Glastonbury 2011: Alcopopalypse Now

You would be forgiven for thinking that the Glastonbury festival was a great national celebration, given the near-blanket coverage that the BBC provides. You might well think that everyone in Britain would be heading to Glastonbury or one of its numerous imitators, given the almost daily ‘festival essentials’ features running in the broadsheets for the past month or so.

The establishing crowd shots of a sea of shining faces give that assumption the lie, however. As the scene changes to a closer shot, it’s even more apparent that Glastonbury is an almost exclusively Caucasian event. 

As the camera zoomed in even further  on the front of every roiling crowd it seemed to find those same four pretty blonde girls that are apparently under contract to The Daily Telegraph to illustrate every Summer’s record-breaking A-Level results.

Despite The Guardian’s unstinting approbation for multiculturalism, and The Daily Mail’s unbridled fear, Glastonbury demonstrates that the great influx from Asia and Africa really hasn't penetrated our society all that deeply.

Camelot: Looking for King Arthur's iPod

Sword and sauciness really does seem to be the televisual flavour of the moment. In the last few years we’ve had Rome, two series of Spartacus, The Tudors and the towering majesty that was Game Of Thrones.

All have featured – to a greater or lesser extent – swordplay, intrigue and no small amount of nudity in a pseudo-historical context.

Michael Hirst, the creator and writer of The Tudors has rebooted or reimagined or rehashed the legend of King Arthur for us, the easily-pleased 21st Century television audience.

Now.

You can make a grown-up sexy King Arthur. Just ask John Boorman. You can make a family-friendly Camelot story for tea-time audiences too. It’s called Merlin, and it’s doing fairly well thank you.

But I don’t think you can do both.

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

In which Stewart Lee gets it right, and the BBC TV schedulers get it wrong

There are only so many hours in the day, so it seems churlish to complain when a television show gets squeezed out onto the fringes of the schedule. Especially when it’s a show that may only appeal to a comparatively small demographic.

But when such a show then becomes an absolute smash on the iPlayer, it’s probably a sign that the BBC schedulers have in this case made a mistake.

You know, that iPlayer they have nowadays. The iPlayer. You've seen it haven't you. The iPlayer...

Further reading: More lively Michael Moran nonsense on the web

I do a lot more than write about television programmes you know. I walk my dog. I do a certain amount of light dusting. And sometimes I write things for other sites.

Mostly, I look at films for Bleeding Cool. Some of my more recent efforts include the splendidly heroic Thor, the momentously groovy X-Men First Class, and the ineffably daft Priest.

Because, when I was a lad, I played synthesizers for a living I have also written about a large and lovely synthesizer for The Register.

If you like my chatty style and devil-may-care approach to research, you’ll find more of it on those links.

Give ‘em a go, why don’t you? 

Preview: Falling Skies

When the story of early 21st Century television is written it won’t consist entirely of indistinguishable reality shows featuring publicity hungry no-marks. Not entirely.

There’s also a fine tradition of  big high-concept TV series being maintained. We’ve got a couple over here – Sherlock, the rebooted Doctor Who series, Spooks, that kind of thing.

The US of course did it bigger, better and first. The trend really kicked off with shows such as 24 and Lost.  Now we are almost routinely encouraged to get excited about ambitious new TV dramas. Some of them, like The Event, prove to be non-events that leave us high and dry waiting for a conclusion. Some, such as The Walking Dead, are so great that we never want the end of the world to stop.

True Blood series 4 preview: May contain traces of witch

There's a vampire for everyone. You can have your old-fashioned louche Count, you can have your twinkly emo, or you can even have the freaky Pan's Labyrinth Alien kind they're trying out in Priest.

I'm pretty keen on True Blood's version though. Taking most of their vampiric cues from the Blade movies they're strong, supernatural and more than a bit saucy.

Last series, our bloodsucking pals had a few werewolves to deal with.

This time around, Sookie and Bill take on a coven of witches. Seems fair enough.

What do you reckon for Series 5? Shall we start a sweepstake? Zombies? Mummies? It's been a little while since anyone has put together a halfway decent Frankenstein's monster...















If your're still reading, I have one more question: Why didn't Marvel hire Alexander Skarsgård to play Thor?