Category: Mainstream Media

Planning A New Kind Of UK General Election Results Show – Can You Help?

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Tuesday’s announcement of a General Election in the UK for June 8th caught me a little by surprise and set off a riot of emotions. I tend not to talk about politics too much online, so many of the thoughts I had yesterday are mine, or for friends and family. But I’ll happily tell you my very first thought, because it’s one you can all help with. “I need to get behind a microphone to do the results show from 10pm on June 8th.” I’ve anchored a number of overnight election shows on community radio here in Edinburgh since 2010. These

The one lesson I learned that The Nightly Show needs to understand

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After the first year of hosting my daily chat show at the Edinburgh Fringe (which is still running thirteen years later), Brian Luff gave me one of the best pieces of advice I have had in my broadcast career. It went something like this: “I listened to the Fringe podcasts, but now I’ve met you I have to ask… why is the ‘you’ that I see in front of me not in the podcast? I want to spend time with that person.” You can have the latest names, the greatest guests, and the biggest world-changing ideas, but these will only get people

I thought M*A*S*H answered the laughter-track question in the Eighties?

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Apart from the curious fact that Lucille Ball’s mother is the ‘Wilhelm Scream’ of chuckles on US TV’s canned laughter track, it still surprises me that the debate about whether a laughter track is a good idea continues to this day in America. Anthony Crupi on AdAge is the latest voice: There’s actually very little research to justify the practice. The last comprehensive study to suggest that a laugh track could precipitate genuine peals of merriment was published in 1974, or a good three years before DeDe Ball chortled her last. A far more recent inquiry into the matter arrived at a

‘The Touch’ becomes ‘Warrior’

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Stan Bush’s career shows the power of a single hit song. Since ‘The Touch’ in 1986 pushed him into pop culture and the hearts of millions of fans, he’s re-iterated the same song style over and over… and over again. And why not? Part of being a creative is realising  when you are in the  middle of ‘a good thing’ and it’s not getting any better. Because it’s really hard to listen to his latest track ‘Warrior‘ without thinking of his classic.

When Lego Batman beats Superman V Batman

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Scott Mendelson reviews ‘Batman V Superman’ for Forbes: The best moments of Dawn of Justice resemble nothing less than a feature length adaptation of a series of Alex Ross paintings in all their naturalistic glory. But amid the visual treats is an utter mess of thinly sketched characters, haphazard plotting, surprisingly jumbled action, and “cut your nose to spite your face” world building. It’s not a success either as a stand-alone Man of Steel sequel or a would-be kick-off to the DC Extended Universe, and attempts to insert Batman and his Super Friends do real damage to the story and thus

Michael Mann’s Heat, twenty years (and two months) later…

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Jennifer Wood’s extensive look at Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’ has been sitting in my ‘must read pile’ for a few weeks now, but I’ve finally got around to it. It’s fascinating, and Heath is a film that I appreciate more every time I watch it. It’s far more than a heist movie, even if it remains one of the best heist movies of all time. Rather than usually grab an ‘oooh that’s nice‘ paragraph I’ll stick to Wood’s opening: After one false start as the 1989 television pilot-turned-movie L.A. Takedown, Mann eventually realized that he had the ending of the movie all wrong.