Intelligent? No. Big Brother housemate? Yes.
Not quite as strange as last year, but not exactly BB4 contestants either (thank goodness).
Alan Carr sums it up nicely: “They should have played circus music when they came out … complete loons.”
Pete to win! (obviously Endemol’s pick)
Tonight is the night. Big Brother returns for its seventh summer season with the longest ever series and the largest number of contestants. This thing is going on for quarter of a year!
Sixteen hopefuls enter the house later this evening. Will they all be making the same mistake so common in housemates past? Will they wrongly assume this is their ticket to automatic stardom? Will they wrongly think the public see them as anything more than entertaining lab rats?
And what about Endemol? Will they assume we’ll put up with more of the same rubbish? Will they get creative? Will their “new” ideas work?
Tonight is guaranteed entertainment: we know what we’re getting on Launch Night (a dumb blonde, one or two gay blokes, a couple of conflicting ethnic minorities, an older woman, a hunk and a supermodel I’d guess) and it would be very difficult to muck up. As for the next thirteen weeks, I’m not so sure. Yes I’ll probably still watch it, but Big Brother needs to pull its oversized socks up and find once more the freshness of the early series.
I’ve just caught up with last night’s episode of the BBC’s superb Egypt drama/documentary.
Easily the best of the series to date, it followed the (first half of the) story of the Rosetta Stone and the decyphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Being politically correct, it skirted over some of the mirkier aspects surrounding the achievement. Obviously not wanting to offend our French neighbours, Champollion was painted as more of a lone-worker than I have previously been led to believe he was. Champollion never publicly recognised the significance of the contribution Thomas Young made to his work, and Young’s efforts seem to have been down-played in the drama too.
Aside from the view of history slightly more skewed towards Europe, this is a fascinating story brought to life by the BBC. All credit to them on a brilliant series so far.
Children in Need has just shown a scene featuring David Tennant as the new Doctor Who, filmed especially for the occasion. A great taster of what’s to come - even worth sitting through the awful Peter Andre and Jordan duet-come-screech-a-thon.
Bring on The Christmas Invasion…
I’ve been thinking about how I actually find out about what’s going on in the world recently, and I’ve realised I’m using a lot of different news sources and media. Here’s a (quite probably incomplete) list:
Newspapers (as in the real-life printed variety)
A combination of The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Sun (hey, it’s my Nana’s and anyway it’s often good to see what the “nation’s favourite paper” is feeding the masses), Metro (when I’m travelling somewhere on the train) and The Evening Standard (if I’m in need of a late-afternoon read and can cope with all the spelling mistakes).
Radio
Driving into Uni in the morning, I have a choice of 3 news-ish presets on my car radio: First choice is Radio 4 for the 8 O’Clock News (call me prematurely middle-aged if you like). If the 8:10 interview isn’t of interest, it’s over to LBC to see what Nick Ferrari is complaining about. If that’s no good, it’s the final option: Johnny Vaughn on Capital: his newspaper review is usually hugely entertaining (”What’s in the papers? What’s in the papers? What’s in the papers, Johnny tell us right now!”)
TV
BBC Breakfast first thing. My rolling news channel of choice is BBC News 24 (accurate), although Sky News (fast) is good for an alternative view. In the evening I do my best to stay well clear of ITV and especially London Tonight (although the Beeb’s Six O’Clock News is becoming almost as dumbed-down). The real jewel in the crown of TV news is Channel 4 News at 7pm, then a quick channel hop to The World on BBC FOUR at 8pm. Depending on what’s happening, BBC PARLIAMENT is good for dipping in to whenever.
Mobile
It surprises me how much I actually use my mobile to find out what’s going on. There’s news from Sky on the Orange World portal, plus the BBC’s mobile content is invaluable.
Online
Taking a look in my browser history brings up a huge number of news sites. A few of the more unlikely ones are The Hindu Times and The Melbourne Herald Sun (via Google News no doubt), but ones I visit more regularly include BBC News (well, yah), The Times Online, Guardian Unlimited, Silicon.com, Digital Spy and Google News.
E-Mail
My inbox seems to fill up with Snowmail, BBC News alerts, CNN alerts and MSNBC alerts.
I try to get a rounded view of current events rather than relying on a single source. If anything, the above shows I maybe steer towards the BBC most often, but at least they’re supposed to be impartial. Living where I do, it’s easy to become very London-centric. Recently I’ve been trying to expand my horizons a bit: Things like The World on BBC FOUR help open up the international news agenda, reporting on stories which often don’t make other news outlets.
Sky Three launches on Monday, with Sky Mix rebranding as Sky Two on the same day. Let’s just hope they spend a bit more money on the programming than on the logos.
It’s all very clever making the words out of geometric shapes, but the end result has been that Sky One has looked like Sky Onc for the last few months and now Sky Two will be Sky Tuo and Sky Three will be Sky Tnrcc.
Sky News’ new look logo is just as unimpressive. What’s happened to the creativity which went into some of the great logos from the 1990s?
I’m not just singling out Sky. The BBC squares logo has failed to grow on me, and I always read BBC ONE as BB CONE. ITV seem to have gone down the easy route of copying the squares idea but adding a bit of colour.
Channel logos should convey the channel’s image. At the moment these just make Sky look like a playschool.