A great bit of propaganda here about the need for more UK children’s TV, ably assisted by Donna’s granddad.

A sceptic of the existing license fee arrangements, I have to say that children’s television is on my shortlist for what public money should be paying for to go on TV (as opposed to, say, twelve week long advertorials to subsidise Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals). Of course that ought to apply to all channels, not just the BBC.

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At the start of last year I wrote a post entitled The Trouble with Torchwood detailing everything I thought was so terribly wrong headed about that show’s first season. The second season finished last night so I thought I’d give my review of how I thought it went. In summary: much, much better.

The second series was less a continuation of the last series as it was a reboot. Pretty much all my criticisms were dealt with. The unremittingly dark tone - ditched. The ugly sex - bye bye Guppy’s bum! Stupid characterisation was replaced with emotional intelligence. And not just one but a whole series of metaplots wove throughout the series, giving each of the characters their day in the sun. One recommendation - to ditch Chris Chibnell - was not taken up but given that he is responsible for all of the other improvements, I don’t think we can really begrudge him that. Well done, Chris.

Not everything was perfect. Reframing Ianto as the bimbo love interest got a bit tiresome after a while, although whether I would have been half as irritated if it had been a female character is a moot point. John Barrowman’s scenery chewing seems to have got worse and he seems to be turning into Jon Culshaw’s caricature of him. Freema Agyeman/Martha Jones guest appearance was largely squandered by having her moping about in the background of two of the three episodes she appeared in, both of which largely focussed on Owen. The second episode Sleeper was well acted but plotwise was utterly derivative (has a single science fiction series ever avoided this stock plotline about sleeper agents being “out there”?). Dead Man Walking seemed to ramble in a way that made little sense to me, focusing on a “myth” which seemed to hinge on us believing that medieval plagues were the result of alien beings rather than viruses. From Out of the Rain was the standout worst episode for me, making very little sense (again with the fairy stories) and it was too dependent on the creepiness of the villains who were frankly not all that.

But overall these are minor gripes which were eclipsed by the high points. With the exception of From Out of the Rain even the weaker episodes were misfires which had several strong points. No longer cyphers, the characters were allowed to grow. At the same time, some of the subplots from the last series that were going nowhere (I’m thinking specifically of Owen and Gwen’s relationship) was allowed to die - to be replaced with a triangle between Jack, Rhys and Gwen and a focus on Tosh’s unrequited feelings for Owen. The latter was particularly strongly handled and ended up underpinning the whole series (for reasons that become clear in the final episode).

The scope of the series has been extended. No longer terrified of touching on Jack’s past for fear of treading on the Doctor Who team’s toes, we got to explore 100 years of Torchwood and his own 51st century childhood. In Fragments, we got to see everyone else’s backstory as well - it’s a shame this episode didn’t come earlier in my view. In Adrift, we some idea both of how the rift affects ordinary lives in Cardiff and about the worlds that lie on the other side.

So where does the series go from here (assuming there is to be a series three)? Well, they’ll need to find two new cast members for one thing. Will Martha Jones get to return as a full time cast member rather than attractive guest cypher? With the Doctor having to juggle three assistants by the end of his new series it seems unlikely he’ll carry on with all of them. There are hints of more guest appearances of “Captain John” and the door has been left partway open for a return of the already undead “King of the Weevils” (but not Tosh). Nobody seems to stay in the Torchwood freezer permanently so expect to see more of Gray.

For me though, I’d like to see the third series spend a little bit more time outside of Cardiff and even Wales. Torchwood Three, in Scotland, was mentioned in the pilot episode and it’s high time we got to see it. It would be nice to see some of these other worlds as well, rather than just hearing about them from mad people. More explanation about the Weevils, and just why they are so polite to dead people, would be nice too.

Here’s a thing. By the end of the last series I was frankly bored to tears with the whole exercise and slightly surprised a second series had been commissioned. By the end of this series I’m imagining future plotlines. That’s got to represent a success in anyone’s book.

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I’ve just finished watching the third episode of Mad Men over on BBC Four. It hasn’t gripped me yet I have to say, but one thing that is starting to bug me is, well, the smokespoitation (a word I thought I’d made up but apparently haven’t). Yes it’s okay, I do get that everyone smoked in the 60s. Even in the office. Even pregnant women. That anti-smoking guy who hangs outside all the party conferences every year shouting at people must be doing his nut.

But it isn’t just the smoking. In general, it is one big fetish fest for everything they did in the 60s that we now consider dangerous. This is all very well, and factually accurate, but do they really have to signal everything with such great big neon signs stating “LOOK PUNY NOUGHTIES-ERA VIEWER! WATCH US TAKE MINIMAL CONCERN FOR OUR HEALTH AND SAFETY AND QUIVER WITH REPULSION AND DESIRE! BWAA-HAH-HAH-HAAAH!” Last week it was children running around with plastic bags over their heads and rolling around in the bag seat of a car with no safety belt during a crash. This week we’ve had extreme drink driving and a kid being slapped across the face. We aren’t talking subtle here.

