Digital TV Blog

Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Saturday the 29^th of March, ITV1 10:10pm

With the success of The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Virgin 1, it was only a matter of time before one of the TV networks got round to broadcasting the best Terminator movie of the bunch – Five showed T3 last month, but we won't go there.

The film, which cleverly plays with the character roles of the first Terminator move sees future governor Arnie inadvertently trashing urban California as he fights to protect future resistance leader John Connor from the molten metal melty T-1000 assassin, played by a pointy-eared Robert Patrick. 

The movie is also notable for the pioneering use of CGI, which, despite the film being well over a decade old does not look hackneyed or obtrusive, which is more than can be said for more recent releases. T2 is also broadcast post watershed on ITV1, so we should get to see the nuclear annihilation of the playground scene in all its bone-liquefying glory.

Judgment Day is this Saturday the 29^th of March at 10:10pm (ITV1).

New Media IPTV recruits former Auntie adviser

As mobile and broadband providers O2 and Orange prepare to launch digital TV platforms in the UK. BT has appointed Simon Milner, former BBC policy adviser, as its head of media and convergence policy as it makes plans to moves further into the digital media market, hoping to shake off the perception of some, that IPTV is something of an attendant white elephant broadband add-on.

Milner said: "Convergence [in the telecoms market] has been a hot debating topic for at least a decade. For BT and our customers, it's now a reality and it's generating policy conundrums which need tackling."

In the last five years alone we've seen mobile phone companies merge with internet service providers, and TV companies setting up their own fixed line networks – BT Vision was launched just over a year ago, and has been busy in snapping up content for the service, most notably near-live coverage of Premiership football games, which when combined with the Setanta Sports Pack, made for an alternative to Sky.

Last year, BT inked a deal with Channel 4 which allowed customers to watch content downloaded on the 4oD platform on their TV screens via the BT Vision box. BT also made noises about New Media 2, a new concept for 21^st Century TV which would see viewers actively participating in the plot outcomes of drama series, allowing for multiple endings to programmes via a library of additional content downloaded from an online backend of additional material.

BT Vision currently has a consumer base of nearly 200,000.

Borat, Saturday the 22nd of March, Sky Movies Comedy, 8pm

Seeing as it's the Easter weekend, we've had to pitch our votes a day early as we've got the Friday off – and so, until the next time there's a Bank Holiday, we present the Thursday Theeling instead.

When the votes were cast the organised proletariat spoke as one voice, and elected faux Kazakhstani documentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan to the top spot for this week. The film follows Sacha Baron Cohen around his supposed homeland and the "US and A", the "Greatest Country in the World," where he gets into scrapes with a string of misogynist, homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments – none of which are as shocking or offensive as some of the responses he inadvertently extracts from his interviewees.

Not at all PC, Borat isn't for everybody, but worth watching for the 'Kazahk' slang employed throughout, the 'marriage proposal' to Pamela Anderson, and the singing of 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' to the tune of 'The Star Spangled Banner' at a rodeo.

Borat is broadcast at 8pm on Sky Movies Comedy.

Sky 1 2 to make 3 in HD

Sky One will be producing three high definition drama series following a hefty investment of an eight-figure sum into its production wing. Following on from the Terry Pratchett adaptation of The Colour of Magic, the channel is set to spend more than £10m throughout 2008-9 on three new productions, all of which will be book adaptations, filmed in HD, one of which will again be based on a Pratchett novel.

Seemingly following in the bootsteps of the critically acclaimed Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, the first of the three is set to be a remake of Strike Back by ex-SAS man Chris Ryan, about a British military hero and a fallen war veteran now living rough in London. The pair used to know each other and are reunited by a Middle East hostage crisis. The drama will be split into six one hour long episodes and will be produced by Left Bank Pictures.

David Almond's Skellig tells the story of Michael, a young boy who discovers a strange wasted creature called Skellig living in his garage, which comes to the aid of Michael's sister when she becomes seriously ill, and will be made into a two-hour one off broadcast is by Feel Films.

