Did anyone notice we had an election? If you voted you will no doubt have been disappointed. Tory supporters didn’t get the clear mandate they wanted. Labour did better than some expected, but still got pushed out of Downing Street. The Lib Dems think they’ve done quite well by getting a few cabinet seats, but I suspect that in a few years’ time we’ll see that as a mistake and they’ll become even more obscure than they were before the election.

Nobody else really figured on the electoral radar, apart from the Greens who did a fantastic job of bagging a seat down in Brighton. The first of many, I hope.

The biggest winners, then, seem to have been the broadcasters, who have been camped out on the green outside Parliament for the last two weeks.

The BBC, as ever, is putting on the biggest show as it seems to have moved half of White City to Westminster and boxed it up in a big black spaceship. Sky, on the other hand, is having a little garden party and has cracked open the gazebo. ITV, too.

Kay Burley, from Dancing on Ice, interviews Ken Clarke, Secretary of State for Justice

The ITV gazebo (left) and the BBC’s glossy black spaceship (right)

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It’s taken us almost three years (certainly more than two) but we’ve got to the very end of Allo Allo. All nine series and 85 episodes. I didn’t think I’d be saying this when we were sitting through its nadir around the end of series five, but now I’m actually quite sad to see it go.

Admittedly it went on longer than it should, running for longer than the actual war during which it was set. It first aired on 30 December 1982 and finished almost exactly ten years later on 14 December 1992. There was a best-of in 1994 and a terrible ‘Return of’ programme in April 2007, but I don’t think you can count them as part of the actual series.

So what does happen when you get to the very, very end? Inevitably, what follows contains spoilers.

The British and Americans are advancing on Nouvion and the German forces fleeing the town. Herr Flick has plastic surgery to change his appearance and then he and Von Smallhausen try to escape to South America in a bathtub submarine. The plastic surgery storyline was a bit of a fudge to explain the fact that Richard Gibson had left at the end of series eight, and to be fair they pulled it off pretty well because David Janson, his replacement, was so good at mimicking him.

The Germans are thrown in the local jail until the terms of their surrender can be finalised, and then we skip ahead several years. Rene is in a wheelchair and his son has taken over the bar. Mme Edith is more or less bed-bound, as her mother was before her, and Gruber, without his little tank, is now an international art dealer. He is also, bizarrely, married to Helga, despite his amorous pursuit of Rene throughout the war.

The final scene is set in the square outside the cafe. The aged characters are admiring a statue of Rene that has been erected in the square to celebrate his work for the resistance. They manage to snap off one of its hollow arms and, as it drops off, out falls the lost picture of the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies.

Finally rich, Rene jumps in the car with Yvette and they elope – something he had been promising and failing to do through the whole of the previous nine series.

It was a neat tying off, but we did get the feeling watching the last two series that they were only commissioned for the sake of completing the storyline. That aside, it’s a pretty impressive achievement.

It is cheesy in parts, but that’s half the fun of it, and I think over the course of 85 episodes you have to make some allowance for that, don’t you?

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[Via]

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An opportunity missed.

Perhaps I’ll subscribe to Challenge.

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I love the way that the woman at the desk doesn’t even look around.

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Of course it’s worth watching without Wogan. If they’d chosen the right replacement it would be far more worth watching. Wogan should have hung up his Euro microphone years ago.

The question Metro should have asked was ‘Is the Eurovision Song Contest worth watching now that Graham Norton is doing the commentary?’

In my view, certainly not.

Well, it is. I’ll still be watching and singing along and flying the flag for whichever eastern European nation enters the best song (it won’t be Britain, I can tell you now). But that’s in spite of the BBC’s choice of commentator.

Why couldn’t they have chosen someone like Lorraine Kelly, Fern Britton or Sarah Kennedy?

Or indeed all three.

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The show, now in its sixth year, was all about the letter F (series one was about the letter A, series two about B and so on), with this particular episode majoring on Families, as it’s due to go out on Children in Need night. That was strange enough, as the studio was decorated with Pudsey Bears and it won’t go out until November. Last week, though, they did the Christmas episode which must have been even stranger.

Anyhow, being Children in Need night they had Terry Wogan on as a surprise guest. A bit hmmm, but at least they balanced him out with Ronnie Ancona and David Mitchell (and Alan Davis, of course).

We were lucky to get in. Doors opened at quarter to seven, and we were told to get queueing (beside the people for Have I Got News For You) from five, but that doesn’t really work with general office hours, so we were much later than that. When we got there they were queueing around the block, with burger and ice cream vans doing a good trade by the kerbside. But of course we did get in, although only by the skins of our collective teeth: just a few spots further back and we’d have been turned away.