The problem is, combine that with the rest of the sixties Americana - the cine film camera, the hats, the rampant sexism, et al - and there isn’t much left. This week’s episode in particular just felt like two episodes jammed together. The subplot about the main character’s wife’s unidentified illness (MS?) was all but forgotten. They’ve spent so much time and energy recreating a period (albeit very much from a contemporary perspective) that plot-wise it seems to be little more than a run of the mill soap.

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Cringeworthy stuff from Gavin Whenman on the topic of positive discrimination again:

To elaborate: Discrimination, of any kind, on a criteria which bears no relation to your ability to do the job, is wrong. It is fair to award party posts, such as PPCs, on the basis of merit only. It is not fair to award it on the basis of skin colour or ethnicity. To say that black or other people aren’t good enough to be MPs unless they have help from the white man is possibly the most patronising, shameful position we can take on this issue, and I hope Nick Clegg sees sense soon.

None of which is particularly inaccurate or misleading (even if it is intemperate), but it doesn’t get us very far, leaves us with a woefully unrepresentative party and begs the question: what would you do then? Clegg hasn’t backed positive discrimination - in fact he’s called a moratorium on imposing such measures within the party for at least two parliaments. What he has done though is back a system of training and support that will receive significant funds, warn the party that if this isn’t made to work then the debate on positive discrimination will need to be revisited and, today, backed enabling legislation to allow political parties to introduce all-black shortlists if they wish (just as we already have enabling legislation to introduce all-women shortlists).

How political parties select their candidates ought to be by and large a matter for them surely? If people feel they are having a candidate imposed on them there will be a backlash, as Labour discovered in Blaenau Gwent. Surely deregulation is a good thing in principle? Why does Gavin feel white guys need such stringent protection?

By backing this legislation, Clegg is supporting deregulation in principle and making a political point about the importance of parties doing more to recruit ethnic minority activists and politicians. I’m amazed that either of these things are regarded within the party as being a bad thing.

The bottom line is party politics is looking alarmingly white, male and middle class these days. In many respects we appear to be going backwards. The Lib Dems have particular problems. We have a few Asian activists and I can probably mention a token member of most established UK ethnic minorities, but within the black community particularly we are a joke.

But its the anger this all provokes that irritates me. I’ve got quite worked up about this myself in the past, and the establishment of the Campaign for Gender Balance was a result of a number of us trying to come up with an alternative to all women shortlists. But at least we were talking about alternatives - and now CGB is regularly cited by some with no sense of history as part of the positive discrimination agenda it was established to bypass.

We shouldn’t be blind to the enormity of our task though. If the television industry struggles to recruit visible black faces, as Lenny Henry was bemoaning last week, what chance has politics got? Expecting it to sort itself out however is simply ludicrous.

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I’ve just got back from appearing on what it turns out was the last ever Blogger TV. 18 Doughty Street is, well, the best way I can think of putting it is that it is about to enter a chrysalis from which it will spend the next couple of months changing into something else. Whether it emerges into a beautiful butterfly or a moth remains to be seen.

In all seriousness, I’m pleased for them. It certainly does appear that this is a move forward. Their studios are to move to Westminster, they’re planning to step up the news content and concentrate more on the on demand side and less on the live side. All of these moves seem sensible - I for one have never watched it live but will frequently dip into the on demand service.

The channel itself has changed significantly over the past year. 12 months ago it was all about attack ads and most of their presenters were so embedded within the Conservative Party that they might as well have been called Thatcher. But I’ve been very conscious of the fact that over the past few months since I’ve been going on (which thinking about it has been pretty much a year) the times when I’ve been outnumbered 4-to-1 by Tories has become much less the norm. There has been a self-conscious and sincere attempt to bring it out of the Tory TV image it had to start with. Equally self-conscious and sincere has been the attempt to bring new political voices to the force - not just bloggers - and to talk about political issues at a level of depth that you simply don’t find on mainstream television.

My personal highlight? Going on the Doughty News Hour with Donal Blaney to discuss the Human Rights Act. It’s up to others to judge who won that particular fight, but I certainly enjoyed every minute of it.

My personal low point? Erm, possibly tonight, where I totally over-stretched discussing the Lib Dem leadership election and exploring my own views on air rather than consolidating my position with two Conservative commentators beside me itching to tear my argument to shreds. In short, doing exactly what I was bemoaning about Nick Clegg doing on GMTV this Sunday - live television is not the place to navel gaze! I blame the pork stew I had at the Duke of Cornwall in Islington just before. Never do Doughty Street on a full stomach; you need to be hungry!

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Aaron Sorkin, at his best, has produced some fantastic television. The West Wing, for all its flaws, had some great moments and is remarkable as one of the few pieces of drama that presented politicians as sympathetic human beings.

I’ve now watched the first six episodes Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and I like it, but whether it could have extended beyond its first season is open to question. It seems to be already running out of steam.

