Articles by Redvers

Telephone Numbers for drama purposes (TV, Radio etc) A lot of water has passed under the bridge since VINcent XXXX was the dramatist’s number of choice. OfGums, showing more imagination…

BBCi takes an interesting line… …not backed up by their own figures. Success stories: Arsenal vs Newcastle United, Sky Sports, Sunday – 1.6 million viewers Friends, E4, Thursday – 1m…

Interview with producer/director Jo Haywood Would someone – anyone – like to explain the meaning of the following quote from Jo Haywood? …but ITV have also lost a lot of…

The Scotsman – of all things – on the BBC Essex free radio celebration. This is a busy year for broadcasting historians – the 40th anniversaries of Radio Caroline, Rediffusion…

DCMS starts S4C Review Television is the plant forever being plucked out of the ground to examine its roots. But S4C, despite difficult birth pangs, has so far escaped the…

Guardian Politics on BBC succession More likely to be true than if it had been in the Grauniad’s Media pages, this is, finally, is a piece of good news for…

Getting email from the BBC Google is the world’s best website. Simple, easy to use and giving you what you want when you want it with no faff and no…

Mass Observation through the years Typically, I find my evening taken up with researching for future Transdiffusion projects. Tonight, it’s the turn of Sean Day-Lewis’s (ed) 1989 book “One Day…

Chris Stacey on being unemployed from the media industry at 44. One can’t but feel sympathy for people like Chris Stacey. Bitten by the media bug, he wants to do…

Shropshire Star confused ‘news’ report Leave it to dire local news sheets to miss a point with such accuracy (can you hear the true story whistling as it passes their…

Pay TV for Freeview Ignoring the fact we’ve seen this story ages ago on DigitalSpy (but two cheers for the Grauniad for being second with the news… as usual) would…

Er, why?

Reuters ‘short’ on the resignation of Gavyn Davies The main news story here is not that Gavyn Davies has resigned, but that the Chairmanship of the BBC is in the…

BBC News Online – Nick Higham on Hutton Not wishing to prejudice the Hutton report, but this article is a must read. Whatever side of the political spectrum you are…

Media Grauniad story The Grauniad’s well-known and much, much regretted rabid anti-BBC stance (made worse because it is evidently all from a biased view that the BBC is a ‘competitor’…

Puff-piece pretending to be news ‘ITV mulls soap spin-offs’ So, ITV1 isn’t doing too well. We need a solution, and fast. I know! More crappy soap operas! They’re not at…

BBC to broadcast silent orchestra My latest artwork is 4’34” long and is also completely silent, save for a distant sound of someone giggling whilst rolling about on a pile…

A new channel for people with no lives A rousing two cheers for Murdoch’s latest venture – FX-TV, a ‘lad’s channel’ which will launch all too soon with a mixture…

Arts host says BBC should share licence fee with any pretentious idiot who would like some free money for tat. Of all people, Melvyn Bragg should know better. You’d think….

I’d sooner eat worms.

Scotsman.com report bizarrely celebrating less political regionalism in the kingdom Perhaps, after all, we can now see how come regionalism, that noble goal of broadcasting in this country since 1922,…

allAfrica.com on Zambian censorship of the BBC World Service’s ‘Network Africa’. I’d imagine that corruption, a chained press speaking with one voice, and oppression of those with views other than…

Financial Times report on the blandname ‘ITV’ It seems, although it’s barely believeable, that the brandname ‘ITV’ has monetary value. The FT reports, from that curiously-isolated high-money perspective that it…

Any ‘blog like this can become a place to whinge about the ills of the world. Indeed, I do a lot of that here about television (only as a public…

BBC News report Former BBC-1 continuity announcer Michael Aspel is suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. The cancer is under control through chemotherapy and other treatments…

Tawdry but gramatically interesting piece from the Daily Record about Hogmany television. The verdict: BBC-1 won but were awful. SMG [don’t click this link – it’ll play music at you]…

Danielle Demtriou twists the words of a BBC spokesperson in order to create a news story that wasn’t there originally. “[The BBC] does not rule them [resignations] in or out”,…

Lies, half-truths and utter bollocks about the BBC from an American ‘news source’. Least said, soonest mended on this one. But the fact that Google News is drawing on this…

An unusually perceptive piece from Nick Higham on BBCi And so it has come to pass. To the surprise of everyone except us ‘amateurs’ who don’t know what we’re talking…

BBC licence fee ‘criminalises poor’ says a known group of idiots in the Financial Times. This just in: a group of known freelance idiots calling themselves the Institute of Public…

Xmas TV Listings So this is Christmas, and what have you done… to us? EastEnders (soap), Meet the Parents (film, Ben Stiller) Rio Grande (film), Mastermind Celebrity Special (quiz), Porridge…

BBC-1 BBC-2 Strange that ITV.com don’t offer the ability to download their idents, too. Perhaps we wouldn’t be interested in ‘celebrities’ we can’t quite put a name to and anonymous…

BBC Press Office Audience figures are a tyranny. They tell us nothing of use and blind programme makers to the possibilities of television as an artform. They are derived from…

Media Grauniad report “…the way we’ve been expressing breaking news on-screen has not been conspicuous enough. Lots of people watch News 24 in offices with the sound turned down,” Rachel…

Media Grauniad report The fallout from today’s power cut continues, with news that BBC News 24 is to miss its planned relaunch date of Monday. The loss of a day’s…

BBC Press Release Westminster insiders are quite clear that the BBC as we know it will not make it through the next Charter renewal. The lobbying efforts of those bastions…

VRT website A trip tomorrow to Belgium causes me, somewhat sadly, to have a poke around for what I could watch on TV whilst I’m there. Of course, British television…

Latest Sky financial results press release Is anyone here concerned about BSkyB’s profits being too high? If you consider that the majority of their profit appears – according to their…

Sky Corporate’s press release on the recent AGM. “It is a great honour to be able to stand before you today as Sky’s chief executive, and I am deeply grateful…

Strange testpage A search on Google for Transdiffusion brings up a new look for LogofreeTV. This site, which started out with the admirable aim of campaigning against the various screen…

Oddly parochial story from ‘The Scotsman’ All of you people left without access to ITV, Channel 4 and five on Sky will be very pleased to discover that you can…

Grauniad speculation Oh good, the same bunch that have made ITV such a success in the last decade will continue in power for the next phase of ITV. Plus a…

Reuters speculates… A Disney channel, but not branded under the Disney name. Sky Travel to go General Entertainment, but not until there are 2 million ‘subscribers’ to the Freeview service….

Eastern Daily Press news story Of course, you have to expect the regional newspapers, struggling for so long, to welcome – or at least fail to notice the shortcomings –…

Croner news release “Some day a sympathetic writer will have to analyse the effect of mergers – and there are hundreds of them – and the impact they have upon…