Posts by Rich Lock
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In other Friday happy news, Fongers gets to get rid of Lhaws, whether they wanted to or not.
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the only way to stay awake in an airport hotel is to watch porn.
there's always the Gideon, Bart :)
Now available with wipe-clean cover and extra-absorbent pages?
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Which way to the cloakroom? -
My sister, who is about as ginger as they come, apparently got a fair wee bit of shit at school back in the '80's (I didn't really notice at the time), but I don't recall it being as prevelant as it is now.
It might be instructive to compare and contrast the fate of Ron Atkinson to that of Haden.
Ron Atkinson's comments = media shitstorm and loss of job.
Haden's comments...not so much.
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If a television station/channel is run as a business, then it's obliged to please shareholders. If those shareholders demand increased returns, then even a subscription channel is tempted run advertisements, and move "down-market", where the audiences are larger.
Depends if you can sell your shareholders on the idea that a percentage of your programming should be a long-term profit model (same as some speculative R&D in certain companies may only pay off long-term).
Circling back to 'the wire': the show finished two years ago, having run for five seasons. But the word-of-mouth is still building the following for it. I've had two people in my office come up to me recently and ask if I've seen this great US cop drama called 'the wire' which they've just started watching.
So sure, 'dancing with the changing room stars of Coronation Street while finding a place in the sun' can pay for your daily runing costs, but maybe the should be a slice of the pie for speculative stuff that might pay off only in the longer view, too.
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I did suspect I was sticking my neck out and practically begging for a counter-factual.
I don't have the time to reasearch the ratio of failed/cancelled free-to-air vs those that could be considered a success, but I do suspect it would run rather higher on the cancelled side of the line. But while everyone remebers the successes, no-one remebers the cancelled shows.
There is a 'family guy' clip where Peter Griffin monologues a loooong list of cancelled recent TV shows as the punchline to a joke, but I can't find it easily.
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Brickley does have a point. 'The Wire' may have been free to air here, but it wasn't made here.
As Emma has pointed out:
We get a bunch of HBO stuff free to air here - The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men
HBO is a subscription channel. Isn't the accepted wisdom that this gives them a lot more freedom than the networks? The boardroom suits aren't as likely to ruthlessly cull shows mid-season that are seen as underperforming?
As well as the stuff above, the subscription model has also delivered the following:
Dr Who (made with licence payers money, so subsciption by the dark forces of the commie-nazi state...)
BSG was a product of the SCI-Fi channel (also subscription, I think?)
So that's five sucessful series mentioned so far delivered under the subscription model.
And on the free-to-air side of the ledger:
Dollhouse (Fox, and has been cancelled)
The Sarah Conner Chronicles (also Fox, and also cancelled)
Fastlane (also Fox...)
Family Guy (also Fox, and only resurrected because of fan outcry and strong DVD sales).
Those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and I unfortunately don't have time to do more research...
I think there's merit in the argument that 'good' telly is only really going to be delivered by payment of some sort outside the ad revenue stream.
Do you know how many film versions of A Star is Born there are?
Come watch me now?
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Likewise, no sign there of what should be the biggest story of the day, namely that the banking ombudsman has found that ANZ told large investors to get out of the collapsing ING fund, while telling small investors that it was all good.
Hmm, shades of the Lloyd's name 'recruit to dilute' scandal there.
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Battlestar Galactica.
To channel my inner comic book guy for a minute: Worst. Ending. Ever.
I suspect the rash of bad endings to long-running shows (BSG, Lost, The Sopranos, and so on) has more to do with the constraints of the business model than anything else.
The series-creators will never be given more than around half a series as a guaranteed future timeline, and if their cherished baby does turn out to be a success, it'll be milked for all it's worth. Which generally means adding more and more stuff to a framework which was never meant to support that much crap.
BSG, as an example, was probably meant at the most to last two-three seasons. The creators probably hadn't even thought out an overall story arc longer than that. So in the original arc, Laura Roslin gets cancer, leads them all to some planet. Dies. Ends. But wait! The show is a success! We need more seasons! Quick! a script re-write! She gets better! So two more series worth of arc gets loaded onto a framework not intended to carry it. And inevitably tying all that extra crap up in a nice bow is more or less impossible. You've used up all your creative juices keeping the show staggering along for three years longer than it was intended.
With that in mind, my cap is doffed to the creators of 'the wire' for managing to keep everything more or less consistent and running smoothly right up until the end of season five. Where, admittedly, it became clear that the creative engine was down to fumes. But still running, nonetheless.
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Well, in the original, Greedo kept his hands in view over the table, and his fatal error was to allow Han to move his under the table. Han shot him cold.
In the crappy updated version, L*c*s CGI'd it so that it looked like Greedo shot first.
But I'm sure we'll get a new version soon, where Greedo is surreptitiously updating his facebook profile, unfriending Han and thus driving him into a killing rage.
Anyway, if you've ever wondered what star wars would be like if they had facebook, here it is.
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Does m'learned friend demand satisfaction? The usual place? I shall leave the choice of weapon to you, sir.
But in a roundabout way, I think you've added weight to my point about MPFC being ahead of it's time.
I note from this useful website that it's comtemporaries were such delights as 'the Benny Hill show', 'Ken Dodd And The Diddymen' and
'The Liver Birds'. Oh, and something called, 'the gnomes of dulwich'.Anyone still wondering why monty python was so popular?