For those who hated summer camps and the like...

Yesterday while channel surfing I came across a rerun of Addams Family Values. And the very best scene is available online:
The perfect antidote to all the patronising smarminess of helpers and plastic artificialness that many a child has endured at one holiday activity or another throughout the ages.

Humans *will* walk elsewhere again

Neil Armstrong has died. And many have wondered if the Space Race is a thing of the past. It's forty years since the last Moon landing. Missions to Mars get routinely predicted and put back further and further. Heck even science fiction set in the future keeps putting the date back in the hope of seeming realistic.

But I believe it will happen. One day we will return to the Moon. And we'll go further. We'll go to Mars. We'll go all over the Solar System. We'll go to Alpha Centauri. We'll even go to the Andromeda Galaxy and beyond. And not just to explore but to expand, live, work and play.

It may take a bit of time, but we'll get there eventually.

30.15 million did *not* watch EastEnders on Christmas Day 1986

Last night ITV ran TV's Biggest Blockbusters, looking at the most watched shows on British television in several categories. It was an interesting programme, particularly when it highlighted shows that are now completely forgotten (e.g. Oh No it's Selwyn Froggitt, Market in Honey Lane or Mrs Thursday) or showing which comedians were more popular - it's a shock to discover that Mike Yarwood got slightly more viewers than Morecambe and Wise at their height when you consider the coverage each has got since.

However they repeated at least one big error in compiling their list - the claim that on Christmas Day 1986 30.15 million watched EastEnders (and thus Den giving Angie divorce papers was the most watched drama of all time). This is repeating a common misunderstanding of how the viewing figures worked, and reflects the BBC boasting at the time.

The given figure actually combines the viewers on Christmas Day itself with those for the omnibus repeat the following Sunday. About 19.5 million actually watched on Christmas Day - still a very impressive figure but not as good for boasting and often the media (and TV's Biggest Blockbusters researchers) overlooked the distinction. This was despite the point being made at the time - Granada complained more than once when Coronation Street, which then didn't have a repeat, get more viewers than the first screening of EastEnders but the latter got written up as the "winner" of the ratings battle. It's a pity that these myths get trotted out all these years later.

What was the most watched drama of the 1980s? It was in fact a movie - the January 20th 1980 screening of Live and Let Die with 23.50 million viewers.

So how many of the other figures and chart places can be taken as accurate? It's hard to say because there are several problems with viewing figures, not least the lack of a single industry wide system before 1981 and ITV counting households rather than heads until 1977. There's a further problem that the recording systems haven't always been very good at catching crowd viewers in pubs, schools, workplaces, open air screens and the like and so the precise figures for some shows may be undercounted. This most obviously hits live events like sport and Royal Weddings, but further down the charts could also hit current affairs shows and documentaries that might attract group watching with special parties at people's homes or discussion groups. Discussing Question Time live with other viewers didn't begin with Twitter!

One of the best written intros to how figures have been calculated historically that I've seen is Corriepedia: Viewing Figures (and no, I've never been a Coronation Street fan). It also highlights that back in the 1960s and 1970s Christmas Day was often one of the worst days for soap viewing figures, and there was a period in the 1970s when Coronation Street would actually skip Christmas Day altogether! How times have changed.

And other than live events we'll probably never see such high viewing figures again. Not only are there far more channels now, but with many shows having multiple screenings in a week plus the growth of one hour later channels and programmes on demand, audiences are becoming ever more fagmented. Timeshifting through digital and video recorders is generally incorporated into the final viewing figures for a show but with so many other opportunities to watch a programme there isn't a huge audience all at once.

But there are still exceptions when an event is live. Invariably they're Royal events.

Bill Mantlo and health insurance

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I'm a bit of a comics buff. But today I don't want to talk about a particular comic but about a creator and the horrific situation he faced, not just twenty years ago but since then.

