Digital TV Blog

Cutting Edge investigation

Sky 1 is to launch a knife crime awareness week next month called War on Knives. The campaign is being run in collaboration with police forces from across the UK.

The special week, starting on 14th October, will kick off with a live 120-minute show and will finish with an hour long programme featuring interviews from those affected by knife crime and possible solutions for getting knives off the street. Both shows will be presented by Donal MacIntyre and June Sarpong.

“Knife crime and the toll exacted in recent months and years, on our young in particular, is one of the most important issues facing communities today,” MacIntyre said.

“If a whole generation is casual about knives today then tomorrow it’s guns and already we are seeing that trend developing.”

Brief monologues showing celebrities lending their support to the campaign will be interspersed with other programmes in which cameras follow police forces and local communities where knife crime is a problem. Famous faces include Olympic gold medal-winning boxer James DeGale, singer Estelle and Brooke Kinsella, the former EastEnders actress whose 16-year-old brother, Ben, was killed in June.

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The orb-shaped brain wrong of a one-off man mental

TV presenter Noel Edmonds was one of the BBC’s star presenters for 30 years, fronting hugely popular light entertainment television, before dipping into obscurity and then reappearing like a hairy Phoenix from the flames with Channel 4’s popular guesswork-based quiz Deal or No Deal. However, as yesterday’s BBC Breakfast News broadcast displayed, somewhere along the way, it seems as though everything went a bit David Icke.

As well as publicly stating that he was going to break the law and not pay his licence fee on live TV - on the BBC of all places, smart move mate - former resident of Crinkley Bottom also claimed that the spirits of his deceased parents were following him around in the form of two melon-sized floating orbs.

“Orbs are little bundles of positive energy and they think they can move between 500 and 1,000 miles per hour. They look like little round planets but they come in all shapes and sizes.” Conventional photography “can’t pick them up, but digital cameras can,” as our picture above proves.

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TV presenter Noel Edmonds was one of the BBC’s star presenters for 30 years, fronting hugely popular light entertainment television programmes such as Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, Top of the Pops and Noel’s House Party. But now Edmonds has stopped paying his licence fee in response to the BBC’s “threatening” manner towards those who do not have a TV licence.

In an interview with the Breakfast show on BBC One, Edmonds declared that he had refused to pay the licence fee for four months and would do so still if the BBC continued “hectoring and threatening” the public into paying the £139.50 annual charge – a legal requirement for anyone who owns a television.

Commenting on an adverts by the TV Licensing Authority that warn of prosecution for fee evaders, Edmonds said “I worked for the BBC for 30 years. When I was there it promoted the licence fee by saying how wonderful it was because - let’s face it - the BBC licence fee is astonishing value. But now Auntie’s put boxing gloves on.

“I am not going to have the BBC or any other organisation threatening me. I’ve cancelled my TV licence and they haven’t found me. Nobody’s coming knocking on my door. There are too many organisations that seem to think it is OK to badger, hector and threaten people.”

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The repeat-heavy UKTV channel Dave has announced that the original cast of space comedy Red Dwarf will reunite for a series of new episodes, to be broadcast next year. John Cleese, Jonny Vaughan and John Sergeant will also front original programmes for the channel.

Cleese will present a six-part gadget show called Batteries Not Included which will test out wacky new inventions, it was announced yesterday at a launch event for UKTV’s numerous rebranded channels. Meanwhile Jonny Vaughan, who currently DJs on the Capital FM breakfast show, will return to the small screen to front the four-part series Car of the Year 2008 in which the audience votes for its favourite vehicle. Political commentator John Sergeant will present a current affairs show called Argumentative in which comedians discuss issues of the day. Sergeant is also a contestant on the current series of BBC1’s Strictly Come Dancing.

The new shows are part of an attempt to move away from Dave’s reputation as a channel which only shows repeats. Originally called UKTVG2, the channel - a joint venture between Virgin Media and the BBC - was renamed Dave last year. UKTV has already committed to broadcasting 800 hours of original content across its channels next year.

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Satcaster fed up with regulatory heel draggage

Sky have temporarily put the kibosh on their proposed Picnic digital TV service, following the non-emergence of the Ofcom report that was due to be published this spring.

“The blunt truth is that Ofcom has spent 18 months looking at our proposals and there is no end in sight. The Picnic team have done everything they can to prepare for launch and there’s nothing left to be achieved until Ofcom makes its mind up,” said a Sky spokesperson, who added that “no business can go on like that.”

With Picnic, Sky had intended to replace its current line up of channels on the Freeview platform – that’s Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three – with premium Sky Movies and Sky Sports content, and the flagship channel Sky One. Picnic would be available either on its own, or as part of a bundle deal including fixed-line calls and broadband services in the same vein to its See Speak Surf bundles, and would require potential customers to purchase a new MPEG4 compatible set-top box.

The proposal was initially submitted back in February 2007, on the eve of the missing channel hoo-hah with Virgin Media, and prompted a response from rival providers Setanta and Top-Up TV.

X Factor contestant axed from home

X Factor wannabe Emma Chawner and her family are being kicked out of their home after repeated complaints from neighbours of noisy rows and nocturnal karaoke sessions which go on till the early hours.

