Bye-bye BB
Posted: Wed 26 August, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Media, Thoughts Leave a comment »Happy, happy day.
Channel 4 have announced that the 2010 series (the 11th) of Big Brother is to be the last one on Channel Four. Viewing figures have been dropping in recent years, from the 2002 peak of 8million people down to the current series with an average of 2 million people watching.
Personally I don’t give a damn about Big Brother and/or its spin-off shows, but at least with luck it’ll be off mainstream TV after this time next year.
I’m quite certain that some other dumb-arse channel will scoop up Big Brother past 2010 – but hopefully it’ll be some little-watched satellite channel that thinks it’ll get the viewers.
And in the meantime, maybe – just maybe – it’ll be the start of a move away from these pox-ridden “reality” shows that seem to pollute so much TV at the moment.
Most Burgled
Posted: Fri 14 August, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Creativity, Cynicism, News Leave a comment »The story today about the “most burgled postcodes” in the UK makes for some interesting reading – but also misses out on a couple of rather relevant bits of information.
Firstly, it’s been done by MoneySupermarket.com (I’m not adding a link to them, because they’ve had enough PR out of this already) based on people trying to get home insurance. There’s no corroboration of these figures with any police reports etc.
Secondly, it’s this (from the story)…
Some 0.42% of people from Arnold who asked for quotes via the website said they had been burgled in the past five years, while that rate was above 0.24% in the rest of the top 20.
So 0.42% of people in Arnold (Nottinghamshire) have been burgled in the past five years. But that means that 99.58% of people in Arnold haven’t been burgled. Which (to me, anyway) is far more interesting, and actually helps to put all this shit in perspective a bit.
Locational Errors
Posted: Tue 11 August, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Own Business, Travel, Web Development, Work-related 4 Comments »Checking out some information about the location I’m going to be based in over the next month or so (from a week on Monday) I had a look at the dreaded Tesco website to see what stores are close to the places I’ll be working/staying. (And in this case, the answer is pretty much “fuck all”) I’ve also looked at the locations for other supermarket-type places, and will obviously wander around the area a bit too, see what’s around that isn’t easily web-findable.
Anyway, while looking at the map on the Tesco site, I noticed this…
I think they haven't checked the work on placenames
Yep, there’s notation for “Waterloo Strain Station”…
NOTE : You can find the same thing by typing “SE1” into the store locator.
PR Words to Ban
Posted: Tue 4 August, 2009 Filed under: Advertising, Charm School, Creativity, Thoughts Leave a comment »Just a quickie, but I love this TechCrunch article about “10 words I would love to see banned from press releases”
Thankfully I don’t get too many press releases, but I see enough of them online that I have to agree with pretty much all of what’s been said in this one…
Portraiture
Posted: Sat 25 July, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Photography Leave a comment »I think that the photo accompanying this article is absolutely fantastic.
It sums up everything about the article in one image – you know what the person does straight away, and in my opinion it’s just brilliant.
Portrait of a bridge painter
Image (C) Guardian Newspapers 2009 and Murdo Macleod
Back to Where It Began
Posted: Thu 23 July, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Cynicism, Thoughts 2 Comments »I see that the ITV series “The Bill” is getting a lot of publicity about how it’s going from being a shitey soap-type programme down to a one-hour/episode-per-week drama series. It’s even going out post-watershed.
But what no-one seems to be commenting on is the fact that this isn’t a new thing for The Bill – in fact, that’s right where it started.
So this rethink and reschedule is really more an acknowledgement that all the fucking about with it over the last few years didn’t work, so it’s going to go back to its roots a bit, and see where it goes from there.
Personally, I hope it works out – when it first came out, The Bill was a decent police series. Maybe it’ll go back to being one again, although only time will tell on that score.
Too Much Free Time?
Posted: Fri 3 July, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Cynicism Leave a comment »Definitely filed under “Too much time on their hands” comes this – 50 examples of ‘coffee’ art.
Although on a more cynical note, I can’t help wondering if some of those designs have been brought into being through the wonder of Photoshop…