Mssv

The ghost of Orson Welles strikes again - according to the BBC, ‘the Belgian public television station RTBF ran a bogus report saying the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.’ Lots of faked footage of celebrations, traffic jams, and 2600 calls were made to a phone number given out during the show, which […]

“No-one’s watching TV any more, and even worse, all this user-generated content is killing us.” That was the cheerful attitude at the C21 Futuremedia TV conference I went to last week. The audience was composed mainly of TV executives, with a smattering of smug ‘internet people’ like myself, who alternately confirmed their worst fears and […]

On Tuesday, after about five hours of sleep following the Second Life ARG panel, I found myself at the BBC Audio Drama Festival in London. As usual, I was due to give a talk about ARGs. I did think it was a little strange that I was invited to speak, because while we do have […]

Despite my dislike in the direction that Doctor Who is currently going (immature jokes, nonsensical plots), I found Russell T Davies’ remarks on why Doctor Who never seems to leave Earth very refreshing:
“People will say, ‘Why doesn’t he visit alien planets more often?’” he said. “But that’s because they are expensive. They’re hugely expensive.”
Davies also […]

Two interesting developments have occurred in London in the past few days. The first is the Sultan’s Elephant. I haven’t been able to see the three-storey mechanical moving Elephant myself, since I’m in Oxford, but I intend to come back early on Sunday to see it off. The Sultan’s Elephant is performance art of the […]

A conversation at work:
“I wonder what’ll be in the adverts for Lost tonight?” I pondered, thinking about the imminent ‘Lost Experience’ (aka ‘we didn’t want to call it an ARG because it might put people off and look as if we didn’t think of it first’).
“It’s going to be a phone number.”
“I think it’ll be […]

Prepare for a special holiday bumper set of posts in the next few days! I’ve spent the last week or so getting up late, reading books and watching a lot of TV, which surprisingly has given me the time to think about a lot of interesting things, such as Sky Movies, zombie language, boardgames, the […]

I didn’t think I’d see the day when the BBC made good science fiction, but it has finally come with the new series of Dr. Who. I was never a big fan of the show when I was a kid; it seemed completely inferior to Star Trek and I can’t remember a single episode. In […]

Along with several million other people in the UK, I watched the first episode of Desperate Housewives today. I’m not sure why this deserves a post here when I’ve been watching better shows recently (namely Lost) but the buildup and hype behind this has been such that I couldn’t avoid seeing it. It was amusing […]

There’s an advert on TV for I, Robot where a typically breathless voiceover proclaims that in the movie, ‘Will Smith defines excitement’. For some reason I can’t get out of my head the image of Will Smith beginning the movie by reading out the definition for ‘excitement’ from a dictionary.