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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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It goes a bit further than that. Or, as it were, less than that. In the current book there's a bit on treason trials and alleged treasonable documents proving the treason. It's so dumb writing such letters one starts off thinking they're dumb but then you move to a 'the letters were forged' position. But then why not go the whole hog (Richard III reference there) and invent the treason as well. It's one way of dealing with vaguely or potentially oppositional tendencies. Hamas in the Gaza Strip are fond of this policy. Every now and again they round up anybody who hasn't been sufficiently Hamas-ite lately and shoots them as Israeli spies.

"Glad to see the government's on the ball. Caught seventeen Israeli spies last night and shot the lot."
"Shooting's too good for them, if you ask me."
"You have to shoot mad dogs. No time for an interrogation which might have been useful, but it couldn't be helped."
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Mick Harper
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Fortitude (Syfy Channel)

You might wanna check this out despite it lasting about 500 hours which means my 100% digibox misery will continue into the new year. As it does every year. Why can't someone come and take it away? Crack addicts get help, why don't I qualify? They could take the crack away as well.

Anyway Fortitude is a big budget extravaganza (Christopher Eccleston, Michael Gambon etc) set in some polar outpost and has riveted me for the first three hours despite this kind of alien-menace-in-enclosed spaces normally passing me by. Not that we've seen the phantom menace in the first three hours. It's a slow burn.

Apologies if this was on ITV two years ago and you've all seen it/dismissed it. It's not usual for anything on the Syfy Channel to be up to much so I thought you might have missed dismissing this one.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Haven't seen it. The problem I have with the science fantasy genre (I guess there is little actual science) is that it always starts out interesting, but then you get more and more increasingly implausible plot twists (it is after all mostly fantasy) and so normally by end of season 1, the real intrigue is over. You are now suppossed to care about the characters.

CF Helix. A group of scientists travel to the Arctic in order to investigate a potential outburst of a killer disease.

CF Missions. A group of astronauts on the first manned mission to Mars.

Great first seasons.......then it's a dive into the canyon.
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Mick Harper
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I am awaiting this familiar development to kick in any day now. What makes it worse is that eejits burst into raptures after, say, three episodes, get all their friends watching it and have to spend the next several seasons defending it. Which means loyally watching it. I forbid any of you to watch it.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Rather mysteriously I was just about to give up on Ipcress Files (my wife slept through most of Episode 1) which ended on a fake cliff hanger (Arrgh)... and Episode 2 started with a his an hers road trip, (oh dear). But it suddenly got better, a lot lot better. Rather than being a 2020 reimagining, with designer brown coat, and specs... it suddenly went all 1940s Brief Encounter, the wife woke up and we started paying attention. Not much was being said.

Cripes.
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Mick Harper
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Lords of Water Al-Jazeera

Nice piece of bogusness. Al-Jazeera is (natch) against privatised water so it sonorously announced that when Thatcher privatised British water, the private companies (the 'Lords of Water') cut people off if they didn't pay their bills. Bastards. Cue footage of elderly Brits in carpet slippers queuing up to fill plastic bottles from a stand pipe. Well, they should have paid their bills like the rest of us have to. Twats. They get no sympathy from me.

"Even the Germans didn't manage to do this to us in the war," opined one of them. Yes, it was 1976, the year of the big drought, when everyone was being cut off from time to time to conserve supplies. Thank goodness the water companies provided some stand pipes.
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Wile E. Coyote


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It was a neat idea to re-invent The Oscars as The Jerry Springer Talk Show, but they will have to do paterntity tests to get me watching. You need the science. I do have standards.
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Mick Harper
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My main window on the workaday world, Pro-Football Live, spent the first twenty minutes (of two hours ostensibly devoted to NFL issues) discussing whether Will Smith and Chris Rock rehearsed it. They concluded they had not, a verdict with which I agreed. Though the AE-ist in me wished they'd thought of the idea and had. Perhaps they should have Oscars for performances at the Oscars.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Ridiculous.

The whole idea of faking an attack would be to boost your career. The trouble is, if the plan goes wrong you could get a conviction for wasting police and court time.

