Japanese Grand Prix ponderings

This won’t take long.

First of all, it is worth pointing out just how awesome Sebastian Vettel was at Suzuka. At this “drivers’ circuit” which suited the Red Bull car down to the ground, Vettel was untouchable.

An error meant that instead of the normal on board channel, the BBC broadcast the on board camera of Vettel only for a large part of the race. Although this meant being unable to see any other cars on board, it provided an opportunity to watch an up-and-coming master at work. I can tell you he was definitely pushing hard, and to my mind he almost lost his car at Degner 2 twice. And they are only the moments I saw.

Vettel’s awe-inspiring dominance was in stark contrast to the other three Red Bull drivers in a weekend that promised so much. Even the Toro Rosso, which has been at the back for almost all of the season, looked like it had awesome pace. Unfortunately, its two rookie drivers both made a bit of a hash of things multiple times each throughout the weekend, meaning the potential came to nothing.

Webber also had a tough weekend after a big crash in Saturday Practice which left him with no car to qualify with. Having started from the pitlane, he then suffered a litany of problems forcing him to pit three times in quick succession. As a result, the race ended with one Red Bull dominating, and the three others footing the result sheet.

Beyond that, there is not much to say about the race. Jarno Trulli did a good job, which he does once or twice a year. But it’s not the sort of thing that would impress me enough to hire him. Maybe the new Lotus team will think differently.

For my money, the best action of the race came from Heikki Kovalainen. Firstly, there was his tangle with Adrian Sutil which appears to have divided opinion. I think it was a racing incident — Sutil was probably too optimistic to go for it, but Kovalainen was probably too eager to close the door abruptly having left it wide open in the first place.

But if that was a bad move from Kovalainen, he more than made it up with his gutsy and opportunistic overtaking manoeuvre on Giancarlo Fisichella while they were both coming out of the pits. I let out a yelp and probably woke up half the street at that time of the morning, as I thought it was going to end up as a huge accident. In the end, it turned out well for Kovalainen and I was left impressed. It is the only ballsy thing I can ever remember him doing. But it’s probably too late to save his career at an established team.

It says a lot about the state of F1 at the moment that the biggest talking point of the weekend was the way penalties were dealt with. Eight drivers were penalised after qualifying. Most were for ignoring yellow flags after Sébastien Buemi’s accident, another was for blocking and others changed gearboxes and chassis.

This left the entire world scratching its head as to what the actual grid might be. Apparently several permutations were doing the rounds, while the FIA decided to sleep on it and published the grid just hours before the race began. Seemingly this is not a case of the Random Penalty Generator — it all seems above board, with the grid having been determined as it should be by the letter of the law. But clearly this is a system that fails the fans. We watch qualifying to find out what the starting grid will be, only to tune into the race finding that the stewards have changed it.

Then there is the case of the investigation into Nico Rosberg failing to observe the lap delta times under Safety Car conditions. It transpires that Rosberg was unable to know what his target time was because the message was overridden by a low fuel message from the standard ECU. Given that McLaren Electronic Systems designed the ECU, my first thought was that this was a particularly elaborate way of penalising McLaren for the incident.

In all seriousness though, this just sums up how Formula 1 has been swallowed up by an officious governing body more interested in rules than racing. The Safety Car rules have become so ridiculously complex in the past few years, mirroring the crisis that hit qualifying a few years ago when several formats were tried out in quick succession.

I suspected that Nico Rosberg knew he was guilty of driving too quickly under Safety Car conditions when he conducted an evasive interview on the BBC after the race. When questioned, he would only say that he didn’t gain an advantage. When asked if he was within the rules, he only said “I definitely did what I should do”.

As it transpires, he probably had good reason to be coy given that it seems as though he simply did not have the information that should have been displayed, even if it meant he technically broke the rules. In that light, it is fair to let Rosberg off on this instance, but he shouldn’t even have been in this position in the first place.

Now we are left with the tantalising prospect of Sebastian Vettel making a Räikkönen-esque comeback. James Allen says that a mental block has been passed, with Vettel now within 16 points of Button with two races to go. That is closer than Räikkönen was with two races to go in 2007.

It still seems like a long shot, but if the momentum is going anywhere it is not towards Button. All of a sudden, the pressure looks like it’s all on Jenson Button.

This is an accompanying article to my contribution on this week’s episode of The Pod Delusion. You can listen below.

This week, Freeview has had one of its occasional retuning events. As new channels come and old channels go, the channel list becomes increasingly messy until the point where the powers-that-be decide enough is enough and it’s time to bring some organisation to it.

This sort of thing is a necessary evil of the digital era. But I feel sorry for those, particularly older, people who are used to setting up their television once when they buy it, then making do with two and a half channels for the rest of their lives.

A couple of weeks ago in the first episode of The Pod Delusion, James O’Malley spoke about the bonkers-sounding Conspiracy Channel. Sadly, I do not have Sky, so have been unable to sample its delights for myself. I must rely on humble Freeview for my post analogue switch-off telly fix.

