Thursday 30 October 2008

suspensions, resignations, and iPlayer nonsense

Ross suspended for three months
(from BBC News)

A relatively sensible step, especially with it being these three months -- March to May wouldn't seem a long time, but October to January will seem an age, what with all the fuss of Christmas and New Year. Hopefully it'll be long enough for people to calm down and gain a sense of perspective.

However, I dislike the controller of Radio 2 resigning. I always hate it when people are forced to resign over something they weren't even involved in, just because they're the highest person in the chain. It's also a stupid concept -- she made a mistake (well, she didn't, but for the sake of argument...) which she could learn from and be careful not to do again; her replacement has made no such error, leaving them more open to do the same / something else more easily, unaware of the early signs of where things are headed.

Back to Ross: amusingly, if you search iPlayer for "Jonathan Ross" or "Film 2008" or what have you then any programme featuring him seems to have been pulled. However, search the BBC's site more generally, and they can still be found. (That doesn't guarantee they still work however, as episode 8 won't play for me. I'm just glad I got round to watching the Daniel Craig interview before the show was removed!)

It also seems all his shows have been entirely cancelled. While it's understandable that Friday Night With... has been cancelled (as it's very much "The Jonathan Ross Show") I hope they can find an alternate presenter for Film 2008 -- people don't watch that for Wossy, they watch it for info on films, and removing it because the regular present is suspended wouldn't be in viewers' interests.

As with this week's big Who news, this has finally managed to garner some moderately-prominent coverage on US sites like IMDb too.

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