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)
I’ve been lucky enough to live with an iPad for the last couple of weeks. It’s a truly transformative device. I’ll freely admit that I didn’t fully understand the potential of giving the iPhone a bigger screen and taking away the phone bits, but now that I’ve been playing with it, I see exactly why it’s such an important product.
Nobody I’ve shown it to, away from work, has really understood it until they’ve got their hands on it. Sit them down with it and give them a nice fast net connection, though, and you have to prise it back out of their hands.
The sad thing is, beyond the built-in Maps, YouTube and so on, the one app that seems to impress the most is the BBC News application, and the chance of getting that in the UK any time soon is slim indeed.
The interface is deceptively simple, with headlines taking up the left-half of the screen and the contents of your story taking the right. Scroll up and down to read the story and swipe it to the left or right to read the next one. The headlines scroll, too, both up and down and left and right, and there’s a live radio button at the top of the interface that tunes you in to the World Service.
Being an iPad app it also obviously works in portrait mode. Spin your iPad around and the interface redraws itself to give your story more space and strip your headlines across the top, making it much easier to read.
And if you want to watch the news rather than just read or listen to it, there’s plenty of embedded media. Tap on a video link in your story and it switches to fast, high quality, widescreen playback, even without an embedded Flash player.
It’s the iPad’s first killer application, yet even when the iPad finally ships in the UK (it’s been pushed back by a month or so because sales in the US are so strong that they’ve created a global shortage) I doubt it will launch in the UK for several months, if at all.
The BBC is simply too good, and its content too strong for its rivals to compete against. That’s led the BBC Trust to investigate whether we should ever see its smartphone and iPad apps in the UK at all. As the BBC’s iPad app pages state:
The BBC Trust has announced a review of the BBC’s plans to deliver content via dedicated smartphone apps. The BBC will therefore not be launching public service news and sports apps for smartphones in the UK pending the outcome of the Trust review.
However, the US iPad app is a commercial activity outside the UK and is not covered by the Trust review. It has been released in the Apple store in the US by BBC Worldwide, the main commercial arm and wholly owned subsidiary of the BBC. BBC Worldwide’s mission is to create, acquire, develop and exploit media content and brands around the world in order to maximise the value of BBC’s assets for the benefit of the UK licence fee payer.
What the Trust will conclude at the end of its investigation is up for debate, but my prediction is that it will either rule against a UK release or recommend putting out a crippled version for the UK market that features only a subset of the US application’s content and abilities.
That’s a shame. This may be a BBC Worldwide product, but the content seems to be largely drawn from output funded by UK license payers. While I’m all for allowing competition and giving the BBC’s rivals a chance, shouldn’t we also be allowed to view, read and listen to the content we have funded by whatever medium we choose – including the iPad?
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?
From the BBC:
Really? As little as 40%?
Apparently ‘only 8.7% of messages could be said to have “value” as they passed along news of interest.’
The BBC is an easy target because it makes a lot of its money from licence fees. Somehow that makes a lot of people think they know best how to run it. They don’t, of course, but the fact that the revelation of its bosses’ expenses has happened today – just after Parliament has been hauled over the coals for MPs shameful squandering of public funds – means they’re ready and willing to drag it over the same political coals.
Here’s a headline:
£350,000. Tsk tsk tsk. That’s 2,456 licence fees gone on expenses.
Why isn’t it more?
It sounds like a lot, but that £350K was run up by ten board members. An average of £35,000 each.
Over five years. So an average of £7,000 per person per year.
To run the BBC – a job that involved international travel, late nights, wooing suppliers, customers and talent, researching, entertaining and providing five national television networks, ten national radio networks, the World Service (radio and TV), 40 local radio stations and countless web sites.
They should really be congratulated for keeping things under such tight control.
The Vicar could be back as a Bishop, it seems. In breaking the news, Dawn French also talked about that infamous jumping in the puddle scene, and how she warmed herself up:
Dawn revealed that when she filmed the famous moment where she falls into a deep puddle it was a cold mid-November day – so the crew used warm water to make it less unpleasant for her.
“But of course that meant there was steam and you could see it so we had to take the warm water out and put the cold back in… It was absolutely freezing – but I did have a secret wee! Don’t tell anyone.”
Vicar of Dibley may return as woman bishop, hints Dawn French – Telegraph
