The internet is teeming with information. Sort of. Thanks to things like blogs, Wikipedia and even plain MSM news sites, everything that has happened since the mid-1990s is covered in minute, sometimes anal detail. But anything that happened before then? It’s almost as if it’s neo-prehistoric.

In a way you can understand the lack of information from before the 1990s on the web. After all, the web didn’t exist until 1989. But the meticulous recording of events since the invention of the web is dizzying. It’s good in some ways, but sometimes I come across a piece of useless information that makes me think, “Really, what is the point of that? Who thought it was worth their while to put this on the internet?”

A home for a large proportion of this useless information is Wikipedia. I should point out that I am generally in favour of Wikipedia as a quick and easy way to plug embarrassing gaps in your knowledge. And I think a lot of the criticisms some people make of Wikipedia are quite wide of the mark.

Wikipedia churns out astonishingly mind-bending articles like 0.999…, Architecture of Windows NT and Equipartition theorem. But Wikipedia also contains masses of articles concerning contemporary popular culture.

I do not at all mind Wikipedia carrying such articles (I read many of them myself), but it has to be said that the quality decreases pretty rapidly. Sometimes I read something in Wikipedia and can’t believe that I actually spent time reading it.

This evening I was innocently reading up on Bonde do Rolê because I have just bought their album, With Lasers. Overall it is an adequate encyclopedia entry. It delivers the facts in a fairly straight manner. But from the middle of nowhere, some way through the article, I was bombarded with this:

Rodrigo Gorky [is] the DJ/producer who, when combined with the powers of MC Marina Ribatski and MC/producer Pedro D’eyrot, create the hellish firestorm of beats and thunderous bass that is…Bonde do Rolê.

Someone has been reading too much music journalism. As if describing something as a “hellish firestorm of beats and thunderous bass” on a website that is meant to be a reasonably reliable source of reasonably impartial information wasn’t bad enough, they go and add an ellipsis to signify mock suspense. Do they think Wikipedia is just one long cheesy film trailer? It is such an irritating sentence. I would understand if somebody wrote it for the NME, but not Wikipedia.

But it is not the fawning that annoys me the most about pop culture articles on Wikipedia. It is a sometimes unbelievably anal focus on inconsequential information. Take this section from the article about Fonejacker.

The end of the show [Fonejacker's Christmas Message] displayed Fonejacker: Coming April 2007 - Don’t Pick Up The Phone.

In March, a teaser trailer started to air on Channel 4 and E4, which consisted of clips of the pilot put together into a thirty second advert, ending with e4.com/fonejacker, which redirected users to the Fonejacker MySpace page. [1]. However, for undisclosed reasons, the show was put on hold, and wasn’t aired in April. After this, a rumour spread that the show would start on June 7, 2007, but this also proved to be incorrect. Whilst fans thought there was no hope for the show, new trailers aired in June which saw the Fonejacker in his own flat performing various calls, and a television tuned into the news reporting “new sightings of the Fonejacker”. The advert ended with the catchphrase Don’t Pick Up The Phone and finished with the same E4 website. This was followed a couple of days after by a newer alternative advert.

This is a paragraph and a bit entirely dedicated to the different dates that the first proper series of Fonejacker was supposed to start. It is really just an incredibly long-winded way of saying, “The first series was delayed by a couple of months.” I mean, really. Big deal!

It’s just topped off by the phrase “fans thought there was no hope for the show”. I have images of some socially inept Fonejacker fan rushing to update Wikipedia with “useful information” about the latest teaser trail or even plain hearsay about possible transmission dates about a television series that he feared for the life of.

Then there are the articles which clunkily add news into an article with absolutely no regard given to the overall flow of the article. The following paragraph appears at the end of a section about the 2007 season in the article about Felipe Massa:

On 24 August 2007, Felipe Massa stated that he is a fan of Fenerbahçe [2] . Massa said: “Zico was idol of my childhood, Roberto Carlos is my best friend. I am a Fenerbahçe fan, because it is just like Brazilian team. I love Turkey, as I won my first championship in Turkey, it has special value for me.”

