Tag Archive for 'channel-4'
After all the hullabaloo surrounding last year’s Celebrity Big Brother, Channel 4 went into hasty back-peddle mode and announced there would be no celeb version in 2008. Which is true. Ish.
They’ve gone back to the drawing board, coming up with Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack, which will be shown on E4 for the next few weeks. Last night was launch night, featuring an hour long simulcast on Channel 4 and E4, before the main channel was ditched in favour of an E4 exclusive (clever digital telly marketing strategy there).
There have been some big changes in the format: rather than filling the house with a bunch of celebrities or forcing a freakshow as they’ve tried to do for the last few summers, they’ve selected a group of twelve gifted contestants aged 18-21. The whole thing immediately feels more natural, a hark back to the simpler days a few years ago when Big Brother was good. The twelve chosen ones just seem, well, normal. There’s no forced “stick a homophobic guy and a lesbian together” meddling. It’s almost like a rerun of the Teen Big Brother show.
That’s not to say there’s no fun. The celebrity hijack element comes into play here: Each day, a new celebrity will get to become the voice of Big Brother and decide what goes on in the house. Last night was Matt Lucas, who busied himself communicating with one of the contestants via a hidden earpiece, telling him what to say and do. Poor guy, but it was quite funny.
So will Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack manage to save Big Brother from a slip into ratings obscurity? Possibly. It’s too early in the series to make those kind of predictions, but it certainly already feels like a return to the basic winning format of putting a bunch of normal people together in a house and observing how they live together.
Please don’t mess this up again Channel (E)4.
As Channel 4’s summer behemoth Big Brother draws to a close this week, it seems the bosses have another series up their sleeves to attract us advertising friendly viewers.
Lost begins tonight with a two episode special, sandwiched neatly between Big Brother’s surprise eviction (yeah, right, as if the housemates haven’t twigged).
Supposedly Lost is as big as Desperate Housewives in the States. With a lack of quality drama on TV at the moment, it should do well here too.
A plane crash and survival on a deserted island. The first episode is just a few hours away. Will it live up to the hype? I guess I’ll have to watch it.
The big wigs at the BBC have been talking for a long time about opening up the Corporation’s vast archive for use by the British public.
Our New Errand Boy (GB, 1905)
bfi/Williamson Kinematograph Company. Licenced to me and to you under the Creative Archive Licence. |
A while ago they announced the Creative Archive project which will eventually provide access to public service audio and video archives over the internet. Members of the British public (who after all paid for the material via their licence fee in the first place) will be able to download, play, edit, re-use and share clips - even making their own compilations. All for free, all totally legal.
I thought it sounded like an exciting initiative when I first heard about it, but it has taken ages and ages for it to get off the ground.
Things seem to have taken a step forward on Monday, with the launch of the Creative Archive Licence. This is the (actually quite easy to read and understand) legal blurb laying out the terms under which content will be licenced. In summary, it appears you can do what you like with it as long as its not for commercial use and if you share your creations then you agree to licence them under the same terms.
More exciting than the legal document itself is a bit more confirmation that the Creative Archive, as has been rumoured, will not just offer BBC content. Auntie has clubbed together with the bfi, Channel 4 and the Open University. The archive could end up being massive, including huge volumes of the best audio, TV and film material ever produced in Britain!
The Creative Archive has entered a trial period, with various pilots to be carried out over the next 18 months. Now is the time it starts to get useful…
The bfi have taken the lead in launching the first four clips available to download right now under the new licence: Our New Errand Boy (a silent comedy from 1905), a newsreel from 1905 featuring some morris dancers performing in France, and two scenes from a 1913 production of Hamlet. Each clip is available in Windows Media, Quicktime and good quality MPEG1.
Expect to see some of my creations before too long!
Channel 4 billed The Exorcism as if it was to be one of the TV events of the year.
Shown “as live” yesterday evening (meaning it was pre-recorded, but saying it is “as live” makes it sound so much more exciting), the programme promised to show what happens in a subject’s brain when they are being exorcised (not very much as it turned out).
However, it seems to have been one monumental cock-up. It all went wrong right from the start, with presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy attempting to interview various scientists, psycholgists and religious leaders - few of whom seemed to know what they were doing there (save for the free bar) and fewer still even thought they knew what an exorcism was. Worse still was the man performing the exorcism, giving one word or extremely evasive answers in the obligatory pre- and post-event interviews.
To cap it all, there wasn’t even agreement between the experts whether what actually happened was an exorcism. Was it really a deliverance (whatever that is) or simply some intensive prayer?
