down after getting out of his car. Next thing we know, he’s lying in the middle of a disused factory, soon to be the site of the new bypass he was just run over on. The year is now 1973, and Sam finds himself confused, and lost. Is he in a coma and dreaming? Has he somehow travelled back in time? Or is it something else? He doesn’t know, but finds his way to the same police station he left earlier, albeit thirty years previous. Sam finds himself fighting against his superior, Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister), and somewhat old-fashioned policing methods. His only support comes from WPC Annie Cartright (Liz White), and he’s left trying to work out what exactly is going on.
This series is truly great, on levels of drama, comedy, and the mystery surrounding the overal storyline. It’s not immediately obvious if Sam actually is in a coma or not; after his accident we’re taken back to 1973 with him, and don’t go back into 2006 at all. Various things happen which could suggest he’s hearing the outside world, such as doctors talking about a patient being in a coma, but Sam will sometimes turn and find a radio playing a radio play which happens to be about the same thing.
It’s an intrigueing storyline, something which keeps you enthralled, whilst Same and Gene find themselves warring over how best to apprehend various criminals. I wonder what direction the show will go in later on, whether we will find out the reason for his time jump. I certainly hope so! I know I’m going to be glued to the rest of this series for sure though.
