It’s been on the cards for a while now - a couple of days ago I wrote that my blogging wouldn’t be sustainable, and it’s with a heavy heart that I must emigrate from the blogosphere, after five years as a resident. 

Conflicts of interest (such as writing in public about the BBC) have always had to be run past your line manager. My blog’s never been an issue before and I suspect that I could probably continue if I fought hard enough.  But it’s a strange time for the BBC, broadcasters aren’t allowed to broadcast opinions, and I don’t have any desire to stick my neck on the chopping block.

So this shall be my last blog entry - 30,000 of you read this doggerel every month so it’s been a difficult decision, but I hope you can understand my reasons for disappearing (partly why there’s been so few posts of late).  JamesLaidler.com will remain, but only as somewhere I can stick any special bits of work I’ve done.

Thanks for sticking with me and taking an interest.  I’ll leave you with a great quote from Cyril Connelly, the former editor of Horizon, that’s always been foremost in my mind:

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

Toodles,
James
x

It’s the worst kept secret in TV-land - reviving the News at Ten is the sort of thing the new boss of ITV was expected to do to usher back in the heyday associated with it.

The scheduling and audience problems associated with bringing it back have been summed up nicely by Organ Grinder.  To my mind though it’s a backward step.  Of course ITV has to broadcast current affairs, it’s part of its remit, but shoehorning a bulletin into a primetime slot (up against the behemoth of the 10 on BBC One/News 24) is ratings suicide. 

More than half the UK has digital television now and along with it the urge to channel-hop.  Viewers can get news on-demand from plenty of sources (Ceefax/Teletext, red-button, or the semi-on-demand 24 hour news channels) but entertainment programming is still to catch up.  So with linear news occupying your main competitor’s flagship channel, why not offer something different?  Big budget dramas do well on ITV (but need to be post-watershed, meaning they’d have to straddle the News at Ten as they’re usually more than an hour long), as do light entertainment shows like Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Take-your-money-away. 

Mr Grade’s thinking might pay off in the short term, as the novelty of Sir Trev on our screens produces a rubbernecking effect (although from his performance on News Knight ,he’s well past the stage for being put in a home…), but eventually cracks will form.  Sport will overrun. Flagship dramas they don’t want to split in half will make the bulletin shift. 

Of course all of this will rely on a more beefy news agenda. And the once visually stunning ITV News has become limp, in part due to cuts I believe, meaning there’s no fancy camera moves or running around the studio (standing has fallen out of fashion it seems…).  Why not try and plug a sort of ‘Push red for Sir Trev’ style service?

It’s essential that news output is carried on ITV (I’m Reithian in my desire to inform people about what I think they should know), but going head to head with the BBC just serves to reduce plurality, forcing viewers to choose between one or the other and, for those in search of light entertainment before bedtime, deserting ITV altogether.

You can’t help but to have seen the news about the BBC’s cuts and the restructuring within News, it’s well documented. However, it’s felt almost painful not to be able to write about them and air my views. But the powers that be tell us we shouldn’t have an opinion.  I’ve tested the water with managers near me and with HR, and the guidance is clear: no talking about the BBC.

For someone who’s talked about nothing else for at least half of his life, if not more, this is quite a struggle and, I feel, might have sounded the death knell for this blog. I hope that’s not the case, but it seems perverse to sustain a media blog, yet ignore one of the world’s biggest broadcasters…

For the moment I’m without internet at home, so until I figure out how to post on here using my blackberry, it’s going to be a little quiet for a couple of weeks. Sorry!

…I’m waiting for real life to begin”

After professing to all and sundry that the last place I’d ever want to work, let alone live, was London, I now find myself packing boxes preparing to move into my new home in that very city.

The past few months have seen a lot of changes in my life and next week is the biggest one yet - a new job (albeit still with the BBC), a new flat, a whole new part of the world explore and lots of new mates. One thing I should mention is that since I’m now contracted to the BBC rather than being freelance, I’ll have to be more careful about what I write about them. Not to say that this blog will become Aunty’s equivalent of Pravda though!

