Ken Loach made the keynote speech at the 54th BFI London Film Festival. He said television has become the ‘enemy of creativity’.

In 1978 I was a teenager and one afternoon switched on the local ITV channel — Tyne Tees — at about 5.15pm to watch the US sitcom Mork and Mindy. However I nearly fell off my chair when it turned out that the episode was all about their evil landlord who was called ‘Arnold Wanker’.

Although a Wikipedia page about the word claims that the show was severely edited by ITV when it was shown (and wrongly calls him ‘Oliver’), the word certainly wasn’t cut in the north-east. I can only imagine no one at Tyne Tees had viewed the episode before screening it!

Now like many dimly-remembered shows from years gone by it has turned up on YouTube.

Last night as Alex Thomson presented More4 News live from the City, a man pushed his way in front of the camera. (more…)

The experience of uncovering the widely misreported crowd figures at the Manchester Pride parade has given me a healthy scepticism towards anything I read in the press.

A popular theme in the news these days is that the BBC is short of cash. But this is never put into a historical context. It seems that journalists are either too lazy or over-worked to look into it in any depth. So I decided to find out for myself… (more…)