Teenagers are being targeted with shock warnings about the dangers of cocaine through a £1million television and internet campaign launched by the government.
The adverts feature a fictional dog named Pablo, who is used by dealers as a ‘drug mule’ to carry cocaine into the country. In the surreal commercials Pablo, who is given the voice of Peep Show’s David Mitchell, appears in various scenes including one where partygoers prepare to take cocaine and another where a girl has a heart attack from using the drug. (more…)
Sky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling has been confirmed as the next host of Countdown, Channel 4 announced today. He will be joined by maths whizz Rachel Riley, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate who will take over Carol Vorderman’s role.
Stelling is best known for his knowledge of match day statistics on the Sky Sports programme Soccer Saturday, and has been named Sports Presenter of the Year for three years running. His appointment ends months of speculation as to a replacement for the Countdown host Des O’Connor, who announced his resignation in July.
“I am delighted to be hosting Countdown and follow in the footsteps of such great broadcasters as Richard Whiteley, Des Lynam and Des O’Connor,” he said. (more…)
Graham Linehan’s offbeat sitcom about the (very) small IT department of the fictional Reynholm Industries returns to Channel 4 this Friday for a third series. Much of the humour of The IT Crowd is derived from the social ineptitude of Moss (Richard Ayoade, below, left with the monitor) and Roy (Chris O’Dowd, below right, with the copy of Mustard), the two “standard nerds” who do all of the actual work and the technical ineptitude of their supervisor Jen (Katherine Parkinson, below, middle) a Head of IT who doesn’t know the first thing about computers.
Attempts by Jen to ingratiate her charges with the rest of the company and secure them dates with real life 3D humans fail miserably, as do their attempts to bring their manager’s knowledge of modern day IT up to speed – Roy jokingly tells Jen that Googling ‘Google’ will ‘break the Internet’ – she mistakenly believes him, to her eventual embarrassment during a head office meeting.
Despite being considered outcasts and social misfits by the rest of the company despite their dependence on them to keep the computers humming, the feeling is mutual; Moss and Roy have set up looped recordings of basic suggestions such as “Are you sure it’s plugged in?” and “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” on their answer phone, which seems to do the trick most of the time…
Rupert Everett is to present a two-part documentary about Lord Byron for Channel 4.
The programme, called Rupert Everett – In Search of Byron, will retrace the steps of the romantic poet during his travels through Portugal, Greece, Albania, Turkey, Switzerland and Italy, exploring Byron’s personal life and examining his relationship with the countries he visited.
Considered by many to be the first modern celebrity, from 1809 to 1811 Byron embarked on the grand tour of Europe customary for a young nobleman of the era. Avoiding the Napoleonic Wars, Byron headed for the Mediterranean, the birthplace of the Classical antiquity, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his Homeric heroes. The documentary will mark the 200th anniversary of his travels.
This will not be the first time that Everett has presented a history programme on Channel 4. Earlier this year the actor fronted a Channel 4 documentary examining the life of the infamous Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, called the Victorian Sex Explorer.
Everett said: “I love anti-heroes, and Byron is one of the 19th century’s great misfits. His story has everything: incest, sodomy, drugs, scandal, madness and war. But would we have found Byron as electrifying and seductive as his contemporaries did? Is his genius still relevant? Are his poems fresh or are they dried flowers?”
Infamously described as being “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, Byron was a libertine of Herculean proportions, and his name is as synonymous with promiscuity as it is with poetry. (more…)
Producers at Channel 4 may be coming up with some four-letter words of their own, as Alexander Armstrong pulled out of a deal to host Countdownat the 11th hour. Last month the comedian, better known for his part in The Armstrong and Miller Show, was offered a contract to become the fourth presenter in the popular quiz show’s 26-year history. He had previously said that would like to follow in the footsteps of previous hosts Des O’Connor, Des Lynam and the late Richard Whiteley.
But Armstrong reportedly withdrew days after looking embarrassed when ribbed about his prospective Countdown role on BBC1’s Have I Got News For You last Friday.
Armstrong will be the third person to turn down the Countdown job, after impressionist Rory Bremner and Sky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling. His sudden withdrawal leaves Channel 4 just two months to find a suitable replacement before filming of the new series begins in the new year.
A source at Channel 4 said “It is a race against time to get someone because the series begins filming in January. We were desperate for Alexander to do it.” The Channel has said that it is currently talking to a number of people about the presenter role, but that as yet “no decision has been made”.
