little bits of everything

Before I start, let me just say that there have been comments about the lack of diversity with the judges for my awards. I have to say that I agree with those comments, but it's difficult to know what to do about it. Without further ado (not that we had much ado in the first place), here we go. Best radio programme on a Sunday afternoon Guy Garvey's Finest Hour (which actually lasts two) is one of those things that it's almost worth paying the license fee for just to get that one thing. If you're worried about it being a bit weird because it's on 6 Music then you don't need to worry. He plays things you just don't normally hear it all you mostly listen to is Radio 2 (like me). Some are old, some are brand new, but almost unfailingly, all are good, and you're glad you listened. As well as the talking bits in between that he does there are "On this day" items from the BBC archives and introductions to songs by his sister, the Beckypedia and his ...

 I've written about how I could get lost in the legend of Robin Hood before. I thought I never see the TV series Robin of Sherwood again, but it's popped up on ITV. So how does it hold up? Would I be as traumatised as I was when I saw Blake's 7 as an adult and ruined my childhood? I saw one episode and in fact it holds up pretty well. The pacing is a bit slow, but that's just the way TV was then. The theme music is fantastic - lovely synths and chorused singing. A young Ray Winston stands out as Will Scarlet, because he's probably the most famous of them all these days. I haven't seen any other episodes, and I probably won't, because there's so much other stuff to watch. They'll stay on the Tivo for a while though, in case I change my mind...

A year or so ago I did my 2018 awards . As 2019 is over it's time for this year's awards, though you'll find all the categories are different. Best Orchestral Album of 80s tunes When I heard a track from  Trevor Horn 's Reimagines the Eighties  on Radio 2 I thought it was worth seeing if the other tracks were as good, and many of them were. The first track, Everyone wants to rule the world , sung by Robbie Williams, was released as a single, and doesn't depart too much from the original. The second track, Dancing in the dark , sung by Gabrielle Apin, is a slowed down version of the original. The leisurely tempo and string arrangement really enhances Bruce's words. Seal sings Ashes to Ashes and his powerful range manages to competently handle the melody that David Bowie wrote. Matt Cardle sings The Power of love . Yes, he's still around. There are other slowed down tracks: Slave to the Rhythm and Take on me , and they manage to not...

I have a post brewing in my head called "I don't love your thing, but I love that you love your thing", about SF/F and media fandom and how I stand on the edges watching what people do, which would end with an "except". This is the except. I was reading a review of Sherwood by Meagan Spooner  and I thought I'd get on and tell you about Robin Hood. In particular I loved Robin of Sherwood on ITV in the 1980s. Thirteen years ago I posted about how I was looking forward to the BBC's (then) new series of Robin Hood . Whilst that programme was really good, and something we all enjoyed as a family, Robin of Sherwood was better in my mind. It had an atmospheric soundtrack by Clannad (so I bought the album). As well as the usual story of a good outlaw it also had elements of pagan spirituality as the character of Herne the Hunter helps out somehow (my memory of actual plotlines is pretty faint). On those olden days (the 1980s, not the middle ages) there was ...

While 2018 is not quite over, I think we've had enough of the year that I can announce my personal awards. Starting with... Best TV series based on a number of short SF stories Electric Dreams This was a real treat. A number of Philip K Dick's short stories were turned into hour long TV programmes. This doesn't happen often, maybe because it's expensive to create one-off sets and do casting for anything less than a complete series, but kudos to Sony for doing that with this series. Philip K Dick wrote the stories that the films Minority Report and Total Recall are based on, so you can guess what sort of subjects are covered. Some are set in the future, or on other planets, while others are set around now. Given that they were written decades ago some are very prescient.  The title sequence for this series also deserves an Honourable Mention for the next award: Best TV title sequence Lucky Man The third series of Lucky Man came out this year on ITV. Altho...