The fact that it tackles the subject of live TV comedy with the same reverence as the top tier of US politics is simultaneously ridiculous and sublime. The show has already demonstrated how its initial conceit allows them the opportunity to explore big themes about American culture and where it is headed. Even some of Sorkin’s worst habits, such as his apparent dictum that no problem exists in the world that is so difficult that it can’t be solved by an inspiring speech in the final act, sort of works in this context because in the context of a TV show it is the performance that counts.

The latest episode to be shown in the UK however, was almost parodic. It concerned several plot strands:

• One of the performers shows his parents around the studio, and it emerges that a) he has a communication problem with his father and b) they’re very worried that his younger brother is fighting in Afghanistan.
• Danny (aka Josh) tries to hook Matt (aka Chandler) up with some girls to get his mind off the Love of His Life who turn out to be vacuous airheads.
• The Love of Matt/Chandler’s Life spends the evening with a baseball player who is opposite to him in every way. Opposite to the extent that he comes onto someone else.
• Matt/Chandler is taken to a club by Token Black Lead to talent scout a comedian who turns out to be doing the same Angry Black Man act that Eddie Murphy ripped off Richard Pryor. Cue heartfelt monologue about living in Da Hood. But, hurrah! It turns out that there is another black comedian who is intelligent and sensitive (but not very funny). He gets recruited on the spot. This character is not in any way similar to Charlie in the West Wing. Honest - he wears glasses and everything!
• An elderly man is caught sneaking around the backlot. It turns out that he was a World War II hero and writer for Studio 60 in the 50s, but got Blacklisted during the McCarthyist purges. Cue: swelling music and lots of leaden comparisons between Then and Now.

Can you spot the plotline that isn’t a hackneyed load of dingo’s kidneys? Trick question - there isn’t one! Add to that Amanda Peet continuing to flail around completely out of her depth and the fact that Bradley Whitford (see, I do know his real name) still isn’t being used to anything like his full potential and you have the TV equivalent of popcorn - tastes vaguely sweet but completely unsubstantial pap.

All you needed to make this a totally Sorkin episode was a moody scene in which a character stared out of a window while the rain pours down to signify torment. But this being set in LA, I suppose that wouldn’t be practical.

In short, if you have to resort to this kind of by-the-numbers plotting by episode 6, it’s no wonder it didn’t survive past its initial run.

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Talking of unintelligent design, I finally got round to trying to make iPlayer work today. Waste of time.

First of all, I tried opening it in Firefox, only to have it inform me that it only works on IE. Then I opened it on IE, only to be told it only works with Media Player, which I have, but it didn’t recognise. Much faffing about with crappy, slow, buggly Microsoftware later, and I finally got the site at least talking to me, and the crucial actual iPlayer sofware downloaded (which appears to be little more than a DRM interface to stop Media Player playing things it shouldn’t be - and this took years of development?!).

So, anyway, I finally got to look around, picked a couple of programmes to watch (coverage of Gordon Brown’s statement on constitutional reform wouldn’t even download - clearly the programme couldn’t cope with the demand), downloaded them, pressed play…

… only to be told I didn’t have a license to watch them (which I do, by the way). Big floppy donkey dicks.

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With apologies to the late Kenneth Williams, I offer you my interpretation of an unsettling mental picture that Paul Walter has unleashed on an unsuspecting blogosphere.

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Somebody please tell me this isn’t true:

The Government is asking pensioners and disabled people to pay £40 towards the cost of the digital switchover, despite digital boxes being available for as little as £20.

Government figures have revealed that up to four million people will be asked to contribute a total of £160m towards the cost of switching the UK’s television broadcasting to digital.

However, the Liberal Democrats have found that whilst people will be charged £40 for the digital switchover ‘targeted assistance’ scheme a new digital box with more advanced features could be bought from the high street for as little as £20.

The digital boxes being offered as part of the scheme could also be hopelessly out of date in just a few years time.

Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, Don Foster MP said:

“We were told targeted assistance would be ‘the lowest cost option’. But, like other government contracts, it looks set to be overpriced and out of date.

“Even with installation help, charging pensioners and disabled people £40 for this service isn’t much of a help scheme.

“Not only are the Government using licence fee payer’s money to fund digital switchover, they’re now charging over the odds for help to the most vulnerable.”

Bear in mind that part of the justification of the license fee hike is to pay for this.

Holds head in hands.

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Can someone explain this to me?

Life on Mars Season 1 Box Set DVD Release Date: 15 May 2006 Run Time: 472 minutes Amazon Price: £16.98 GBP

Doctor Who Season 1 Box Seat DVD Release Date: 21 Nov 2005 Run Time: 585 minutes Amazon Price: £49.16 GBP

Those 113 minutes seem awfully expensive. Is this really the most profitable price the BBC should be charging for Doctor Who, two years after original broadcast? That would suggest a remarkably inelastic demand compared with other DVD boxed sets.

UPDATE: Via Facebook, a friend of mine has just pointed out the following pricing regime for another group of BBC DVD box sets:
Red Dwarf Box Set (Season 1-8) - £104.99
Red Dwarf Box Set (Season 1-4) - £24.98
Red Dwarf Box Set (Season 5-8) - £24.98

Would it really be too much of a strain on the license fee to give the chaps pocket calculators?

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