The whole paragraph is spew-worthy trivia which is placed in a section about Felipe Massa’s 2007 season. I don’t mind the inclusion of information like this, but it should be in a separate ‘Trivia’ section. It is jarring to be reading about Felipe Massa’s on-track events in one sentence and about his footballer pals in the next.

And don’t get me started on the sometimes cringeworthy articles about Boards of Canada. Just check out this one about Old Tunes which reports happenings on a messageboard as though it was as serious a situation as Watergate.

The thing is, though, I can understand why people put such information in Wikipedia pages, and even that there might be demand for such information. I would be interested in this kind of information if it was about a topic that I was really interested in. But it does make some Wikipedia articles look rather ragged and untidy, with a sometimes obsessive focus on inconsequential details.

I know I could edit the articles myself, but it would probably be fruitless. I don’t want to risk upsetting the obsessive Fonejacker fan. Besides, it would probably be reverted back anyway. Plus, I think the information is of value. Just, maybe not on Wikipedia.

Wouldn’t it be good if there was a Fanpedia? A wiki site where people are allowed to be disgustingly obsessed with the minutiae of their hobbies. This could leave Wikipedia to focus on information that has proved to be important over a period of time.

I guess Wikimedia would not be too keen to provide a ‘Fanpedia’ service. I wonder who would actually be prepared to fund one? Then we might find out the real value of this trivial information is not so great after all.

I wonder if one of the great promises of digital television will not be kept in the long run. Theoretically, Freeview offers viewers more choice than the old five analogue channels. At first it was true. As well as the five channels we already knew, ONdigital launched with plenty of sport and film channels, childrens’ channels and a variety of other niche channels.

That’s still kind of the same with Freeview today. But Freeview is becoming a victim of its own success. There are dozens of channels on Freeview. But once you take away the shopping and quiz channels, many of the remaining channels spend much of their time broadcasting shopping and quiz programmes, or advertising their own subscription services.

Having a Freeview channel is like gold dust for a broadcaster now. But this means that if a company only has one channel on Freeview it has to make the most of what it’s got. Now, instead of each channel catering for its own niche, channels are scurrying around chasing the average viewer. So instead of having loads more choice than we did in the old days, we now have slightly more choice.

It’s a bit like local radio stations. There are millions of them, but as far as I can tell they are almost all exactly the same. Listeners don’t get choice here. They get the same bland middle-of-the-road pop music with over-excited presenters yelping over the top. I mean, how many radio stations have a slogan along the lines of “Classic hits and today’s best music, only on 97.3 Scrotum FM”? All of them?

Freeview still has a lot of quality channels. But most of the choice comes from the BBC, Channel 4 or (at a stretch) ITV. Even then, you sense that this is only because each of these broadcasters have multiple Freeview slots to fill.

Disney has one channel on Freeview: ABC1. Its diet of cheaply imported, inoffensive daytime-friendly American comedy has barely changed in years. Yawn.

BSkyB has three channels: Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. That was, until they decided to replace Sky Travel with a general entertainment channel especially created for Freeview, Sky Three. So what about the fans of travel programmes? They’ll have to make do with gameshows that were originally shown on Sky One five years ago and cheaply imported American comedies. Boring. (Apart from Futurama, of course!)

Even Channel Five couldn’t manage to come up with interesting Freeview channels. Overnight it brings us The Great Big British Quiz, one of the worst quiz channels there is! Past the watershed, Five US is filled with wall to wall repeats of CSI. During the day we are treated to cheaply imported (imported from the past, that is) episodes of Happy Days and comedy backwater Joey. Pass me the pillow.

Five Life is so inconsequential, I won’t even go into it. All it ever seems to show is The Ellen DeGeneres Show (a cheaply imported American chat show). I shat my duvet out of boredom.

