March 5, 2007 by dafyd
According to the Radio Times, our quarter-final match against Edinburgh will be broadcast next Monday (12 March), 8pm, BBC2.
Be there, or be square.
Mind you, we’ve not heard from Granada or the BBC that it’s actually us playing that week… but I seem to remember us being the second quarter final, so it makes sense.
Category 1 | Tags: tv,universitychallenge | Comments Off
February 24, 2007 by dafyd
So, the episode of CSI:NY that just aired on Five (in the UK, it was on in October in the US) involved a Da Vinci Code-esque clue trail laid with t-shirts by a serial killer. Yeah, about as bizarre as CSI usually is.
But anyway, this t-shirt treasure hunt was linked to a website, kodecon.com, which, geek that I am, I promptly tried to access. Turns out it just shows a preview of next week’s episode. Fair enough. But, in the story, a character was shown complaining that these kodecon t-shirts were blatant copies of his own clothing-based murder mystery, edoclaundry.com.
edoc laundry is a real website, selling real t-shirts, part of a real puzzle game. Awesome. For a (relatively) small and new company like that to get the coverage of a huge TV series like CSI must have been quite something. They also created (and still sell) the kodecon t-shirts featured in the episode. Apparently Anthony Zuicker, the creator of CSI, saw them and thought they were “cool”:
“You show me a shirt that has a secret code in it, and that’s a ‘CSI’ episode made in heaven,” Zuiker said in a phone interview last week. “I thought, well, hey, let me bring in a small company and borrow their intellectual property to make our show cool.”
Meh, shipping to the UK is twice the cost of the t-shirt…
Category 1 | Tags: csi,tshirts,tv | 1 Comment
February 9, 2007 by dafyd
I was muchly saddened this morning to hear of the passing of Ian Richardson, one of the UK’s greatest character actors of recent years. He died unexpectedly in his sleep, according to his agent.
He could always be counted on to bring a degree of gravitas to any role, from the grotesque Lord Groan in Gormenghast to the Magician in the Sunday afternoon drama The Magician’s House. He was most excellent as the traitor Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy opposite Alec Guinness 25 years ago, just as he was as the Chancellor in Bleak House last year. Among his other roles were Dr Joseph Bell, the “real” Sherlock Holmes, in the Murder Rooms series, and Canon Black in the patently bizarre supernatural series Strange. Of course, he was perfect as Francis Urquhart, the Machiavellian (count how many of his obituaries use that word…) Chief Whip – and later Prime Minister – in the House of Cards trilogy… so perfect, that he would later complain that people assumed he was Urquhart.
When I read that Sky One were planning to adapt Terry Pratchett’s novel Hogfather, the biggest concern I had (among many) was who they would get to play Death, who speaks only in capital letters. Ian Richardson, of course, was born to play the role, and performed with aplomb.
When I saw his name in the Radio Times, I knew the programme would be top notch. British drama lost one of its true characters today. He will be missed.
Category 1 | Tags: ianrichardson,theatre,tv | Comments Off
February 4, 2007 by dafyd
Captain Caroline pointed me towards this story in the Daily Mail about our latest University Challenge match:
Angry viewers have accused Jeremy Paxman of showing favouritism towards Oxbridge teams on BBC2 quiz University Challenge.
Fans of the show have complained that Paxman, who himself went to St Catherine’s College at Cambridge, has been giving the Oxbridge teams an easy ride and openly giving them more encouragement that their less lofty rivals.
This week’s show sparked controversy after the Newsnight presenter was accused off letting off Oxford’s Somerville College for a seemingly incorrect answer.
But when University of Durham also got an answer slightly wrong there was no such leeway.
The Somerville question was about digital radio. They gave the answer “dabs”, when the answer should have been “DAB” (pronounced “dab”). Fine – it’s close enough, and I don’t have any complaints.
Our question was about Romeo and Juliet – we were asked to name the girl with who he was infatuated at the beginning of the play. Rosaline was on the tip of my tongue, but we couldn’t think of it. So we answered, through Caroline, “Rosalind”. Which is wrong. There is a different character in a different play (As You Like It) called Rosalind. He was perfectly right to mark us down.
