F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E
Because 2018 somehow is still a thing
TV, Internet news, Web 2.0 and anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories.
Years have passed and millions of DVD box sets have been sold, and Futurama has remained cancelled. Family Guy has been revived (and is still very much OK) but us Futurama fans have been left unsatiated.
Until, according to the New York Post and John DiMaggio, now.
A 13-episode series.
Sweet Zombie Jesus! Fox have finally done something right for a change, even if it is just selling the show to Comedy Central. Should at least mean it'll come out on DVD, though.
It's been a shadow of itself for over ten years now and, finally, the BBC have axed it. About time too, as far as I can see – there's enough music channels showing nonstop crap that there really is no need for any more of it on the national airwaves. Shame that it'll reduce the amount of live music on TV, but since that's from near-zero to nearer-zero it isn't so much of a problem.
TOTP has been destroyed basically because it was the kind of format that the Theakstons and Coxes that dominate the BBC light entertainment department don't understand – they tacked on "interview" segments and added in lame "celebrity" hosts and it really didn't work. In its heyday, it was presented by Radio 1 DJs – at the time, as far from appearing in Heat magazine as you could get, and better for it (you certainly wouldn't get a John Peel-type figure presenting a primetime music show nowadays.) It has been killed by people who think that "celebrity", rather than skill or knowledge or a sense of fun, is the be all and end all for producing a "kids" TV programme.
It's also been killed by the music it's been showing; it's been rather incongrous watching the BBC2 variant of the show and seeing an archive clip of Bowie or whomever strutting their stuff and having that followed up by Yet Another Generic R&B Song (or something much, much worse). It just confuses people; who is such a show for?
If relaunched properly – no Andi Peters producing, no celebrity input, more artists in the studio (if not actually performing live, allow them to perform live), a presenter who actually likes music and has a sense of humour – TOTP could actually have worked. But it was never going to happen, and it's too late now for it – let's put the show out of its misery.
At least we still have 6music, for now; the station that Radio 1 should be, but isn't. And we've got Radio 2's specialist DJs, most of whom are wonderful. Shame about everything else, really…
When you realise that the gazumped buyer is Uri Geller, on the other hand – a man for whom the term "fraud" doesn't do enough justice – it becomes fairly easy to determine the answer to the question. Quoth the article:
"As the clock closed on the bidding [on] Sunday, I felt intuitively I got the price," Geller said.
"Suddenly the radio started playing an Elvis song. That was Elvis telling me we got the house."
[BBC News Online, "Elvis's home sold to Uri Geller", 16.05.2006]
What a load of utter bollocks.
Still, even though there's a bit of schadenfreude in seeing Geller get outmanoeuvred with no place to go, it doesn't say much for eBay's buyer protection for you and me, does it? So here's a few lessons we can take from this…
That should do, I think.
Just you wait until you see Finland's entry. (That is, if you haven't already been spoiled by the news or Eurovision's website.) Just you wait…
Shame about ours, which is the first single of ours to actually deserve nul-points for a long time (and so, of course, will score big), but that's life.
NME: Pete Doherty in MTV syringe fiasco.
Just when you thought one guy really couldn't go any lower, Pete Doherty surprises you again with a display of such amazing boneheadedness apparently his band members apologised for him…
How much lower can he go?
Fundamentalists! Worried about the 'blasphemy' of The Da Vinci Code? Wondering how best to beat up people who go and see Jerry Springer: The Opera? Now, how about putting your moronic talents towards something that actually deserves it?
Living TV, unfortunately popular home of various crappy psychic series, "woman centred" sexploitation programming (e.g. the appalling Extreme Makeover) and CSI repeats, is putting on another crappy psychic series in which various psychics attempt to "solve" famous murder cases by, get this, summoning the murder victims on air.
Yes. Really. Dear God.
Now, it might just be me, but isn't that just the most tasteless thing you've ever heard of? It's exploitative, it's useless and it's just bloody wrong. I've seen Visitor Q and thought it was a decent satire, but this is just beyond the pale; what's worse is that there's more than enough viewers for this junk. Ugh.
MTV is free for a month on Telewest Essential, and as a result I stumbled across "Pimp My Ride UK" (Sunday 5:30pm). God help me.
Basically, the point of this programme is that celebrities with supposedly "clapped out" cars get an OTT make-over by (Tim) Westwood and a bunch of blinged-out morons – in this case, the one I'm watching is making over a black cab owned by ex-Happy Mondays dancer (and Celebrity Big Brother winner) Bez, and turning it into a psychedelic nightmare.
These are people who think putting 42" plasma screens in the back of a black cab is a good idea; they make the interior of the car look like a 70s disco with leopardskin and garish red leather; they add eight power amps and twenty speakers in the rear (in reality, it'll sound like a bassed-out nightmare); they put a DJ booth in where the front passenger seat used to be (a cheap mixer and a HP laptop running NI Traktor) and to cap it all off they paint the cab purple. Purple. A bad purple, at that.
So now we've established that the design is frigging awful, defiling the classic London cab – pretty much deserving of Bez, to be honest – what do I think of the show? It's unbelievably awful – no-one actually needs a video camera in the rim unless you're James Bond, Westwood is as annoying as he is on the radio, and everyone talks in an obviously faked "wazzup?" lingo.
And that's not going into the implications of referring to something as being "pimped up"; especially since, unless you're really rich, you're going to have to sell your sister to be able to afford such a makeover. People think that doing something like this will make them admired, whereas in reality they'll just look like a prat. And their peers tell them to do it.
No, it's a stupid, stupid, stupid show. And like most stupid shows, it's watchable in an open-mouthed way. Happily it's blatant enough that everyone should see that Westwood's a fake prat and Bez is a prat and the car is a Bad Thing, and the craze will burn itself out. We can only hope.
New Beatles graverobbing album for Cirque du Soleil. Cirque are cool. The Beatles were the best thing ever to happen to rock music, but after three Anthology sets and god knows how many bootlegs, do we really need more archive material unearthed?
On the other hand, McCartney and Starr did a wonderful job with "Let It Be Naked", so if it's with their approval we can only hope. Others may think differently.
Can't seem to think of any ideas for long blog articles, so instead I'm just going to link to the best thing I've seen today: this excellent rebuttal of a wrong-headed John Harris article by qwghlm.
(I prefer "ned", actually, but then I think I'm in the minority.)
For example, the original Soft Cell "Sex Dwarf" video, which most people think is completely unavailable; as banned by local Trading Standards and in piss-poor third generation French VHS quality (for no obvious reason; the video isn't as nasty as, say, NIN 'Broken Movie'.) Oddly, the video release version of "Sex Dwarf" isn't on YouTube, although an Old Grey Whistle Test performance with more listenable audio is.
It's nice that there's a place on the Internet where we can watch this stuff on demand, because otherwise it's a trawl through godawful file sharing outlets hoping we'll find a .mpg – videos are somewhat rare, especially ones like "Sex Dwarf" that weren't even properly released on VHS. Plus, YouTube allows us to find stuff like this, which you'd normally never see even on the best of DC++ hubs. I love it.
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