Lately I've hugely enjoyed watching Go 8 Bit , an original programme on the Dave channel. It's like sitting on the sofa watching your friends play a console game or sitting next to them as they play on a PC, but on TV. I thought it was worth checking out, but it turns out that watching people on TV play games is more fun that you might think. It's billed as Dara O'Briain's show, but it was created by  Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon , who have done it as a live show. They are joined by Ellie Gibson , a gaming journalist, who does a bit on the history of the games they play. Each week they have a couple of guests, usually comedians, who join Steve and Sam's teams and play video games each other. They usually start with some sort of retro game in the first round, like Galaxians. For the next two the guests each play their favourite game against the other team captain. The fourth round is pretty random. The last one is the big finale. One week they had a level...

Last Saturday I went to Comicon . It was held in the same place as Worldcon , Excel in London, so it was interesting to compare the two. It was far, far busier (over an hour queue to get in), less well organised, the average age was a lot lower and mainly all about the companies selling stuff. I wouldn't say the latter is necessarily a bad thing, as it's a good way of small businesses selling their stuff, but if you're thinking of going it's worth knowing that. It mainly consists of two of the big halls full of stands.  Costumes  Even if you don't know much about it you may have heard about the costumes. I found that the most interesting thing about it. It started on the train at Amersham. There was someone with a purple jacket and bow tie. It could have just been his normal way of dressing, but the cyberman head fastened to his suitcase was a bit of a giveaway.  The photo at the top shows one I was extremely impressed with. Not only had this person m...

Tomorrow's World (along with Top of the Pops) made Thursday evening the best TV evening of the week (in fact the best evening of the week, but that's another story). We would be shown some really cool new inventions, many of which had great potential to change things. I don't remember many of them appearing in normal life though. When I worked for a small electronics company I understood about how much is involved in bringing things to market, and making them on a big enough scale to make enough money to make more. I remember when the Walkman was first shown, something which did change how music was listened to. My memory of the way it was presented, which many be flawed, was that the revolutionary part was not the small tape mechanism, but the headphones. The inventors had found a way to get good quality sound from a tiny speaker, because after all, who wants to walk around with a big pair of headphones on? I also remember when the digital camera was first shown. Al...

I didn't realise until I came across this book that Douglas Adams had written Doctor Who episodes. So what was the intersection of these two major parts of British SF like? Douglas had already written an episode called City of Death  (note requires Real Player - actually it doesn't require it, but I just wanted to say such an anachronistic thing). Then he was commissioned to write six episodes. They got abandoned after three because of a strike. What Gareth Roberts has done here is write a novel based on all he could get hold of with those scripts. Unfortunately I found that the combination was lesser than the sum of its parts. It's well written, but not as brilliant as I might have hoped. The story is quite slow, but not tedious and the ending doesn't disappoint. Maybe just for fans only.

So, Doctor Who. The BBC had related programmes last night on Radio 1 and Radio 2, but maybe the hype will die down now. I enjoyed The Show, mostly. I did wonder in the middle though, why aliens keep on choosing this country to invade, but maybe that's not the point. I was pleased to spot Christopher Ecclestone in the last few frames of John Hurt's regeneration. It may be because he doesn't want to take part in all the shows about the show, but I feel he gets overlooked. Although on the whole I enjoy Doctor Who, I'm disappointed that although we're in a Golden Age for TV drama generally, that's pretty much all we have for SF drama. Terry Pratchett made a comment in an interview how he wouldn't write for Doctor Who like it's done currently, with (and I can't quite remember the quote) leaving the clues as to the solution to the problem obviously at the start of the show. Maybe it's the all the story over in under an hour format that means you ca...

Various thoughts that rattle around in my head and in my draft posts list have coalesced as I've come across a new online magazine. (Did I manage to sidestep Rule 1 ? You judge.) I clearly remember the first time that the word content made me mentally shudder. I was listening to Scot Mills who was doing a prank call to some of his colleagues in BBC Radio 1. The woman who answered the phone said to one of her colleagues when she'd worked out what was going on, "It's probably Scott because he needs more content for his show". What?  I thought. All that stuff he does with interviews on Stupid Street and Becky's contest with that other guy and "What's Becky's forte", all that is just "content". The trouble with hearing it described like that is that it made me think about how Scott, and Chris Moyles too, come up with all that, er, content.  So they probably sit around in meetings and come up with ideas and send people off with tape...