The latest culprit to contribute to the increasingly tumbleweed-infested airwaves is Viacom, whose sole Freeview channel is TMF. It used to be called The Music Factory. Just one problem. You’ll never find any music on it. This was understandable when it showed MTV programmes such as Newlyweds or Dirty Sanchez. For one thing, it brought MTV programmes into terrestrial homes which I guess you should be grateful for. And there was still a (tenuous) link to music.

But now TMF has brought into its schedule “classic comedies” such as Cheers, Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years. WTF!!! TMF is now even unrecognisable to what it was last week, never mind a few years ago! What do these programmes have to do with music?

Even the higher quality Freeview channels, such as ITV2, More4 or E4 show more than their fair share of American comedy and drama. Sky took off their travel channel to show more American programmes. MTV have changed their music channel beyond recognition to show more American programmes. Now Channel Five have an entire channel dedicated to it. So where has the variety gone? We may have more choice, but we no longer have variety.

But there is a silver lining! Ftn has been on Freeview almost since the very start, but it was easily the most uneventful channel on the lineup. This was despite all the potential. It could draw from the pool of Flextech channels, which surely have a few quality programmes to rub together. But whoever was responsible obviously didn’t care. Ftn was like a piece of shit on your shoe that you hate so much that you won’t even bother to wash it off, so instead you scrape your shoe all over the pavement as you walk along and hope that it just goes away. Yes, Ftn was exactly like that.

Until now, that is. On New Year’s Day, Ftn’s schedule was shaken up to include more quality programmes. The phone-in quiz shows and Thomas Cook TV segments have gone, and they’ve been replaced with repeats of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye!

Wow! Those were three of my favourite programmes when I was young! The fact that these programmes are now almost twenty years old messes with my mind. What’s even more amazing is just how much of The Crystal Maze I can actually remember, despite it being made way back in 1990.

I know what you’re thinking. These are just cheap repeats like all the other stuff. Well yeah, but at least it’s not Dawson’s Creek. Now, start the fans please!

five (that’s Channel Five to you and me) is set to take its first tentative steps into the world of multichannel with the launch of two new channels: five us (Five U.S.) and five life (not to be confused with Five Live). They’re both going to be launched on Freeview, which is good news, isn’t it? Nah.

I used to get quite excited whenever a new channel was added to Freeview’s lineup. But I’ve come to realise that most of the channels are utter crap. Also, most of the new channels have been squeezed in by reducing the picture quality. These days most Freeview channels just look like a load of pixelated, blocky shit — a step above YouTube.

Luckily, Channel Five has found the space for their new channels by buying part of Top Up TV and nicking all of their space. (Top Up TV is repositioning itself as a PVR service. The PVR will cost £180, then £9.99 per month. Any takers? No?) So at least Five’s new channels won’t look as though you’re watching them through a sieve.

But they sound as though they are going to be full of a load of insipid trash.

Five US features a mix of American drama, films, documentaries, sport and comedy…

Just like the original Channel Five then.

…while highlights from Five Life include the highly-acclaimed drama series Love My Way and the award-winning The Ellen Degeneres Show.

“Highlights” like some programme that nobody’s ever heard of, and a chat show hosted by somebody that everybody thought was left behind by the 1990s.

Let’s face it: these channels are going to be filled with programmes that aren’t even good enough to be shown on Channel Five. And is there anybody who thinks that Channel Five has enough material to fill even one channel?

People said the same when ITV launched ITV3, which the last time I looked was the third-biggest multichannel channel (behind Sky One and ITV2). That doesn’t make its content any good though. ITV3 is filled with twenty year old dramas that look as though they were filmed in an actual theatre, and probably should have stayed in the theatre aswell.

Meanwhile, ITV2 has become the home of uninspired spin-offs called things like The X-Factor X-treme DX Reloaded Uber Edition the Third On ITV2 (I think that’s also the name of Gilette’s new razor). Either that or it’s showing some wet Holywood chick flick or teen movie.

ITV4 is the worst of them all, especially when you consider that ITV essentially removed Men & Motors to make space for it. Like Men & Motors, ITV4 is meant to be aimed at blokes. But whereas Men & Motors had the well-known brand, fanbase and reasonable programming, ITV4 doesn’t.

