Friday 20 May 2011

TV

Plenty today...

Archer
2x03 Blood Test
[Watch it (again) on Demand 5.]

The Event
1x20 One Will Live, One Will Die
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

House
7x22 After Hours
Different; good. Season finale next week! Crikey.

How I Met Your Mother
6x12 False Positive
Another strong episode. After struggling a bit (and coming in for some flack for it), HIMYM seems to have re-found its earlier narratively-playful groove. Nice.
[Watch it (again) on 4oD.]

$#*! My Dad Says
1x11 Family Dinner for Schmucks
So this has been cancelled. It's not the greatest sitcom ever, but it's entertaining enough. Ah well.
[Watch it (again) on Demand 5.]

The South Bank Show
37x10 The Final Cut [series finale]
The last-ever edition of ITV's long-running arts show, which aired nearly a year ago now. It looks at South Bank itself, though in its usual atypical way: rather than just providing a history of the series it interviews three of its filmmakers to find out why they did things the way they did them. Very good.

Articles

The Impossible Astronaut - most recorded TV show of all time by Chuck Foster
(from Doctor Who News Page)
4.11 million people chose to record the opening episode of this series of Doctor Who and watch it within a week; the next nearest is the first episode of Come Fly With Me, with 3.29 million. That's quite a margin.
It's interesting to look at the full top ten, compiled here. The quote in the article points out they're all within the last three years -- that's true, but it's more impressive to look at it this way: nine of them are within the last 12 months. The anomaly is Christmas 2008's astonishingly popular Wallace & Gromit special. Also worthy of note that, of those nine, three of them were on Christmas Day 2010.
I'm also not sure I believe this is the real top ten: there's very neatly ten different series on there, series which are all enormously popular and air many episodes per year (as opposed to it being full of one-off dramas or sports events, etc), so how can it be that (for instance) 3.17 million people recorded one episode of The X Factor but no more than 2.37 million recorded any other? That doesn't seem to make sense.
But hey-ho, Doctor Who is still #1!

$#*! My Dad Says Creator, Father React to Show's Cancellation
(from The Live Feed at The Hollywood Reporter)
The news it's been cancelled is just news -- this response is pretty funny, but also heartwarming... in the way the show itself is heartwarming, so...

Waterstone's sold off as Amazon eBook sales bite by Nicole Kobie
(from PC Pro)
"For every hardback we sell online, we sell four eBooks online" -- this kind of statistic shouldn't surprise anyone. Who wants a huge, heavy, expensive hardback when you can have the same text on a highly portable eBook reader for the same price or less? It would be more interesting statistically to see how eBooks stack up against paperbacks.

Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

This week, the number of Blu-rays I own passes the 200 mark. Woo! They now make up just over 15% of my collection.

Number of titles in collection: 1,309 [up 2]
Of which DVDs: 1,108 [no change]
Of which Blu-rays: 201 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 3,246 [up 3]
Number of films in collection: 1,380 [up 1]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 4,816 [up 6]

See you next week, faithful reader.