On that note however… I’d like to say a monumental thanks for all the comments, emails and pigeon-carried letters about the BBC iPlayer. I’d no idea that I’d strike such a nerve. I’m yet to have another stab at using the programme; I’ll probably do that in a couple of weeks when I’m settled in my new place. 4OD however released an update to their program which allows off-line viewing, for which I can’t thank them enough. My broadband provider probably isn’t though, after downloading Skins, 8 Out of 10 Cats, Paul O’Grady and a couple of documentaries (it wasn’t all fluff I tell you!) to watch on the hideously long train journeys I’ve been making of late. I shall go through your comments etc again and post about them with an update as to what’s changed on the iPlayer front when I get some time over the next week or two.

As you might have noticed, it’s been quiet here. I’ve been having server issues which should be rectified this week, when I’ll be back to my normal self (too many visitors apparently, yes, I was surprised as well!).

Matt raised an interesting counter-argument to my rantings on the BBC iPlayer.

However, I have to disagree about the iPlayer not being a full release (because it’s still called iPlayer beta).

The BBC’s given this product’s release a lot of hype and only a small proportion of users will understand what ‘beta’ means.

The software has already been in a typical beta stage before - about a year’s worth of testing with a closed group of users.  Off the top of my head it was about 1,500 people.  Those who sign-up to the beta phase are tech-savvy and able to feedback on all the major issues meaning release will work for most people. I consider this product to be a release - they’ve given it tonnes of publicity across all their own outlets and opened it up to everyone. Yes, they’re controlling the number of people who can use it to start with (hence the first set of crazy passwords I’ve been given it seems), but that’s more to prevent a huge surge of people downloading the software until the servers have stabilised.
A controlled release, yes, but uncontrolled in the sense that anyone with access to email could sign-up - this means that there will be non-tech-savvy folk who’ve got this product on their computers.  I’m good with computers, I’ll admit it, but there are some things that still confuse me and I need a little guidance with.  The help pages associated with this software offer me no explanation as to the solution, just the jargon-infused problem.

Your typical viewer doesn’t stick with a programme they don’t enjoy for more than one episode (that’s why Brothers and Sisters on Channel 4 has seen its audience figures dive-bomb). Does the BBC really think their audience is going to stick with a flawed piece of software? They had one chance and have blown it.

The BBC’s new lemon iPlayer launched yesterday and I’m one of the first folk to be using it. Privileged? I don’t think so.

Whoever created this piece of rubbish should be ashamed of themselves.

The obvious lack of bookmarking or series-stacking feature has been well documented, but it’s only now that the software is available that we can see how unfriendly the experience is for the poor licence fee payer.

Let’s start with the initial set-up shall we: I get an email with some instructions about how to get started with the software which I follow with ease. They’re very clear, I’ll give them that, but they need to be as the set-up is exceptionally convoluted.

First how about your username and password. Mine’s something like hdgIFnfhsoUYfn and a password of 5826529. Am I supposed to remember this? There’s no facility for changing this so I’m relying on Windows’ temperamental password recollection to do it for me. Secondly I have to set up another username and password for the BBC site. Why, I have no idea. Neither does it say which set of logins I’ll need to enter in future and where. The former is for accessing the iPlayer website and the latter for accessing the software. Hardly a way to enamour this supposedly groundbreaking software to anyone less than a computer-nut.

But how come I have to have iPlayer software on my computer and have a website as well? 4OD have got it right with the whole thing integrated into one thing, it’s lucky I’ve got dual monitors as there’s a lot of clicking backwards and forwards.

And we’re only two minutes in to my first use of the software. Seems I can’t actually use it anyway as I’m using Firefox not Internet Explorer. Now excuse me if I choose to keep my computer safe and enhance my browsing experience. It’s a sign of lazy programming on the part of the BBC that they can’t make the software/website (it’s neither one nor the other) work with Mozilla. No biggie, I’ve got a little extension that renders Internet Explorer within Firefox, but I shouldn’t have to do that just to use this program, nor put up with it opening IE windows left, right and centre whenever I click on things.
So now I’ve managed to install the software and am downloading my first programme, an episode of Doctor Who. It was tough for me to find anything to my liking as the website doesn’t seem to present the content in an interesting way. 4OD advertise their content well so there’s usually something that’ll interest me, and I can browse all the content from A-Z without having to go back and forth accessing the As, then the Bs etc etc.

