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Archive: Virgin Media

Moving out

3 December 2010 22:49

Categories: Dundee, Fife, Personal, Scotland, Weather

I am writing to you direct from my new flat. It has been a hectic week, trying to move up here at the same time as a particularly nasty cold snap has hit the UK, and the east of Scotland in particular.

I was hoping to get the whole thing pretty much finished this week – I had even booked the week off work in order to get as much done as possible. Instead I am sitting here having not done very much, and even feel like it is a major achievement just to be sitting here.

I got the keys last Friday, and travelled up with some bits and pieces. There was loads of kitchen stuff that I bought two years ago at the Woolworths closing down sale! I had my staff discount on top of all the discounts that were going on anyway, so I got plenty of bargains.

Over the weekend, the snow worsened. A trip to Ikea was planned for Monday, but I decided to postpone it until Tuesday as the weather was looking like it was due to be a bit better. But the trip down was pretty hairy. I am pretty glad that my dad decided he would drive the van that we had hired. The conditions would probably have got the better of me – as they got the better of dad a few times.

We hadn’t been in Ikea for more than perhaps 15 minutes when an announcement was made that they would be closing the store in 60 minutes! That is not enough time to do Ikea properly, so the whole rest of the time was a completely mad stress-rush.

Considering the time constraints, I think I did a pretty good job, but there are still glaring gaps. I don’t have shelves for all my CDs. I don’t have a bed for the second bedroom. And most of all, I still don’t have a sofa. All there is to sit on is one office-type chair that I bought for the computer desk.

After taking it all up to Dundee, we had real trouble getting the van out of the snow. Luckily, the main roads between Kirkcaldy and Dundee have been largely okay whenever I have made the journey. But as soon as you turn off onto a side-street, the snow gets pretty bad.

I can’t get anywhere near my proper parking space, and it looks like all of my neighbours have their cars properly stranded. We made the mistake of being a bit too ambitious coming in, instead of parking on the street before (as I have done today!). Luckily, the neighbours seem really good and helped us get out!

There is still an awful lot to do. My bed has been built, so I am sleeping here tonight. Tomorrow, an engineer from Virgin Media is due to arrive to install my broadband, television and telephone line. Unfortunately, I still  haven’t got an HD television to test out the new HD Virgin Media box! I ordered it a week ago but it hasn’t arrived here yet – not that I’m surprised due to the snow. Hopefully it won’t be too much of a problem for Mr Virgin Media.

Meanwhile, I am kicking myself for some of the things I have forgotten to bring with me! Despite owning two phone chargers, I have neglected to bring either of them – so I have to keep remembering to go easy on my phone usage. That means that this little stay at my flat will be short-lived. I will go back to “old home” tomorrow afternoon, and I probably won’t return here until Monday evening.

I will get moved in one day…

4 comments

Fantasy F1 competitions and strategies

11 March 2008 14:45

Categories: Guide

A fun diversion during the season is to enter a Fantasy Formula 1 competition. When I was at school I actually used to run one for a couple of years. It was a bit too ambitious though. By the end I was getting people to design their liveries and even choose sponsors for points. I definitely overdid it there.

Anyway, it is years since I entered a Fantasy F1 competition. I was looking around for competitions to enter when a Sidepodcast league was announced. The league now contains an astonishing 84 entrants, with a few familiar names to the F1 blogosphere in the mix.

I have also decided to join in Linksheaven’s Fantasy F1 competition. The rules are a bit weird because you get a point for each lap a driver completes. I’m not sure if I have taken the right approach with this one. Apparently a lot of people have chosen Sutil on the basis that he is cheap and he will rack up the points by completing loads of laps. I’ve just gone for a general mid-grid selection, in the hope they’ll pick up some actual points now and again.

The other competition I am indulging in this season is Formula 1 Picks, a Facebook Application. Last year F1 Picks entailed predicting the top three finishers, but this year has seen a tweak to the rules. Drivers are now separated into three groups — Ferrari / McLaren drivers and Alonso; the midfield; the no-hopers. You score the Championship points of your three picks.

This is a simple approach, and the three tier selection system has mixed it up a bit. However, I am perplexed at some of the choices made by the application’s developers. Mark Webber is in the second group while David Coulthard is in the third group. It’s not clear to my why DC should be regarded as so much worse, especially since with the new gearbox rules Webber is sure to retire from several races!

