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ITV paid £40m for the rights to the 2003 and 2007 Rugby World Cups. So they must be really happy when a certain Antipodean themed pub-chain replaces ITV’s ads for its own – cutting into the ad break to run them, before returning to ITV programming. While Sky Sports undoubtedly has a contract with pubs…

I saw about ten minutes of Sky One’s much trumpeted new gameshow “Are You Smarter Than A Ten Year Old” at the weekend. Based, on a format from Fox in the US, it asks contestants questions aimed at children aged 10 and under. I gave up watching because of that malaise of all recent quiz…

Living TV has for the last few years ridden the crest of a “paranormal” wave – most successfully with their “Most Haunted” franchise, in which teams of “ghosthunters” arrive at some old building and try to sense the presence of spirits from days of old. There are two key elements to these programmes: the “psychic”…

In a blaze of publicity (well, they’d bought the back pages of either one or both of the free London papers), Virgin 1 launched last night at 9pm. Virgin 1 (like most Virgin products – no relation to my employers), is partially Virgin Media’s response to the petty falling out between Virgin Media and Sky…

This is fascinating. Radiohead has suddenly announced that their new album comes out… next week! And much more interesting is their revenue model. Since they’ve been out of contract with EMI, it was I suppose, expected that they’d either re-sign with EMI or another label. But they’ve gone down a very different route. As their…

Jeremy Kyle used to work at Virgin Radio hosting the late night “Jezza’ Confessions” show where he took calls and gave advice in between playing music. But most people these days know him from his morning ITV show where his guests confront various issues. Actually that’s a pretty polite way of saying that some very…

Well the short answer is no. But since a few people I know are beginning to get tempted, I thought I’d lay out all my objections to Apple’s new wondrous piece of technology. Cost Most people in the UK who have large monthly spends are used to getting even the very newest phones free of…

This week, Heat Radio has relaunched using an advertising free format. Instead it’s using sponsorship to earn revenue. In this respect it’s similar to stations like Virgin Radio Xtreme which launched with Sony PSP for the first six months. Heat magazine isn’t exactly regular reading for me. I’m not, and indeed, have never been in…

Boris Johnson has now been formally chosen by the Tories as their candidate for the London Mayoral elections. That’s what a few appearances on Have I Got News For Your can do. Now far be it from me to really believe that his key election promises are those that the media has highlighted, but let’s…

Languages always change and develop as we start to use words that never existed before. But there’s one area of language development that I really don’t like, and it’s the use of marketing-speak in everyday language. I have too pet peeves – “content” and “premium.” They can be used separately, and are particularly terrible when…

In my last post I mentioned that I was pleased to be able to watch Channel Four News when I get in without having to record it first. The reason I was pleased to see it this evening was because there was an excellent report from Burma where as we know, there are enormous anti-government…

It’s all about the plus ones it seems just now. Channel 4 is terribly excited about it’s newly launched +1 channel allowing you to see programmes that were on an hour earlier. It has always confused me that they’re called “+1” channels – surely they should be “-1” since it was on an hour earlier?…