Month: November 2006

We’re filming right now. Er… that wasn’t the plan. But hey, what are you to do when the Futureheads rock up in Dublin, their PR people say ‘yeah, they’d love to film a piece for your inventions strand,’ and then they turn out to be really quite excited about geeking out about something absurdly mundane and domestic?

Answer: the production team spends the night painting and sewing props and writing scripts, you drag in a director from one place and a crew from another, find a camera (no, the one with charged batteries!), and on you go.

So… we’re underway. Excellent!

Plus, it makes me feel slightly less bad about tomorrow, our first ‘proper’ day. For which I need my presenters not to have had any sleep. At all.

I’m a bad person.

Comic genius from The Onion (via Inky Circus).

Utter genius – blender manufacturer Blendtec posts carefully-crappy videos of their products blending cans of Coke, marbles, and a rake handle. The video are all over YouTube, with 100,000+ views – cheap and effective advertising? There’s more than a touch of Look Around You about the clips, particularly the brilliantly cheesy music.

The landlord and I have been discussing the dishwasher, which he inherited from the builders:

“Have you any idea what the buttons do?”

“I was hoping you might have worked it out.”

“Hmm. Well, so far as I can tell, this red one sets it to leave a liberal coating of small particles of grit all over the mugs and glasses.”

“Right. What about the green one – is that some sort of eco programme? Oh, but then, you’d expect the red one to wash better…”

“…whereas the green one seems to do a better job, yes. But yesterday I opened the door in the middle of a green programme, and the water was cold.”

“But there wasn’t any grit?”

“No.”

“How about looking for manuals online? And what about that button that appears to be labeled with a stylised mushroom cloud?

…

“Woo! I found a video of Bosch engineers cleaning the filters!”

“Any good?”

“You can hear the zoom button on the camera. And the captions are in Comic Sans.”

My search was not entirely successful. Bosch/Neff have a support site (unlinkable, since it’s inexplicably behind an https cookiewall) from where one’s supposed to be able to download PDFs of instruction manuals, but so far as I can tell it doesn’t actually work. And yes, I tried Virtual PC and an old enough version of IE that it usually does the job with brain-dead sites.

Back to the Fairy liquid, then.

Recap: as a condition of their broadcast license, UK channel ITV is required to show children’s programmes. The original thinking was to provide commercial competition for the BBC, and this has been the situation for more than 30 years. This year, however, ITV have cancelled or failed to renew children’s production for 2007 transmission, and dropped the hours they show to the bare minimum, comprised principally of repeats, animation, and US imports. Simultaneously, they’ve been arguing with regulator OFCOM about reducing the required hours.

The pretext for this is that advertising revenues are down across the board (unless you’re Google), and there’s a voluntary ban in the offing concerning advertising ‘junk’ food to children which, it is said, would render the situation commercially hopeless. Not that it’s been running at a profit for the last decade, but hey.

From my perspective, whatever happens in the regulatory world is somewhat irrelevant, since children’s production outwith the BBC is essentially dead anyway. Oh, there are odd little pockets – things like Me Too! in Glasgow – but in general there’s precious little going on. The days of being even vaguely a children’s specialist have gone. We were nearly all freelance anyway, and we’ve all had to move into other areas to keep paying the bills. Several have left TV altogether, or are trying to.

Oddly, not much of this shows to the public yet, in part because unless you happen to have children of the right sort of age, children’s TV is something you remember fondly and assume is still there. I spent a day last week trying to convince people at an exhibition that How2 was (a.) an ITV production, not BBC, (b.) one of mine, and (c.) cancelled. Their initial response is denial, and the public debate is still at that stage.

It’s somewhat shocking, then, to hear what the discussion really was between ITV and OFCOM, as reported in Media Guardian in an unusually BBC Onlinesque single-sentence paragraph style, and quoted here for those who can’t be arsed to sign in:

It is well known that ITV asked Ofcom if it could reduce its commitment to children’s television from eight hours a week to just two.

What is not so well known is that ITV’s original scheme was to ask if it could air around 80 hours in total throughout the year.

It wanted to pack these hours around the run-up to Christmas and Easter.

The radical move was proposed because the two periods are the most lucrative for the broadcaster.

…

However, the move would have left ITV1 with no children’s shows for the majority of the year.

It is understood that sources at regulator Ofcom indicated it would turn down such a request. So instead ITV asked if it could to air just two hours a week.

…

ITV will reveal how much children’s programming, what kind of shows, and how many will be repeated in its statement of programme policy to Ofcom at the end of the year.

There is speculation that it might air half an hour of pre-school shows each weekday morning, with the afternoon block dropped or greatly reduced and the rest of its commitment airing at weekends.

If that speculation plays out, ITV’s long and proud tradition of children’s drama and factual programmes will be at an end. Don’t think that equivalent shows can be found elsewhere, either – the satellite channels have never produced much within the UK. I say this with some conviction, mostly because it’s already happened.

Children’s viewing habits are changing. But they’re not choosing to watch less home-grown, high-quality programming. It’s simply not there any more.

Link: Save Kids’ TV.org.uk.

Things I wish I’d thought of doing #458.

I am, evidently, a BAFTA-nominated producer. OK, so it’s BAFTA Scotland, but it still counts. Kinda.

Scroll down to ‘Best Entertainment’: ‘Mechannibals’ – well, that was me. Making it was also, as the regular reader will recall, the least fun I’ve had in TV since I started. I’d love to say that an award nomination makes it all worthwhile, but you know what? It really doesn’t.

Still. Wish us luck for the ceremony on the twelfth. It’d be deeply ironic if I won for a show I can’t bear to watch.

