A Friday Hotch Potch

I was going to extol the virtues of Press Gang in this column. I was going to wax lyrical about how the Guinness Book of Classic British Television was very close to the mark when they described it as “possibly the best television programme in the world”. With its unrivalled blend of genuinely funny comedy and extremely dark and serious storylines, it was a truly magnificent piece of television.

But I can’t because the DVD didn’t arrive today. All I got was a card bearing an unfamiliar logo which said I had a parcel waiting to be delivered. It may or may not be from Amazon so I don’t know when I’ll get to relive the glories of ‘Gang. Hence me falling back on the lazy device of lumping a bunch of things together and hoping for the best.

Which brings me to “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here” which has just finished apparently. I have never seen the show but it was the talk of work throughout its run. On the one had I have to applaud the surreal genius of putting Jenny Bond and Johnny Rotten in the same jungle but the other hand is waiting to slap whoever thought that television was invented so that the only writing to be done was contriving links for Ant and Dec to smoothly segue in and out of commercials. Such shows are built on the idea that it is better to watch someone really suffer than it is to watch an actor pretend to suffer. But the peeps would point to the ratings and say that I am wrong to disapprove of such entertainments. Well, really, if they’re going to use ratings to justify the existence of trash then I might as well point to the popularity of the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany and not have to worry about the absurd flippancy of my retort.

I bought a digital radio this week. I’d been wanting one for a while – being the gadget nut I outed myself as some columns ago it was inevitable. The problem is the same as the problem with digital television. The hype bringers promised both would offer perfect quality picture and sound (well, not perfect pictures on the radio but you get the point) when it is plainly not true. Thus expectations are raised and the eyes and ears become more finely tuned. We all grew up with dodgy FM signals, analogue TV aerials on roofs and atop tellies. We paid little attention to the crackles and static and ghosting that was the inevitable result of transmissions that were bouncing off more buildings than Superman after a night out with George Best. But we were told digital broadcasts would be perfect because they didn’t suffer from the same distortion that clumsy old analogue waves did. And this is true. However, what the ad men didn’t mention was that the digital platforms would squeeze so many channels into so little space that compression reduces the output quality and you end up with pixelated pictures and muffled sound. My digital radio gives me the option to display the bit rate being used by the broadcaster and the alleged CD Quality Sound is in fact well below that. Not to say that it is bad – don’t misunderstand me – it is generally speaking easier and better to listen to a new digital set than an old analogue on. But don’t expect CD Quality Sound any more than you’d expect digital TV to be as high quality as a top of the range DVD.

Finally we come to some site news. Today marks the end of what I’m sure most of you never look at – the third season of Doctor Who Unbound Unbound. The last six plays have seen WWE star John Cena in the role of the Doctor and it’s been fun to write his battle raps. But, alas, I’m aware that most people don’t know who he is and just see what appears to be badly scanning poetry beneath pictures of a typical witless American youth. The main advance of this season of plays (if you’re going to spoof Big Finish it at least entitles you to be as pretentious as they are) has been in the field of the covers. No longer just putting a face on a generic background, I have attempted (with varying degrees of success) to produce proper covers. Yes they are still spoofs (I doubt BF would ever use a man pretending his penis looks like Concorde) but done to look vaguely professional. Like the Albanian video covers, they use the same basic techniques (though obviously not to the same standard) as the professional cover designers. It is like Les Dawson’s bad piano playing – he had to be a proper pianist in order to play so badly. I hope each cover improves on the last and they will continue to be a learning experience. But for now it’s back to the one offs for the next season. They are both harder and easier to do and that’s good enough for me.

I will leave you now as I am weary.

13th February 2004