Certainly, if you’ve ever seen any clips from The Exorcist it didn’t look like an exorcism. The subject just sat there calmly, looking bewildered about the whole experience. No signs of him vomiting green slime or his head spinning around.
I’m intensely sceptical about the whole programme. I think it was more a demonstration of how a bit of prayer and attention can bring somebody a lot of peace, rather than anything more dramatic.
I know it’s not always good to laugh at other people’s misfortune, but this made me chuckle.
At the end of last night’s Friday Night Project on Channel 4, the continuity announcer was giving details of how to buy Jimmy Carr’s DVD from the C4 shop. However, she seems to have got a bit mixed up.
Listen for yourself: you can call it by ordering 0870…..???
From the wavering of her voice, you can tell she realises the mistake half way through the sentence!
Two controversial TV programmes have graced the terrestrial airwaves over the last couple of days. Jerry Springer: The Opera attracted record numbers of complaints before it was even shown, but Derren Brown: Messiah seems to have slipped beneath the radar undetected.
Unlike many Christians who, fired up by the Mediawatch lobby group, picketed BBC buildings last night in protest even though most of them hadn’t even seen the play, I actually watched Jerry Springer: The Opera before judging it.
I have to say I enjoyed the first act - well acted, good songs, an excellent satire of the Jerry Springer Show. Unfortunately, the whole thing fell down in the second act. Rather than continuing the clever observation, it got stupidly silly with Jerry decending into Hell and hosting a special edition of his show for the devil. It wasn�t even funny.
I do agree, however, that it was blasphemous in places. For example, suggesting that Mary was raped by the Holy Spirit was way past the mark of acceptability.
Unfortunately, all the Christians who have read a couple of things in the paper over the last few days and have launched a full scale rant have badly let themselves down. I’m quite ashamed to be associated with them. They’ve let their anger get in the way of checking out any of the facts. Jesus didn’t appear on stage wearing a nappy - at least it looked like a loincloth rather than a nappy to me. The reference to Jesus being gay is almost a throw-away remark. As for the 8000 swear words, let’s do a quick calculation:
Running time: 120 mins = 7200 secs
Supposed # swear words: 8000
Time between swear words: 7200 / 8000 = 0.9secs
A swear word more than once a second? There wouldn’t be time for anything else!
It’s a pity these people were so quick to jump the gun. They have got a valid point - I believe the show did contain some blasphemous content (but looking at the context of the show I don’t think they were trying to make any serious allegations). Unfortunately, the protestors picked up on the wrong things, effectively nullifying anything valid they may have said.
As for the minority (I hope) of the group who sent threats of physical violence and bloodshead to BBC staff, I think God may well judge them even more harshly. Who knows?
So on to Derren Brown: Messiah, screened on Friday night on Channel 4. The programme followed Derren to America where he posed as five different characters with supposed supernatural powers, seeking to gain a seal of approval from various psychics, mediums and religious leaders.
Of course, Brown did not actually possess any such gifts. He merely used his skills of showmanship, diversion and suggestion to make out that he did. He was attempting to get the audience to question belief systems - how people can be made to believe, whether these beliefs are real and valid.
Three of the five experiments were clear cut - a demonstration of “psychic abilities”, a dream machine that could play back a person’s dreams to Derren, and an alien encounter which left him with the ability to tell someone their medical history. The “experts” all freely lauded praise on Brown, each one of them unquestioningly accepting his powers as real.
One of the other experiments had Brown posing as a man who could convert unbelievers to Christianity merely by touching them. While this doesn’t of course disprove that God really exists or show Christianity is a load of rubbish, it does raise some interesting questions about these miracle conversions that go on at mass rallies and so forth. Is it really just crowd histeria and clever tricks? To his credit, the reverend who saw Derren performing his “miracle” said that, whilst interesting, he would want to meet with Derren again before going any further.
The final and most disturbing experiment had Derren visit a Spiritualist Church, claiming he could put people in contact with their dead relatives. Once again, of course, he did not really have any such gift but was using standard techniques used by mediums, picking up on information and guessing. It was surprising not only how accurate he seemed to be, but also how willingly the participants accepted what he was saying.
So, a 4 out of 5 success rate, or failure rate depending on the way you look at it. A challenging and thought provoking programme.
Unfortunately, the Jerry Springer: The Opera controversy has pushed to the side all discussion of Derren Brown: Messiah - a programme that at other times may have led to some interesting viewpoints.