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Click through this lot, and tell me that ‘underwater dance class’ isn’t an ongoingly giggle-worthy source of hilariousnessesess. Dare you.

Whilst I shivered in my unheated Glaswegian flat last night, barely a half-brick’s throw away the great and the good of (Scottish) media were making non-alcoholic merry at the (Scottish) BAFTAs. Dry, evidently, because of some indiscretions and heckling last year, and the BBC’s inexplicable intention this year to broadcast the event, albeit after a judicious cooling-off period.

It’s a sign of the respect and affection with and in which we hold these noble (Scottish) awards that today’s Media Guardian does not, in fact, mention them at all. Presumably, the thought of sending an actual hack all the actual way to the actual (Scottish) Glasgow was viewed as terribly gauche.

Interestingly, there’s precious little on Technorati today, either (am I the only Scottish media blogger currently working in Dublin? Surely not?). Credit due to ‘Laura’ (surname unknown, though bizarrely we do know she’s a Libra) for pointing up the Screenplay winner (Run Tony Run!). Otherwise, there’s a thundering silence from basically everywhere.

Which is a pity, because thanks to BAFTA Scotland itself (persevering in publishing the news, even if nobody appears to give a damn), we know that:

1. Mechannibals did not win the Entertainment award. Which is something of a relief, in most respects, though ultimately not as funny as the other outcome might have been. & —
2. My friend Debs won Best Documentary for her Richard Dawkins film, Root of all Evil – The Virus of Faith.

Yay Debs! I had lunch with her yesterday, and everything! Woo!

Ben ‘I am the new Renaissance’ Hammersley has a new gig, as multimedia reporter for The Guardian. Given that we like his writing and love his photography, is there any doubt that we’ll appreciate his videos too?

That rumbling noise you hear in the background somewhere is conventional media wondering if it just missed something, then going back to sleep again.

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.