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.

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.

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 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.

This programme explores one of the major issues in Filipino life: the strength of the Catholic church, versus the need for sex education and control the exploding population. However, just the portrayal of daily life so different from that in the UK makes this worth watching.

I’ve complained before about the ever-increasing repeats on the BBC - normally with ruses similar to this spin-off programme. However, taking a story from the main programme on the Philippines and exploring it to the depth needed represents a clever use of multi-channel and digital TV delivery.

The Money Programme has been running a special series of programmes about the media, including this episode looking at the business of TV, something that the UK excels at. Specifically, we’re good at creating and selling formats - a complete programme recipe that can hopefully be translated to other countries. There’s a programme bible, which includes everything from specific editing, sound and lighting directions through to, tellingly, how to pick the “real people” to appear in the show. The Millionaire Bible includes that the top prize money must be ‘life changing’: a million pounds in the UK, but just 50,000€ in Kosovo and Albania - which still represents twenty times the average salary there.

My favourite interpretation of a format was Affari Tuoi, the Italian version of Deal or No Deal. The show seems to last for hours, there are gag prizes as well as money, but the presenter, Flavio Insinna (now replaced by Max Giusti) was genuinely charming, and everyone on the show seemed to be having a great time, compared to the tension-ratcheting we get in the UK, and the smarmy, slightly evil Noel Edmonds.

Meanwhile, ITV have trotted out its new Saturday night gameshow, The Colour of Money, all formatted up and ready to be sold, probably including the gurning Chris Tarrant. It’s the complete opposite of Millionaire - it’s a random game, but with personalities, a backstory (husband going in the army), rationalisations about colour decisions (the game revolves around 20 ‘cash machines’, each named after a colour), reaction interviews with seemingly everyone in the studio, heavily edited ad bumpers showing crying, fear etc. Blimey, there’s even fireworks if they hit their arbitrary money target, in this first case £64,000 - not completely life changing. It all feels a bit pointless, with contestants and their families wheeled on and off so quickly there’s no empathy, and therefore, no show.

After enjoying the repeats of Michael Smith’s Citizen Smith series, he’s been commissioned on another journey round the UK, this time focussing on cars, motoring and driving.

Previous BBC4 seasons on buses, trains, public transport have provided much nostalgia for the typical BBC4 viewer, even sojourns into motorways have lit up the eyes of the Guardianista with bright-eyed 50s infrastructure optimism, but this new thematic strand is about ‘the joy of motoring’. I can’t drive (like Michael Smith), and the only passing interest in cars is Top Gear. Smith reroutes the discussion to more familiar territory:- the growth of cities, the tension between freedom and conformism that cars bring, and the non-places of service stations.

It’s hard to determine quite what this programme is: not quite the tone poems of Keiller, nor the playful but rigorous intellectualism of Meades, maybe radio with pictures. They seem a bit half-formed, and that’s a good thing. Issues and feelings around things like cars are complex, and are dilemmas, with no clear answer. Smith has a trove of poetic one-liners, and his entertaining chats are with people that wouldn’t normally be on TV these days.

Lex van Dam is clearly an interesting chap. He’s either very confident in his ability to train normal people how to make money in an amateur hedge fund  that he’ll risk his money to proove a point, or he’s one of those worryingly rich people for whom losing a million (even if it’s only a million dollars) doesn’t really matter. Maybe he’s mad. Either way, it makes for surprisingly good television.

It’s better than regular Reality TV fare too. It’s easy to care for the characters (I particularly find myself rooting for the cage fighting promote, Emile) and the direction always seems compassionate, never mocking or exploitative.

I’ve embedded the second of the three episodes, so if you’d prefer to start from the beginning, and/or really want to know what happened next, here are links to episodes one, two and three.