Scott Matthewman

It’s been a busy week over at TV Today, where we’ve been running a series of features around Torchwood: Children of Earth, which begins a five-episode run on Monday and continues throughout the week. The stripped scheduling is a tactic BBC1 has been using in increasing amounts, to create a buzz, or “event television”.

And so, we responded with “event blogging” — and for us at least, it seems to have worked.

Page impressions to the TV Today blog were up by a massive 155% week-on-week in the last six days (statistics for today, Friday, are not yet available). Now, it’s not all due to Torchwood: we’ve also seen a spike in people searching for information on a possible fourth series of Robin Hood after Saturday’s series three finale. But it’s Torchwood that’s formed the bulk of the increase.

For those who haven’t enjoyed our content yet, here’s the full list (and bear in mind that they all, to some degree or another, contain spoilers):

• Interview with Russell T Davies, part 1
• Interview with Russell T Davies, part 2
• Interview with Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones)
• Interview with Eve Myles (Gwen Cooper)
• Interview with John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness)
• A look at the BBC Torchwood website
• A competition to win three Torchwood novels
• Reviews of the first of the three Radio 4 Afternoon Play Torchwood episodes
• And finally, a preview of Day One, the first episode of Children of Earth

When I went to the press launch, my original intention had been to try and get enough information for a double-page feature in the weekly print edition of The Stage. However, by the time I left the launch I was convinced that the material I had got was too bitty to make a coherent prose piece. In addition, the BBC had embargoed any content until ten days before the transmission (TX) date — but at that stage we did not actually know what that TX date would be, which made scheduling a print feature difficult.

So instead I filed the sound files away, thinking I’d be able to grab a few bits and pieces to make a single blog piece in the run-up to Children of Earth’s broadcast. Only when I started transcribing the interviews some days later did I realise that there was more interesting content in them than I’d appreciated at the time.

And so we decided to put out one interview a day, splitting producer Russell T Davies’ over two days: not only because he had so much to say, but because that conveniently meant that we’d have an interview a day for five days. But when I wrote the announcement post, Mark and I didn’t have too much of an idea what other posts we could come up with — save for an episode 1 preview, something we have done for numerous series in the past.

As it was, we had no problem coming up with additional content, and the reaction from around the web has been incredible.

Will this form a template for other series in the future? Possibly. Quite whether other shows have enough of a pre-existing internet following to give us the sort of feedback we’ve enjoyed this week, I’m not sure: certainly Doctor Who has, but what else? And will we get such a following combined with the “event TV” scheduling that has made this Torchwood mini-series so eagerly awaited?

We shall see. But from a personal point of view, it’s been an invigorating experience, so I hope it’s something we can repeat further down the line.

On Saturday, I went to Leicester Square to see some of the onstage performances put together by Westminster City Countil as part of the annual West End Live event.

Due to engineering works on train lines, and the long queueing time to get into the Leicester Square stage area, I missed performances by the cast of several big name shows, including Sister Act (which I still have not seen yet).

However, I did catch quite a few performances, and have put a selection the resulting photos up on Flickr. A slide show version is below:

The full collection is available to browse on Flickr. Please note that, unlike previous photos, I am not releasing these under any form of Creative Commons licence: if you want to use any of them for other purposes, please contact me.

A pleasant surprise to see this status on Twitter this morning from the BBC Radio 4 blog:

I’ve been doing weekly radio previews for a while now as part of the Turn off the TV section of our TV blog. Infuriatingly, this week’s has been, I think, one of the weakest: not helped by a computer crash yesterday corrupting my original draft of this week’s piece.

Still, if it brings in a few new readers it can only be a good thing. And compliments are rare, so I shall be savouring this one for a while.

Previously posted on TV Today

Every morning when I get into work, I find an inbox crawling with press releases, most of which are of little to no interest either to me directly or even to The Stage as a whole. This morning, I did see one which deserved additional reading, as it covered children’s television, an area that TV Today readers will know is dear to our hearts.

The release claims that 70% of parents of children under 7 have said that their children have had regular nightmares because of children’s programmes.

Needless to say, both the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph have pumped out the story onto their respective websites, pausing only to rewrite every other sentence into their house style. Seriously — the Daily Mail version of the story is, sentence for sentence, exactly the same structure as the release (except for omitting a crucial couple of paragraphs at the end — but more of that anon).