Can anybody actually think of any progammes that ITV4 shows? The only one I can think of is David Letterman, which already had a perfectly good home on ITV2. Indeed, since they moved Letterman to ITV4 you would think that they would show it at a decent slot, but it still occupies the same irregular post-midnight slot. You could only hope of catching it if you came back late from the pub and happened to be flicking past ITV4.

ITV isn’t the only company polluting Freeview. Channel 4 has also done a disappointing job. E4 is okay, but it promises a lot more than it ever delivers. It should be showing more experimental British programmes. But most of the time it shows cheap American imports that are superficially good looking but are ultimately as appealing as stapling your bumcheeks together. The one thing going for the channel is E4 Music, which actually shows a decent variety of music. It certainly does a much better job than The Hits or TMF.

The jury is out on Film4. I have watched a few films that I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else, but the number of repeats already is worrying. I don’t think it’s quite delivering.

Then there is More4, another channel that seemed promising but you never seem to watch it. Again, does anybody know what this channel shows? There is The Daily Show, if you can remember to watch it. But is there anything else? Whenever I flick past it, it seems to be showing repeats of Noel Edmonds’ Imaginary Telephone Conversations.

The channel launched in a blaze of publicity with A Very Social Secretary, but has produced nothing notable since then. More4 is obviously hungry for more of that kind of publicity — it’s only gone and shot George Bush. Please.

Then there is the BBC. In fairness, the BBC’s digital channels have produced much more quality programmes than its commercial rivals have. But still something seems to be lacking. BBC Three in particular seems to have completely lost its way.

In fairness, a lot of BBC Three’s troubles seem to stem from the ridiculous rules and quotas that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport imposed on the channel. It famously told the BBC that BBC Three must show news in order to distinguish itself from commercial rivals, then later criticised the news programme because nobody watched it!

A couple of years ago, on the crest of the Little Britain wave, BBC Three seemed like a quite a good channel actually. Don’t forget that BBC Three was also the home of The Mighty Boosh and Monkey Dust, two fine programmes.

But since then it has produced reams of steaming poo like Tittybangbang (officially the world’s least funny comedy) and Grownups (a flimsy script coupled with dreadfully wooden acting, this makes Two Pints look like a bloody masterpiece). Even Rob Brydon seemed to be shat up with the misfiring Anually Retentive.

Since ditching the 7 O’Clock News, BBC Three seems to have filled its current affairs quota with documentaries by complete dullards wittering on about their tiny penii. And people think bloggers are self-indulgent! And let’s not forget those awful programmes about parenting. If I want to see lots of toddlers with potty mouths I’ll go to the supermarket.

The whole tone of the channel is unbearable aswell. Why are those continuity announcers trying to be my mate? It is contrived, unfunny and annoying.

BBC Four is pretty good at what it does. And let’s face it, most of BBC Three’s best programmes would probably fit easily on BBC Four. Vaguely decent comedy shows like Screen Wipe or Don’t Watch That Watch This do fine on BBC Four, so why not? Sometimes it feels as if the Beeb uses the word ‘youth’ as a proxy for ’shit’. So they should do with that shit what everybody else does with it. BBC Three should probably just be thrown in the toilet, and the BBC could concentrate on just the one digital channel.

FilmFour is Free, you surely must have noticed.

Except that in the middle of the huge campaign to alert us all to the fact that the respected film channel is coming to Freeview, Channel 4 only went and decided to change its name. The new name is Film4. It’s not a huge change, but that only makes it all the more strange.

Apparently it is so that it will fit in with Channel 4’s other digital channels — E4 and More4. Curiously enough, there is no mention of Quiz Call. I suppose this means that Channel 4 will soon be changing its name to Channel4?

Ignore the fact that FilmFour was Channel 4’s first foray into the multichannel world. Ignore the fact that anybody who would care that FilmFour is owned by Channel 4 already knows it. None of this has stopped them from rebranding the channel, complete with fugly logo and all.