Nobody would be dumb enough to risk that.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I am fully in favour of BBC ending Holby City, in fact they should have got rid of Casualty as well at the same time. Should have blown up the whole city of Wyvern. More good news is that Channel 5 is getting rid of Neighbours.

It's not that these programmes are bad. No, they are still seven out of 10s, week in week out. Comfy sofa viewing.

Still, it's all gone horibly wrong, these programmes should be as God intended: cheap melodramas, with good-looking actors complemented by scene stealing over the top character actors, and cheap sets, instead they have become lazy, flat, bloated expensive exercises in middling TV. Some of these actors can actually act, you are watching the equivalent of Premiership players in the championship. It's a waste of their talent. The sets are now super expensive as glossy pseudo realism is now viewed as important, but it adds nothing to the plots or narrative. These terrible middle of the road programmes are now dying out and rightly so.

What we need is more good stuff and more bargain basement cheap stuff.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I can't see that Channel 4 is worth anything at all, it does not have its own in-house production team, does not own any back catalogue, can't sell any shows it currently backs worldwide. It does have the right to broadcast on terrrestial TV but will still be supposed to cater as a public sector broadcaster.

The rational for privatisation is that it's :

“holding Channel 4 back from competing against streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon”

Good luck with competing with those two, Netflix and Amazon are hundreds of times bigger, without the limitations.
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Mick Harper
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True, but it was built in from the start. They had to make 'distinctive programmes' and yet earn their money from an advertising tie-up with ITV. In the initial years, when the mere existence of Channel 4 created the British independent TV programme-making industry (for which much thanks, Mrs Thatcher, ye who is always being grotesquely maligned) it was found that 'distinctive' was in fact profitable.

Unfortunately (and qua AE) it was discovered that you can't make distinctive programmes and make money once the circumstances that created the distinctiveness is over. Everyone else copies it when it's profitable and does it better because they are not required to be distinctive.

So, having done your job, Channel 4, you can sail off into a sunset not necessarily of your own choosing.
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Mick Harper
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Changing Lives BBC R4 9 am Tomorrow

This features the dude who sunk two ships (according to us). I find it extraordinary that he has the temerity to be still milking it but I suppose it's sort of in his favour.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Channel 4 got their biggest audience ever for Great British Bake Off, a programme originally commisioned by BBC 2 and made by Love Productions. Channel 4 merely outbid the BEEB (a public sector broadcaster) for the right to show it on terrestrial and boost the numbers of people that watched Channel 4 programmes.

This illustrates the absurdity of the situation, Channel 4 is there to commission programmes but its level of new content is about the same as ITN and contra ortho it is not good at commissioning, if it were, it wouldn't have to pay megabucks for shows others were clever enough to commission.

Who in their right minds is going to pay a billion pounds? There is no back catalogue, the only value is the right to broadcast terrestrially on Channel 4, and they are going to stuff this with duties to provide public sector stuff.

To be honest the best thing to do would be to let it chug on, but with a requirement to only commission shows for a maximum two series or seasons, as there is nothing distinctive about commissioning Countdown every few years.
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Mick Harper
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Further to some weird backstairs quid pro quos, parts of Channel 4 have been shunted off to Leeds. You will only notice because Channel 4 News sometimes has a second-rank newsreader using the autocue in front of a picture window of the Leeds skyline. This is mildly important for two reasons

1. The TV culturati of the north have been up in arms ever since ITV abandoned its federal structure and went national. No more Yorkshire TV and Granadaland jobs for the boys and girls.
2. The north has been up in arms ever since 1913 and the turndown in heavy industry.

It occurs to me that Channel Four should go north lock, stock and two no longer smoking barrels. To become Channel North or whatever. This will require subsidies -- what talent will venture so far otherwise? -- but since the government already keeps S4C and the Welsh language going via stupendous subventions, I see no reason why 'e-by-gum' should not be given equal linguistic treatment.

If nothing else it will keep keep the e-by-gummers quiet while we get on with forging the New Britain down here. Plus it will be good fun insulting them by putting subtitles on all their programming.
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