Davblog

In which someone you've never heard of writes about things you have no interest in

Posts Tagged ‘television’

Doctor Who Series 7

As far as I can see, the most detailed information that we currently have about the broadcast dates of series 7 of Doctor Who is in this tweet from @bbcdoctorwho.

There will be 6 episodes this year, including the Xmas Special. Then 8 next year. Jenna’s character will first be seen at Xmas.

But it seems that people are taking that information and constructing the most bizarre theories about the forthcoming broadcasts. There are two particular theories that I want to address. One that I’m almost certain is wrong and one that there’s just no evidence to support.

The first of these is summed up in the title of this article - “Liam Cunningham To Star In ‘Doctor Who’ 50th Anniversary Series”. Some people seem to assume that the second half of series 7 will be the only Doctor Who that we’re getting in 2013 and that, therefore, it will contain the 50th anniversary celebrations. I think that this is very unlikely.

When it was announced that series 7 would be moved to the autumn (rather than starting in spring as it has done every year since 2005) Steven Moffat was quick to explain that this was because he saw the show as best suited to winter. In Doctor Who Magazine he wrote this:

Doctor Who in the summer? All that running down tunnels, with torches, and the sunlight streaming through your windows and bleaching out the screen? All those barbecues and children playing outside, while on the telly there are green monsters seething in their CGI-enhanced lairs? It’s just not right is it? Be honest.

For me, as a kid, when the afternoon got darker and there was a thrill of cold in the air, I knew that even though summer was over, the TARDIS was coming back!

I’m the same age as Moffat, so I remember Doctor Who as a winter show and I completely understand his reasons for wanting to move it.

If we see Doctor Who as a winter show (at least until the next showrunner wants to move it) then it’s obvious that we’ll be getting more Doctor Who later in 2013. It’s very likely that season 8 will be broadcast in late 2013 and early 2014. And that will be the obvious place for most of the 50th anniversary celebrations. Doctor Who was first broadcast on 23rd November 1963. And guess what? 23rd November 2013 will be a Saturday. I’d be astonished if an episode of series 8 wasn’t broadcast on that date.

Oh, and that’s another point. There has been some news over the last few days of various past Doctors saying that they haven ‘t been invited to take part in the 50th anniversary celebrations. Well, that’s probably because Moffat and his team haven’t started detailed planning for series 8 yet – they’re still working on series 7. There’s still plenty of time for people to be invited to take part. Or perhaps they won’t be. I trust Moffat to give us a great anniversary whether or not it includes previous Doctors.

So that’s the first error. Series 7 will not be the 50th anniversary series. That’s not to say that it won’t contain pointers to the anniversary – but the main event will be in the first half of series 8.

The other question I’ve seen people discussing is whether series 7 will be split in the same way that series 6 was. Doctor Who TV (an unofficial news site) says ” it looks like this format will be continued once again into Series 7″. But I can’t see any evidence for this.

Ok, I can find one piece of evidence for this. Another piece from Doctor Who TV says:

The BBC has confirmed rumours that Doctor Who Series 7 will be split over two years. They will only air six episodes in 2012, the remainder in 2013.

But that turns out to be paraphrasing Steven Moffat who says “six of them will come out this year, including the Christmas special and then eight in the next year”. That’s a split, I suppose, as the series is being broadcast over two years, but it’s not necessarily a split in the same way that series 6 was split.

In 2011 there were almost three months between the two sections of series 6. “A Good Man Goes To War” was broadcast on 4th June and “Let’s Kill Hitler” was broadcast on 27th August. I don’t think there’s any evidence that there will be a similar split in series 7. It’s possible for all fourteen episodes to be broadcast weekly and still fit in with the information we already have. If the first episode is broadcast on 24th November then episode 5 would be on 22nd December. Assuming the Christmas special is on 25th December as it always is, the next episode could be as soon as 5th January.

To be honest, I don’t know if that’s the plan. It’s possible that the first part of the series could start sooner than that and that the second part could start later. I just wanted to demonstrate that the series could be broadcast without a split and still fit all the information we currently have.

It’s likely that even the BBC don’t know for sure. I’m sure that they have rough plans for the schedules around the end of the year, but things aren’t likely to get confirmed until much closer to the actual broadcast times.

This is all speculation, of course. I’m happy to admit that it is. But so are the stories that I’ve linked to (and many others like them). The people writing these stories don’t have any more information than we do. They’re just extrapolating from a few facts. And in many cases they extrapolate wildly and end up in completely the wrong place.

iPlayer Announcement

It looks like the BBC are ramping up to make an announcement about the iPlayer later today.

I’ll link to the press release just as soon as I can find it on their site.

Update: Here it is. Looks like the iPlayer officially launches today.

Update: I can’t read properly. It doesn’t launch today. It launches in a month’s time. On July 27th.

smok0.com

Mike has emailed me to point out smok0.com which shows the top news stories from a number of different news outlets. Apparently he’s making use of the OPML files from my newsfeeds page.

Nice to know some of my stuff is useful.

