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Yesterday: waving a fond farewell to the transmission masters, I filed a small mountain of paperwork, handed over the clear-up notes to Duncan the production secretary, and… cleared my desk. Today I’m messing about trying to do DVDs of the show so the cast and crew can actually see it, and I still have to write half the billings, but otherwise – Scrap It! is finished. Thirteen weeks since I started on it, and we’ve delivered thirteen shows.

I’ve never worked that fast, but it’s been an absolute blast. OK, so some of it we got away with by the skin of our teeth, and the dub was a bit rushed, but it’s been one of the most fun jobs I can recall. It’s not really for me to judge, but overall I’m delighted with the show, the commissioner seems extremely happy, and while it’s still a tad early to say with confidence, it’s looking like we even brought it in on budget. Which is something of a miracle, frankly.

Transmission is on Discovery Kids from November 7th (a week on Monday!), at 7:25am, 12:10pm and 4:00pm. The billings are somewhat out of date (we never did shoot the nose pump mentioned in the first episode blurbs…), but that’s probably because I haven’t had chance to write them yet. Well hey, we only worked out the series running order a week ago!

Oh, and the pig? At some point, I brought in a very cute cardboard pig made by Dave Pitt for The Big Bang, many years ago. I think it was supposed to be an example of the level of finish we were aiming for, or something. Anyway, it ended up as set dressing… then the graphics guy got his mitts on it… and now it’s animated all over the titles and graphics sequences, despite having come from an entirely different series. But hey – everyone loves the pig.

Philip Greenspun has one of the most original takes I’ve heard on the whole ‘teaching of Intelligent Design’ debacle – that scientists should cheer it on. His logic: only by crippling the intellectual development of a generation of students can scientists be guaranteed ongoing careers. If there’s nobody to replace you, your employment prospects go up. Win!

[giggle]

As a rule, I don’t get phone calls offering me work. Unusually for TV, I’ve never really moved in those circles, instead falling from job to job. So the call from Mentorn this lunchtime was something of a surprise.

More of a surprise was the call from Pioneer this afternoon, asking if I’d like to direct a documentary. Er… yes. When?

Next month. Bother.

Ah well. In accordance with the Bus Queue Postulate I’m now waiting for the phone to ring once more – meanwhile, many thanks Patrick for pointing them in my direction.

Monday. That’s when I start. We have eight weeks to put five shows together, then they go out on Five from Boxing Day. Live. It’s… the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.

The astute observer of my CV may recall that I worked on the Christmas Lectures back in 1990 – which was, in fact, the last time I worked in London, before I was even a student. So, I’m unreasonably excited about the whole thing. I only vaguely know where I’m going to stay, it’s only just dawned on me that I may not be able to leave London for Christmas itself, and the pay is rubbish. But… it’s the RI.

Yay!

Over the weekend the Telegraph ran a story about a new report, apparently funded by the BBC, recommending that children’s TV presenters should be older and more conservatively-dressed. At least, that’s how the Telegraph chose to tag the article – quite what the report itself says is anyone’s guess. I was alerted to the story by Sam Pinkham, erstwhile presenter of this parish. Or at least, of The Big Bang, anyway – he’s mostly a DJ for Heart 106 in Nottingham, doing the drivetime show. Would I, he enquired, care to record a brief interview on the subject, since they were going to discuss children’s TV this afternoon?

Of course, I tried to fob him off by offering up Fred Dinenage, who’s a living rebuttal to any concern that children’s TV is entirely full of scantily-clad youngsters barely out of their teens. He’s been presenting the same show since 1966, you see. Fred gamely stepped out of a meeting down at Meridian and did the interview… but then Sam rang me again anyway, and we recorded a little something.

Now, I get nervous as heck doing this sort of thing. I’m OK again in front of an audience – finally! – but radio brings back horrifying flashes of a live interview I did on BBC Radio Humberside when I was 17. It was supposed to be a two or three-minute piece, but some link or other went down… then the news feed collapsed… then something else packed in… and before I knew it the host and I were twelve minutes into the discussion, surrounded by terrified-looking station execs frantically making ‘s-t-r-e-t-c-h’ movements.

So I regret to report that I’ve absolutely no idea what I driveled on about. I think I got a good boot into the BBC at some point, for not showing anything much resembling factual programming and thereby setting a terrible example to the rest of the industry. But really, for all I can remember I could have been wittering on about the weather in Patagonia. I’m just hoping I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself.

Wow. There’s a blast from the past. I’m currently – that is, over on the other Mac right this very moment – editing the last session video from July’s OpenTech. I got most of it done and uploaded the week after the conference, but then this inconvenient job sort of drove in and sucked up all my time. But now I need the media drive space back so I can prepare DVDs of Scrap It!, which is something of an incentive to get the laggard sessions edited, compressed, and uploaded. These include Suw, Gavin, Ewan‘s iPod Shuffle Shuffle (which I didn’t think I had, but it turned out the other camera more-or-less caught the audio), and Rob McKinnon’s demonstration of the most amazing GreaseMonkey site rebuilding.

And I’m nearly there. Only… oh gnats! I’ve just spotted James Larsson’s Motherboard Kerplunk, which was sort-of not on the programme, only it’s very lovely and I do actually have video of it and… bother.

Heigh-ho. More video hackery to come, then. And I was soooo close.

David Rowan, writing in the Times Magazine back in May (though I’ve only just seen this), explores the games children play in the school playground. A fascinating insight into an alien world. I may make television for children, but I wouldn’t claim to begin to understand them.

OK, this is so mad it has to happen: the Mini Concept Tokyo, as reported on CoolHunting. As they put it, it looks like the designers have been ‘smoking some Marc Newson weed from a Paul Smith bong.’ Make sure you scroll down until you see the roof interior shot. You’ll be glad you did.

More pictures at Mini2.com; it’s a reprinted press release with all the expected nonsensical marketing/design drivel. Awful pretty, though. And personally, if this is the 2006 Mini’s front end, I much prefer it to the current ‘facelift’ version.

(And if you’re wondering: yes, I’m catching up with NetNewsWire again. Hence the sudden flurry of posts).

It’s Sunday afternoon. Four cars just parked up on the road outside my flat. Six people got out, five women and one man. All are wearing blue polo shirts, white boiler-suits and green rubber gloves, and appear to be carrying cleaning products. They’ve just entered a house opposite. One of them has a stepladder.

There are several scenarios I could hypothesise to explain this, none of them pleasant. I haven’t been in all week, so I wouldn’t have noticed… oh, I don’t know… a large police presence or whatever.

Yikes.

Update: They’re now marching in carrying multiple Numatic Henry vacuum cleaners.

Update 2: Ten minutes later, they’ve all gone again. Er… weird.

A sometime colleague of mine theorises that any noun can be turned into a west-end musical by the simple addition of an exclamation mark. For example: Squid! works better than you’d expected, right? How about Elastomer!, or maybe Sprocket!. Hair! has, of course, already been done.

Thus: Teach!, inexplicably called Reach! on the video itself, which is clearly a typo. Or something. It appears to be a bunch of students doing the sort of thing students do, only with amplification, multiple video cameras and perhaps a little more panache than most of us managed back in the day. Made me laugh, anyway. Linky to Quicktime video: enjoy.

There are more videos too, though they’re mildly obfuscated by one of those annoyingly slow Flash interfaces, and there’s nothing I can see about the perpetrators.