I would choose Coulthard from the third group because it seems like an opportunity to pick up an ‘undervalued’ driver. But Kazuki Nakajima is also in this third group! I realise that Nakajima is a rookie, but the Williams is going to knock everyone’s block off this year, and Nakajima was handy in the Brazilian Grand Prix (pitstop mishap aside).

What other decent Fantasy F1 competitions are there? I have noticed competitions run by Virgin Media (goodness knows why), Times Online / The Sun and everyone’s favourite, ITV-F1.

But entering these competitions involves giving away quite a lot of personal information, and who knows, maybe even selling your soul. I suppose that is the price you pay for entering a competition that actually has a prize. But that’s not what it’s about surely?

Also, what do you think is a good strategy? When I ran my competition at school I sadly undervalued Michael Schumacher just in time for him to have one of his most dominant seasons (I think that must have been 2002), so everyone who bought Michael Schumacher and had even the crappest chassis and engine just ran away with the competition.

Is the “great driver / poor chassis” combination the best? I tend to go for an all-round middling team in the hope of grabbing a few points here and there, rather than going to the expense of buying, say, Räikkönen. I am out of practice in this Fantasy F1 malarkey though. Time will tell.

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ABC1, Virgin 1 and BBC Two 2

18 October 2007 16:56

Categories: Entertainment, Nostalgia, Television

I am quite a fan of Freeview. Even though I hardly ever watch any television these days, I think it is so wonderful to have that kind of choice fairly hassle-free for £20-odd. There have been quite a lot of changes to Freeview recently.

First came the unexpected and abrupt death of ABC1. It wasn’t a bad channel, but it always seemed like there was something that didn’t quite work about it. When it launched there were no adverts for months — so how was it funded? Then there was the distinct lack of space on prime-time on Freeview, which essentially made ABC1 a daytime-only channel.

ABC1′s schedule was therefore restricted to rather tame American comedies. The same ones. Over and over again. What’s more, they did that odd thing that digital channels sometimes do, of showing the episodes seemingly in random order. This was especially problematic for 8 Simple Rules. One minute John Ritter was dead, the next he had come back to life! And then he was dead again.

In a way this was a good thing though, because you knew what you were getting. Unchallenging, homely television. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I imagine that if ABC1 was around ten years ago, I would have loved watching it on the days when I was off sick from school.

Then came Virgin 1, which is Virgin Media’s latest little stone thrown in their big bear fight with BSkyB. “Oh, they think they’re so smart having a channel called Sky One,” some Virgin Media big-wig probably said on day. “We’ll show them! We can have Virgin 1.”

So, Ftn has been killed to death just when it was getting good. I loved Ftn in its later days. Its repeats of retro gameshows like The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye were strangely captivating. Then later at night there was always Takeshi’s Castle if you were up for vegetating a bit. While it was always Freeview’s worst channel, in the past year or so it had carved out a distinctive identity for itself.

The new channel, on the other hand, does not have a distinctive flavour. In fact, it is almost as if they looked at Sky One and decided “we want a programme like that, a programme like that, and a programme like that.”

In short, it is like a watered-down version of Channel Five. Do we really need another channel full of sub-standard American imports? I think not. I would have thought that, especially with the Virgin brand attached to it, they would have put a bit more effort in to make it more distinctive.

Then this week there was the launch of Dave. Dave is essentially a re-branding of UKTV G2, so it’s good to know they’ve gone from one silly name to another. A lot of people are going on about what a great name Dave is for a channel, but I think it is quite silly. They say that it’s based on the idea that “everyone knows a bloke called Dave”, which is true. The problem is that whenever I hear the name I think of that balloon-faced Conservative leader.

As for the programming it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Watching Dave is like being transported back to the 1990s. Have I Got News For You, Red Dwarf and Bottom are among its roster. Essentially, Dave seems to me like BBC Two 2. It’s the channel that BBC Three secretly wishes it could be, if only it could be unleashed from all of those quotas to do with repeats.

Then there is Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I can’t stand watching it, at least when it was hosted by Mark Lamarr. He seems like a genuinely spiteful person. He tells nasty jokes about people, which I don’t mind usually. But Mark Lamarr doesn’t seem to tell them in the sense of “I’m only having a laugh”. He seems to be genuinely nasty. I can’t stand watching it. For a further insight into the dark world of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, check out this blog post by Adam Buxton.