In the time I’ve been writing this the programme has downloaded and I go to watch it. Oh dear.

“You do not have the licence to play this file, please visit bbc.co.uk”

Not sure how the BBC homepage is supposed to help me. It doesn’t give me any explanation as to why the thing won’t play. Neither does the help page within the software do what it says on the tin - apparently it might be that my DRM needs updating, but it offers no instruction as to how to do that. And quite frankly I can’t be bothered, I shan’t be using this piece of rubbish again. I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. If I had the energy I’d write to them, but a quick look on the forums and the more than 2,000 threads of issues/bugs/complaints suggests they have plenty to think about.
Anyone else having problems with it, let me know!

Never before have I felt so impassioned about a programme on television. And perhaps that’s what Channel 4 wanted, but viewers outside of the gay community looking in have been betrayed.

This post is a departure from what I normally write about, so hopefully you’ll indulge me while I climb onto my soapbox.

I keep my personal life quite close to my chest and Clapham Junction, in my mind, only further served to show why. This programme is nothing like the world I inhabit and, despite Channel 4’s assertions that viewers will recognise that it’s only a story, the socio-political context it’s been broadcast in suggests heavily that this is rooted in the docu-drama genre (trailed as ‘celebrating 40 years since the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between men’).

I’d actually been quite looking forward to last night’s programme - finally a drama about the real lives of gay men and women and the issues still facing us in modern society. Not only were there no gay women, there were no real gay men.

Last night just 25 minutes of the show left me restless for much of the night.

25 minutes of cocaine-snorting, cottaging, violent attacks and infidelity. That’s all it took to make me angry and upset about being a gay man, or rather being perceived as a gay man who lives that lifestyle.

Clapham Junction will no doubt spark debate, as it did in my household, but it was a debate I shouldn’t have felt the need to have. All of a sudden I couldn’t bear being tarred with the same brush.

I watched the rest of Clapham Junction this morning and it didn’t redeem itself, leaving only unanswered questions and reinforced stereotypes.

And from the reaction I’ve been getting from friends and colleagues who also saw it, along with folk on the Channel 4 forum (notably funkster, who’s quoted in the title), I’m not the only one who’s been let down by what could have been a force for good.

Interesting that the producer and commissioner of the programme are apparently engaged with the debate, but I can’t help but feel it’s the forum equivalent of crocodile tears - they now know they’ve broadcast a lemon and are trying to appear as if they’ve orchestrated a dialogue on the topic.

I’m a realist and know that broadcasting a programme about happily-civil-partnered men and women isn’t a ratings grabber, but why couldn’t some positivity have been injected into Kevin Elyot’s creation? There was no light, simply shade. For anyone getting to grips with their sexuality it looked very bleak to be a gay man.

The Observer wrote an excellent review on the programme, so I shan’t cover the same ground, but needless to say it didn’t address the programme’s commissioning remit to explore why ‘at the same time that there seems to be a growing tolerance of homosexuality in society, there also seems to be a steady amount of homophobic violence’.

The main problem with the programme for me, and from reading what others have written is simple: while it covered a lot of ground, none of that ground has been traversed by many gay men today, serving only to alienate myself and others further from a ‘community’ of which we’re supposed to feel a part.

Channel 4, shame on you.

Apparently there are more students studying photography in Britain than there are people working as photographers in the whole of Western Europe. Haven’t checked if that’s true, but if Question Time is to be believed then this whole AimHigher business needs rethinking.

I’ve always had to sit uncomfortably on the fence. While being employed to extol the virtues of higher education and its accessibility to everyone, I always wondered why we even want everyone to have a degree. Thinking purely from a selfish perspective it would devalue my standing in the world of work if everyone else had degrees as well. What does need looking at is whether some subjects should be degrees at all. I’ve studied a postgrad in a media subject, and it always felt perverse that I was studying in six months what the undergrads were doing in three years and for more money.

Oh and one final thought, Davina Big Brother loves you and wants you there permanently. Please don’t come any where near current affairs again, or at least make an effort to look interested…