Actually "rant" is probably a bit strong. I'm mildly annoyed by TV programmes that use a wide variety of small snippets of music throughout. I much prefer the music to be used over and over again as Grand Designs  and The Apprentice  do. Sometimes they use pieces they haven't before, but they very much fit into the pattern of the regular music. In particular, the music they play when the contestants are about to go into the boardroom must invoke a pavlovian response for regular viewers. I do appreciate that there must be people who spend a lot of time picking out the music for the programmes, but the two things in particular that annoy me are - I hear a good song, and I only get a bit of it - there's less of an identity to the programme, like a cheese and chocolate drop sandwich On a tangential note, the BBC have researched the fact that people often complain that the background music is too loud. Their conclusion  is "Reducing the music by just one poi...

You know you're old when they make a programme about your childhood. I watched Micro Men on BBC4 last night, about the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry as they developed their home computers. Our school got a ZX80 and then a ZX81 and we got a Spectrum at home (Sinclair's machines). We also got a BBC computer (made by Curry's Acorn company) at our school. So these machines were part of my childhood. I heard names I hadn't heard for a long time like Sinclair QL, Dragon, Oric and BBC Master. Towards the end they sit in a pub and speculate what it would have been like if they'd worked together, however I think the home computer market may still have dried up. Someone's probably done the analysis, but I guess consoles took over from these computers for games, and PCs for "serious" stuff. One of my sons got a T-shirt yesterday that said "retro gamer" with a picture of a cassette tape on it. The tape also said 2kB. One of them a...

My blog piece of neural implants  was fiction of course. However last night I saw a Horizon programme  which had a couple of things that came close. The first was a series of things (with a name I've forgotten) that are built into a helicopter pilot's harness that vibrate when he goes too high, or gets close to the ground. There's one near the belly button that shows you which direction you are moving. It's designed for situations like landing on sand where you have no visibility. They showed a pilot landing a simulator successfully with his eyes closed. The second one was a belt with 8 vibrating pads around it. It was hooked up to a compass so that the pad nearest North vibrated continuously. So whilst not quite being a heads-up display as my previous post predicted, it seems there's plenty of spare bandwidth with the sense to touch to get useful information into the brain.

For the programme Virtual Revolution . I couldn't have done it without a team of people. Seriously, I couldn't have, as I actually didn't do very much. However they could have done it without me. As the programme was put together in public on the Digital Revolution (working title) blog I made some comments, so I consider myself as having been involved in it. Other posts on the programme: How I'd do the BBC Digital Revolution programme My 1.5 seconds of fame Update: We won a Bafta too. I discovered that you can see all my contributions.

The BBC are making a programme called Digital Revolution digital revolution is a four part series for BBC Two about how the web is changing the world They are making it in public view, showing rushes as they put the film together, asking questions about content on their blog and getting ideas on the final title (as Digital Revolution is a working title) on the blog and twitter. The questions asked by each of the episodes are: Are all web users created equal? Can the nation state survive the web? How much are you giving away for free? How is the web affecting our brains? I had my chance to give input earlier in the process, so it's a bit late now, but if I were making a series about how the web is changing the world it would be a bit like this: Look at eBay - it gives us a way to sell our stuff instead of chucking it away and people run small business from our home. Look at FriendsReunited and Facebook - we're getting in touch with people we used to know more easily and remaking...

The BBC Digital Revolution people (putting together a 4 programme series on the web and stuff) asked on Twitter if anyone had questions for Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty. Her answer: Original blog entry: Tim Berners-Lee and Shami Chakrabarti interview clips (Video): web privacy and obsession (cross posted to my work blog )