The new BBC iPlayer is better than ever

A quick hands-on:

The iPlayer home page now has four columns at the top: Featured, which details the BBC’s current pick of its output; For You, which is based on what you’ve been watching; Most Popular, which is self-explanatory; and Friends. That’s the iPlayer’s new social network integration, and you’ll need to sign up for a BBC ID to take advantage of it.

Once you’ve done that you can hook into Facebook and Twitter, viewing your Facebook friends in iPlayer, seeing what programmes they’ve recommended and posting status updates or tweets whenever you recommend something.

I’ve always liked iPlayer, and its latest incarnation is the best yet. It’s a superb service.

Schemes o’ mice and men

BBC Scotland’s showing a new documentary programme, The Scheme. If you’re in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer here. I’d love to know what you think of it.

For those of you who don’t speak Scotland, a scheme is a housing estate. This particular one is in the Onthank area of Kilmarnock, about half an hour southwest of Glasgow, and if you believe what you see on the programme it’s a pretty hellish place. Everyone appears to be on drugs, selling drugs, getting beaten up or beating up pregnant women.

Naturally a lot of people are appalled by this, arguing – quite rightly – that the programme makers have distilled a year’s worth of footage down to the most sensational stuff. People doing nice things or even normal things aren’t exactly riveting TV, so there’s precious little of that in the programme. What you get instead is a freak show, a “look at the funny poor people!” programme for the smug middle classes.

All perfectly true. And yet… I know, or rather knew, loads of people like the unfortunates in the first episode of The Scheme. Some of them in the town I grew up in, others as “clients” of the back-to-work training programmes I used to teach in Ayrshire and Clydebank in my previous, pre-writing life. And of course you don’t need to live in the West of Scotland to encounter similar characters.

They might not be the majority, but they do exist, and watching them makes for incredibly uncomfortable but compelling viewing.

Is it irresponsible for the programme makers to devote an entire episode to them without showing the positives? Is there a responsibility to do anything other than make an interesting programme? The local MSP says there is:

“The danger with programmes like this is that they give a misleading impression of an entire community. Featuring the chaotic lifestyles of one or two families might make for interesting TV but it does nothing to support the positive regeneration that has been going on in this community for the past few years.

Here’s a bit about it from The Scotsman newspaper.

FOR its part, the BBC said the documentary makers – the award-winning Friel Kean Films – had looked at various towns, before settling on Onthank due to the number of families who agreed to be filmed over a sustained period of time. A spokesman said The Scheme will look at a number of different families with a “mix” of stories.

While later episodes promise to capture some of the regeneration work in Onthank, concerns remain the picture will be one-dimensional. After watching the opening show, Paul Whitelaw, The Scotsman’s television critic, said that “it remains to be seen whether The Scheme has any purpose other than wallowing in their misery.”

That raises another question: should documentary series be balanced on a per-episode basis, or is it fine to show the other side of the story in separate episodes that people might not watch?

As I say, I’d love to know what you think.

Ear mutations, why it hurts when I Wii, a completely unbiased review of the new Eels album, and a quick thing about iPhone 3G coverage

Hello there. Sorry for the lack of blogging recently, I’ve been taking a break from the computer. Here are a few things that have been occupying me lately.

First up, headphones and mutating ears. I’ve been reviewing some high-end headphones – in-ear ones – and while I can’t put any details up here until the reviews hit print, I can say that once you start spending £80-plus on headphones you end up with something pretty amazing. Such phones deliver so much bass that even the nicest, prettiest acoustic number feels like somebody driving an 18-wheel truck into the side of your head.

My existing headphones weren’t quite as dramatic as that, but they were pretty good – until recently, when they stopped delivering any bass at all. The problem is the seal. With in-ear headphones, once you get a good seal you get bass; if the seal isn’t perfect, you don’t get bass at all. If you ever see user reviews of £150 headphones where an outraged punter accuses the cans of being a bass-free zone, you can be sure the problem was that either the phones didn’t fit properly or the punter didn’t put them in properly.

The problem with my ones, however, is a bit different. I can’t get a seal any more. I’m not putting them in any differently, there’s no damage to the headphone covers. They just don’t fit any more, and because I’ve thrown out all the other spare covers, there’s not much I can do about it. I think the problem may be that I’ve been using earplugs quite a lot recently – our neighbours have a new dog, which can be noisy, and I often need to nap during the day – and the earplugs have widened my ear canals slightly. Not hugely – I’m not able to put, say, a large carrot into my lugs – but enough that the headphones that did fit, don’t. Very annoying.

