“Thanks so much”. They seem to always say that—in an over-sincere (close to patronising) way—after crosses (weather, other reports, etc). It always seems very out-of-place to me.
Television (category archive)
As if new epsiodes of The Simpsons aren’t bad enough—and they are—on the episode that aired here yesterday, JABF10 (’Marge Gamer’), the whole thing was sped up by 5-10% (I assume this was done locally). The end result? Ridiculous and distracting high-pitched voices. Very not cool. I assume that’s to fit more material into a small amount of time, but that’s stupid because it was a particularly terrible episode to begin with that could have been easily shortened (or, shockingly enough, they could have shown less advertisements).
Compare the original, sped-up version to the slowed-down, ‘how it should sound’ version.
What were the odds that the voiceover guy on Australia Post’s ‘daily’ ads had a cold when he was doing the recording? You’d think they could have postponed it by a week or something.
After Channel 9 (Australia) first showed previews for their upcoming 2007 lineup, I expected this show would have more of a gladiatorial angle—spears, lion pit, that sort of thing. Alas.
I love everything the Chaser team does, and that includes the War. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a comedy show, recorded in front of a live studio audience, where the team discuss various happenings and generally generate comdy. This week, among other things:
- they played clips of, and talked about, Chas Licciardello’s boneheading at the Logies (as I called it last week)—he scored a grand total of around 34 appearances.
- Craig Reucassel went door-to-door with email spam
- Charles Firth vox pop’d Americans, trying to see if he could get one to break George Bush’s record of saying ‘freedom’ 17 times in one speech/conversation (he succeeded)
This is one show I’ve got to get on DVD, but in the meantime I’m downloading the episodes.
Sunday night was Logies night, Australian TV’s night-of-nights. While it’s hard to take the audience-voted awards, the Silver and Gold Logies, seriously, it was still, without doubt, a highly entertaining night. Night. Adam Hills was backstage in the green room, interviewing winners as they came off the stage, Bert Newton did a predictably good job as one of the five hosts (the others did a good job, too), a truly bizarre Joan Rivers swore and staggered, not to mention the insane performance from Cirque du Soleil, and all the presenters struggling to say “Natalie Bassingthwaighte” (or fit it onto a statuette). The Chaser team were there in full force, too—especially Chas Licciardelo, who ‘boneheaded’ his way into almost every shot possible (and even hijacked the stage at one point). Chris Lilley (of We Can Be Heroes and Big Bite fame) picked up two logies, including the inaugural Graham Kennedy Outstanding New Talent award, and did a live performance of ‘Indigeridoo’, in-character as Ricky Wong. While he didn’t win an award, Heath Franklin (aka. Ronnie Johns) was nominated for the Oustanding New Talent award and was shown drunk at his table, which was covered with empty beer bottles.
Finally, the Gold Logie: the sentimental favourite John Wood finally took it out, breaking the ten-year drought of being nominated without winning.
PS: the Logie has got to be the coolest-looking award statuette ever.
PPS: RIP, Richard Carleton.
Local and Television
Back for 2006. It has never been a brilliant show, but this year it has been particularly poor. Why couldn’t Ten have given a second chance to some of the better shows axed from Nine (<cough>Micallef Tonight</cough>)?
Local and Television
idents.tv is a blog of television idents from various countries (including Australia) and it is very good, with downloadable videos and usually some commentary. Very nice if you’re into all of this design and branding stuff like me.
Australia’s Channel Nine has unveiled new logo and identity. Basically, they removed the dots and stuck the 9 (otherwise unchanged) in a box. They also released some new idents and spruced up a few of their shows, including Today.
First, the good: when used well, the new logo is good, primarily for purposes of symmetry. Nine promos make good use of this, with the logo in the bottom middle, surrounded by orange bars (highly unoriginal, but I’ll get to that in a minute). Parts of the new Today are also good-looking, primarily the little weather section. The weather symbols (rain, sunny, etc.) look real hot and fit in well with the box theme, and the adjacent box with the town’s abbreviation and maximum temperature is also well designed.
It’s not all good. The idents are awful, trying to incorporate the ideas of serenity, freshness, and fun, and failing miserably at all three. Nine’s going for the orange-blue-white colour scheme which is so clichæd it’s not funny, and it’s currently claimed by Channel Ten anyway. Let’s come up with something original next time, shall we? The coloured bars on the station promos are also completely stolen from Channel Ten: the main orange bar with overlapping semi-transparent white bars moving within. And that’s just for their good promos; some use a different, lop-sided design, with blue bars, the blue-on-white logo, and many gaps in-between. This second design has a better colour scheme, but the gaps and alignment are nonsensical and detract heavily.
The design of the new Today show is a combination of individual components, few of which integrate well, failing to give an overall tone to the show. Unlike the weather updates, which look and function well, the weather map is truly abysmal. Too much space is taken up by the three squares, indicating the weather, max. temperature, and min. temperature, leaving no space for names of cities and making it harder to identify where you are.
This goes for a lot of their new look programs, including A Current Affair. Many of the components do mesh well, by virtue of the colour scheme, but the alignment messes it up.
Overall, some good points, but it could have been done better. Also, today was my birthday, but you didn’t come to my weblog to read about me.
This is a quick plug for the A1 Grand Prix, which offers close and exciting racing. The cars are all of identical specifications, and painted in the colours of their countries (each country in the series gets one car). The format is easy to understand, and the combination of identical cars and the power boost button (which provides a temporary power increase for overtaking) results in the close and exciting racing I advertised in the opening sentence. Plus, provided you’re in/from a country represented in A1, it’s not hard to find someone to support.
I recommend giving it a look even for those who don’t watch much motorsport.