Watchification

“We’ve noticed it doesn’t rhyme.”

After spending 3 years trying to write a thesis on Paradise Lost, Iannucci is a great foil for Milton, dissecting the poet’s works with interesting interviews with people faced with similar issues. Iannucci is basically the best English teacher in the world, enthusing about topics unknown, travelling around London and England, and ranting around what looks like an abandoned BBC office floor.

(a repost from my weblog)

When travelling, I spend a bit too much time just watching the TV – I love seeing all the different programmes, formats and adverts, even if I can’t understand them. As well as the cavalcade of youtube clips, you can watch some stations online – there’s an app called Livestation that has quite high quality feeds (including the Aizu Wakamatsu train station webcam), but often not enough users to sustain the p2p network, and best of all, KeyHoleTV, broadcasting many channels of Japanese TV live.

Of course, there’s the timezone issues, and finding understandable schedules is currently impossible. Luckily, my esteemed colleague Yumiko Tanaka has a few suggestions for this weekend – all times in JST (thanks, Yumiko!) -

“爆笑レッドカーペットまさかの土7昇格SP!!
2009/04/18 19:00〜20:54 フジテレビ

I am planning to wake up earlier to watch this on this on Saturday morning (11am) GMT! It’s a special version of a comedy competition show, which I regularly watched on YouTube. The title means ‘burst into laughter read carpet’. Yep, nonsense.

チューボーですよ!
2009/04/18 23:30〜24:00 TBS

Cooking program. Non-chef celebrities cook and learn by looking at master chefs at the same time.

サザエさん
2009/04/19 18:30〜19:00 フジテレビ

Sazae-san. Popular cartoon since 1969! Sunday evening with supper thing for me. (their title songs are very good too)

行列のできる法律相談所
2009/04/19 21:00〜21:54 日本テレビ

This week, they will decide the best B-class gourmet, which is cheap and casual street food.

A masterful Arena, exploring cool jazz – but rather than taking the normal route of talking heads, here the music tells the story, with occasional narration, on-screen quotes from the musicians, clips from all sorts of places, even a brief Allen Ginsberg reading. There’s also wonderful original incidental music by George Taylor. Worth watching, even if you think you don’t like jazz.

In Hyperland, Douglas Adams’ ‘fantasy documentary’ from 1990, Tom Baker plays a software agent who shows Douglas the future of television: Interactive Multimedia.

Are you tired of linear, non-interactive television, Mr Adams?

Bearing in mind that although much of the ‘browsing’ mechanism feels familiar and obvious, this documentary was created in 1990. That’s two years before the first web browser. The internet was a very different place then.

This was not only cutting-edge for its time, it was remarkably prescient.

“It is the eye and the heart that are the surest guides”

It seems Heathcotes have a thing for travel guides. I’ve been known to eulogise, and namesake-but-no-relation David Heathcote presents this series taking old travel guides as a starting point for a journey, in this programme the Shell travel guides from the 30s to the 70s.

The idea of Shell touring guides was dreamt up by John Betjeman, as he needed the money from such a project to get married. He hired enthusiastic amateurs, often friends, to write, design, photograph and edit the decidedly anachronistic guides. They were told to give “your view, of a place now” – now being a time when touring moved from train to car, and hidden gems of natural beauty were widely accessible for the first time. This is the dilemma prevalent in the guides – a fear of the car, knowing that the unspoilt experiences could be destroyed just by mentioning them. Heathcote revisits places from two of the guides, and finds some spoilt, notably Padstow, but resigns himself that that’s all part of progress, for better or worse.