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Archive: E4

Modern Toss is okay

12 July 2006 20:07

Categories: Entertainment, Humour, Internet, Technology, Television

None of these really deserve a post on their own, so I’ll just post them together.

First of all, I watched Modern Toss last night on Channel 4. It got a bit dull towards the end, but a lot of it was very funny. I haven’t enjoyed watching a television progamme so much for a wee while now. It’s good to be seeing something a bit different. It is quite difficult to explain. It feels a little bit like the TV Go Home television programme, but I guess it is more like a comic for television (probably because Modern Toss originally was a cartoon magazine). A bit like Zzzap! except not for small kids.

This is the sort of thing E4 maybe should be doing, but they are too busy showing cheap repeats of repeats of The OC. So Modern Toss has to make do with being on at 11pm on a Tuesday night on Channel 4, with no repeats in sight. If you get a chance, try to catch it next week. This guy likes it aswell.

Yesterday I found quite a good video on YouTube. It’s something that somebody has actually created as opposed to being something ripped off the television.

David Cann is perhaps best known for playing the doctor in the woozy comedy series, Jam. He was a very rude doctor: his advice usually invovled doing something strange with your willy.

Later on he played a doctor in EastEnders. Somebody has taken one of these scenes from EastEnders and applied Jam-style effects to it: fuzzy visuals, time-stretched audio and an ambient soundtrack. Ironically, the rubbishness of YouTube (particularly with the video and audio being out of sync) adds to the effect. Here it is: Eeeeeastenders.

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TMF is The sHits

1 April 2006 00:14

Categories: Entertainment, Music, Television

Music channels really are a load of pish. Apparently it is cheaper to run a music channel than it is to publish a magazine. And it shows. This is probably why Emap like to milk every last droplet out of their magazine brands while the magazines themselves have gone the way of the dodo (hello, Smash Hits!).

Freeviewers like myself have two and two-halves options. There is The Hits and TMF — the two halves being E4 Music and E4+1 Music+1 or whatever it may be called. I have to say that E4 really must be applauded for actually making music television watchable. You can tell they’ve put in a bit of effort to make it a bit more diverse, aiming for a more discerning audience. It’s just a shame that if I ever have a day free to dispose of by vegging in front of a glowing square, I am hardly ever up early enough to watch E4 Music.

The Hits and TMF are just diabolical though. When I first got Freeview I found it difficult to believe quite how many adverts they were broadcasting. Every three videos or so it would be time for another commercial break — one long enough for you to flick through all the other channels at least twice. And there are the adverts themselves of course. All for ‘ringtone clubs’ aimed at people with the intelligence of a fish.

Even worse are these new quiz subscriptions, which are like some evil combination of quiz channels and ringtone clubs. I wonder if anybody has yet won that £2000 they were giving away to one lucky person who was stupid enough to subscribe but clever enough to know that another name for ‘money machine’ is ‘blackbox’. …What?

Despite the fact that it appears to be so cheap to run a music channel, I saw recently that The Hits has jumped onto the quiz channel bandwaggon. At least it’s very late at night. What gets me is that they’ve decided to squeeze in a couple of hours of Teleshopping as well! I mean really! Do we really need yet more Teleshopping?!

Meanwhile, TMF is the home for amusing technical glitches. If you’ve ever watched TMF late at night you will no doubt be aware of ‘Matchmaker X-rated’, the on-screen money-making scheme that encourages twelve-year-old nincompoops to text their name and date of birth which in turn makes the ‘Matchmaker’ generate some random naughty text. A typical caption might say, “Ooh, you just made the computer cum in your eye. Try felching her ear tonight.” Well that once went out during the day.

Andrew at Cage of Monkeys has his own idea for a music channel:

NO ZANE LOWE!

Give that man an EPG number!

In the process, Andrew linked to this blog of interesting music videos. Definitely one to subscribe to. I like this video for Jamie Lidell’s ‘New Me’. It reminds me a bit of those smart BBC Four idents. Must have been a chore to time it all.

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Freeview gets E4 — twice

28 April 2005 00:37

Categories: Formula 1, Television

Freeviewers are getting absolutely spoiled now. Every now and again they just squeeze out some more space for a new channel, just like that!

It’s got to the point where just about all the decent channels are on Freeview now, and all the extra space is dedicated to really bad ones. Not even shopping channels — at least you can understand that, because Freeview is… free to view, and, well, something’s got to pay for it.

Four new channels are apparently on their way — two from Channel 4 (three if you include More4, but that’s old news really) and two from ITV.

Wait a minute… TWO FROM ITV! Shit! ITV don’t even have enough good programmes to fill one channel, never mind two, three, four or five (six if you include the ITV News Channel).

So what do ITV give us to fill up one of their brand spanking new spaces? Men and Motors. Oh man. Cars crashing all day. Great! And to add insult to injury the Freeview version will stop broadcasting at 11pm. If you take a look at your television guide, you will see that this totally defeats the purpose of the entire channel! No doubt at 10:59 just before Freeview closedown they’ll say, “And if you want to have a wank get out your credit card and pay for Sky Digital you tight git!” Maybe slightly more subtly though.

As for ITV’s other slot, it’s going to be filled by ITV4. Holy hair. ITV1 is only there for Formula 1, ITV2 is only okay at times and ITV3 is a bloody joke. And they don’t know what ITV4 is going to be yet. If I recall correctly, it was originally going to be a female-orientated channel; then it was going to be a gaming channel of some sort; then it was going to be a male-orientated channel (then they realised — doh — that they’ve already got one!). Now it’s apparently going to be a children’s channel. You’d think if you come up with a new channel you’d at least have a few ideas of the sort of stuff you’d put on it first.

As for Channel 4′s offerings, well one of them is E4 so we’ve got all we need now thank you. E4 was the only thing that Freeview really needed (perhaps Sky One aswell, but there’s not a snowball’s chance of that coming to Freeview). Their other new channel is E4+1, which is a bit of a waste. You wait years for E4 to come along to Freeview, and then two come along at once…

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