Our radio rocks

A true story: when I used to have a day job, I’d listen to BBC Radio Scotland during my morning commute. I’d listen to the people on comedian Fred MacAulay’s programme and think “that must be a laugh to do. Imagine if that was your job.” These days, I’m one of the people going on Fred’s programme, and I’m thinking “this is a laugh to do. I can’t believe this is my job.”

Radio’s a magical thing. I have fond memories of listening to Irish radio under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep as a child, trying and failing to get into the bands on John Peel’s playlist as an adolescent, drunkenly calling late-night phone-in idiot-fests as a twentysomething, hearing my own band played on an indie rock show in my late twenties and damn near falling out of my car laughing at various programmes – some of them serious – today. It’s a fantastic medium and I feel very privileged to be even slightly involved in it.

It’s World Radio Day today. As UNESCO director general Irina Bokova says:

“In a world changing quickly, we must make the most of radio’s ability to connect people and societies, to share knowledge and information and to strengthen understanding. This World Radio Day is a moment to recognise the marvel of radio and to harness its power for the benefit of all.”

UNESCO explains:

Since the first broadcast over 100 years ago, radio has proven to be a powerful information source for mobilizing social change and a central point for community life. It is the mass media that reaches the widest audience in the world. In an era of new technologies, it remains the world’s most accessible platform, a powerful communication tool and a low cost medium.

The angry face of DCI Banks

I’m hopeless at catching programmes when they’re actually broadcast, so it’s taken me a while to get round to watching the DCI Banks adaptations of Peter Robinson’s books. I like the books, but I encountered exactly the same problem I had with the recent dramatisation of Mark Billingham’s DI Thorne novels. No, not the annoying sidekick, or the maverick cop breaks the rules but always gets his man blah blah blah… the problem I had was overacting. It was bad in Thorne, but even worse in Banks.

Put it this way: if you created a drinking game where you had to down a shot every time DCI Banks made this face:

You’d be very pissed very, very quickly.

That face put me off the programme. I mean it. It’s not just his “I’m angry at a suspect” face. It’s his “I wish I’d had some toast before leaving the house” face, his “I wonder what I’ll have for my tea” face and his “I’m feeling quite chipper today, actually” face.

I don’t get it. Was there a memo that says all TV detectives are allowed two facial expressions, Really Pissed Off and Absolutely Fucking Furious?

The Booth at the End: genuinely gripping TV

I know I’m late to this, but if you haven’t seen The Booth at the End, it’s well worth your time. The series is available in its entirety online, and I loved three things about it: the economy of the writing, Xander Berkeley’s acting, and the clever way separate strands begin to interleave.

Here’s a review from The Guardian:

A man (Xander Berkeley, delivering a performance so brilliant it should be used as an acting masterclass) sits at the end booth in an anonymous diner. People come to him with problems. He offers them each a deal. They must perform a task – rob a bank to be prettier, kill a stranger’s child to save a cancer-stricken son – tell him the details, and they will get what they want. Whether they agree and fulfil their side of the bargain is entirely up to them.

Poverty porn? Maybe. The Scheme is back on the BBC

Last year I blogged about BBC Scotland’s The Scheme, a fly on the wall documentary series filmed in Kilmarnock. It was pulled for legal reasons – people featured in it ended up in court, and the episodes including them couldn’t be shown until the legal process was complete – and it’s back tonight. If you watched it last time you can skip this week and next, as they’re showing the full series. If you’re not in Scotland you’ll be able to watch it on iPlayer.

The programme has attracted fierce criticism, and it’s been dubbed “poverty porn”. The critics have a point. As I wrote when it first aired:

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.

Then again:

I suspect few sensible people would agree to be filmed for that long in the first place, so what you end up with is a year in the life of attention whores and idiots, edited to make them look more whorish and idiotic. Of course it’s not representative: most people’s lives aren’t interesting enough to watch.

