I don’t tend to talk much about my Tumblr blog on this site. I use it for posting little pictures, thoughts, or snatches of audio, some of which develop into something more substantial over here. But I do feel I have to acknowledge by far my post popular post over there. It’s just hit over 200 likes/reblogs.
Extraordinarily unsafe for work.
Maybe I should stop talking about old radio airchecks or obscure sitcom edits on here, and just concentrate on women enjoying dog cock.
Today, the Guardian posted the following story: Scottish referendum: how broadcast media covered results. Regarding ITV’s coverage, we simply get the following:
“ITV’s Scotland Decides averaged 400,000 and a 5.5% share over the same period.”
This, however, is not how the article read earlier today. The above paragraph originally read as follows:
“ITV’s Scotland Decides averaged 400,000 and a 5.5% share over the same period, also for two simulcast editions – STV’s version for Scottish viewers fronted by Bernard Ponsonby and Aasmah Mir, with ITV News’s programme for the rest of the UK, anchored by Alastair Stewart.”
This is the tale of one of the more ridiculous things that happened to me when I worked in Channel 5 TX.
Saturday, 14th December, 2013. I’m sitting at home, preparing for my first day back in work after a short illness. It’s live BAMMA coverage that evening – mixed martial arts, which usually involves the floor being entirely smeared with blood by the end of the night – and I decide to have a look at BAMMA’s Twitter feed to see what’s going on.1
So, I scroll down their feed… and something catches my eye. Something horrible. I reproduce it below – but I’ve had to blur out the relevant bits, I’m afraid. I’m sure you’ll understand when I tell you what they are.
All TX ops should do a little research on the show they’re going to be working on. Not all do. To be fair, I did once find myself in the middle of a live sporting event and suddenly realised I didn’t know the scoring system. Never. Again. ↩
I just read two articles. Two articles about two entirely different subjects. Oddly enough, however, they both managed to annoy me in exactly the same way. (Incidentally, congratulations – you’ve just managed to find the only site on the internet to tie together Mrs Brown’s Boys and Flappy Bird.)
Firstly, Rachel Cooke interviewing BBC director of television Danny Cohen:
“Would he explain to me the success of Mrs Brown’s Boys, watched by 9.4 million on Christmas Day? “Yes. There are huge numbers of people – and I’m one – who love studio-based sitcoms. The joy in the room!” Again, I peer at him, trying to work out if he’s being sincere. Oh, Lord. I think he is.”
Secondly, Patrick O’Rourke on Flappy Bird. He starts off with an interesting question:
“After about 10 minutes, I came to the realization Flappy Bird is an absolutely horrible video game and began to wonder why it’s so extremely popular.”
Somehow manages to contradict himself within two sentences:
“It’s Flappy Bird’s simplicity that makes it so addictive. What I don’t understand is how people genuinely seem to be enjoying playing Flappy Bird.”
And then just gives up:
“So do yourself a favour and stop playing Flappy Bird; it sucks.”
Now, what I think about the two topics is irrelevant. (For the record, I really like Flappy Bird, and haven’t seen enough Mrs Brown’s Boys to be able to judge.) What irritates me is the acknowledgement of how successful they both are… and a complete lack of engagement on behalf of the writer as to why.
In the case of Mrs Brown’s Boys, I genuinely don’t understand the interviewer’s response to Danny Cohen’s statement. Which bit is she disagreeing with? That people like studio-based sitcoms? That Cohen specifically likes studio sitcoms? The bit about the “joy in the room”? Or does she think he ducked the specific question and just spoke in generalities, and that’s what she’s perturbed by? It’s not clear at all. It’s just a dig from someone who doesn’t like the show, expecting the reader to happily go along with it without a single further thought.
The Flappy Bird article is even worse. It claims to be a piece where someone who hates the game genuinely tries to find out what people love about it… and yet the writer makes little effort to actually figure it out. The point of the article having now completely disappeared, instead he throws out an order from on-high to tell people to stop playing the game. I would hope that last part at least has some level of irony attached, but it’s still pointless. The entire article is ridiculous.
Let me be clear. I’m not saying that just because something’s popular, you have to like it. You hate something popular, you should write articles in deep and penetrating detail saying exactly what you don’t like about it. (God knows I have.) What annoys me about these two articles is that both specifically bring up the fact that something they hate is popular… and then refuse to engage with any potential answers as to why. Instead, they prefer to sit back and sneer.
My suggestion: have a go. Listen. Engage. Think about why people might like something you don’t. You don’t have to suddenly agree that something is brilliant – but at least have the discussion. You’re more likely to come up with something that’s actually worth saying.
Two images of the Golden Gate Bridge. On the left, a fake picture posted by the Twitter account @HistoricalPics. On the right, the real picture which it took me all of two minutes to find.1
Unsurprisingly the account failed to post a correction, even with numerous people – myself included – pointing out that the image was fake. I say “unsurprisingly”, because the account smacks of the kind of thing that doesn’t care what it posts, as long as it continues to gain followers. The Twitter bio of the person who owns the account does nothing to dissuade that impression.
Let me be perfectly clear. If you post any kind of content to the internet – professional or amateur, paid or unpaid – and aren’t willing to post corrections when someone points out when you are wrong: you stink. Not only are you spreading misinformation rather than truth – the very opposite thing an account called “Historical Pics” should be doing – but you also come across as someone who is massively, massively insecure. You really think so little of yourself that posting the odd correction is just too much to bear?
That’s just… embarrassing.
As was pointed out to me, why the hell was this ever photoshopped in the first place, when the original looks so much more impressive? ↩
In September 2005, me and a group of friends set up a site called Noise to Signal. Its initial inspiration was pretty much “Ganymede & Titan, but talking about other media things other than Red Dwarf“. We had so many plans for it. It was going to “rock”, as I believe the kids all say.
