Tag: bbc

Thinking About the BBC Ratings and Renewing TV Shows

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As well as the regular TV ratings, the BBC also has something called the Audience Appreciation Index, which helps them gauge the reaction from viewers to a program. It’s an imprecise science, and that’s before you start trying to get solid numbers and methodology out of the BBC. So when programs get renewed, is it ratings, AI or managers taking courageous decisions? Originally provided by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB), each programme’s AI score is now researched in-house by the BBC. It has become a shadowy, hard-to-find number which carries an almost mythic quantity for fans of programmes with

Pavlovian Formula 1 and Hollywood Monsters

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9am on a Sunday and the bass-line of The Chain wakes every F1 fan up and drags them into the spare room to watch the Malaysian Grand Prix (thanks to Scooby Doo commandeering the main TV in the house), and had a wonderful thought. The cgi-based graphics running during the BBC theme are far in advanced of those in the Hollywood delight (ahem) of Sylvester Stallone’s Driven.

No Crazy Ally Pally Hacking in 2009 – BBC Mashed Will Be Missed

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I’m in two minds about the announcement on the BBC Backstage Blog that there won’t be a Mashed event in 2009. Part of me is upset – the Mashed event in 2008 (and the Yahoo/BBC Hackday the year before) was one of the highlights of the year for UK Developer circles – you put smart people in a room and great things happen. Put smart people in a room with their own DAB TV station and a red button service they can hack away with, and you get some gorgeous results. For those who weren’t coding, it was still a

Tonight Will See Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross overtake Robert Scoble.

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It’s going to be a big night for Twitter here in the UK, and it’s all the fault of Andrew Sachs and the Daily Mail Three months ago, broadcasters Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross called his answering machine, left a message, and the Daily Mail manufactured outrage over the incident. Brand left the country for Pirates of the Caribbean 4 while Jonathan Ross went and hid in a bunker for his suspension from the Big Brother Corporation (*). And what a jolly few weeks that has been. Because he found Web 2.0 Specifically he found Twitter, everyone knew it was

Why Five Mintues With… is frustrating me.

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Just spotted this over on the BBC News website, a series of 5 minute interview with various people, chaired by Matthew Stadlen. They’ve just posted one for Michael Portillo, and it’s left me feeling a little bit… cheated. It’s clear that a lot of preparation has been done by Stadlen on his subjects, and I can’t see any notes or list of questions, but there seems to be one thing missing in these interviews, and that is listening to the answers. The Michael Portillo interview is a good point here; partly because Portillo gives such short answers and Stadlen has

Turkey Pays for Eurovision, UK Still On The Hunt For Talented Amateur

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As well as the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, this weekend also saw the deadline for entries to the BBC’s “Your Country Needs You” talent show, which will choose the UK representative for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Moscow in 2009. At the same time, it’s also come to light that Turkish broadcaster TRT has paid 450,000 Turkish New Lira (about £180,000) to singer Hadise to represent Turkey in Moscow – although in previous years the payment to the artist was also used to fund the promotion of the act. So we have one country paying big