Next up, the Wii. If you played Dead Space on Xbox, you’ll love Dead Space Extraction on the Wii – especially if you can get it for £15, as I did in ASDA. Unfortunately while it’s a brilliant game and superb fun, it’s absolutely hellish to play if you’re using the Wiimote. I was diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome the other week, and playing with the Wiimote makes the symptoms appear pretty much instantly. I don’t know if things are any better if you use the Wii Zapper, the gun-shaped holder for the Wiimote, but it’s probably not a good idea for me to try.

On to phones. If you’re getting crappy 3G coverage from your current provider you might find that switching makes a huge difference. According to their online coverage maps both O2 and Orange deliver great 3G coverage to my bit of the world, but in reality I can’t get an O2 signal in much of my house, anywhere near the gym or in either pub I frequent. I switched to Orange this week and I get full-strength signals everywhere.

It’s worth thinking about if you’re switching and taking a number with you: to do that you need to hand over a code called a PAC code, which your new provider uses to transfer the number. If I were moving from Orange to O2 I’d be bloody furious at the coverage in my neck of the woods, but having transferred the number over there would be a lot of hassle if I wanted to go “your coverage is crap! Shove your contract!”. The moral? Make sure the coverage is good enough and *then* hand over the PAC code.

The new Eels album, End Times, is very good. If you like music made by people with beards, you should buy it.

Last but not least, I had a complete mental blackout today on the radio and couldn’t remember which key press gets a right-click on a Mac when you don’t have a two button mouse. The correct answer is, of course, the Windows key.

A-ha-ha-ha.

Watchdog’s “expose” of the PlayStation 3 Yellow Light of Death

Me on Techradar:

I’m gutted. A gadget that cost me over £300 has packed up, and it’s taunting me with a flickering LED. I called the manufacturer and they’ve told me that since it’s out of warranty, it’s going to cost me money for an engineer to look at it – and if I’m right and it is gubbed, it’ll cost a small fortune to repair it.

PS3? Nope. Dishwasher.

Spotify on mobile is doomed to failure

Sorry I’ve been quiet: still ill. But not too ill to predict doom! DOOM!

in order to exist, Spotify has to pay the bills – and you can be confident that it’s paying rates that the BBC would laugh at. By all accounts the going royalty rate for streaming music is around 1p per stream, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you start getting lots of users.

One user listening to ten streams per day is 10p a day, or £3.00 per month – which means Spotify’s paying more than the BBC spends on its entire radio and online output.

3D TV: what to expect; Windows 7 gets even more confusing, and how to fix UK broadband

Words on the Internet? I writes ‘em!

First up, what will we be able to watch on Sky TV when it goes 3D next year?

7.00pm Bruno
Sky Movies Premiere 3D
You know that bit where the focus group sees Bruno’s pilot for a TV programme? Remember THAT bit? Now you can see it again – in 3D!

Six things Ofcom could do to fix the sorry state of UK broadband:

ISPs that deliberately throttle traffic – such as peak-time iPlayer nobbling – or block entire protocols should say so up-front. Ryanair isn’t allowed to replace its planes with trampolines, although we suspect it’d like to. ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to do the tech equivalent, either.

Just when you thought the EU launch of Windows 7 couldn’t get any more confusing, it gets more confusing.

it seems rather silly to wait until you’ve started manufacturing install DVDs before deciding that a browser-free Windows is a donkey.

It’s the tech equivalent of getting married, climbing into the marital bed on your wedding night and telling your partner: “I’ve just realised something. You’re a minger! God, I wished I’d noticed that earlier!”

Sky+ HD: is it worth the money?

Despite my ongoing cynicism about high definition TV, I’ve just upgraded my Sky box to a shiny new HD one – not for the HD content, but because I wanted more storage space (series-linking Waybuloo and Timmy Time takes up more space than you’d think) and the ability to record two things while watching something else. Going through the schedules has been interesting, because I can’t make up my mind whether HD’s any cop or not.

The good: picture quality and sound are superb, if you can get them.

The bad: you can’t get them very often.

