Elsewhere on the web: Stevyn Colgan on the state of TV

The 'baby food diet' is currently exciting the imaginations of slimming faddists across magazine land. Imagine if we only ate pre-chewed mush all the time. Evolution is economical. If there were no advantage to having teeth we'd lose them.

There's a baby food diet for your mind too. It's called television. Here's Stevyn Colgan talking about it. He's funny, he's clever, he's right and he makes me afraid.

TED, if you've not found it yet, is an organisation dedicated to encourage us all to think. They hold conferences and shows and invite a staggeringly diverse range of people to deliver short 20 minute talks on their area of expertise. All of these videos are then posted to the TED website for us to watch for free. And they are watched. Over 100 million viewers per year. Staggering. But guess what? TED offered their talks to the BBC and they turned them down as being 'too intellectual'. 

The two exciting futures of television

A little while back I had a job interview at ‘a major national newspaper’. One of the interview questions was “what would you do with our TV listings?”. My answer was “scrap them and use the space for something worthwhile”

I didn’t get the job.

My point was that IP-enabled televisions are becoming so common, and IP enabled devices such as games consoles and minicomputers are attached to so many more TVs, that access to on-demand services such as the BBC’s iPlayer are edging towards universality.

My friend Steve who knows about these things assures me that the number of IP-enabled IPTV ready 3D TVs in the wild will, according to figures from iSuppli, reach 23.4m by the end of 2011, hitting nearly 160 million in 2015

Game Of Thrones: This fantasy shit just got real.

My initial take on Game Of Thrones was cautiously positive. With Monday night’s episode all my reservations are oficially suspended. We saw Peter Grant out of Led Zeppelin lose a joust and behead Shergar, we saw Peter Dinklage shield the bejaysus out of some random miscreant, and best of all we saw one of 2011’s most spellbinding bits of dialogue writing.

Game Of Thrones: May contain sexual content, scenes of violence, and nuts.

Amid all the more obvious HBO imports currently being touted by Sky Atlantic at the moment is a fantasy cuckoo in the nest. Fantasy books and movies always live, to an extent, in the shadow of JRR Tolkien. He’s the daddy of dwarves. He’s the don of dragons. Nobody writes an elf into a story without kicking a buck back to JRR.

Game Of Thrones is not your average kiddie-friendly trip to Middle Earth though. As the continuity announcer reminds us at the outset of every episode there’s talk of effing, there’s talk of jeffing, there are boobs and supposedly there’s violence although so far I’ve been disappointed on that score.

Everyone knows if there are boobs in something then it's OK for grownups to watch it. Even if it's about an imaginary olden days time that Simon Schama never told us about.

The tricky thing about writing fantasy is that there’s a whole new set of rules to get across. Fewer people than you think have read Lord Of The Rings or the Narnia books but there’s enough of that stuff floating around for most viewers to have absorbed most of the grammar without noticing.

In Game Of Thrones there are few of the standard fantasy tropes to lean on. In the handful of episodes I’ve seen so far no animals have spoken, despite numerous hints no dragons have appeared, and there’s only been one dwarf.

The real third dimension of TV

The rush towards 3D in cinema and television isn’t, I don’t think, driven by the desire of creative artists to show us new and interesting things in new and interesting ways.

It seems more likely that it’s an accidental conspiracy. First you have hardware manufacturers who need a new buzzword to help shift the next generation of TVs. Working alongside them you have content owners (and by this I principally mean movie studios) who want to make the pirating of their wares as non-trivial an operation as possible.

That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad thing. Commercial motives drove the development of widescreen cinema, for example. The format soon provided new creative opportunities for the film-makers who had it foisted upon them by their paymasters. In went on to, belatedly, foster the wide screen telly market and the vocabulary of visual comedy as the production team at Holby City hilariously struggled to make any meaningful use of the new aspect ratio.

Now, I’m not sure that 3D is ready to replace mainstream 2D pictures. Maybe it’s just me but nearly everything I see in 3D has the air of a Victorian toy theatre, with flat characters sliding about in a series of discrete planes rather than a continuously three-dimensional field. And, while we’re on it, the screening of Alice In Wonderland that I attended a year or so back left me with a growling headache that still hasn’t quite cleared.

Meanwhile, the quiet innovation that has blossomed from the grassroots to give TV a real added dimension has passed the major channels by almost completely.

Mankind is a social animal. Television watching, ostensibly an indoor, private pleasure, was always enhanced by the so-called watercooler conversation at work the next day. Now, with the near ubiquity of Twitter, the banter that makes us human is as immediate and as thrilling as throwing an empty beer can out of the window and seeing who it hits.

Instant communities quickly accrete around significant TV events, such as Eurovision, the Big Brother final or the tragically predictable Raoul Moat endgame. Really terrible films, and I’m looking at you here Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, are instantly transformed into kitschy interactive cult experiences. Even the ads between segments of major shows benefit from the rolling ‘directors commentary’ of online wags.

Despite the adage, not everyone has a novel in them. It does, though, appear that everyone has at least one 140 character zinger about Kerry Katona’s diction or Charlie Brooker’s hair.

Who am I, and what is all this stuff, and who are you?

Who Am I?
My name’s Michael Moran. At the moment I’m a journalist. I wrote for The Times for quite a while. I've also written a few books, my favourite is called SOD ABROAD: WHY YOU'D BE MAD TO LEAVE THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME. At The Times I specialised in fluffy info-tainment stuff about (mainly) films and stuff. Some of those stories attracted quite a lot of traffic, but the new regime at The Times isn’t really too interested in masses of traffic right now.

Consequently, around three months ago, I and some sixty of my little friends were invited to pursue new and exciting opportunities in the ‘freelance space’. I’m doing that right now, I’m spending many of my days writing news stories and such for the Daily Mail. There are worse jobs, but I do rather miss the world of fluffy info-tainment.

I think it was a reaction to the loss of fluff from my diet that drove me to spend a lot more time watching trashy TV shows and tweeting about them.