Smarter Than Your Average

When The Archers became available as a podcast, I was excited, simply from a podcasting fan’s point of view. Then I started listening, and was intrigued by the way radio soap is put together. The little things fascinated me – having to say character’s names more than you would in real life because they’re not always distinguishable by their voices, managing to make an entire 13 minutes listenable, despite very little happening, and clearly doing plenty of research into current and potential farming techniques.

That interest wore off after a while, but I’m still listening. I have no excuse for that; I guess I’ll just have to admit that I like it.

Anyway, I was looking at the website, checking up on the Who’s Who for details on a character (it’s been going so long that a new listener can often miss out on some vital history), and I stumbled across the message boards. I had a quick browse around and wasn’t that bothered. I don’t really like forums that much.

One of the boards is called Notes and Queries, and it’s a space for listeners to question the story, the details, the writers. A recent example would be a premature baby storyline. Listeners are saying that she can’t possibly be as premature as they’re telling us, because the conception dates just don’t add up. And let me tell you something, these people are adamant they’re right, and they want an admission of guilt.

The boards are monitored by a BBC employee, I think actually someone quite high up at the Archers, script editor, executive producer, something like that. He goes off, finds out the information people are asking for, and gets back to them. But, unfortunately, he was on holiday.

This made people mad.

Mistakes happen - although I think it’s very sloppy not to get this particular calculation right as it’s CRUCIAL to the premature birth storyline - but hey, mistakes happen, we all make them. What I find unacceptable is that now it’s been pointed out by listeners and an explanation asked for, none is forthcoming. Utter radio silence on the matter.

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Enjoyment of storyline is already ruined, I’m afraid, for me, at least. I appreciate that it cannot really be corrected at this stage in the game, but an apology/explanation from whoever failed to count the weeks properly wouldn’t go amiss.

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Sloppy, shoddy, and an insult to our intelligence, I’m afraid.
Really really really poor show.

Finally, we got our answer. The writers held their hands up and said they’d made a mistake with the dates, but as the storyline was so entrenched currently and for future plots, we have to grant them some artistic licence.

And to that I have two things to say:

1) The whole thing is artistic licence. It’s a soap. I never even bothered to work out the dates. Why would you? It’s about the dialogue, not the realism.

2) How amazing to have a programme actually interact with its fans? If you wrote to Corrie and said: “Wait, you know what? You’re wrong.” Do you really think you’d get a response?

I know, I know, this blog has been about television far too much recently. The problem is that at the moment, it’s the only other non-Sidepodcast thing I’m interested in.

ITV hasn’t really featured in my thoughts recently, but now two things have happened that sort of cancel each other out. Let me explain.

The Good
ITV shows are now available on iTunes. Get your hands on Cold Feet (yay!) or Lewis (uh…) and that’s about it at the moment. But shows are being added all the time, and this makes me happy. And very, very poor.

The Bad
There’s a US import on ITV at the moment called Pushing Daisies. I haven’t managed to tune in, because I’ve been busy catching up with The Apprentice, but I did see a trailer. It looked a bit bright for my liking, but either way, I won’t be watching it on ITV anyway.

They decided to schedule it just before some kind of football championship, except they’ve made a slight error. There aren’t enough weeks to get through every episode, before the football begins, so they’re just going to drop one. The second episode isn’t going to be shown. This is wrong on so many levels, I don’t know where to start. Surely they forked out a decent amount for this show, and that money is literally just sitting on a shelf somewhere? Is the story going to make sense without this episode? Why can’t they just show two in one night, like the penultimate and finale in a 2 hour special? That would make it a big exciting marketing dream, rather than this scheduler’s nightmare.

The Ugly
The worst part (or best, from a consumer’s point of view) is that almost the same day that ITV let slip this information, Pushing Daisies became available on iTunes.

I have been putting off writing this blog entry for a long time because, well, basically because it means admitting that I watch Dawson’s Creek.

Before you laugh at me, I’m going to tell you a little story.

I used to watch it when it was on originally, I saw the first few series, then it moved to Five. At the time, I couldn’t get Five, it was a snowstorm of Dawson’s head with no sound. Wonderful.

With Freeview now the norm in my house, and a PVR installed to catch programmes I miss, I was glad to see the Five Life decided to re-run the show from the very first series.

Look at how young little Joey Potter looks. Aw. Bless.

Anyway, I watched, and I kept watching, and I got to season five. A combination of waning interest, and what little free time I had being given over to the ramping up of Sidepodcast, meant that the episodes began stacking up on the PVR.

I decided to stop watching.

I kept the episodes though, in case a miracle happened, and I had a spare day or two for a Creekfest. Imagine my horror, then, to find that Five Life pulled Dawson’s Creek midway through the last season, to start showing repeats of their new acquisition Neighbours.

I’m not the only one who was upset either. This is a snippet of the Tube Talk Digital Spy column, where reader’s questions are answered.

Nine measly episodes left. That’s two weeks. They couldn’t have waited two weeks to start showing the Neighbours repeats? Why bump a repeat for another repeat? Especially when you and the viewers have invested so much time in watching from the very beginning.

It breaks my heart to see this lack of care, although it doesn’t surprise me.

It just adds further weight to my online TV is the future argument. Throw all the Dawson’s Creek episodes online and let people pick and choose what and when they watch.

To be perfectly honest, I was only really interested in the show’s finale set five years later. I read what happened and I wanted to see for myself. Watching the rest was a sort of added bonus, just to give the finale its dues.

Now I’ll never know.

I don’t actually watch Eastenders, but I have had a look at the YouTube clips associated with this story.

So, Eastenders featured a buried alive storyline. Max Branning (who?) apparently cheated on Tania Branning (who?) and she got her revenge by burying him alive. This was something he was particularly afraid of.