The third production will be the previously mentioned Pratchett adaptation Going Postal, which sees con artist Moist von Lipwig running a postal service up against the newfangled 'clacks' system, which is sort of like the Discworld's version of the interweb. Unfortunately, as the narrative of Going Postal doesn't feature Rincewind, there will be no David Jason; no actors have been announced yet.

Viewers return to the (real) third channel

ITV seem determined to reverse recent fortunes by bringing the big guns to bear on the competition in the form of a new brace of gritty gun-toting crime dramas which sees plenty of shooting and killing.

The new drama The Fixer, the pilot episode of which was broadcast last week, is pretty much a rewrite of the gritty 60’s TV show Callan, featuring the same premise; a shady Government body recruits a former ex-Special Forces man and his cellmate to be an unofficial government hitman – they kill people to earn their freedom. Starring Andrew Buchan as John Mercer, the titular Fixer, and Tamzin Outhwaite as a femme fatale, the debut episode revolved around the taking out of an Albanian gangster and netted ITV a nice share of the ratings (6.2m).

ITV have also been heavily punting their adaptation of Jake Arnott's He Kills Coppers, which is concerned with the murder of three Met officers in 1966. Spanning two decades, the series begins in the build up to the final of the 1966 World Cup, it takes in the 'Clean Up The World Cup' initiative on strip clubs in Soho and moves through to the 80's to the Greenham Common protests, providing a neat alternative to Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes on the BBC;  it turns out that David Bowie is a huge fan of Jake Arnott's work.

Executive chairman Michael Grade has insisted that company is experiencing a turnaround. He said: "We're focused on a three to five year growth plan, we're fixing the fundamentals of the business, we've recruited a phenomenal team, (and) viewers are coming back to ITV."

The Fixer is broadcast every Monday at 9pm on ITV1, and He Kills Coppers unloads both barrels this Sunday the 23^rd of March.

Sexy cyborgs rule Digital Terrestrial

Bionic Woman, the NBC remake of the 1970's series of the same name featuring former EastEnders star Michelle Ryan has seen a spike in ITV2 ratings, with the debut performance broadcast on the 11^th of March, raking in 2.2m viewers, breaking the record previously held by I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here Now! which drew about 2m in February 2004.

The story follows bartender Jamie Sommers, who is rescued from the brink of death after being implanted with a range of experimental cybernetic enhancements courtesy of a US government-affiliated company, for whom Sommers is obliged to do some dirty work for; the first episode saw Ryan engage in some high-wire fisticuffs with Katee Sackhoff from Sky's Battlestar Galactica.

According to Ryan, the shoots for the first series of Bionic Woman were "hardcore" and involved a lot of Matrix-esque aerobatics; "they had me up in a harness one day and then I'm on another harness the next, doing these sort of crazy stunts."

For UK audiences, the show represents a literal screen transformation; from Londoner Zoe Slater, to Jamie Sommers complete with a flawless American accent. The series went down well in the US, although possibility of a second series appears to have been scuppered due to complications arising from the Writer's Strike.

Last month, Terminator spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles pushed the nascent Virgin 1 channel into prominence, pulling a combined total of 1,386,000 viewers on its launch night, proving that cyborgs rule the airwaves in the digital millennium.

Bionic Woman is broadcast on ITV2 every Tuesday at 9pm.

Yet again we've experienced an even split – this week is a closely tied toss-up between the high-larious high octane Hot Shots: Part Deux, and the weird and wonderful star-studded sci-fi gun fest The Fifth Element.

Hot Shots: Part Deux (ITV2, 10:40pm) – genius spoof sequel, timely broadcast following the recent spate of Rambo re-runs. Following the Coalition Invasion of Iraq/Second Gulf Distraction (delete as appropriate) this also makes for slightly uncomfortable viewing, seeing as the villain of the piece is none other than Saddam Hussein ("Now I will kill you until you die from it!"). Part Deux also bucks the sequel trend in being better that it's unfunny predecessor by actually being funny.

