Fat Pigeons

For those not in the know, Gilmore Girls is a show about two women, a mother and her daughter with only sixteen years separating them.

It’s been running for six years now, and has performed variably in the ratings. But it’s done well enough to be renewed year-on-year, and a six year run is nothing to be sneezed at.

This year, showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino asked for a few things. A director on staff. A two-year deal. And an extra staff writer or two. These are not unreasonable requests.

The show was renewed.
Their contract was not.

TV Guide interview here.

It makes interesting reading.

I’ve just finished a short contract working out in Slough.

I was amused to read the following posted on the toilet door:
“Please leave these toilets as you would wish to find them.”

As the title of this post attests, I was unable to help.

It seems that the theme tune to Starsky and Hutch was quite different on the other side of the channel.

Wacka wacka wacka.

And it just so happens that my good friend and housemate Nick has written a novel. And posted the first chapter on YouWriteOn.

So why not give the man some encouragement and check it out?

The Arts Council of the UK have introduced this new website called YouWriteOn. You can blame them for the lack of spaces.

The idea is that up-and-coming prose writers can put up the first three chapters of their novels, where they’ll be read, reviewed, and rated by members of the public.

So far so blah. But read on…

The top five rated opening chapters each month get read a free critique by a literary professional (a talent pool currently made of three published novelists and a literary agent).

And if that isn’t good enough, the highest-rated chapters overall in the year will result in a prize – publication of the novel. Course, that could go tits-up if the rest of the novel isn’t as good as the opening chapters. But I’m sure they’ll assign an editor. I hope they’ll assign an editor. They’ve got to assign an editor, right?

So it’s a prize. Big whoops.

But here’s where it gets really interesting:

They’re working on a facility so that everyone can self-publish their book. Which will include an ISBN and distribution.

So if you like someone’s opening chapters you can immediately order their book from Amazon, or place an order at your high-street retailer.

This is as risk-free as it gets for novelists. You don’t have to self-publish until you know that there’s a demand for it, and if you’re getting high ratings you get introduced to the publishing industry anyway.

One to watch.

Great news. The only thing that was stopping me from switching 100% was the fact that pretty much anything you want to play (with the notable exception of World of Warcraft) was only available on a PC.

Hell, I was thinking I’d have to buy one just to play games on.

Life just got a lot easier.

Mr Daydream, by Roger Hargreaves
=
“Ah, my rod reverer!” brags gay dream.

It’s just possible that someone other than me may be interested in this. It’s a breakdown of UK primetime TV by genre.

Data is from the Independent on Sunday TV guide, sampled as of the week 2-8 April 2006. I’ve defined primetime as 7-10pm Sunday to Saturday and have assigned my own genres as there didn’t seem to be a simple way to get the data from anyone else. It looks like RT have some sort of feed at http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat, but I didn’t think it worth writing a parser for a one-off analysis. Still, it’d be nice to have this sort of info exportable to CSV direct from the source… some kind of API maybe..?

OK, back now.

Couple of interesting points came out of this.

1) There’s a hell of a lot less Soap than I was expecting (I’m counting The Bill, Holby, and Casualty as drama mind… you could take issue with that.
2) Rumours of the death of primetime comedy have not been exaggerated in the slightest – come on, people, what the hell happened there?
3) Reality and Makeover shows together make up about 7% of primetime. Passed their heyday, or is it just that Big Brother isn’t on at the moment?

Anyhow, if anyone wants to play further, here’s the data.

Badger.
Footie.
Potter.

BBC4 recently aired a new version of “A for Andromeda”, originally shown as seven 45-minute episodes back in 1961. Not much of the original series survives, so as with their recent production of “The Quatermass Experiment” the BBC has updated and re-made the production.

Sadly, “A for Andromeda” wasn’t transmitted live. One of the most wonderful things about the new Quatermass was seeing how actors cope knowing that if they fluff a line they can’t simply re-do it. About the only time you see that nowadays is at the theatre, so it’s always nice to see people acting without a safety net.

Quatermass was rendered especially challenging by the fact that the pope died half-way through. A little ticker came up at the bottom of the screen saying “Major Breaking News on BBC1 now”. In my house we thought, fuck it, a giant plant-monster eating Tate Modern has to be more fun than people droning on about a dead white guy.

I like to imagine the whispers flowing through the set as those actors not on screen were filled in by their friends and colleagues. Did it put them off? How many of them were Catholic?

Back to Andromeda.

The new version was filleted to ninety minutes. Most of the story still made sense, though there was one moment where a couple of characters managed to somehow figure out that someone had been a) murdered and b) selling secrets to the US despite the lack of any evidence or information.

So what was good about it?

Mainly the fact that it was cheap, good, ideas-led science fiction. A riposte to the concept that SF can’t be entertaining without being filled with the latest CGI wizardry. A proof-of-concept that an audience is willing to engage with big concepts without enormous explosions to sweeten the pill.

BBC4 have proved that there’s an audience for tightly written genre pieces, and that it doesn’t have to be all about the effects.