Torchwood: Miracle Day. Who are these people?

When your Twitter timeline accelerates to an unreadable blur, it’s generally a sign that something special’s on the telly.

When the warning before a TV show isn’t for bad language, flashing lights, or even boobs but a mysterious ‘something that some readers may find upsetting’ then it’s generally a good time to start paying attention. After all, what could it be? Peanuts? Gluten?

That happened to me the other day, when Doctor Who’s anagrammatic spinoff Torchwood returned for a new series.

A number of recent TV series, especially BBC TV series, have flirted with America. It’s a big market and if you can consistently sell your content over there, worries about licence fees would be a thing of the past.

The new series did a lot more than flirt with America though. It slipped off its slingback under the table and boldly thrust its stockinged foot into America’s groin for a full hour.

The week the news went pop

It was difficult this week to avoid news of The News Of The World’s voicemail ‘hacking’ scandal, and the ripples of shame that emanated from it across the News International group.

It went beyond difficult, and shaded into the impossible, if you share my vice of watching current affairs television programmes and using Twitter to form a national catcalling mob of wisacres.

It wasn’t difficult to find commentators ready to condemn the NotW’s methods. John Prescott and Tom Watson were at the head of a phalanx of politicians and commentators of every political hue eager to stick the boot into Rupert Murdoch and his organisation.

But politics is just show business for ugly people. Show business is show business for pretty people and the News Of The Screws made plenty of enemies in showbiz too.

And you don't need me to tell you that TV prefers pretty people, if it can get them...

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

Spooks, the Likely Lads, and the return of Lady Mary's Deadly Vajazzle

So for the first two days of this blog’s short life I have been rattling on about how social networking toys – most notably Twitter – enhance and expand the television-watching experience.

But there is of course a downside.

I’m very fond of Spooks. More specifically, I’m very fond of #spooks. That’s the hashtag that brings together a temporary online community which takes enormous delight in every improbable plot twist or convenient technological shortcut thrown up by BBC 1’s fast-moving and deliciously daft spy drama.

However, I have interests apart from watching the telly. Oh yes. I quite like brutally violent videogames too. Tonight I’m going to a press launch for Black Ops, the latest iteration of the Call Of Duty franchise.

I’m very pleased to be attending but of course that means missing the last Spooks episode of the season. It’s bound to be packed with incident and accident. Every twist and turn will be faithfully chronicled and discussed by that community on Twitter.

How will I remain ignorant of the outcome until tomorrow night when I can catch up on the iPlayer?

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.