Archive:
Television

Gremlins affecting BBC One closedown

This BBC One closedown from 1996 didn’t quite go to plan. Just as well it was time to go home. I always find it interesting watching closedowns from the past. Continuity announcers just don’t seem so important these days, do they? Today they would never tell you to take care when heading out on the […]

The Chain

Next weekend sees the start of the Formula 1 season. So for this week’s television presentation gem of the week, I had to feature The Chain. This week there is a campaign to get The Chain to number 1 in the charts for the start of the Formula 1 season. Here is the title sequence […]

How committed to F1 is the BBC?

There was some alarming news for F1 fans yesterday. According to The Guardian, the BBC is considering ditching F1 coverage as a result of budget cuts. Easy target I used to think the chances of the BBC dropping its F1 coverage at the end of the current contract were fairly high. For critics of the […]

4-Tel On View

Welcome to the first ever television presentation gem of the week. Each week, on a Friday afternoon, I plan to indulge in one of my geekiest and most shameful traits — an unhealthy interest in television presentation. If you read the post below, you will get the gist… This is a brilliant example of television […]

Second rate 5*

It has just about the simplest and least imaginative channel name possible. But over the years the people behind Channel 5 have still managed to regularly get themselves ito a bit of a tizzy over what their channel is actually called. So for years, the powers that be insisted that you should just call it […]

Just remember the simple phrase

One of my odd little interests is public information films. Lately I have been getting stuck into the ‘Charley Says’ DVDs. Fantastic stuff. It was just after watching the ‘Splink’ PIF with John Pertwee that I realised that I hadn’t taken in what ‘Splink’ stands for at all. It always gets me how some mnemonics […]

A confession

Despite my blog post on Saturday about why I was going to miss the Korean Grand Prix, I need to confess that I actually did end up watching it live! Not only did I sit through the pre-race coverage, into massively delayed start and then the entire race, but I also watched the BBC’s F1 […]

Singasnore — What makes a good F1 race?

What do viewers at home love about F1? It is great wheel-to-wheel racing? Lots of overtaking? Strategy calls? Or the venues? Looking at the polarised reactions to this past weekend’s Singapore Grand Prix got me wondering. A few of the journalists were pretty effusive about the race. Will Buxton was particularly euphoric: Epic race. One […]

UK-wide Capital? How not to name a station

I saw that eyebrows were raised today when it was announced that BSkyB was going to close Channel One, just a month after relaunching it, and two months after buying it. I guess the half-hearted attempt at removing the Virgin branding from the channel formerly known as Virgin 1 should have been a kind of […]