Murdoch and Sky

As one of my recent posts might suggest, I'm not a fan of what one of Murdoch's papers have done. I don't read The Times, Sun or NOTW and I'm going to be ditching my Sky box soon.

But I still don't really understand what the big deal is with Murdoch owning Sky.

OK, I can see that someone owning influential media is a big deal, that they can report for or against one party, and perhaps not having them owning all the newspapers is a good idea. Is that affected by Sky? Well, no. He's not going to own Sky News anyway.

Or, if he was doing something that would reduce competition, that might be a bad thing. Is this deal reducing competition? Err... no.

Does Sky therefore have control over say, oil, food or spice? No. It's movies, footie and bought-in US TV shows. Anyone can live without them (as I'm about to do).

So, why is this such a big deal?

Into the Storm

If you missed this last night on BBC2, I'm not sure if it's available anywhere, but as a biopic of Churchill during the war years, it was quite splendid.

The Office

I've never really quite got BBC's The Office. I watched a couple of episodes and thought it was not funny at all. It's probably because I've worked for years in offices and that I've met more extreme versions of the main characters who did far, far crazier shit than went on. So, really, I got nothing from it than turning up at work would have done.

Now, I don't have a problem with people reflecting the monotony of office life or mid-life crises. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin did it marvellously, precisely because it exaggerated the monotony including the repeated train delays, the boss who always says different sage-like words in the same ways, but also, that the protagonist created comedy from the drama of breaking out from it.

But I think this Guardian piece has illuminated why people like it:-

The Office still feels unique in its commitment to the bleak monotony of the average British working day. "We didn't want anything sexy or cool," Ricky said in last night's interview. The sea of bored, distracted faces, the greyness of the soulless strip-lit set and the repetition of deadly dull punctuating images like a churning photocopier created a sitcom environment which still strikes me as unusually authentic in 2009.

In other words, The Office is part of the rockist ideology to that writer.

To anyone not familiar with rockism, I will try to explain. Rockism was originally termed by the singer Pete Wylie to describe the belief that some forms of music are more authentic than others, and therefore more worthy. It comes from the desire of people to show how smart, clever or part of a particular group they are by their musical choices, rather than enjoying music for what it is (the best example of rockism around is Later With Jools Holland which eschews pop music for dull-yet-worthy world music).

So, back to The Office, is it just that people like it for that reason? That liking The Office says something about them? That instead of watching something funny like TV Burp or whatever Peter Kay has produced, they'd rather demonstrate how hip and clever they are?

Opera on TV

You know how whenever there's an argument about the BBC license fee and how there's always the claim of "but without the BBC, you wouldn't get things like opera on TV and Murdoch just wants to pump game shows into your front room"?

Sky Arts to broadcast live opera from Glyndebourne

Sky Arts has also acquired television distribution rights to show the Glyndebourne opera series for the next four years.

That's high quality German and Italian opera, in the original language including subtitles. And Handel's Giulio Cesare is quite an obscure opera at that.

If Sky can do it without subsidy, we don't need the BBC to provide it by forcing single mothers to cough up for it.

I rather like that Sky and Glyndebourne have done this, seeing how neither of them depends on the state (Glyndebourne receives arts funding to do some touring, but if that was cut, they'd survive quite happily in their current location).

Local News

I was reading another piece in the Mail, and noticed that it was about a local news presenter here in the South West and something about allegedly fiddling expenses. No big deal. But this...

But sources close to Ms Aziz say the £150,000-a-year presenter has been suspended over allegations that she made seven wrongful expense claims

Isn't ITV in the crapper? Don't we keep hearing how they're repeatedly getting their arse kicked by Google in the advertising market? What the fuck are they doing paying £150K for someone to present the sort of inspid local crap that you get on West Country Tonight?