Last year 19-year-old Emma was mocked by Simon Cowell for her feeble attempt at Céline Dion’s My Heart Will Go On. Determined to succeed, Emma returned to the TV contest this year having had a make-over and singing lessons, but was rejected again. The teenager has expressed the possibility of auditioning for a third time, in spite of advice to the contrary from the show’s producers.

But the singer now faces an even tougher challenge as her parents received a final warning about the family’s behaviour from the council after admitting to 17 separate offences. The council has received 134 complaints from neighbours in the last eight months alone, and has given the family a month to find new accommodation.

Meanwhile the family continues to plague fellow residents with abusive shouting, violent rows and playing the TV at full volume during the night.

Dad Philip defended the family’s behaviour, claiming they were being picked on because of their weight. He said: “They say we are playing loud music and pushing furniture around at all hours and letting the dog bark for hours on end. We asked the council to install noise detectors to prove this isn’t true but they wouldn’t do it.

“We are not a wild family. My daughters volunteer at a local charity shop and an animal sanctuary. A lot of people living around here will tell you that we are not troublemakers.”

Saturday night musical format to be further milked

Andrew Lloyd Webber has announced that he will not be judging another BBC talent contest next year, since he will be working on the sequel to his West-End hit Phantom of the Opera. However, he plans to return to the small screen again in 2010 as he goes in search of a Dorothy for the stage version of The Wizard of Oz.

“I have my own musical in Phantom 2 to get on with and bits and pieces to do in America,” Lloyd Webber told Closer magazine. “There will not be another custom show with the BBC next year – [not] with me anyway. But I will do the search in 2010 to find Dorothy and possibly Toto the dog.”

The original talent search How do you Solve a Problem like Maria which was based on The Sound of Music attracted huge audiences, as did its successor Any Dream will Do. However, Lloyd Webber’s most recent BBC1 project, I’d Do Anything, failed to bring in viewers with the same success.

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How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is a frothy, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes plain moronic romantic comedy which relies on the witty charm of its two leads Kate Hudson and Matthew McConnaughey. Good looking, intelligent and deceptive, both have a hidden agenda as they start dating each other.

Hudson plays the implausibly named Andie Anderson, a columnist for air-headed women’s mag Composure. Sick of writing about handbags and facials, Andie is looking for her big break into political journalism, but will only have the chance if she nails an article on the classic dating mistakes that women make. She has been given 10 days to date a guy and then ‘lose’ him by committing every relationship faux-pas in the book, reporting her findings to her desperate readers.

Then, at a party, she meets advertising exec Ben Barry whose boss has promised him a diamond account if he can make a woman fall in love with him in – you guessed it – 10 days. Of course neither knows about the other person’s wager. Andie creates scenarios that no man could stomach – like naming Ben’s penis Princess Sophia or allowing her dog to pee on his pool table – whilst Ben tries to grin and bear it and simultaneously win the dappy reporter’s heart.

I find these bet plots really annoying. Any intelligent woman who found herself in Andie’s shoes would surely have a quiet word with the man who was supposed to dump her, maybe offering him half her first month’s wages to go through with it. But these sorts of tactics never occur to our two hopefuls, and so we have to go through all their awkwardness and guilt with them until their ulterior motives inevitably come to the fore.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days will be showing on FilmFour at 9pm, Saturday 6th September.

Cable Chameleon

Living TV is to go behind the closed doors of Boy George’s life in a new series called ‘Living With…‘. The cable channel will follow the former Culture Club singer to give viewers a snapshot of his day-to-day life, filming both his mother and his friends. The series will also film former Big Brother contestant Jade Goody as she battles with advanced cervical cancer.

Living TV’s director of Programmes, Claudia Rosencrantz said: “We have been incredibly sensitive over this. It was an extraordinary coincidence that we were filming already when it happened.

“It was clear when the whole Big Brother thing happened that there was more to come from Jade. I never thought she was a racist and thought the time had come where our viewers wanted to know what had happened to her. And then this happened.”

Rosencrantz made clear that Goody had set clear parameters within which Living was allowed to film. The show is just one of several in Living’s autumn line-up of programmes offering “trashy glamour”. The channel, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month, will also be broadcasting Dirty Dancing: The Time Of Your Life, America’s Next Top Model and Grey’s Anatomy.

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Henry the Underweighth

The famously fat monarch Henry VIII is to remain radically slimmed down in the BBC drama in order to retain his sex appeal.

Gormenghast and Velvet Goldmine star Jonathan Rhys Myers, who plays the ageing king in the planned fourth series The Tudors, shown on BBC2, will neither be expected to wear a fat suit, nor will he have to stuff himself with food to bulk up for the role. The real Henry VIII was estimated to weigh around 20st with a waist of 54 inches when he died in 1547. By the end of his life he was so overweight that he could walk only a few meters unsupported.

However, the makers of The Tudors are more concerned with having an actor who is attractive to audiences than an accurate physical representation of the obese Henry.

“We still want him to be appealing,” said Morgan O’Sullivan, an executive producer on the show.

“We don’t want to destroy his good looks. An exact portrayal of Henry is not a factor that we think is important. We are not in the business of making Johnny look like Henry VIII. We have accepted that from day one. We have been criticised for not casting someone with red hair. But you either cast him exactly like Henry VIII, or you choose to deal with it differently.

“We chose from the start to have him looking fit. So there will never be a fat suit. That would be unreal.”

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