But without a doubt the worst programme on Dave is A Question of Sport. Why does this programme still exist, even in repeat form? It is just diabolical.

Fortunately, this crime is outweighed by the repeats of Whose Line is it Anyway. Now, why is Whose Line is it Anyway not on any more, huh?

Despite the patchy output, the launch of Dave on Freeview seems to add a lot of value. It is replacing UKTV Bright Ideas, which I doubt will be missed by many people. The hours for UKTV History have been cut back, which might not be very popular. But let’s face it. Everyone knows that history channels only ever get ratings if they either

  1. Show programmes that are nothing to do with history
  2. Dedicate their entire schedule to programmes about Adolf Hitler’s second cousin twice removed’s hairdresser’s pet ostrich.

7 comments

The BBC covers its own scandals; its rivals cover their tracks

25 July 2007 14:56

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Newspapers, Radio, Television

It’s funny how I was writing about media hypocrisy in relation to the premium rate phone-in scandals, only for the entire issue to resurface in a major way the following day. I have the power!

Anyway, I think the way the latest revelations have been covered by the media prove my point. Predictably enough, many people have sprung up to bash the BBC for fixing competition results. And while this is indeed despicable, what these people have ignored is the fact that every single other major broadcaster has done this. This is not a problem with the BBC. It is a symptom of the state of the MSM as a whole.

Earlier this year, record fines were handed out after viewers of Channel 4 and Channel Five were defrauded. Votes cast via premium rate phone lines were not counted on ITV programmes. Today the boss of GMTV resigned.

It is worth also remembering that the BBC is the only major broadcaster in the country that hasn’t had its fingers in the utterly deceitful quiz scam channel craze that has dogged airwaves of the past two years. In this sense, the BBC looks pretty clean compared to its commercial rivals.

Because most of the faked BBC competition results (with the exception of the truly shocking Liz Kershaw ones) were of the “panicking producer” variety. Meanwhile, the commercial broadcasters built up an entire industry that was desliberately designed to misleadingly part viewers with their cash.

It is nigh on impossible to think of a commercial broadcaster that has not played a part in this massive scam. Programmes such as Quiz Call (set up and formerly owned by Channel 4; still broadcast to this day by Channel Five), ITV Play and Quiz Night Live (produced by Endemol and broadcast on a channel owned by Telewest / NTL / Virgin). Viacom’s TMF broadcast Pop the Q, Emap’s channels featured the truly dire Cash Call. BSkyB have Sky Vegas. Few commercial broadcasters are clean.

None of this is to excuse the BBC though. Encouraging viewers to use premium rate phone lines to enter non-existent competitions is unacceptable. But the BBC cases do not have nearly as strong a whiff as the ones involving its commercial rivals.

And there is not a smidgen of the hypocrisy that has come from the newspapers surrounding the premium rate scandals of this year. Newspapers were quick to jump up and down when Richard & Judy and The X Factor got caught up in it all. But they remained conspicuously quiet when it came to similar premium rate phone lines used by themselves.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s own coverage of the scandal was notable for how harsh it was on itself. I have always felt that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant allegations of bias, the BBC provides incredibly dispassionate coverage on any stories that involves itself.

I remember that on the day of the Hutton Report I was glued to BBC News 24. While you could argue that the BBC would be biased in favour of itself, for the same reasons Sky would be biased against the BBC.

It’s just that the magnifying glass is forever focussed on the BBC, so they cannot afford to be biased, particularly when talking about themselves. So they way they covered it was professional and detached, although there was a slightly surreal moment when you could see everyone in the newsroom rushing towards the corridor where Greg Dyke appeared. For a journalist to maintain a stiff upper lip when the story literally surrounds them in this way is seriously impressive.

I first learned about the BBC phone-in problems on BBC News 24 itself, and you would have thought that the scandal was almost as seismic as Hutton. But the problems seem to be roughly on a par with ITV’s problems with The X Factor, and certainly nothing reaching the outright deception of, say, Richard & Judy or GMTV.

And, as Matt Wardman points out:

have Sky manipulated their phone-ins? If they had, how would we find out?

That is the key. Only the BBC has the ability to be as self-critical as it is, even though it can sometimes do a lot of damage. And they never seem to get any thanks for it.

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