Almost sci-fi pictures
There was a bloke on the train covering his eyes. A picture of him could be captioned: Don’t blink!
But it would be wrong to publish such a photo without his permission.
Instead I give you this, found in a street in Footscray. Let’s hope it’s bigger on the inside.
And it was nice to see this in Dudley Street, West Melbourne.
Tags: Doctor Who, Max Headroom, Photos
2 comments
TV news
Superb! Charlie Brooker on what makes a generic TV news report:
(via Mumbrella)
ABC: wall-to-wall kids shows
An opinion piece in The Age yesterday comments about the introduction of kids’ channel ABC3.
What I can’t figure out is why, about the same time ABC3 has started up, ABC2 has dropped most of its non-kids programming on weekends during the daytime (eg before 6pm) and replaced it with more kids’ programmes.
Compare for instance the listings of Sunday November 29th to to Sunday December 6th. The former included Scrapheap Challenge, Father Ted, and a bunch of music shows. The latter is wall-to-wall Magic Roundabout, Sesame Street, Miffy and Shaun the Sheep.
I can understand ABC1 having extensive kids’ programming given some people still don’t receive the digital channels, but if ABC3 is dedicated to kids’ shows, why does ABC2 need to show them as well, given ABC2 and ABC3 have precisely the same availability?
Tags: ABC1, ABC2, ABC3, television
6 comments
Red Dwarf – they thought it was an arts programme
You want comedy? I’ll show you comedy.
When British sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf came on the scene, the ABC programmers didn’t know what to do with it. First they put it on Saturday afternoons, as a filler.
The following year, the summer of 1990-91, they aired it again, this time as part of the Sunday afternoon arts coverage. Because, y’know, it fits in well with programmes about Mozart and Giotto.
And they got the Sunday Arts presenters to introduce the episodes. The first one, read by Helen Wellings, included a run-down of the plot, just in case we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves.
Just to further irk the fans, they also managed to get the name of the show wrong, repeatedly calling it The Red Dwarf.
Oh wait, you want proof? Very well.
The other consequence of showing it in the middle of the day is that they took the knife to the episodes and made numerous cuts, particularly to the second season. One episode got skipped completely.
A year or two later the ABC figured out what kind of show Red Dwarf really was — a potential cult comedy classic — and started airing it in the evenings.
In a way it’s similar to how other free-to-air networks have treated sci-fi over the years. Badly, mostly.
And the Sunday Arts show? It’s getting a revamp.
Tags: ABC, Red Dwarf, television
12 comments
Two more thoughts on Hey Hey
The Jackson Jive
The controversy over this skit, which involved five men blacking up (and one “whiting” up) to portray the Jackson 5, rages on.
I don’t think it’s as simple as some are making out.
Those offended (especially the Americans and Brits) should bear in mind that “blackface” has no history in Australia, and the racial connotations, including that those participating are parodying stereotypical blacks, simply don’t exist here. And certainly it appears that the partipants meant no offence. (Note: most of them are not actually white.)
Meanwhile, those annoyed claiming that people are being over-sensititive and that apologising is “political correctness gone mad” should remember that now we’re a global village. Even without the presence of Harry Connick Jr, this was bound to be seen internationally, and by people who would be offended by it.
So why are people offended? As Wikipedia notes:
Stereotypes embodied in the stock characters of blackface minstrelsy played a significant role in cementing and proliferating racist images, attitudes and perceptions worldwide.
…and as Harry Connick Jr quite eloquently pointed out:
…I know it was done humorously, but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons, that when we see something like that we take it really to heart…
Society changes. Just because it was okay to show the same act in the 80s (and even in the titles of the 1999 finale) doesn’t mean it’s okay anymore.
When was it that smoking was banned in restaurants? About 2001? Today smoking in a restaurant (or even in a pub) seems totally outlandish. We’ve moved on.
I like nostalgia. But some of what was on Hey Hey in the past should have stayed in the past.
The Hey Hey mix
Beyond the current furore, I was pondering what makes Hey Hey tick. I’ve decided that it’s like a big dinner party conversation. They basically get a whole bunch of people in a room and wait for the humour to happen, guided through the show by the various segments. You’ve got the host, the assistant, the various puppets, you’ve got the voiceover man, the caption person, the cartoon-drawer, the sound-effects guy, the interjecting bandmembers and roving comic, all coming up with one-liners.
Hey Hey
When we tuned into the first Hey Hey special last Wednesday, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It’s been ten years since the show ended, which seems like a long time, but most of the regulars from back then are still around.
I first watched Hey Hey when I was a kid, when it was shown on Saturday mornings. It could be quite absurdist, and they’d freely admit when there was no audience present, panning the camera around an empty studio while playing audience sound effects. When it switched to evenings, I kept watching, and I certainly recall tuning in most weeks into the mid-90s, though I don’t recall if I kept watching to the very end.
What we got in the reunion was, essentially, the same show as it was in the 90s. I got some laughs out of it, and was fairly unimpressed by the musical numbers, just like in the 90s. (For me the musical numbers, unless it’s a guest artist of particular interest, just punctuate the rest of the show.) Likewise it seems people who never liked it weren’t impressed this time round.
But what surprised me was that, after a little encouragement, the kids got hooked. We were all sitting in the motel room in Bendigo, and possibly due to the style of humour (never too clever or subtle) they were rivetted to the screen until we switched off at about 9:40 to get some shut-eye. The Disasterchef skit, Molly’s dog and Dicky Knee, and the Red Faces Vegemite kid all kept us laughing. As did the old Maurie Fields joke, though I’m not sure why they bothered to splice that old and new footage together to do it.
In perhaps a similar way to the successful resurrection of Doctor Who (which is BBC1’s second-highest-rating programme), it would appear that “family entertainment” is a demographic that TV networks would do well to try and target more often — the Hey Hey special got more than 3 million people tuning in across the nation. (Note some media said 2.1 million — apparently this is capital cities only.)
Since we missed the end of the show, I hoped to set the VCR for Saturday’s repeat, but it was pulled at the last minute. No matter, we’ll be tuning in to the second special tonight. It’ll be interesting to see if the cast can maintain the momentum, and whether the huge audience numbers are sustained. If they can, and they are, then surely Channel 9 would have to seriously consider bringing back the show for a full season.
Exchange rate
I’m not going to claim I’m a currency expert, but I think Channel 10 put the decimal point in the wrong place, as I’m pretty sure an Australian Dollar is worth more than US 8 cents.
Tags: AUD, exchange rate, USD
9 comments
Doctor Who goes mainstream
You know a TV show has gone mainstream when you see a t-shirt for it in the window of Target (as well as having its DVDs advertised on phone boxes).
Tags: Doctor Who, t-shirts, Target
2 comments