She and her new boyfriend dug a grave, put him in a coffin in the hole and left him there.

The BBC had over 600 complaints about this storyline - mostly that it shouldn’t have been pre-watershed.

I thought it was a bit unnecessary, but it’s all Lost’s fault that I am even the tiniest bit freaked out by buried alive stories.

What blows my mind, however, is that on the next episode of Eastenders, the Tania character feels some kind of remorse and goes and digs Max up. They fight, they half reconcile, then he leaves in the back of a black cab. (I don’t actually know if that last part is true, but he does leave by simply driving away from the Square.)

So the BBC went through all of those complaints for no reason whatsoever. The buried alive guy didn’t die, he just drove off. The burier did not become a murderer, she went and rescued him again.

What’s the point? Either have the guts to go through with the storyline or don’t bother. Or, try and be at least somewhat knowledgeable about your audience and know that if you’re going to toy with their sensitivities - do it after the watershed and resolve it in the one episode. At least that way everyone knows where they stand.

Official details of The Sims 3 have been released.

Whilst I’m flipping out with excitement, I’m also desperately sad, because I just don’t have time to play anymore.

Maybe I will by the time 2009 rolls round… ha.

I was going to write a post about the ITV player, and how it’s new and improved and could start rivalling the iPlayer.

But then Channel 4 released some shows onto iTunes and I forgot about everything else.

The most important thing to note is that I have now given up buying a TV Guide, and I’m relying on TV blogs to tell me what to watch, and I’m relying on the internet to allow me to watch it.

I saw this on The Buzz Report and wanted one straight away.

It’s too cute.

Originally, I was impressed by the gadgety goodness, the functionality, the ability to read your emails or your RSS feeds, or listen to the radio. My favourite feature was the ability to plug in your iPod, but then I was told: “You know, you have been able to do that for a long time, it’s called an iPod dock.”

But honestly, why would you want a cold, sterile, white iPod dock, when you can have something cute and squeezable?

Sadly, it’s only available in the US at the moment, and I imagine once it is available here, it’s going to be aimed at the kids. So, I will have to be happy to just ogle it from afar.

The BBC have finally released their updated homepage, after months of Beta. It’s very Web 2.0 with curvy edges, pastel colours and viewer customisation.

When I first saw it, I wasn’t impressed. I couldn’t really put my finger on what it was exactly, but the colours weren’t right and it just didn’t do it for me. The only bit I felt was of any use was the clock in the corner - which is very cool, by the way.

But now it’s released, it’s much better. Again, I’m not sure exactly what’s changed to make it different, but I feel like it actually works.

Anyway, the benefit: You can pick and choose what information you want and you can drag it around the screen.

It’s like the Yahoo pages of old, a customisable homepage, but this is done the BBC way. And everyone knows when the BBC does something, they do it right. It may not be right for you, but they’ve put a lot of thought into it.

I’ll be honest and say I’m not going to use it very much. I don’t remember the last time I went to bbc.co.uk. I tend to go to news.bbc.co.uk or else I know the extension I’m looking for: /radio, /tv or /sport.

However, well done to the BBC for updating a homepage that was looking very old and increasingly done.

Another tech dilemma:

I want to make more Sidepodcast Diary episodes. They are designed to be quick and easy to produce with minimal effects. The very essence of the Diary is that it’s just an upload to YouTube and that’s it. No RSS feed, no fuss, it’s a snapshot of life behind the scenes at Sidepodcast.

I have been using a little camera, now I’ve been using my mobile and the quality is acceptable if not great. I import the raw footage and edit it in Adobe Premiere Elements.

I can just about get what I want done – the most recent uses some black and white, a little bit of texture, some speeded up stuff – all the basics.

But there are limitations. I can’t vary the volume of audio, it only allows a fade in and a fade out. There aren’t that many effects, and they’re not that easy to control.

Maybe I need something better than Elements.

If we ignore the fact that I’m going to buy a Mac this year, I’m now in a dilemma. I can’t justify spending money on editing software because I don’t use it enough to make it worthwhile. But at the same time, maybe I don’t use it as much as I might because I can’t always do what I want. If I had more options to be more creative, perhaps there would be more diaries.

As always, I’m assuming that the Mac is going to solve this problem and be the answer to my prayers.

Twitter appeals to the short-form writer in me. I used to run a site called 101 Words, which essentially a short post every day about random stuff, but that was crucially 101 words long. Exactly.

It became quite an art to fit all your thoughts for the day into 101 words.

Twitter is the same kind of thing. There’s something about having a short space to get your message across that makes it a much easier place to share things. You don’t feel like you have to explain things, because let’s face it, you couldn’t even if you wanted to. There’s no room to go into detail, people are either going to get it or they’re not.

I started a Twitter account for F1 Minute that features the latest Formula 1 headlines condensed into 140 characters. Sidepodcast also has a Twitter account which is more of a brief insight into what goes on at Sidepodcast Towers.

I haven’t really got involved in the social side of things too much, the occasional message to and from other Twitterers is about the extent of it. We’ve got plenty of followers and we follow plenty of people as well, but I think there comes a point where it’s just too many people, and now I can’t keep up.

Anyway, I was looking for a desktop application to make Twitter easier to use, and I found Snitter. The name isn’t that great, I grant you, but the application is amazing. It’s based on the Adobe Air framework and is really beautiful. It’s seamless to use and a great way to stay on top of things.

My only complaint is that it only manages one account. At the moment I use it for the F1 Minute Twitter, whilst Sidepodcast is relegated to the browser.

Also, does anyone know if you can use the same mobile on more than one Twitter account as well?