Glasgow Prestwick Airport – perhaps better known as ‘Troon International’ – is quite possibly the worst airport through which I’ve flown. I’m not a hugely seasoned traveller, but I was once nearly arrested in pitch darkness at East Midlands at 2am (they’d turned off the terminal lights), and earlier this year was trapped in a small departure lounge at New Delhi, the principle feature of which was a total lack of escape potential from the worst sewage smell I’ve ever encountered. What, then, can Prestwick possibly do to earn my nomination? Let me see…

1. There’s a Ryanair Dublin flight at 06:50 on Monday morning. This is not a good time, given that a taxi to Prestwick costs £35 (ie. usually more than the flight), the trains don’t start for another couple of hours, and hence one pretty much has to drive.
2. Also leaving at or around 07:00 are flights to Pisa, Paris Beauvais, Stanstead, and Prague. Also Ryanair. All of them. Given that the only airline using Troon International for more than two flights a day is Ryanair, this strikes one as spectacularly inept planning.
3. Ryanair typically put on about seven check-in staff.
4. One of the check-in staff is brilliant (top tip: the older lady with the greying hair). The others we’ve timed at three minutes and thirty seconds per passenger. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to check that figure.
5. 3:30mins × 100 people on a 737 ÷ 2 check-in lines (if you’re lucky) = 2½ hours to check in the whole plane. For a 45-minute flight. If your check-in lines don’t include the lady with greying hair, you’re not going to make it unless you rock up at 4am.
6. Did I mention that the check-in staff are surly, uncommunicative, and more intent on chatting with each other than helping passengers? Oh, you guessed, huh?
7. The whole process is, of course, complicated by Ryanair’s customer-hostile policy of requiring payment for checked baggage. In the event that you’ve not prebooked this, of course the check-in desks can’t take payment — that requires a trip to a different counter, with its own lengthy queue… which (obviously, ahem) doesn’t have a luggage conveyor. Hence, having coughed up the dough, one must rejoin one’s original check-in queue to actually check-in the bag. Most customers find this process entirely delightful.
8. Once one’s shuffled through the check-in queue, one joins the security check queue. Which is even longer, and slower. There are two scanners, but before one reaches them Prestwick insists on rifling through one’s hand luggage. By hand. They’re quick (ie. cursory), but 500 people trying to get through security within a one-hour window, with three staff on, gives them only about 20 seconds each.
9. They confiscate all fluids, creams, gels, etc, as per current UK regulations (“Arrgh! Lipsalve!“). If one wishes to keep one’s containers, however, they’ll empty the contents… into a large bin. With all the other fluids. Because, clearly, if you’re confiscating liquids on the grounds that they might be explosives, mixing them together can’t possibly be dangerous, right? Sigh…
10. At the scanners, one must remove belts, shoes, laptops, and outer jackets (including, on occasion, cardigans), and remember to place everything in the right stacking order in the minimal number of trays, since each machine has a stock of only about six.
11. All laptops are swab-checked. I haven’t seen any exceptions to this, yet have never had my PowerBook swabbed at any other airport.
12. Having collected one’s belt, shoes, laptop, outer jacket, bag, cash, wallet, phone, boarding card, and so on, one’s left hopping around trying to redress oneself, with 300 people right behind all intent on missing their flights.
13. The only route from security to the departure lounge is through the duty-free shop, the layout of which is specifically and carefully designed to impede progress. In particular, light and easily-dislodged items are cleverly placed at bag-height, in order that they be most readily knocked off the displays.
14. Once through the duty-free gauntlet, the route through the departure lounge to the gates is similarly blocked… by seats.
15. The seats are almost all covered in chewing-gum, and give every appearance of having been thus disfigured since velour was thought to be modern.
16. The screens displaying gate numbers are, usually, illegible.
17. Gate staff can’t be arsed to help point one to one’s flight.
18. The tannoy is only audible from outside security (ie. while waiting in line for an hour or so), or from inside departures (ie. while running). While one’s actually in security one can’t hear a thing. Hence, one never hears one’s flight called, and only ever hears ‘Absolutely final call, get your arses down here now!’
19. The staff who take one’s boarding card have an amazing knack of doing so without breaking off their discussion with their colleagues, and hence without realising that they entirely block one’s path to the aircraft.
20. On one classic occasion, I emerged onto the tarmac to find no trace of the requisite Boeing. I’d walked a hundred yards across the airfield before discovering that they’d hidden the damned thing around a corner, in the opposite direction.
21. The customer service desk opens after the early-morning rush, and closes before the end-of-day return flights land. Go, as they say, figure.
22. The word ‘dead’ should not, I contend, ever appear in any slogan pertaining to the airline industry.

Given that even Cardiff manages a charmingly petite and stylish little number in the airport stakes, it’s hard to comprehend how Troon manages to cock the idea up quite so completely, but I do have a theory: I think Glasgow Prestwick (sic) Airport was bought lock, stock, and barrel from the Soviet Union, circa 1985.

That would explain the predilection for creative queue-optimisation techniques (ie. optimising queues for extreme length and sloth). It would explain the surly and disinterested staff, who merely ape the local accent (but seriously, given that the population of Troon is approximately 74 and eight goats, who’d know if they were way off the mark? Any old Scottish twang would suffice). It would explain the byzantine layout and passenger route planning, designed around the concept of trapping customers in duty-free and, at all costs, barring their onward progress to their flights, lest they realise that the aircraft are, in practice, painted outlines designed to fool American spy satellites. It would also explain why the Pisa flight boards down the end of an extremely long corridor that appears to stand zero chance of ever reaching an aircraft, given that it’s heading in entirely the wrong direction.

Troon International Airport is, I contend, a cold war-era throwback, communist mecca, and Stalinist trudge-fest. So there.

For those who’ve struggling this far, the good news: as of this month, Aer Lingus have restarted their 08:00 flight to Dublin, from Glasgow Airport. Oh, happy day.