The Fifth Element (Channel 4, 9pm) – Luc Besson's lavish sci-fi romp starring Bruce Willis as a luckless taxi driver, Milla Jovovich, as a "perfect being" cloned from a statue (!) and Gary Oldman as a Hitler-cum-hillbilly with a penchant for violence, and a pre-Rush Hour Chris Tucker as a camp as Christmas chat show host. Whilst Willis doesn't totally experience a full John McClane moment, he does get to indulge in some wife-beater action whilst shooting up entire rooms of bad guys. Bearing in mind that Die Hard 2 was shown on ITV2 mere weeks ago, we don't feel that the general viewing public is currently capable of handling two doses of Yippie Ki-Yay is such a short succession, so it's probably for the best.

'You will go, on my first whistle'

The ITV leotarded superhit of the 90's is all set to be remade for the 21^st Century on Sky this May, with Kirsty Gallacher and Ian Wright stepping into the shoes of Ulrika Jonsson and John Fashanu, and being joined by bellowing athletics coach John Anderson, famous for his delivery of lines such as "Contenders… Ready!"

Infamous events from the series such as The Wall, Joust and Hang Tough will be making a return, as will the final Eliminator obstacle course. Wolf fans hoping for a return of Michael Van Wijk, will be disappointed; 12 brand new Gladiators will face off 32 contenders chosen from 20,000 applicants in the new series.

The show also marks Kirsty Gallacher's return to TV since she took time off to become a mother. Of the show she said: "I grew up with Gladiators so I couldn't be more excited to be involved in the new series. It promises to be great entertainment on a major scale and I can't wait to get started."

Fellow Scot Anderson was also optimistic about the new series: "Only the strongest will succeed… the best athletes, the best contenders, winners. We want men and women that can beat the Gladiators in their arena."

Hopefully the fist-pumping soundtrack, largely compromising of Queen, and squalling guitar solos will make a return.

In a distant and second hand set of dimensions…

Following on from the hugely successful BAFTA award-wining production of Hogfather Terry Pratchett's Christmas-based wheeze, it was inevitable that more Discworld adaptations would winging their way to TV screens on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a massive space turtle.

Sky, once again working with The Mob Film Company, turned their attentions to the first two books of the Discworld series, producing The Colour of Magic, a two-part epic which sees Sir David Jason reprise his role as the cynical and inept wizard Rincewind, and Lord of the Rings stars Sean Astin and Christopher Lee making respective appearances as bumbling tourist Twoflower and the voice of Death. Dependable screen villains Jeremy Irons and Tim Curry also make appearances.

The first episode – covering the events of the first book – was screened at a world premiere on last Monday at the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair, and the red-carpet event was attended by Jason, Astin, plus director Vadim Jean and Terry Pratchett. The Colour of Magic will be broadcast in two two-hour long parts over the Easter holiday in standard definition and HD on Sky One and Sky One HD.

The hugely successful BBC iPlayer has seen a massive recent rise in internet traffic which has seen customers exceed their monthly usage policies which has seen users restricted to near-dial-up speeds, or having to pay extra charges at the end of the month, or in some cases, having their internet connection temporarily cut.

The iPlayer, it turns out, is pretty bandwidth hungry, commanding on average 300Mb per download, and has seen viewers eager to catch up on BBC programmes they've missed out on, inadvertently choking their connections.

Traffic shaping and connection throttling, as seen on the Virgin Media cable broadband packages, were introduced to prevent users downloading massive torrents of illegal files, but it turns out that many users are penalised for using entirely legitimate services such as the iPlayer and VoIP calls, which happen to consume a lot of bandwidth.

Problems only really arise when punters use the download aspect of the iPlayer – streaming content directly from the website eats up less bandwidth. Service providers have been quick to blame the BBC for not tailoring the iPlayer software so that downloads were smaller, whilst customers have hit out at ISPs for not investing in the development of the UK's telecoms infrastructure – surveys reveal that the UK is lagging behind most of Europe when it comes to broadband speeds, with punters on the continent enjoying on speeds of up to 100Mbps – the average speed here in the UK fluctuates between 3 and 4Mbps.