The logo does make you recoil at first. What on earth were they thinking of, replacing that classy logo with this blocky monstrosity? Chris Riley likes it. I just think it looks like Teletext. Mind you, it is starting to grow on me, so I probably won’t even notice it a couple of months down the line.

But there is no excuse for this logo which goes straight to the top of the pile of crap logos.

Now I was never a fan of SMG’s logo, but at least it wasn’t offensive like this one! Now I can see what they’re trying to do here. “Look, we own STV don’t you know, so we’ll use that ‘S’ in our logo.” Very good. Not that the S was very nice looking in the first place. But you can see what they’re thinking with that. But look at the bit after the ‘S’. What is with that ‘M’?

Film4 and SMG both seem determined to take us back to the 1980s. Please! Wasn’t it bad enough the first time around?

This year’s Big Brother has been a pile of old bum apparently. A bunch of the original housemates turned out to be possibly too ill. A series of stunts devised by the producers has backfired — the Golden Ticket housemate turning out to be an immense dullard, and the building of a “secret house next door” which wasn’t soundproof. In past years I actually watched a lot of Big Brother Live, but this year they all seem to go to bed early. Pah.

But I’m still kind of keeping in touch with what’s going on. Why? Because the spin-off discussion show, Big Brother’s Big Mouth, has become essential weeknightly viewing. They show it on E4 from Tuesday–Friday after the main Channel 4 show, but it actually feels better in its late-night repeat slot on Channel 4.

BBBM is not a must-watch because of any groundbreaking format or because of the wonderful insight that the participants have to offer. It is a must-watch because it is presented by Russell Brand.

The comedian polarises opinion. I wasn’t sure at first. But on one boring evening when I was flicking through the channels I caught him at full throttle, in the middle of an energetic tirade. I can’t remember what it was about — it might have been about one of the housemates, but it was more likely to be about his dinkle. I became a fan. Now that the programme is on at a more suitable late-night timeslot I try to catch it every time it’s on — and there certainly aren’t many programmes I can say that about.

Before he was resurrected in BBBM, Russell Brand got himself involved in all sorts of shameful debauchery. A heroin addict, he once infamously turned up to work at MTV on September 12^th 2001 dressed as Osama bin Laden. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time… But he’s clean now! And he’s got loads of funnies about it all which he uses in his stand-up routines, such as: “The thing about heroin, it’s very more-ish.”

If I have a criticism of Brand on BBBM it is that a lot of the programme is actually the same every night — it has become very catchphrase-heavy over time. Regular viewers know that the script changes very little from day-to-day, as Brand tries to shoehorn new jokes into the same old punchlines.

For instance, before the end of part 1 every day, Brand will launch into a soliloquy about his ball bags. His speech will always end with the words, “the swines!” Sometimes audience members will attempt to join in with him at the end, as though it is some kind of greatest hits concert.

Although I like the regular bits, Brand is at his best when he is ad-libbing and interacting with the crowd. During the show he mingles amongst the crowd like Kilroy. He wields a Wogan-style stick microphone, thrusting it around like a rapier whilst firing off quick-witted funnies.

Once an audience member was in the middle of a banal speech about how lovely Pete is, and how he doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone. Brand retorted, quick as a flash: “Yeah he does, he keeps on saying ‘wankers’.”

Brand doesn’t just tell rude jokes about Big Brother though. He is still on MTV (despite being sacked from it several times), and he now has a weekly radio programme on 6music. Justin at Chicken Yoghurt, though, likes him most for his World Cup column in The Guardian.

Unfortunately I’m not so much into football, so most of the jokes in that column would go straight over my head. I did read it once, but the bit I liked the best was the bit that wasn’t about football:

Shouting at a football match, like talking during sex, should only be undertaken with supreme confidence and commitment.

Yelping, “Blimey, you’ve done a goal” or “I’m gonna do a sex on you” can mar, irrevocably, the necessary tension.

• Big posh interview with The Observer
• Russell and Lea finally meet: