Digital TV Blog

BBC4 has commissioned a four-part drama based on the life of the first black officer to lead British troops during the first world war.

The drama is one of a series of BBC programmes commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, which marked the end of the first world war. Written by actor and award-winning playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah (Elmina’s Kitchen), Walter’s War explores the life of Walter Tull who, as an officer in the British Army, faced not only the horrors of the first world war, but also prejudice from his own side concerning his skin colour. OT Fagbenle, who has appeared in Doctor Who and the Anthony Minghella feature film Breaking And Entering, will take the leading role.

Fagbenle will be joined by Ewan Stewart as Sergeant Fuller and Dugald Bruce-Lockhart as fellow soldier Captain Coombe.

The film will focus on Tull’s service on the front line, as he recovers from trench fever before undergoing officer training, in spite of the bigotry of those in higher ranks.

Before the first world war, Tull was also one of Britain’s first black footballers to play professionally, competing for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton. He was killed at the second battle of the Somme in 1918 at the age of 29.

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The original Caped Crusader returns

Tomorrow see the first episode of new family oriented fantasy drama Merlin on BBC1.

The 13-part serial focuses on the backstory of the Arthurian legend, and features an ensemble cast including veteran actor John Hurt, who provides the voice of a dragon, former EastEnder and Bionic Woman star Michelle Ryan as an evil sorceress, and Gold Blend shill and Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Anthony Head, as Uther Pendragon, AKA Arthur’s dad. One Foot in the Grave’s Richard Wilson, and Heroes’ Santiago Cabrera, who appears as the Lancelot.

Merlin is set to replace the early Saturday evening slot vacated by Robin Hood and Doctor Who, and is being made by independent production company Shine through BBC Wales, which also makes Doctor Who and Torchwood. According to Julie Gardner, head of drama at BBC Wales, Russell T Davies has been “a huge supporter of Merlin. He immediately saw its potential and proved invaluable in early discussions about how to shape the series for Saturday night.”

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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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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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Robot Chicken stars to portray comic book geeks

Seth Green and Breckin Meyer, the duo behind the stop-motion Adult Swim animation Robot Chicken are said to be in the process of working out a deal with NBC which will see them joining the cast of hit sci-fi series Heroes, as a pair of comic geeks fans who co-own a comic book store in Atlanta.

Their characters are understood not to have any powers of their own, but will instead act as advisors to one of the lead heroes of the show, much like the characters of Ando and Mohinder.

No light has been shed as to whom they will be assisting, but it has been confirmed, pending the clinching of the deal, that the duo will appear in a multi-episode arc late in the forthcoming third season.

This will be familiar territory to Green, whose first major screen role was playing teen wolf Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer; he has, of course also starred as Dr. Evil’s son Scott Evil in the Austin Powers films, and provides the voice for Chris Griffin in Family Guy. Meyer is most famous for his roles in Clueless, Road Trip and the recent Garfield movies.

The pair are famous for their collaboration on Robot Chicken, the stop-frame animated show which parodies typical geek favourites such as Pokemon, Transformers, Final Fantasy VII and most infamously Star Wars, in the 22-minute Star Wars Special episode.

Season Three of Heroes airs next month in the States on NBC, with BBC Two and Three broadcasting episodes “just days” after the US broadcast.

The first episode will be a recap of events depicted in the last two seasons, and will be followed by a two-parter entitled “The Second Coming”, which continues the “Villains” arc which began right at the end of Season Two.

Nearly half of the UK’s cable viewers use VoD

According to Virgin Media, roughly 1.6m of their digital cable television customers, representing nearly half of its TV customer base, make use of the Virgin Central VoD (Video on Demand) services. This includes pay per view content such as movies and music videos as well as content offered on the 7 day catch up service and the BBC iPlayer channel.

The company, which has seen net TV customer additions of 24,800 in the second quarter of 2008, reported that average views of video on demand content per month were 24, compared to 14 during the same period last year.

“During the quarter, we launched the BBC’s iPlayer service on our VoD platform offering hundreds of hours of BBC ‘catch-up’ content,” a Virgin spokesperson explained. “Virgin Media is the first TV platform to make BBC iPlayer available in full screen picture quality directly to its 3.4m digital TV subscribers. Developments like this give VoD a new impetus and help establish on-demand as a genuinely mainstream TV service.”

Virgin also noted that take up of its high definition PVR package V+ is used by nearly half a million of its customers (424,900) or some 13% of its digital TV customer base.

…but fail to decapitate Big Brother

Much has been made of the return of The Tudors – the hit US-funded historical drama based upon the reign of Henry VIII of England – to BBC2 after a moderately successful first series which, whilst wildly inaccurate historically speaking, put bums of living room seats to the tune of 2.2 million.