Root Of All Evil Complaints Dismissed

Richard Dawkins’ programme The Root of All Evil? generated 23 complaints to Ofcom. The latest Ofcom bulletin is published today and it deals with these complaints (the relevant section starts on page 10).

In summary, the complainants considered that the programme:

  1. showed a negative portrayal of religious beliefs and called religious faith “a virus”, and that this was both offensive and harmful;
  2. contained inflammatory comments, slanderous remarks and atheist propaganda, which resulted in possible incitement to religious hatred;
  3. allowed an “ill-informed” presenter to treat religion with “ridicule and scorn”, and misrepresented religious views, which – along with disingenuous editing – offered no opportunity for debate. As there was no balancing programme on the same service, this resulted in an approach to the religious matters being explored that was not responsible;
  4. allowed the presenter to air bigoted, intolerant, biased and anti-religious views;
  5. attempted to promote religious (i.e. atheist) views by stealth;
  6. generally contravened Ofcom’s rules on due impartiality and due accuracy; and
  7. focused on the behaviour and beliefs of “religious extremists”, with little reference to moderate/mainstream religious belief and practice, and that therefore this was misleading;

(I particularly like the description of Richard Dawkins as “ill-informed”)

After considering the complaints carefully, Ofcom has decided that the programme was not in breach of its guidelines. This is, of course, a victory for rational thought over superstition.

(via MediaWatchWatch.org.uk)

BBC Four

The always excellent BBC Four has been excelling itself over the last couple of weeks. First there was the Folk Britannia season which looks at the history of British folk music since the 1950s. Then there was Lefties – a series of three programmes about people involved in left wing politics in the 70s and 80s. And this week they’re starting a series of documentaries about climate change.

This is TV as it should be done. This is why I pay my licence fee. Do yourself a favour – watch more BBC Four.

mightyv.com

A couple of my friends have won the first BBC Backstage competition with their web site mightyv.com (that’s a pun on “mighty tv” and “my tv”). It’s a great site and you should all take a look at it (assuming that the server can cope with the strain of all the publicity it’s currently getting).

Well done Leon and Leo. And it’s written in Perl too (or, as the Backstage announcement says, “PERL”).

Although I like it a lot, mightyv still doesn’t solve my biggest problem with watching TV currently. I have a number of programs that I watch regularly. Many of these programs are shown at various times during the week. Different seasons of the same series might be shown on different channels in the same week. Also it’s becoming common for an episode to be shown on something like E4 and then be repeated on Channel 4 the following week. All this means that it can be difficult to keep track of which episodes I need to be watching. Mightyv will show me that, for example, Lost is being shown four times over the next seven days, but it doesn’t know that I’ve already seen the Channel 4 episode as I watched it on E4 last week – so it still shows it to me.

What I want is a tv scheduling system that does two things. Firstly it needs to understand the concept of seasons and episodes so that it can tell me that the episode of Six Feet Under being shown this coming Sunday is season 5 episode 12. That would make it easier for me to know whether or not I need to watch it. Personally I find that it can sometimes be difficult working out what I’ve seen from the vague episode descriptions that you get from an EPG. I expect that the problem here is that the data that drive mightyv doesn’t contain that level of detail. Secondly, I’d like to be able to tell the system which episodes I’ve seen, so that it could give higher priority to the episodes that I haven’t already seen. It would be really good to get an email saying “that old episode of X-Files from season 5 that you never got round to seeing is on FX tonight at 22:00″.

Oh, and third (on my list of two!) it would be great to be able to search for programmes that aren’t in the current schedules. For example I’d like to see all of Dark Skies or American Gothic again at some point. But I can’t add them to my mightyv schedule until they are scheduled by one of the channels. Which means that I have to remember to search for them every week or so in case they’ve been added to the schedule whilst I wasn’t looking.

Or, alternatively, I could just go an look for them on BitTorrent.

Or, I could just turn of my television set and go and do something less boring instead…

BBC TV and Radio Listings Data

The BBC Backstage project has announced a new data feed which contains details of BBC TV and Radio programs for the next seven days. Looks interesting but, of course, what I really want is details of the listen again radio streams so I don’t have to screenscrape them.

Dixonsvision

I’ve ranted before about shops who try to sell widescreen TVs by displaying 4:3 images stretched across a 16:9 screen. This has the effect that a large percentage of the population seem to think that widescreen TV is supposed to make people look fatter.

Things may finally be changing tho’. Currently the Dixons store at Holborn Circus has a display of two TVs – one is 16:9 and the other is 4:3. They are both tuned to the same channel and it’s obviously one that transmits widescreen properly as the 16:9 tv had a proper wide image and the 4:3 one was correctly cropped to the right size. You could clearly see the the wide image had more stuff on the edges. and by looking up at other TVs in the shop you could see how the others all had the 4:3 image stretched in a most unpleasant manner. It’s probably because the display was for Freeview which is a digital platform and therefore transmits in widescreen most of the time. The other TVs are all running off analogue systems which never broadcast in widescreen.

Someone needs to create a web page that explains this in simple terms for the masses.