Hypotheticals

It’s late night television and the heat is off. Unencumbered from producing ratings winners, programme makers who occupy the twilight zone are able to kick back a little and construct more diverse and idiosyncratic television. It is customary for such programmes to either implicitly or explicitly recognise their position in the schedules. Read more

I Love 1975

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources. Read more

The Nazis: A Warning from History

Folks tuning in to watch I Love the Seventies a few minutes early the last few weeks will have seen one or all of the following: a black and white photograph of a shed full of executed peasant women; a line drawing recreating the image of a ditch the size of a field being filled with 10,000 dead bodies; film of a small stocky man with a moustache being cheered by half a million of his countryfolk as he led them to war; and the gates of a concentration camp, glinting in the afternoon sunlight. Read more

I Love 1975

Halfway through I Love the Seventies, and this strictly retrospective show clings to its common blueprint; a series of clip sequences comprising of various relevant and irrelevant people discussing particular trends or artefacts with popular recognition either born or reaching the height of their ubiquity in the year 1975, backed by occasional archive footage from contemporary sources. Read more

Big Brother

When Peter Bazalgette and Michael Jackson arrived at this year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, a week or so after Big Brother delivered Channel 4 its second highest audience ever, it must have been an occasion on a par with the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday pageant: a gross spectacle, somewhat tasteless, with the subjects parading serenely in the glow of attention and adoration while thousands thronged about them seeking to pay homage at the court of the summer’s hit-makers. Read more

I Love 1974

When I Love the Seventies was first publicised, the BBC said that each programme would be accompanied by a complete episode of Top of the Pops from the year in question. Read more

Big Brother

The programme makers may well fear that Big Brother has peaked a little too early. It is difficult to fathom a more compelling storyline than the one that concluded this week.

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The People Versus

It’s the new quiz from the makers of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, they cried. Read more

I Love 1973

I have fond memories of 1973. Read more

Big Brother

“It’s only a game show” they trilled to each other, as one by one the contestants trooped before the camera to reveal who they wanted out this week. Read more

Jackpot

The rarified atmosphere of the poker table. Read more

Tinsel Town

It’s hard to make a hedonistic drama; characters doggedly pursuing self-gratification hardly welcome the audience in. In fact they shun us. Read more

I Love 1972

Most archivism on present day TV is so poor and lazily uninformed that I Love The Seventies is clearly a cut above the rest simply because it knows something about its source material, and appropriately contextualises it. Read more

Big Brother

When Big Brother finishes, one of the legacies it will leave (besides provoking or truncating extended debates on issues of privacy, representation and exploitation) will be much discussion on the use of the web in conjunction with television. Doubtless Victoria Real (the design team behind the Big Brother website) will fire out a flurry of press releases boasting that they have changed the TV experience forever. Read more