But questions of lazy churnalism aside, the line being pushed by the press release does at least deserve some closer analysis.

Except, I’m not sure it really does stand up to such scrutiny.

The debate about whether television affects young people’s behaviour is an age old one — older, indeed, then television itself — for TV, substitute cinema, theatre or (depending on how far back you want to go) poetry and the discussion existed.

It doesn’t help that so many different research studies often draw different conclusions (examples of such studies, and a basic look at possible reasons for the discrepancies, can be found here).

But one thing that must surely be acknowledged is that, even if children’s programmes were as horrific as this poll of parents suggests, any possible long-term consequence can surely be mitigated by the parents themselves.

I don’t actually believe that children’s programmes are any less scary than they were when I was of that age. I would personally find live action dramas like Into the Labyrinth or Children of the Stones far scarier than any cartoon, violent or otherwise. And I’m not sure I accept that, even at an early age, children are unaware that programmes like Ben 10 and Power Rangers are complete fantasy. But the ability to separate fantasy from reality is something that parents can and should encourage in their children.

The release also targets Saturday evening shows Doctor Who, Primeval and Robin Hood as too scary, suggesting they should be shown post-watershed. Here’s a thought - how about watching them as a family, so that youngsters can enjoy them safely? That is, after all, the type of audience they were commissioned for — and not by children’s departments, but by the grown-ups’ equivalents.

The Mail version of the story continues in a similar vein, but ends with a quote a spokeswoman for the website that did the survey:

“We think that back in the 1950s there was a lot more guidance from broadcasters about the suitability of children’s programmes - they had Watch With Mother banners, and For The Children branded programmes.”

And today we have CBBC, CITV, CBeebies, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr. — the list goes on. Whether it’s through dedicated children’s channels on digital networks, or heavily branded strands on the terrestrial channels, it’s never been easier to find programmes specifically commissioned for watching by children.

Indeed, recently the BBC has gone further, and introduced iPlayer for CBBC and iPlayer for CBeebies, which not only include easier layout for young fingers to navigate, but has dedicated links to information for grown-ups.

The whole reasoning behind the press release is fallacious. Is there a link between TV programming and either children’s behaviour or the incidence of nightmares? There may be, there may not be. A guick Google uncovered the aforementioned examination of the possibility of links, looking at various research models. Different research comes up with different conclusions, along with raising more questions. Do naturally aggressive people seek out aggressive programming? What role do peer groups play in establishing children’s understanding of what they watch? And so on.

One thing must be sure, though: when it comes to breaking any possible link between, say, children watching programming they find frightening and having nightmares, parents have an opportunity to provide reassurance and context.

Which brings me to the one section that the Mail doesn’t include in their version of the article: the closing paragraphs of the press release.

[The website spokeswoman says:] “However, parent are left to regulate what their child watches, how much they watch and when.

“This means they would at least need to consult a TV guide to find out which programmes are classed as C band — suitable for all children, and P band — suitable for pre-school children.”

But the poll reveals parents don’t have time to monitor what their children are watching minute by minute, and 70 per cent readily admit they leave their children watching television whilst they make the dinner or get things ready in another room.

How about that — parents being asked to take responsibility for their children’s upbringing, including their TV viewing habits. Er, excuse me, isn’t that your job rather than the broadcasters’?

If you paid a human being to mind your child, you would take the time and effort to ensure that you were leaving your charges in appropriate care. Unfortunately, it seems that when it comes to the box in the corner, not only do some parents want to see it as a free babysitter, they also want to free themselves of any responsibility in ensuring their offspring are left in good hands.

Tonight, I was lucky enough to be invited to the press launch of Sister Act: the Musical, which starts previews in May at the London Palladium after The Sound of Music leaves the West End to tour the UK.

A lot of the usual PR guff — how wonderful an opportunity it is, how great all the cast are, blah blah blah — was, of course, present. Somewhat unusually, we got a preview of some of the new music: unlike the film, most, if not all, of the score is original material rather than the movie’s use of classic soul and disco tracks.

For the females in the ensemble cast, this was an opportunity to use the uplifting choral numbers to raise the spirits of the jaded hacks present; for Patina Miller, who will be playing the role of Doloris so famously taken on by Whoopi Goldberg in the original film, it was a chance to shine. All exceeded any expectations, no matter how high they were set.