Freeview brings a wealth of choice that simply did not exist on analogue terrestrial television. That is of course a good thing, and I personally cannot imagine going back to making do with the five analogue channels. But there is an element of truth to that Fry & Laurie sketch, where a dining Government minister is dumped on by the waiter with a “choice” of cutlery which turns out to be countless plastic coffee stirrers.

At the same time as this week’s big retune, the long-awaited launch of Quest, the new channel from Discovery, has taken place. Its original launch had already been long delayed and finally aborted at the last minute several months ago.

While a channel that promises something resembling quality struggled to get off the ground, there has been no shortage of utter crud getting airtime on Freeview. In fact, I struggled to think of any half-decent channels that had launched recently. So I decided to look it up, and see what changes had been made to Freeview over the previous year.

10 September — Smile TV 2 (a mucky Babestation-style channel; closed on 19 March)
January — Rocks & Co (shopping channel)
8 January — SuperCasino (roulette channel)
8 January — NetPlay TV (broadcasting shopping programmes or infomercials)
15 January — CNN International — 4 hours per day
22 January — Dave+1
2 February — Russia Today — 2 hours per day
3 February — DirectGov (text service)
12 March — Partyland
1 April — Gems TV — 5 hours per day
5 April — CNN increases hours to 7 hours per day, 2 hours of which is SuperCasino
1 May — Gems TV closed down
13 May — Smile TV 2 relaunched — 5 hours per day
14 May — Quest — 14 hours per day — launch aborted!
20 May — Virgin 1 goes 24 hours per day
20 May — Virgin 1+1 — 12 hours per day
23 May — Film4 extends hours
1 July — Create & Craft (shopping channel) launches — 5 hours per day
4 July — Russia Today gets second slot — 2 hours per day
15 July — Big Deal (quiz channel) launches — 7 hours per day
27 August — Price-drop tv returns
27 August — Smile TV 3
27 August — Babestation
30 September — Quest launched

So a couple of channels — Film4 and Virgin 1 — have extended their hours. A couple of news channels have been able to find scraps of space here and there. I say news channels, though in the case of Russia Today, propaganda may be a more accurate description. These channels broadcast at quite obscure hours. It is certainly an interesting spin on the concept of “24 hour news”.

Beyond that, the vast majority of new Freeview channels are pure trash. There are two new “+1″ channels, replaying exactly what was broadcast on a channel an hour ago. By my reckoning, there are now at least five such channels on Freeview, which doesn’t seem like the best use of limited bandwidth.

Beyond that, there is a collection of shopping channels, gambling channels, quiz channels and adult channels. Frankly, this is the sort of stuff you expect at the arse end of the darkest nooks of the Sky EPG. I am not quite sure this is what they had in mind when the digital revolution was promised.

The Babestation channels have long been a fixture on Sky. But their presence on Freeview is relatively novel. They are interesting for the fact that it hasn’t taken long for four of them to crop up. It is surprising because their appeal seems rather limited to me.

If you have never seen it (er, not that I’m an expert, of course), basically the format is quite simple. A few glamour models who couldn’t present their way out of a paper bag sit on a couch trying to encourage people to phone in for a mucky chit-chat.

Once someone with more money than sense takes the bait, the microphone is switched off, and some cheap-sounding music is turned up. The women proceeds to talk dirty on the phone — without the viewer being able to hear a word. They sort of wriggle around on the couch in a way that I assume is supposed to look sexy, but it really just makes them look vaguely like they need the toilet.

In short, it is the modern-day equivalent of the dodgy services advertised on business cards left in piss-stained telephone boxes, only with the beady eye of Ofcom overseeing proceedings. There is nothing extreme in the slightest about these channels. You wonder what goes through the mind of people who would sooner pay through the nose to sample such services when you could quite easily find more enticing free porn on the internet.

Up until this week’s retune, the positioning of one of these channels — Partyland — in the channel list was certainly interesting. It was channel number 50, but with no channels occupying numbers 51-69, the next channel up was CBBC. Even though the broadcasting hours do not clash, I can imagine plenty of children just pressing the down button on their remote and coming across a strange new channel promising a party land. It certainly would provide a more eye-popping rite of passage than accidentally stumbling across the frilly knickers section of the Argos catalogue.

It remains to be seen whether these channels remain a long-term fixture on the Freeview platform. One trashy genre which sadly appears to have stood the test of time is quiz channels. These late-night televisual travesties are hypnotically awful. A slightly desperate presenter will appear to engage you in a stare-out competition while goading you into answering questions with non-existent answers.

Even though they still live on, such quiz channels are not quite as prevalent as they used to be. They were a major victim of the collapse in trust that broadcasters faced a couple of years ago. Into the vacuum came the gambling channels.

It’s noted that this sort of programming tends to be on late at night, especially at the weekend. In other words, they are aimed squarely at the post-pub market.

The morals are pretty dubious. The clear idea is to target people whose judgement has been impaired by their alcoholic consumption, goading people into phoning premium rate phone lines when they perhaps shouldn’t. In the case of the gambling channels, it could be said that they intend to capture a particular section of the population that may have problems with addiction.

This is not quite the vision of digital television that was sold to the public. It is funny how most of the extra “choice” that has been brought into our living rooms revolves around extracting large amounts of cash from our wallets.

doctorvee

Archive: 2009 October