The mutli-part period piece, featuring Gormenghast and Velvet Goldmine star Jonathan Rhys Meyers (right) as King Enry Imself, has been heavily promoted by the Beeb, who used Marilyn Manson’s 1996 hit The Beautiful People to advertise the show, perhaps conscious of Rhys Meyer’s screen pairing with former Manson squeeze Rose McGowan, who played Ann-Margret in the 2005 Elvis mini series.

Last Friday saw around 2.3 million of the British viewing peasantry to flock to their screens; the new series deals with tumultuous events surrounding Henry VIII’s attempts to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so that he can slip the ring on the finger of Anne Boleyn.

Despite all the regal fanfare, the impact of The Tudors failed to dent Big Brother over on Channel 4, which pulled in an altogether more majestic 3.6 million punters, who witnessed the booting out of Luke Marsden, AKA the chap who allegedly got the nasty on with fellow evictee Rebecca ‘Bex’ Shiner.

Henry and the gang even failed to fend off a repeat of Agatha Christie’s Poirot over on ITV1 which, scooped a respectable 3.2 million.

Margaret! Margaret!

A new drama about Margaret Thatcher’s final days in office is being filmed for BBC2. The drama, stars Rome’s Lindsay Duncan as Margaret Thatcher, James Fox as foreign policy advisor Charles Powell and Robert Hardy as deputy prime-minister Willie Whitelaw. Amazingly, her husband Denis is portrayed by none other than Ian McDiarmid, the actor most famous for his role as the Emperor in the Star Wars films. In an echo of Lindsay’s Rome character Servilia, the drama will examine the men “who loved her and those who betrayed her”, and chronicles her last days as Prime Minister, according to the BBC.

Margaret will be produced by Great Meadow Productions, the company begind the controversial BBC4 drama, The Long Way to Finchley which looked at Thatcher’s early days and was almost taken off air for fear that it would upset the ailing former prime minister too much. The new drama is set in the early 90’s, at a time when Thatcher was slowly losing her firm grip on her party and was forced to resign. The BBC has described it as “intimate portrayal of a woman on the brink of ruin”. Robert Cooper, co-founder Great Meadow Productions, says Margaret is a “darker examination” of the Iron Lady’s last months as Prime Minister. “It is a compelling look into what 11 years in power did to her,” he said.

The drama boasts a host of well-respected British actors, such as Kevin McNally (Pirates of the Caribbean) as Kenneth Clark; John Sessions (The Good Shepherd) as former foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe; Doctors‘ Michael Cochrane as MP Alan Clark; Michael Maloney, who starred alondside Judi Dench in the movie Notes on a Scandal, as Thatcher’s successor John Major and Rosemary Leach (My Family) playing the Queen. The production, written by Hancock and Joan’s Richard Cottan, started filming in London last week.

in spite of poor financial management

The BBC Trust has approved a 48% rise in the budget allocation for the BBC website, to £110 million. The increase comes after a review by the corporation’s regulator found that BBC websites cost over 50% more than had been budgeted for last year, due to misallocation of funds and “poor financial management.”

The BBC had planned to spend £74 million on its websites last year, but ended up spending a whopping £110 million because it did not properly account for the cost of maintaining its large collection of sites, which include online local, national and international news, as well as sports commentary pages and weather. £13.8 million of spending for IT support for the websites was misallocated, while staffing costs were £11.1 million higher than had been planned for.

The overspending displayed a “lack of financial accountability” in BBC institutions which resulted in a “serious breach,” according to the trust.

In response to the report, the BBC has said that it will adopt a “cautious approach to new investments” this year. However, in addition to the corporation’s current online services, it wants £39 million extra cash next year for local video news services and educational websites for primary school children, taking the BBC online budget to over £150 million. The iPlayer catch-up service comes under a separate budget.

In a statement the BBC management said that the poor budgeting was “regrettable and we recognise the need to address this.” It is currently drafting a timetable to apply for fresh investment.

Doctor Who and Dot Cotton top downloads

The BBC iPlayer service on Virgin Media saw more than 10m viewers make use of its service in June, according to the first batch of figures released by the quad play company. The June figures are significantly up from the 1.4 million views of BBC content via Virgin when the service was launched in May.

Virgin Media, the first Digital TV platform to give the BBC iPlayer catch-up service its own stand alone menu, managed to attract half as many viewings as the iPlayer website did in June.

Pressing the ‘red button’ on remotes whilst watching a BBC channel on Virgin Media TV brings up the iPlayer menu, without the user having to directly access the internet. Among the top viewings were repeats of EastEnders, Doctor Who and the frankly disturbing kids show In the Night Garden.

Malcolm Wall, the chief executive of content at Virgin Media, said that the figures underlined the “continued success of our on-demand offering,” a sentiment echoed by Rahul Chakkara, the BBC controller for TV platforms, who said: “The initial success on Virgin Media underlines the multiplatform appeal of the BBC iPlayer proposition.”

The iPlayer, which is available to all UK viewers who have an internet connection, has been running fully since Christmas and pulls in an average of 1.5 million users each week.