That’s partly because of my HD box – it’s one of the models that doesn’t have the new electronic programme guide yet, so ITV HD is absent for another month – but it’s more because there’s an HD chicken and egg thing going on. There’s not much HD content because there aren’t very many HD viewers; there aren’t many HD viewers because there’s not much HD content.

Assuming you’re a cheapskate like me and don’t pay extra for the HD movie channels, there’s not a lot: a best of the beeb (which seems rather heavy on Torchwood and repeats of Wallander), Sky One, FX and Channel 4 (which broadcasts everything in HD, although not everything is filmed in HD). There are a few other channels that I won’t watch and neither will you, and there are some surprising omissions – so for example you can get In The Night Garden in HD, but not Top Gear. I’m not sure toddlers really give a shit whether something’s SD or HD, whereas the cinematography (is that the right word for telly?) in Top Gear’s car features would look superb with more pixels.

The other thing about HD is that when you have it, switching to normal channels is jarring. Everything looks blurry, and the over-compressed stuff on the more obscure channels becomes completely unwatchable. It’s like going to the cinema and seeing a YouTube clip. It’s even worse when the HD channel you’re watching actually shows a YouTube clip – such as Rude Tube on Channel 4. Not that I’d watch that crap, but you know what I mean.

The money? It’s £9 per month extra for basic HD, over and above the cost of the HD box and installation. The box itself is nice (horrible dated interface aside), but unless you’re desperate to see 8 out of 10 Cats in HD – and who is? – then that works out as about a pound per programme: four episodes of House in HD and five other things per month. It’s a lot of cash for not a lot of programming.

One way to reduce that cost, incidentally, is to have a look at the Sky packs you’re getting. Turns out I was paying for a bunch of packs – the news and events pack, the lifestyle pack, the something else pack – that I don’t watch, and bumping them cut the Sky bill by £3 per month. So upgrading to HD means I’m paying about 80p per programme.

Don’t get me wrong, HD is lovely. The installer tells me that demand has recently gone through the roof due to price cuts and supermarket promotions, so perhaps things will change quite quickly, but right now it’s a bit like the Xbox 360 movie service in the UK: a great idea that desperately needs more content.

Do any of you have HD? Am I talking out of my arse?

Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3′s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots.

How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous, and she rocks a short skirt in a way that – thankfully – Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t.

With photos, naturally.

“Baby Chef, Baby Chef, he’s praying for an early death…”

When people talk about children’s television, they tend to wheel out the old cliche about the programmes being “…on drugs!” By drugs, they either mean speed – as shorthand for the super-fast cutting and attention deficit disorder many such programmes display – or LSD, to reflect the weirdness of what’s on screen.

Baby TV’s Baby Chef is on drugs too, but it’s not on speed or on LSD. It’s on heroin.

Before I get into this I’d just like to say that Baby TV is brilliant. Toddlers love it, it’s mainly quite gentle and relaxing, and it’s entirely ad-free. But it also shows Baby Chef.

Baby Chef is a simple wee programme. A puppet chef with the amazingly original name of Cheffy Chef teaches toddlers how to cook, with the help of a mute, lipstick-wearing teapot.

This is, of course, perfectly normal in the world of kids’ TV.

What’s not normal, however, is the theme tune. I believe that Baby Chef is made somewhere in Europe, and the YouTube clips I’ve been able to find of it have a brilliant theme tune recorded by someone who sounds like a cheaper Pavarotti. Here in the UK, though, the theme tune has been handed to somebody who (a) doesn’t have any timing; (b) couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket; and (c) hates himself and wants to die.

It’s extraordinary, it really is. “Baby Chef! Baby Chef!” sing the kiddies. “Cooking is a lot of fun”, Baby Chef honks back, putting the shotgun into his mouth. “Baby Chef! Baby Chef!” the children coo. “It’s fun for everyone,” Baby Chef sobs, his finger tightening on the trigger.

I’m not making this up. Check it out for yourself: BabyTV’s on the second or third page of Sky’s “Kids” category, and Baby Chef’s on at 9am.

Or at least, he was today. I’m not convinced he’ll still be around tomorrow.

TV tweets are killing the cliffhanger

Aaaaagh!

The last time we looked, that big box on the Twitter homepage says “What are you doing?” Maybe it changes at 9.55pm on a Wednesday night to say “Why not tell the entire planet who’s been fired on The Apprentice?”, or maybe Americans get a special version that says “Quick, tell the Brits who dies in Season Five of The Wire! It’s not on there for months!”