Archive for the 'News' Category
Yet another plug for the ever awesome Snowmail from Channel Four news here in the UK. Here’s some interesting news on the news that I got last week from Kylie Morris:
I’m going to let you into a small secret today, but an interesting one. This is a milestone in modern television news production. We have moved into half a new newsroom with completely new technology. There’s no paper, there’s no tangible video or film. Everything is digital. And those of us who were mad in the analogue age are now completely crazy in the digital follow-up.
Perhaps I should have made that a singular observation. The potential is fantastic - instant everything and instantly edited everything (perhaps I exaggerate a little). But the human capacity to keep up with it all and to ensure that the journalism does too - that is the real issue. You won’t notice any difference - well, not unless the entire thing blows up and blue smoke starts coming out of my ears. But we certainly hope that we will be able to provide you with an even better Channel 4 News than heretofore. The whole process of change will not be completed until well into April.
This is very cool. Keeping abreast of technology if you’re old media is certainly essential, but so far only The Guardian seem to really grasp what’s going on. This is a great move for Ch4 and I hope their websites now get the chance to step up a notch too.
And just to prove it’s not all high tech sci fi over there, John Snow signed off with this just a few days ago:
Oh, and by the way, if you can’t catch us at seven, why don’t you check your Freeview menu and find Channel 4 Plus One, because we pitch up there at eight. And you could have the soggy Yorkshire pud and the overdone roast beef on your knee, watching it.
And speaking of soggy Yorkshire pudding I’m finding the BBC’s iPlayer horribly underdone:
Late last night I heard via Twitter that Tony Wilson had died and like a lot of people from my generation felt a great wave of sadness.
Today of course most of the tributes have concentrated on his role in music and in particular the Manchester scene. I grew up in Lancashire and hated just about every band that came out of the area with a passion. While friends were listening to the Happy Mondays I’d be trying hard not to laugh and completely failing to understand how anyone could prefer that crap over Anthrax. 1987 saw the release of ‘Among The Living’ and I was supposed to get excited by muppets from Manchester when guys from New York were singing about Judge Dredd and Stephen King novels? Right.
So if anything Wilson played a great part in winding me up for many years as I tried to avoid coming into contact with the music and fans of just about every band he launched.
But his presence was greater than that. As a local news presenter I’d grown up listening to and watching Tony Wilson. In a world of dull as dishwater programming he always brought a much needed boost of vitality to everything he was involved in. Even when a lot of that stuff was cheap and bordering on the ridiculous. I fondly remember him presenting a terrible game show called Remote Control which I believe involved strapping students to a wheel and then spinning them around for a bit. Much earlier than that he’d presented Flying Start in which nervous would be entrepreneurs vied for a couple of quid to get their fledgling businesses off the ground. He also did a fair bit of World in Action and of course Granada Reports (which also exposed me to that bloke off The Krypton Factor and Richard and Judy before they were Richard and Judy).
So music aside (and I was too young to appreciate his role in So It Goes) Wilson was always a TV fixture. And most importantly to me at the time he was the only person on ‘local’ TV who seemed just as good as the ‘real’ reporters on the ‘real’ news in London.
The last thing I saw him do was a cameo in A Cock and Bull Story. It brought him full circle for me, seeing him interviewing again and this time Steve Coogan, playing Steve Coogan who of course played Wilson in 2002’s 24 Hour Party People (a film I still haven’t seen).
So I can forgive him for unleashing the likes of Bez and Shaun Ryder on the world and I really am sorry to see him go so early. To me he was always one of the good guys.
Recent Comments