Wednesday 15 July 2009

TV

Dragons' Den
7x01 Episode 1
Always good to have back on our screens. The battle over this week's final pitch feels set to be a particularly memorable Den moment.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Mock the Week
7x01 (9/7/09 edition)
With Virgin now more or less installed, it's time to catch up on some of the stuff I've missed in the last week or so... starting, semi-ironically, with a topical news quiz.
[Watch it (again) on iPlayer.]

Articles

Five Outrageous Reality Shows from Around the World by Stefanie Lee
(from tv.com)
Penitents Compete? Japanese Tetris? Sperm Race? You know you want to know more.

Rose Byrne: Star Wars TV Show To Be a Family Drama by Seth Abramovitch (from Movie|Line)
and
Star Wars Live-Action TV Series Casting Underway by Eric Ditzian (from MTV Movies Blog)
She's not in the series and she only had a small part in one of the six films ("I’m literally like an extra in that film."), but it seems Damages star Rose Byrne can't help letting slip little details on the forthcoming Star Wars live action TV series.

Steven Soderbergh: 'I can see the end of my career' by Henry Barnes (from guardian.co.uk)
and
Does Anyone Direct More Movies Than Steven Soderbergh? by Kyle Buchanan (from Movie|Line)
Apparently this news has caused a bit of a stir -- unsurprisingly -- but it is phenomenal how many films Soderbergh has directed in such a short space of time. Read the second article for some comparisons to other prolific directors -- Soderbergh leaves them all in the shade.

Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert by Julia Kollewe
(from guardian.co.uk)
"Report on young people's media habits written for investment bank by teenage intern causes huge interest in the City"
It's interesting that this has caused such a stir, because you can read the full text of his report here and see it's really not much cop -- a decent enough piece of work for a 15-year-old on an internship, maybe, but certainly no more than that. I'd also be prepared to wager it shows no more than the opinions of his group of friends -- at best, because it may just be what he thinks, lazily knocked out in half an hour. There's at least one glaring factual error in there, for example:
"Most people have Virgin Media as a TV provider. Some have Sky and some have Freeview"
It's a cold hard fact that the number of people with Sky is several times bigger than those with Virgin.