We won with twice their score. If it was close, or if we thought we were being treated unfairly, we could have asked for them to check the answers. But it was fine with us.
I think – and this is clearly just my opinion – that any bias is so subtle that it is practically non-existant. In fact, I’d have said it was almost the contrary. When certain universities that one might not expect to do terribly well (that is, they’re not Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Durham, Edinburgh, OU) actually do, he’s very supportive. There’s one I can think of from this series, certainly, but I can’t really say which. We found him to be scrupulously fair – if the answer was wrong, it was wrong.
Incidentally, this is series 13 of the Paxman era. So far, six series have been won by Oxbridge colleges, six by other unis (says Sean Blanchflower). Can’t say fairer than that.
And I’ve hunted down the “BBC Message Board” that started the whole thing (the Mail journo obviously has far too much time on his hands if he reads the Point of View message boards…): Uni Challenge – *is* JP biased after all? (BBC Points of View).
Category 1 | Tags: bbc,paxman,tv,universitychallenge | 1 Comment
January 29, 2007 by dafyd
Tonight, 8pm, BBC2.
In case you didn’t already know…
Category 1 | Tags: tv,universitychallenge | 1 Comment
December 10, 2006 by dafyd
For anyone who cares (and if you don’t, why don’t you?), the thrilling second round of Durham’s University Challenge 2006 adventure will be on BBC2 at 8.30pm on Monday 29th January, a whole six months after we filmed it. I’ll be watching, ‘cos I can’t remember who won.
This date is, of course, subject to the BBC not changing its mind again.
Fear not, for I shall remind you again nearer the date. Probably in every conversation.
Category 1 | Tags: bbc,tv,universitychallenge | Comments Off
October 16, 2006 by dafyd
University Challenge – 8.30, BBC2, tonight.
Don’t miss it!
Category 1 | Tags: tv,universitychallenge | 7 Comments
September 17, 2006 by dafyd
So, it looks like Connie won the BBC’s How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?, the televised competition to find the Maria for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new production of the Sound of Music.
For a change, I think the right person has actually won one of these talent shows! She was clearly the best from the very beginning.
I’ve missed the last couple of weeks, obviously, but it seems that the final was between Siobhan, Connie and Helena – both of whom were, I think, not very good in the first place. I’m intrigued, though, by a text I got from my mum a fortnight ago that read “Simone and Siobhan out”… which is weird, if she was in the final. Sigh.
Anyhoo – I’m going to have to find a chance to see the show now – along, of course, with Wicked and Spamalot. Sometime straight after Christmas, I think…
Category 1 | Tags: theatre,tv | Comments Off
July 30, 2006 by dafyd
According to Wikipedia,
In the 1970s, TV was typically used to provide [Open University] lectures, and the image of the OU lecturer in brown ‘kipper-tie’ and flared corduroy trouser became something of a national icon. OU programmes are generally now much more innovative, using documentary styles.
That’s not what I’ve seen tonight. The brown ties are alive and well on BBC2 in the early hours of the morning.
Category 1 | Tags: blogathon,openuniversity,tv | Comments Off
July 30, 2006 by dafyd
Anyone else getting annoyed by those Volkswagen Safran adverts? The ones with the kids, meeting their “new neighbours”?
The first couple of times, it was pretty entertaining. But during three hours of the West Wing on Friday night, it was shown in every ad break. That’s ten times in three programmes. Which is, possibly, just a small amount of overexposure.
For some fairly awesome VW adverts, though check out these two gems.
Update:
I must have been tired. It’s not an advert for the “Volkswagen Safran”… it’s for the Vauxhall Zafira.
You can watch it here, if you really, really want to. It seems the new controversy on teh Interwebs is whether the kiddies are saying “Oh they’re tired” or “Overtired”. The subtitles say the latter, but I reckon the former makes more sense.
Hello anyone who got here Googling “Oh they’re tired”. Looks like I’m the first-ish hit. Goody!
Category 1 | Tags: advert,blogathon,tv | Comments Off