Stumbling across, and being terrified by, a children’s TV programme called In The Night Garden, I wanted to know more. So I found this article, which contained this, which is far more interesting:
Mrs Wood has become a prominent critic of the state of children’s television in Britain. Although the BBC continues to invest around £80m a year, commercial channels are accused of cutting back on the scheduling and commissionings. The blame for the crisis dates back to the 2006 ruling by Ofcom, the industry regulator, that banned junk food advertising during children’s programmes. Initially popular with parents, it has left a £39m hole in production budgets.
“This could be the last big show that we make. Where will we get our funding from in the future? This sort of quality has to sell internationally to finance itself,” Mrs Wood explains.
Oops.
Professor Maire Messenger Davies, director of the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster believes commercial broadcasters have used the Ofcom ban as an excuse to ditch children’s programmes in favour of alternatives more attractive to advertisers. She fears that younger audiences face the prospect of growing up on a diet of foreign cartoons.
“Children are no different from adults - they don’t want to watch only imported shows or a single genre. They want to watch stuff that reflects the society that they live in,” she says. “You don’t get good children’s programming on the cheap. You have to invest in a lot in background research, direction, pacing and lighting. To make something really good you have to put the money in and in the case of Ragdoll you can get it back again.”
Greg Childs, the secretary of the campaign group Save Kids TV, formed in the wake of the Ofcom decision, praises Night Garden as a powerful example of British children’s programme making at its best. “It looks fabulous and wonderful. But not all programmes should have to be global to be viable,” he warns. Present-day cuts could have far reaching implications for tomorrow’s society, he says.
“How can the Government think they are going to create an economy which is full of vibrant and creative people if the young people coming through don’t see themselves in television but instead see some sort of amalgam in some mid-Atlantic scenario. This is why when surveys ask kids what number they should dial in an emergency they say 911.”
So the government has done X, which has caused Y, and so the government must do Z… It’s that circle jerk again. Using the government to solve problems never works. The government thinking they can create anything is a preposterous notion, let alone an economy full of vibrant people.
Incidentally, national borders and national identity are looking like very out-dated concepts. Consumers don’t care where stuff comes from, they just want the most choice and the cheapest prices. Internet shopping means people can easily buy from abroad. They can watch Japanese cartoons and buy the DVDs. Politicians care about national borders because it’s how they derive their power. That’s why they like getting in the way with their tarriffs and their bilateral trade agreements.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 11:01 AM EST
I’m glad to see people are working on the contact-lens-as-display-device problem. Short of brain implants, I think this is the future of computer display. Read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge for some possible applications of this type of technology, including some novel entertainment media.
The lenses will need to be powered somehow, and they will need a very up-to-the-microsecond notion of which way your eyes are pointing, but I reckon this should be feasable in ten to fifteen years.
I’ve been playing around recently with video editing. This is something I’ve had fun with in the past, putting together wedding videos for friends and the like. Now I’m planning a motorcycle trip to Norway and am toying with the idea of a Ewan and Charlie style documentary about it.
Music is important for making montages, but if I want to show off my work on YouTube there are legal implications. Everybody else posting on YouTube seems to ignore the demands of record labels, but confused as I am about the philosophy of intellectual property, I wouldn’t feel good about breaking an agreement. And my video might get pulled off the site.
So I’ve been researching royalty free music. And I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the quality of the music. Until I found Magnatune. From my point of view, I pay $5 for an album and get to use the music in my videos and put them on video sharing sites for free.
There’s plenty here for my purposes. The bluesy guitar of John Williams seems ideal for my motorcycle trip project. Even the album and song titles are thematically appropriate! I’m thinking that Halfway Home from the Long Ride Home album would make a good theme tune.
Lara St John makes a pretty good recording of Bach violin concertos, to my ear. Brad Sucks make some decent indie rock.
It’s well worth exploring — you can preview whole albums before buying, and download the songs uncompressed if you want.
I wish I’d heard about this site when the future of music distribution was being discussed on Samizdata.
Cafepress make things like calendars out of your digital photos. A bunch of guys on a classic cars web forum got together to make a calendar with photos of their own cars. And then this happens, which I find very odd, and even somewhat hard to believe:
a Cafepress representative informed me that …
“Susette van der Beek on behalf of Ford Motor Company provided us with a notice stating that your use of Ford’s trademarks, including images of their vehicles, infringes upon their intellectual property rights (trademark/trade dress/copyright).”
I find intellectual property issues hard to get my head around at the best of times. What are the moral and legal arguments here?
Found via Eugenia, who writes very useful blog posts about video editing.
The Kite Runner is about the life of a boy growing up in Kabul when the Russians invade, and his escape to America. Being a film about Afghanistan, I was worried that it would be all left-wing and post-modern and about how evil Americans are to blame for everything.
But no. The good guys are good; the bad guys are bad; the story is moving and exciting. The protagonist is flawed but his mistakes are punished and he redeems himself. Little good guys defend themselves from big bad guys with superior weapons: “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but there are three of us and two of you.” “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I am the one with the slingshot.”
The protagonist’s father is is a real hero — in one scene foolishly so. He is the film’s moral reference point, making a speech that contrasts the Mullahs’ idea of sin (drinking) with his own (all sins derive from theft). Where there could be moral relativism there is moral judgement. The film continues to portray him as a hero even when it has the opportunity to go all post-modern about what an inadequate father he was (not that he was). The Taliban are portrayed as the medieval bastards that they are. There is nothing not to like in this film, it is excellent. I may even read the book.
From Mitchell and Webb, this is a perfect satire that explains how we get adverts that try to blind us with pseudo-science and convince us we have problems we don’t have. I remember seeing it on TV over a year ago and was reminded of it when I saw a real advert for a toothbrush that had a tounge brushing appliance.
(Incidentally, this probably shouldn’t be on YouTube, but I can’t imagine it being so doing Mitchell and Webb anything but good.)
I tried to brush my tounge once. It made me gag.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Advertising at 9:37 PM EST
Jonathan Pierce posts at Samizdata about an FT report that there are half a million people claiming incapacity benefit, i.e. getting welfare payments instead of working because they say they can’t for medical reasons. Commenter Ian B has a good point:
I really believe the point here is to look at what’s driving the system and I really do think it’s important to point a very pointy bony finger at the class interests driving statism. When you do that, you find a frankly unpleasant circle jerk of academics, pressure groups and politicians with money flowing out of government to produce research that supports pressure groups who demand more statism which gets more money flowing out of government to produce research…
The idea is that while it’s immoral to accept money stolen from others, it’s rational. Meanwhile:
I think on a relative scale I have less ire against people at the bottom of the social heap exploiting a system for which others are responsible, than against those who have willfully constructed that system and enriched themselves by it. There’s a whole grasping horde out there who’ve never done a day’s productive work in their lives but get orders of magnitude more taxpayers’ money than disability benefit. Most of the government spring to mind. They too are acting rationally in exploiting and expanding the system they exploit, and I certainly don’t think they should escape disapproval
I think there’s a good marketing angle for libertarian ideas in there somewhere.
A poster at the tube station advertises courses on Economics with Justice at something called School of Economic Science in London. Bleh.
The course attempts to show how principles of truth, love and service translate into policies for governments and economic planners and practical precepts for individual households and businesses.
Advice to students: don’t waste your time. Go and do a real course.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Advertising at 8:04 PM EST
The Alan Bown Set Before and Beyond