Bill Mantlo was one of those writers who frequently forgot the limitations of the medium and the titles he was given. Assigned to write Marvel Team-Up, a disposable series of one-off stories featuring Spider-Man and any old guest star he instead turned out some epic masterpieces. Assigned to Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, a second headline title for the character that just served to met a public demand he instead began crafting a distinctive direction and identity for the book, at times making it the best Spider-Man title on the market. Then there were licensed titles like The Micronauts and Rom: Spaceknight, both based on shortlived toys. Instead of churning out simplistic tales to just advertise the product Mantlo instead crafted incredible complex sagas that sold so well both books outlasted their toys by many years and set standards for other toy based books. And there was so much more - one estimate is that he wrote over five hundred issues and for nearly every single Marvel title. He didn't just craft fantasies but also sought to use his writing to explore very real and serious issues in a way few others did.

But on June 17 1992 Bill Mantlo was seriously injured in a hit and run accident. And unlike the comics there was no miracle cure, no happy ending. The story of his life is told in LifeHealthPro: Tragic Tale and it's not pleasant. It's a tale of where the focus of health insurance really is, and the damage that has upon not only on a patient's chances of recovery, but the wider damage it wreaks upon families. One of the most horrible points is when the insurance company brought in their own doctor to get a different report from the hospital's own staff. But the worst is that this is not an exceptional case or an example of the system not functioning the way it was planned. It was the system working as normal.

It's a terrifying insight into a world where profit margins are the primary determinant rather than basic humanitarian need. I hope we never go that way.

Bring back Neil Kinnock!

I never thought I'd write this. But tonight's Have I Got News For You with William Shatner hosting was just dire. Far too stiff and stilted, Shatner just didn't hit the right notes IMHO. Even Neil Kinnock was better than this!

So HIGNFY producers, please bring back Neil Kinnock before the next Shatner appearance.

Bye-bye analogue television

Tonight is the second and final stage of the digital switch-over in London. I've blogged before about the screw-ups (The Digital Switchover screw-up) and for the moment am just thinking on the passing of an institution.

Here at least it's the final end of Ceefax as we knew it. When we first got a television with text I remember the fun of going through the various pages. In the days before the internet it was incredible to be able to access so much information, from news stories to weather reports to travel disruption to TV listings and so forth, all at the pressing of a few buttons... and waiting seeming ages for the right page to load. Sure there's the red button service on some of the digital channels, but it just doesn't feel the same. There was something about the blockiness of the old text system that just made it so reassuring, in a way that hasn't been replicated.

What about the signal itself? Well the harsh reality is that on modern television sets an analogue signal looks distinctly worse, largely because the modern sets are over analysing the signal. On a good old fashioned set you could got brilliant pictures given good reception. I grew up not many miles from the Crystal Palace transmitter and we always got brilliant pictures for BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 on our fixed aerial, and pretty good on portable aerials too. Of course there had to be something to let the side down, and that something was Channel 5. I remember the lousy signal quality no matter what was done to boost it, and there were periods when we just gave up altogether. (It was even worse when I was a student in Canterbury. Because of potential interference with French television, Channel 5 simply wasn't available there at all. I often wondered if it was barred from obtaining the rights to screen reserved sports that were otherwise only available to the most widespread analogue channels.)

There was also the fun of trying to get good reception on portable aerials (a fun I haven't yet tried with digital) - the joy of wandering round the room trying to find the precise angle to get the best picture, of trying all manner of boosts through special devices and bog standard VCRs, of frustration with it all, and then triumph when you found the signal.

I wonder if people felt the same sense of nostalgia at the time of what we'd now call the "625 switchover"? I can't remember it myself. This was the time when the transmissions in the old 405 line format were finally ended and the 625 line format was left as the only service in transmission. Although 625 line transmission began as early as 1964 with the launch of BBC2 (which led to a bizarre series called "Theatre 625" - basically plays, or TV movies, shot in the higher definition format - I wonder if anyone would do a series called "Film HD" today?), and was brought to BBC1 & ITV in 1969, 405 line signals were still broadcast for older television sets up until 1985. And you thought it took a long time to switch-over to digital!