Football fans in certain UK regions will now be able to watch the 2010 World Cup in high-definition on Freeview, as Ofcom announced that Channel 4, ITV and the BBC would all be launching HD channels next year.
The communications watchdog today revealed that it will reserve capacity for ITV, Channel 4, and S4C (Channel 4’s Welsh language equivalent) to launch high-definition services on digital terrestrial television (DTT). Until now, the BBC, which owns and operates Mux B as BBC Free to View, was the only designated HDTV broadcaster. The first three channels are expected to launch in “late autumn” next year, with a fourth expected to launch by 2010.
Freeview HD channels will be available in the Granada region next year, followed by Wales, Scotland and the West Country in 2010. Central, Yorkshire, Anglia and Meridian will receive the services by 2011 and London, Tyne Tees and Ulster by 2012. The 17 million viewers with access to the new HD channels will require a set-top box compatible with two new technology standards, MPEG4 and DVB-T2, to watch them.
David Tennant and his Doctor Who co-star Catherine Tate are set to go head-to-head at the National Television Awards this month.
Both stars have been shortlisted for Outstanding Drama Performance for their roles as the Timelord and his assistant Donna Noble in the hit BBC sci-fi drama.
Tennant, 37, who is currently starring in a stage production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Tate, 40, a celebrated comic, will face Ashes To Ashes star Philip Glenister and Alex Walkinshaw of The Bill in the category, which replaces the best actor and actress prizes. Tennant has previously won two National Television Awards. He has yet to announce whether he will return for a fifth series of Doctor Who.
The awards ceremony will once again be presented by Sir Trevor McDonald and fans can vote online or by phone to decide the winners in each category. The show will be broadcast live on 29th October on ITV.
Celebrity Big Brother is to return to Channel 4 next year, the broadcaster has announced.
The hugely popular reality show was taken off the air in 2007 following a race row in which contestants Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara hurled abuse at Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, prompting more than 50,000 complaints and leading to effegies of the candidates being burnt on the streets of India.
In its place Channel 4 broadcast a successful cookery season on its main channel featuring celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall among others. Meanwhile a replacement reality TV show, called The Celebrity Hijack, was aired on E4.
However, Channel 4 has since had talks with production company Endemol and is thought to be planning another series on its main network. As part of the new agreement Channel 4 is not obligated to air every episode if it feels that doing so would be inappropriate. A spokesman for the broadcaster said that no final decision has yet been made.
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.
ITV’s regional current affairs programmes across England are to be replaced by a single brand similar to the BBC’s regional broadcast Inside Out. The show is to be called Here and Now, the title of a former BBC current affairs programme broadcast in the nineties.
Here and Now will be shown over all the ITV regions in England but will address local issues and be fronted by a regional presenter. The original BBC programme, which was taken off air several years ago, was presented by Sue Lawley and addressed regional issues from around the UK.
However, ITV regions director Michael Jermey has dismissed suggestions that the programme has borrowed ideas from the BBC, insisting that the name was chosen purely because it “says what it is”.
“We are producing something very distinctive. It is going to be a very up-to-date programme based in the locality. It will be a new version of what people already like about regional programming. It will be lively and accessible and I hope it has impact.”
ITV is currently in the process of cutting its regions from 17 to nine, saving the corporation about £40m a year. This has been made easier by Ofcom’s decision to allow ITV to broadcast just half-an-hour’s worth of non-news regional content a week in England. Many ITV staff face losing their jobs.
“We face the inevitable prospect - under whatever map Ofcom approves - of many redundancies across the group,” said Jermey.
There is talk of creating regional news hubs, in which news studios would be located outside their regional areas.
“The ‘hubbing’ of studios in some places could allow us to leave some expensive buildings and make good use of existing studios,” Jermey wrote.
A comprehensive region-by-region report is planned for September detailing how ITV aims to create “the best possible service for viewers within the constraints of the budget.”
The BBC and Channel 4 have both held talks with ITV, seeking to establish ways to help plug the gap in regional programming.
Sky Sports presenter Jeff Stelling has been confirmed as the next host of Countdown, Channel 4 announced today. He will be joined by maths whizz Rachel Riley, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate who will take over Carol Vorderman’s role.
Rupert Everett is to present a two-part documentary about Lord Byron for Channel 4.
Producers at Channel 4 may be coming up with some four-letter words of their own, as 
Football fans in certain UK regions will now be able to watch the 2010 World Cup in high-definition on 
David Tennant and his Doctor Who co-star Catherine Tate are set to go head-to-head at the National Television Awards this month.
Return of the Celebrity Insult Generator