Two months with an Apple TV

I bought an Apple TV in an attempt to free my huge home video library from its Mac-shaped prison: I can’t be bothered unplugging everything and moving the Mac downstairs when I want to watch a clip of Baby Bigmouth, and life’s too short to burn your own DVDs. It’s been in daily use since then, so here are a few thoughts.

It’s great if you have kids, and Handbrake
Kids like films; kids also like scratching DVDs. Slowly but surely I’ve been using the combination of Fairmount and Handbrake to copy our various Pixar discs to the Apple TV. It takes forever – DVD ripping, no matter how good the software, is never anything but a pain – but it’s cheaper than having to buy Wall-E all over again.

It’s surprisingly good
720p HD video over Wi-Fi? No problem. If you absolutely, positively have to have 1080p, don’t buy an Apple TV yet. It doesn’t do it. Me, I couldn’t care less. My TV isn’t big enough to tell the difference between HD and True HD.

It’s really good with the iPad
The novelty of watching something on YouTube on the iPad and hitting one button to put it on the TV hasn’t worn off yet. Once iPlayer etc can do it too, things will be fun.

It’s buggy
I’ve never had to reboot an Apple product as often as I have to reboot the Apple TV. If I get two days out of it I’m happy. Luckily the reboot is simple and quick, but we’re not quite in “it just works” territory here.

It can be desperately slow
I’ve had to divide my home movies into individual years, and even then the Apple TV takes between two and five minutes to load details of a 100-clip library – not the video, just the folder listing and thumbnails. To say this pisses me off would be an enormous understatement. I don’t know if it’s the Apple TV or iTunes, and I don’t care.

It needs iTunes
Apple TV is crying out for a media server, I think. Having to leave iTunes running on your Mac is a pain, and I hate to think how much energy the combination of Apple TV and running MacBook Pro is using up. I hope it isn’t too much, but I’m scared to see what my next electricity bill says.

Movies are still ropey
Is there such a thing as a good UK video on demand service? The catalogue on Apple TV (and in iTunes, and on the Xbox, and…) is still very patchy.

It needs iPlayer
If Nintendo can put it on the Wii, Apple can put it on the Apple TV. This one’s right at the top of my wish list.

It doesn’t do many video formats
If you’re the kind of person whose television aerial is bittorrent-shaped, expect to spend a lot of time converting those AVI and MKV files to M4Vs or MP4s.

YouTube is great, but I can’t favourite anything
Anyone else have this problem? I’ve been getting the temporary-error message for two months now.

I can’t see my own Flickr photos
Flickr support is nice. Flickr support without login, not so nice. I keep my personal pics in Friends and Family mode; Apple TV can’t login to display them.

It’s great for music
Or at least, it is if you’re willing to faff a bit. My Apple TV is hooked to an AV receiver, which in turn is hooked to the TV. I’ve got HDMI control on so that when the TV goes off, the DVD player does too; unfortunately that means the process of listening to music without the TV is this:

* Turn everything on
* Turn AV receiver to Apple TV
* Find playlist etc on Apple TV, start playing.
* Turn off the TV
* Turn the AV receiver back on again (it’s gone into standby)
* Take the Apple TV off pause (it goes into that automatically)

It’s not elegant, but it gets there eventually.

It’s worth £101
Provided, that is, you don’t mind swearing at it from time to time and rebooting it every few days. It’s a clever bit of kit but if you want something as simple and as reliable as a basic DVD player, get a basic DVD player.

The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench

…and Google’s the latest tech firm to jump into it. A wee op/ed piece by me:

One of my favourite TV programmes was Casualty. I didn’t like it for the acting, though. I liked it because of the hilariously protracted accidents in each episode. “I’ll just hammer this nail in with an UNEXPLODED BOMB!” this week’s trolley fodder would announce, with the inevitable explosion following shortly afterwards.

“I think I’ll leave this really sharp kitchen knife sticking out of the steering wheel as I drink and drive!” another would say. “I think I’ll attempt to combine the worlds of TV and computers!” a third would offer.

Oops. That last one wasn’t Casualty. That was Google.

Naturally, writing about the television business means I’m going to take the opportunity to quote Hunter S Thomson properly:

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

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.