(Here's a little piece from that time. This clip shows the very BBC1 last signals transmitted in 405 lines in London. And it's the weather with Ian McCaskill:)

(Yes they did used to play the National Anthem upon close-down.)

And now as analogue passes away, I wonder how long it will be before we contemplate a shut-down of the digital system in favour of something more advanced?

UKIP London mayoral candidate admits: I can't deliver my promises

More confirmation of UKIP as ineffective, this time from their candidate's own mouth, as he admits that many of his promises are things the Mayor of London as no power to implement. Courtesy of Metro: UKIP London mayoral candidate admits: I can't deliver my promises.

The headline says it all really.

The failings of UKIP

There's an excellent piece in the Telegraph entitled Why no decent Tory should vote Ukip by Abhijit Pandya, who spent a year advising UKIP, has seen up close just how useless, ineffective and incoherent a party it is. Amongst the damaging charges:

[The] party's MEPs are obsessed with infantile stunts. These include wondering around Brussels, at the taxpayer's expense, singing "there is a hole in my bucket". Entertaining as it is watching Mr Farage doing this, and giving bombastic speeches in the European Parliament, it does nothing to curb the powers of the EU.

...[T]here is not a single amendment to a European regulation forced by Ukip, despite being Britain’s second-largest party in the European Parliament... [I]t is extraordinary that Ukip has not, in over a decade, managed to develop a strategy to undermine European law by appropriate subtle and strategic amendments.
...
The party is more interested in ranting and raving than in the more thoughtful task of fully engaging with its opponents on policy terms. This is why its failure to alter the course of Europe away from a social-democratic federal state has been immense.
...
...[A]s a consequence of being a one-issue Party, they are just about split on everything else. Ukip will go Left, Right or centre to grab the next available vote.
...
For Tories yearning for the old years of glory, a move to Ukip would be a move back to the feeling of looking at the remnants of the Tory Party after its 1997 catastrophe... Worse still it would benefit Labour, and another Labour victory is the last thing this country needs.

It just confirms that UKIP is not a striding force for anything, but just a protest vote accumulating, rabble rousing, whinge-the-whinge not fight-the-fight shouty movement.

Flashback: The 1992 election

Twenty years ago today it was the 1992 general election. A record breaking election that saw the Conservatives win a fourth term, with the most votes for any party in British electoral history. And they did it without spin - compare Neil Kinnock's grandiose Sheffield rally with John Major going out on the streets and speaking common sense on a good old fashioned soapbox.

Yet for many Conservatives 1992 has become a forgotten election. For some the victory is an uncomfortable truth, that the party could win elections without Margaret Thatcher and thus justified deposing her. For others the memory of the next five years is dominated by so many problems that they'd really rather not remember them and secretly wish the election had been lost.

However there are signs of a slow change in John Major's reputation with even some of his old critics starting to reappraise his record - see for example It's time to give John Major the credit we so cruelly denied him by Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph. And the various historical rankings of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom have seen Major slowly rise up the charts judged by academics, in recent years overtaking Edward Heath (University of Leeds: Academics rate Brown one of the worst post 1945 PMs). Maybe he will rise further in years to come.

Would it have been better to lose the 1992 election? It's hard to say, though if the party hadn't deposed Margaret Thatcher it's likely we would have lost. Indeed if the landslide had come five years soon, Thatcher might even have had the humiliation of losing her own seat. Such a result could have been the necessary blow to the neo-Thatcherite wing of the party and silenced the sirens who spent much of the last twenty years claiming that going more Thatcherite than even Thatcher did was the solution for the country. And some of the more Machiavellian might point out that a loss would have given the chaos of Black Wednesday to Neil Kinnock and John Smith. Perhaps the Conservatives would have taken rather less than thirteen years to return to government.

But losing would have meant the country being run by Neil Kinnock. And that's truly a horrific thought. Whether losing might have been better for the party, it would have been far worse for the country.

So as the BBC Parliament channel reruns the 1992 election coverage, a big cheer to John Major for achieving such a victory and saving us from that nightmare.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter everybody.