As ever with these things, once we got inside we found everything to be smaller and slightly tattier than it is on TV. We also found it hard to work out what would make it to air out of the two-hour recording. I’m guessing Wogan’s admission that he can understand why a parent would flip out at their crying child would most likely be trimmed, though, as this will be shown in the news break of a charity show about child abuse and poverty that he himself will be hosting.

He seemed to have calmed down about the Eurovision voting, acknowledging that countries that share similar musical tastes will probably vote for each other. That’s not what he was intimating at the end of this year’s contest.

But it was a fun night and I’ll tune in on 14th November to see how they manage to squash down 120 minutes of recordings into 30 minutes of airtime. By then I’ll probably not remember much of what we saw live, so I doubt I’ll spot the cuts.

I’ll probably forget the surprise guest, too.

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What will happen then remains to be seen. It’s a prime site; it would be ripe for redevelopment. But at the same time it is an important piece of broadcasting history, and a valuable asset in terms of potential rental. A ready-built studio complex for just £300m. A snip, and a guaranteed earner for whoever takes it over.

With that in mind, and its iconic status, it’s unlikely it would be bulldozed, no matter how quickly the value of London flats is climbing. And, of course, in the BBC the new owners will have a ready-made tenant. It may be moving sport and childerns’ programming up to Salford, and news back into the centre of the city at Broadcasting House, but it’s still going to need a sizeable London studio base, and where better a place to rent than the complex it already knows so well?

Despite this, we shouldn’t be complacent. Television Centre is not only a landmark building; it’s also an important piece of our national history which, for the sake of us all, should be listed before it’s too late.

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Ned Sherrin, who died following complications with throat cancer, was probably better known for presenting Loose Ends for the last 20 years than he was for That Was The Week That Was, Up Pompeii or his theatre work in the west end. In that role he broke new talent across pretty much every field, and many big names should be grateful for the lucky first break he gave them.

But it was Ronnie Hazlehurst, who died in Guernsey following a stroke, who provided the soundtrack to so many a 70s and 80s childhood, and whose work will be best remembered and longest surviving.He was three times musical director of the Eurovision Song Contest, conducted the UK entry seven times (and the German entry once), and was responsible for some of the best-known theme tunes on British TV, counting Last of the Summer Wine, Blankety Blank, Are You Being Served, To the Manor Born, The Two Ronnies and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to his name.

A name frequently tagged on to the end of a long run of programme credits, he rarely received the public recognition he deserved for the brilliance of his compositions. They may have sounded like nothing more than cheerful introductions, but they often had a hidden depth, as explained by the BBC:

The composer said he always tried to make the music fit the title of the programme – using a piccolo to spell out the title to Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em in Morse code. (Source: BBC News)

There’s only one thing you can say to that:

.-. . ... - / .. -. / .--. . .- -.-. .

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GMTV was shocked and saddened to discover that between January 2003 and April 2007, some of our competition procedures were not carried out correctly. We found out that staff at Opera Telecom had been selecting finalists before the competition lines had closed. This meant that not everyone who entered had a fair chance of winning. (Source: GMTV press release)

I love the language in this quote. Shocked and saddened.

Shocked and saddened isn’t the kind of language you use when you find out some viewers may have been defrauded 25p in a premium rate phone-in competition. It’s the kind of language you use when a princess is killed in a Parisian underpass, an American president decides to overthrow an oil-rich dictatorship, or people in Gloucestershire get flooded out of their homes and then run out of clean drinking water.

It’s also the kind of language you use when you can’t quite believe the furore being kicked up over something so small. The kind of language you use when you realise the only reason broadcasters are committing hari kiri over the competitions scandal is that they want to appear more penitent than competing stations. The kind of language you use when you find out you’ve been found out. Oops.

Ofcom is almost certain to fine GMTV heavily, but the station is trying to minimise the fallout by not only waving off its managing director, who resigned this morning, but also running a series of draws for the unsuccessful entrants into its earlier competitions. That’s on top of a complex set of refunds, outlined in a claim form:

If you entered the main daily competition on GMTV: We will refund £1.30 for every phone entry, £1.10 for every text entry and £1 for every web entry.

If you entered the bonus competitions after playing the main competition: We will refund an additional 60 pence for every phone entry, 60 pence for every text entry and 50 pence for every web entry.

If you entered the GMTV2 competition: We will refund 25 pence for every phone entry and 35 pence for every text entry.

If that’s not complicated enough, it seems GMTV’s record-keeping is incomplete, and it’s missing details for a whole range of calls made between August 2003 and September 2004, so needs claimants to submit itemised phone bills proving their right to a refund.

The administration costs alone are going to be astronomical.

Let’s hope they don’t impact on the size of the donation it plans on making to ChildLine, which while the BBC puts at £250,000, GMTV merely calls ‘substantial’.

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