The newly-added archive covers The Guardian from 1821-2003 and The Observer from 1791-2003. The years from 2003 to date can be seen via the existing NewsBank service.

So, in a nutshell you can see any page from any issue and it’s free.

This is an amazing resource to have at our fingertips. Particularly as the newspaper was known as The Manchester Guardian until the late 1960′s and was based in offices on Cross Street where Boots is now. So there is a wealth of historical information about the city.

The Times is also available from 1785 to the current date and The Newsbank service provides issues of many newspapers from Britain and around the world, from the last 10-25 years. Including the Manchester Evening News, The Independent, Daily Telegraph, the Mirror…

There are many other free resources in the 24 Hour Library including reference services and the Naxos Music Library which provides 18,000 CDs to listen to.

If you grew up in Britain in the 1960′s or 1970′s then you probably remember the 13-part series Robinson Crusoe on BBC Television. This French production was shown many times between 1965 and the early 1980′s, often during school holidays.

Featuring handsome Robert Hoffman, most people remember the programme for the music, which was composed by Robert Mellin and Gian-Pero Reverberi, and for the distinctive dubbed English language narration. However most would be hard-pressed to name the actor who spoke those words and even fewer know of the love story behind the screen credit.

Read more...

Read more...

The studio is built on a former graveyard they claim. This is not the 1960′s Granada block but a studio that was constructed next to Lower Byrom Street in the late 1980′s.

It’s a good story, but a quick look through some photographs on the Manchester City Council local image library suggests it isn’t true.

Read more...

As I remember the horribly invasive player that is Apple Quicktime for Windows, I was in two minds about whether to try Safari. But I did…

Well it’s a piece of junk so far. When I start it, the top menus have white text on a white background, so I can’t see or do anything.

OK so it’s a beta. It may be fixed next time. Maybe it’s some quirk of my system. But I can’t remember the last time I tried beta software and it presented me with a bug as stupid as this one.

So safari has been uninstalled. I’ll stick with Opera and Firefox.

Other reviews say it seems like a ‘rushed if not a botched’ job.

Read more...

Chris joins me to talk about:

* Queer Up North: Europe’s leading queer arts festival which starts here in Manchester in the next few days, with events throughout May.

* Peter Tatchell

* Our show Bargain Hunters: why we haven’t made any more since June.

* Big Brother

* The TV phone scandals that have engulfed Britain recently and the recent BBC Panorama programme on the subject.

* The Basement Social Centre

* The Conservative Party

* Scally wear: we find out, does Chris own a hoody or any trackies?

* Doctor Who and Torchwood

We filmed it on 1st June. Hilariously, considering the theme, during the making of this we were told that filming in Piccadilly Station is no longer allowed as it’s a ‘terror threat’.

Read more...

Posts that begin with the word ‘rushes’ contain unedited footage, tests, bloopers and experiments.

I mess around with a lot of stuff which, up to now, has never seen the light of day. Also I’m a bit of a perfectionist and can easily spend twelve hours editing a four-minute video.

But, in recent months the tapes of master footage have been piling up, with not enough time to edit them.

I’m not sure how this will work or where I’m going with it. Some edits always have to be made for privacy and copyright reasons. But at least this way you get to see something. I think it can be fun to see what does and doesn’t work.

Either you can take a look at the rough stuff or ignore the posts marked ‘rushes’ and wait for the polished final products :-)

I wanted some practice at building a sequence using a bluescreen effect. It’s fairly simple if you stick with one wide shot only. But what happens when you cut in for closer shots? You need extra backgrounds from a narrower angle, possibly blurred to give that ‘zoomed in close-up’ effect.

We were thinking of including a mailbag section in our Bargain Hunters show, where we would read some of the email we receive. I shot still pics for the backgrounds (video would be nicer) and we ad-libbed this. The ‘indoor’ sound quality is a dead giveaway (as it was a test we relied on the camera mic).

It’s also a bit more experience of what lighting works best. I used an amber filter on a backlight. This warm rimlight is meant to help the separation between the subject and blue background to give a cleaner ‘keying’ effect. Strangely the backlight seems to work best at head height, even though that isn’t very naturalistic. Though in theory it could be from the sun setting I suppose.

In all the hype that surrounded Rocketboom in its first year online, there was one question that always went unanswered.

Print articles and TV reports were in awe of the show. Breathlessly, they told us how it was produced in an ordinary living room, had a quarter of a million viewers each day and yet cost just $20-$50 to make. Some even suggested that the main expense was photographic light-bulbs.

Andrew, the creator and producer of Rocketboom, was quoted as saying he spent some 8-14 hours making each five-minute episode. Which will be no surprise to anyone who has been involved in the time-consuming business of making television programmes or video.

But, as they predicted a rash of ‘user-generated’ Rocketboom-style programmes coming to a website near you, what none of these ‘anyone can do it’ reports ever asked, was how did the people behind Rocketboom pay the rent and buy food?

It was clear that making Rocketboom was a full-time job. After a year, I began to wonder. Did Rocketboom have a financial backer who had given them start-up cash? Was Andrew a rich-kid who didn’t have to worry about earning a living? Were they all on welfare?

Of course money isn’t everything, but eventually it became clear they did want to earn an income from the show.

As a video blog, Rocketboom has been a spectacular success. A phenomenon and I wholeheartedly congratulate Andrew and Amanda on what they did. But, as a business, it represents a missed opportunity of quite staggering proportions. I read they made about $80,000 from the one ad they had so far.

To be running for eighteen months, with 300,000 viewers per day, five days per week, and make only that, is just mind-boggling. With Google ads you can make $500 a year from a website that only gets 50 visitors a day…

History is littered with the tales of people who had great ideas or creativity, but failed to do what was necessary to turn those into an income. Rocketboom gave away its product under a creative commons licence. Its website and show usually carried no ads. It seems to me that the only valuable asset is the ‘brand’ and Amanda Congdon is a huge part of that.

Now the bubble has burst. Occasionally Rocketboom was brilliant (Amanda dancing in Russia), but often it was a bit too off-the-wall and left us scratching our heads in bemusement. Andrew was an expert on the RSS distribution side of things, with the result that Rocketboom was the first to make it big. It was a novelty and highly popular for that reason. That iconic combination of Amanda and the map… They captured a moment in time and I fear that moment is now over.

If I was Amanda, I would start making a new online show right now while she is so much in the public eye. If I was Andrew, I would sell the Rocketboom show, archives (which don’t have a lot of value because they are so topical) and domain name and split the money with Amanda, while they still have the chance to make some money from this. Otherwise Rocketboom is going to begin a slow fade into history without making either of them rich.

The worst thing would be to get tied up in a legal case for several years, by which time there will be nothing left to carve up. Time is of the essence for both of them…