Ah, television. Sometimes you kill shows while they’re still in their prime, making us wonder what might have been. Sometimes you keep shows alive on life support long after they should have whithered and gone. And very occasionally, you get it just right, ending their lives at the natural and right time.
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After my unintended absence, I’m back. Thanks to Jarndyce and Katie for holding the fort and the prime seats in front of the TV for me in my absence, but now I shall retake my rightful place in command of the Sharpener remote control.
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Apologies for the slight lateness in posting my review this week – various reasons mean I’m spending the week in the Midlands, so finding the time to sit down and write has been hard. However, the silver lining is that I now have access to the full delights of cable television, so next week’s review will feature much of the bizarre, the wonderful and deformed that fill those obscure channels.
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There comes a stage in every television actor’s career when they’re asked to star in a detective series. It’s an immutable law of television that every actor, no matter how ill-suited to the role they may seem, can become a senior police officer on the grounds that we’ll never stop to think about just how this person made it through the ranks with their collection of bad habits. And for those of you who doubt me, I’d like to point out that the BBC will soon be launching a new series starring Alastair McGowan as an unconventional maverick detective. If there’s even a hint of an impression in that series, I may demand my licence fee back.
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This week I have been mostly watching programmes featuring ghosts. The sudden burst of supernatural series onto TV could indicate that world events are making people more inclined to look for spiritual answers, or it could just imply that enough time has passed since The Sixth Sense was released for TV executives to feel confident in raiding it.
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As the days get shorter and wetter, the cricket season draws to a close and people start spending more time watching things other than Andrew Flintoff on TV. So, ever alert to public demand, the TV companies decide this is the time to start throwing new programmes at us, which means this week is a good time to start my new regular Sharpener TV review. Because of a busy weekend, this one’s a little late, but future ones will be appearing at weekends.
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One of the problems of modern newspaper publishing is the question of how to fill the blank pages of the newspaper every day. After all, even though there’s a lot of news out in the world, journalists only have a finite amount of time each day to turn reality into news, so sometimes they’re glad when the news comes prepackaged for them and it’s even better when it’s not just a press release, but an entire study allowing them to quote a whole host of spurious facts, stick in a couple of pictures and they’ve filled a page with the news that watching four or more DVDs a day can help lower cholesterol.
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Several years ago, an artist who didn’t appear at Live Aid pondered on the ways in which we expected the world to come to an end, and proposed another:

When you compute the time between an event and the nostalgia for the event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually…the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.

If he’s right, then I suspect Saturday’s Live8 concert, or at least the coverage of it, may be the beginning of the end of the world.
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Following up on my previous post about the internet and the future of television, there have been some interesting developments over the last couple of weeks, which may be the first birth pangs of a new direction in television distribution. Then again, it might just be the internet’s latest nine days wonder.
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(Regular readers of my own blog will be aware that I’m quite a Doctor Who fan. However, you can all rest assured that this post relates to Who only tangentially.)

In his 1995 article ‘What have we got to lose?‘ Douglas Adams made an interesting point about the BBC:

Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programs to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time – it’s actually in a different business from all its competitors)

One of the most interesting developments of the last couple of years has been the BBC’s realisation of this, and how it’s now making a fairly sizeable move to take advantage of it.
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