In December 2009, it closed. And once it closed, I never got round to converting it to a static website, as I’m a lazy shit. Eventually the inevitable happened: a couple of months ago, I got a complaint from my hosting company that someone had hacked it and was using it to send spam emails, so I was forced to take it offline. Today – after some appropriate nudging – I finally got round to fixing it, and the site is now back online.
Of all the projects I’ve been involved in, Noise to Signal is the one which always makes me feel a little sad. The site never reached its true potential. There were some great writers, posting some brilliant articles – and after shaky start and an early revamp, the design of the site really worked well. (I’m especially proud of that final design, now preserved as the archive.) But the site never quite… flew.
The question is why, of course, and I can only speak for myself. I came to the conclusion that the problem with NTS was that the remit was just too wide, and the tone inconsistent. By trying to cover everything, we ended up covering nothing well – there was very little consistency in the output. This would have been mitigated somewhat if we’d had a large quantity of output, but apart from a few busy months, we never quite reached critical mass. (I take a large amount of responsibility for that, especially in the site’s later years – I just plain didn’t write enough, and often didn’t write what I promised.)
Ganymede & Titan always had a tone. NTS never quite found one.
To be brutally honest, despite my regrets about NTS, I’m far happier doing my own site now. Dirty Feed is far less ambitious than Noise to Signal ever was, and is never updated enough, but it certainly is more consistent in tone. And whilst I wouldn’t want to overstate the amount of drama behind-the-scenes on NTS – though there was a particularly thrilling midnight change of server and account block – there was inevitably some, and it could grow tiring. I like having to answer to nobody but myself.
Occasionally, one of us has the idea to do something with the site again – most recently, I brought up the idea of resurrecting the site as a group podcast. But every time, we realise we don’t have enough time to do the site justice. And the part of the spirit of the site lives on, as individual projects: here on Dirty Feed, on Seb and James’s Alternate Cover, on Tanya’s Gypsy Creams, on Phil’s Noiseless Chatter, and on Unlimited Rice Pudding.
I’m proud of the archive we left behind. It’s not all gold, but there’s some lovely stuff buried away in there. So if you get the time, have a peek through the site’s archives – and the final article, The Best of NTS, has links to some of the stuff we were happiest with.
Maybe it never worked quite the way we wanted it to. But I hope we left something behind that was worthwhile.
If you’ve been wondering why Dirty Feed has been updating even less than usual recently, that’s because I’ve been busy redesigning Gypsy Creams, my darling girlfriend’s site based around 1960s magazines. There’s all sorts of amazing stuff there – and posted as part of the relaunch is this great interview with Simon Dee from 1969 – but one of my favourites is still the very first thing ever posted on the site.
(Sadly, it’s not currently very mobile-friendly. Yeah, I know, I know. It SHALL BE FIXED. Apart from that, if you have any suggestions regarding the site design, let me know below.)
Right, back to getting this place updated. I’ve been building up plenty of things to be annoyed about, don’t you worry your pretty little heads.
I’ve been uploading things to YouTube for a few years now. Hardly a heavy user, mind you, and I was never eagerly chasing views: it was mainly just a place to store small bits of video easily that I didn’t especially want to pay the hosting costs for.
This was was the case tonight, where I had recorded a fun bit of video I wanted to share with the world. So I go to the YouTube upload page, and was greeted with this. Pay special attention to the right-hand column:
Yesterday, I bought the domain name for my upcoming internet radio show: 80track.fm. There’s only a holding page there at the moment, though TV pres geeks should recognise the font used for the logo. (For more, check out this post by Dave Jeffery.) There will be plenty of time for more about the actual show, however – let’s talk about simply buying the actual domain itself.
As it’s a radio show, I decided to go for a .fm domain; domain hacks make me feel a bit dirty, but I just couldn’t resist it. My usual domain registrar doesn’t deal with .fm domains, so I decided to go with the official domain registrar. OK, so the website looks like it was designed in 1485, but no matter. So I got to work filling in all my details, and was told my fax number was required. I got a vaguely amusing Tumblr post out of this, typed in “none” in the Fax field, filled in the rest, and awaited a confirmation email. Ah look, there we go…
Robert’s Web. Safely one of the worst television programmes I have ever seen. Not that that’s my main point here, but I’ll take any chance I can get to slag off that wretched show. No, my point here is to do with the show’s Twitter account.
Let’s ignore the fact that the last tweet there is advertising the third show of the series, despite there being four episodes – a sure sign the team had given up by the last one. More importantly: there’s no goodbye message. No “thanks for watching, hope you enjoyed it”. Nowt. Zilch. Abandoned. Production office wound up, nobody there to even tweet a farewell.
Which altogether gives the impression that the account meant nothing to the makers of the show than what they could get out of it. Nobody could spare a minute to even pretend they gave a fuck, and post a goodbye. There is little more transparent than an account just abandoned like that. They never really engaged; it was all a front to try and whip up interest, then abandoned when the show failed.
In comparison, when the online game Glitch had to wind up, their Twitter feed was full of updates, proper goodbyes and fun stuff. The absolute right way to go about ending a project. Engaging with your audience to the last, not running away with your tail between your legs. It was obvious that the people running that site cared about their audience.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, obviously. I’ve seen excellent Twitter accounts run by TV people, and I’ve seen awful ones run by web companies. But it happens enough to spot a pattern, and it’s not a pleasant one when it comes to television shows.
Which makes me sad. Telly can benefit hugely from social media, done right. Done wrong, it exposes some rather uncomfortable truths.