MySpace.com - CAMPBELL & MORAGHAN - UK - Swing / Jazz / Country - www.myspace.com/campbellmoraghan
Have a listen and before you read down the page see if you can guess who’s performing.
Clue - you’re one step ahead if you were a fan of Celebrity Talent Shows on BBC1 or listen to 5Live at Breakfast.
Online ads to overtake TV
The internet will overtake TV as the biggest advertising platform in the UK this year with total ad spend of around £3.56bn, according to a report by Enders Analysis.
But does this mean it’s more effective? I think I would still rather have 30 seconds on peak time TV than the equivalent cost on t’internet. I confess I have no idea if I know what that would mean in web exposure, but TV still feels like you’re in lots of living rooms where it matters more than being on the “lean forwards” screen..
BBC NEWS | Radio 4 news hit by giggling fit
Hundreds of listeners have contacted BBC Radio 4 after newsreader Charlotte Green dissolved into giggles while reading a bulletin on Today.She lost control after playing a clip of the oldest known recording of the human voice.
Charlotte Green has my sympathy - as someone who used to read news bulletins I know the dreadful feeling when a fit of the giggles interrupts your normally sedate reading voice.
The one that I recall most vividly was when I was reading a piece of copy, “North Yorkshire dinner ladies were toasted for winning an employment tribunal case over equal pay”. My imagination played riot with the idea of toasted dinner ladies.
I was very disappointed with this film. Had I been on my own I would have left the cinema part way through I was so disengaged.
No effort was made to create the characters - I felt nothing for any of them. As the film progressed I didn’t care what happened to any of them. Bad things happened to them all - there was no redemption.
The story is about how Ann Boleyn became the second of Henry VIII’s wives. I know it was a bleak era in England’s history - but in this film it was boring too.
Thankfully it was a cheap seats night - so it only cost me £3.50 - and it was cold too.
Perfectly miss-able.
BBC - Religion - Programmes: Miracle on the Estate
Miracle on the Estate
For Good Friday, the residents of Harpurhey in North Manchester - once described as the worst place to live in Britain - join forces with a poet, a composer and a director to see if they can produce their very own mediaeval mystery play, based on the story of the Flood. In so doing they uncover a deep-rooted sense of community, untapped talent and breathe 21st century life into an ancient story of sacrifice and salvation.
It’s Good Friday. A special day for all Christians when we remember the death of Jesus on the cross. This morning we watched a truly inspirational BBC programme about the making of a community film based on the Mystery Play Noah’s Flood. The film is on the BBC Religion Website. I’ve not watched the film yet - but I recommend watching the TV programme Miracle on the Estate first.
I’ve now watched the The Harpurhey Mystery Play and it matches the promises made in the TV programme. It is truly inspiring when people who were unsure of their talents discover them and work together to create a play like this one.
Blasphemy is dead Long live blasphemy | spiked
England’s dusty, archaic and unpopular blasphemy laws look set to be abolished, but Ofcom and others are keeping their censorious spirit alive.
I think Brenden O’Neill has his wires crossed. Companies go to great lengths to protect their brands, challenging what sometimes appear to be only small infringements of the use of their precious “brand properties”. Logos, straplines, positioning statements etc. Just think of the businesses challenged for using the “R Us” gimmick. When these huge conglomerates win their case and force offenders to change the signs on the side of their van or worse rebrand their entire business no one cries “CENSORSHIP” or says that it’s an affront to free speech.
And yet, when Christians protest about the misuse of a phrase or series of words that have been hijacked by the media world you would think the devil himself had stepped up to witness box and won the day. The opposite is of course true. We have ceased the worship of God preferring to honour mammon.
If the phrase “Thy will be done” had not appeared in The Lord’s Prayer the offending splash for GHD Hair Straighteners would have been pointless. If Christ had never been crucified on a cross the symbol in the advert would have been meaningless. The ASA was right to uphold the complaint from the church.
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BBC NEWS | School Report | Table of participating schools
It’s the BBC School News Day and all the participating schools have been plotted on a map. Curiosity took me to North Yorkshire for the schools near York. None - according to the map, but the table lists Easingwold School. Clicking on the map link brings up a location in the sea off the coast of Ghana! (You’ll have to zoom out some way to realise that the blue background is the Gulf of Guinea)
So perhaps pupils from Easingwold are today reporting from the deck of a ship tracing the route of the slave trade as a geography and history field trip. Or possibly someone in the BBC has no idea where Easingwold is and the software has a default location at 0º, 0º.
David Cameron’s first criticism of the budget speech was that it was delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone reading out the telephone directory. So I assume he thinks the job should be given to a presenter.
I switched off - that’s the prerogative of a listener - assuming that, as the opposition leader’s prime criticism, there was little to follow.
Presentation over content is the scourge of the modern age. Make your talk glitzy enough and no one will notice you have nothing to say.
So if David Cameron is elected to power and you want to be Chancellor now would be a good time to put in some broadcasting hours to up your game. Or perhaps David Cameron himself should be given a radio show of his own. If he wants even more popularity he should be a gameshow host, “Vote or No Vote“, or “Who wants to be a Millionaire Tax Exile” with a “Giveaway Budget Jackpot“. The audience figures would be a painful gauge of his popularity.
This is not a defence of Alistair Darling’s budget, just another example of how easily David Cameron can get up ones nose, in the same league as Noel Edmunds and Chris Tarrant.
I’m at my son’s house in London, staying overnight before a workshop day in the capital tomorrow. The is the fourth workshop day I’ve run as part of the Women’s Interfaith Media Literacy project.
I’ll run two short workshops to experience the storytelling part of digital storytelling while other practitioners pass on their skills in print media, broadcasting, and PR. Previous days have been in Bradford, Leicester, Coventry and now London. No matter where I go, I find that people love telling stories, but many don’t know where to start - or finish!
So I will use my Magic Story Bag to see what secrets it reveals and then teach them how to structure those revelations into a story script. Behind all the best journalism is a good story and the best writing is storytelling. What’s your story?
Can news be presented as drama? The editorial team at the BBC must have wrangled over this one. Newsnight is to stage a series of short dramas to raise issues about the decision to go to war against Iraq 5 years ago. This is how the Editor, Peter Barron explained it in his daily email.
Next week on Newsnight we’re making our first foray into drama with a series of films entitled 10 Days to War. This may prove controversial, but we hope it will also open up the debate about the war in Iraq in new and revealing ways. The issue our viewers most often ask us to revisit is - by some distance - the decision to go to war in Iraq.
Over the next two weeks, to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion, we will look back and examine again the circumstances of the run-up to war: the WMD claims, the question of legality, the diplomatic wrangles and so on.
I’m pleased they’ve decided to present the films as a mini drama series that will screen before Newsnight starts. But it still raises difficulties. (more…)