A personal highlight, though, was the onstage appearance of Alan Menken, who is scoring this new musical. After sitting down at a conveniently placed piano he proceeded to walk us musically through his career, starting with a medley from The Little Shop of Horrors and progressing through his numerous works for the Disney Corporation. It was noticeable, perhaps, that movie scores such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin deserved medleys of their own, while less successful fare such as Pocahontas got just a single memorable song. But that did not matter: to hear Menken perform his own material (much of it written with the late and much-missed Howard Ashman) was a dream come true. Should Radio 2 devote a Friday Night is Music Night to Menken’s work, as they have so recently to Don Black, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Strouse and so many other musical theatre greats, I’ll be there on the front row, cheering on the performers and doing my best not to drown them out in my enthusiasm.

I ran into Menken at the bar shortly afterwards. I was a gibbering wreck.

One should never meet one’s heroes.

It’s sobering to think that it’ll be five years ago next week that I won an award for political blogging.

That website, thegayvote.co.uk, fell out of my control when I left PlanetOut UK, who owned the domain. And when the UK office closed down shortly afterwards, the registration lapsed and got snapped up by a third party looking for a quick buck. It had lapsed quite recently and I held out hope that I may be able to grab it back, but it looks like the company that currently owns the domain name has renewed within the allowed limit, so it’ll remain unavailable.

If I had kept the whole blog going, I’m sure that the progression of Iceland’s Johanna Sigurdardottir to become the first out world leader would have been covered before now. It’s a significant milestone, of course, and one that was bound to have been passed one day.

That it has happened in Iceland, a country traditionally more respectful of gay and lesbian people as part of society as a whole, is not that much of a surprise. In that respect, it’s less of a milestone than, say, Barack Obama winning the presidency of a country which in many ways is still racially divided.

There are similarities, though: just as some of Obama’s critics tried to defuse any sense of achievement for the first black president by suggesting that because his mother was white, he wasn’t quite black enough, you get some idiots saying that because Sigurdardottir was previously married and has two children, that she’s “not really gay”.

Well, aren’t we all glad that we have such people declaring themselves the final arbiters. Just as well, perhaps, that all the gay men and women who have had previous straight relationships, many of which have produced children, are off living their lives instead of taking notice of the ignorant amongst us.

With the way my career’s going at the moment, I’m not sure I’d have the time and energy to devote to an extracurricular blog in the same way as I could five years ago with The Gay Vote. When so much ignorance is clearly still at large, though, it is sorely tempting.

Apologies for this site being offline for the last few days. My hosting provider, the otherwise excellent Site5, has been migrating clients over and somehow things got a little screwy in the move.

It wasn’t helped by Site5’s initial email, notifying me that my account was being migrated, promising to follow up with additional emails once the migration was complete. Those emails never arrived — and judging by the support forum set up to cover migration issues, that’s something that a number of clients have experienced.

Most of the time I have zero issues with Site5’s service, which is why the failures in transition have been so disappointing. Still, it’s done now, so fingers crossed normal service can be resumed from hereon in.

Only three to do this year (four if you count an additional Christmas-themed show). And now they’re all done and available online, so the holiday starts here!

• 09/12/08: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Elgiva, Chesham
• 17/12/08: Cinderella, Civic Centre Aylesbury
• 22/12/08: Aladdin,Watersmeet, Rickmansworth

And the additional Christmas show:

• 19/12/08: Christmas with the Rat Pack - Live from Las Vegas

You’ve got to love Merlin Mann’s straight talking way of getting people to buy a camera through his Amazon affiliate link. He gives some good video tutorials on what to do with it once you’ve got one, as well.

If you’re thinking of dipping your toe into the DSLR waters but are baulking at the price, why not consider the Sony DSLR-A200K Digital SLR Camera? It’s great value and delivers a heck of a punch for the outlay.

When using it, the main negative I’ve found is connected to my habit of switching the camera off when I know I’m not going to be needing it for a while. If I’ve changed any settings away from the defaults, they don’t get remembered when the camera’s switched back on. Countering that, the default modes selectable from the physical wheel on the camera’s top left provide excellent default settings, and the battery life seems to be superb — so maybe the problem is more with my own habits than it is with the camera.

You can see a range of photos on Flickr taken with the camera from its own page on the website. Mine are in there, but so too are loads from people who know what they’re doing with it.

So what are you waiting for? Buy a fucking camera!