With such an unusual result expected in this Election, I recorded Channel 4′s show (featuring Jimmy Carr, David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker and Lauren Laverne) so that I could follow all the drama unfolding on the BBC. And I wasn’t disappointed as Dimbleby, Paxman, and the events themselves served up some classic moments. And amongst all that, the shape of the week’s historic Election fallout were clearly signposted by first Harriet Harman, and then Peter Mandelson within the first five minutes of coverage, as the Labour Party quickly lined up one after another, sporting everything but a ‘I agree with Nick’ t-shirt.

After a few hours of this spectacle, I decided I should have a look at the Sky News coverage, to see how they were handling the fact that Cameron, chosen by News International Ltd., hadn’t managed to win the Election. And with perfect timing, I stumbled upon the following exchange between Boulton and Campbell. It starts off amicably enough, but as it goes on, Boulton gets angrier and angrier, and loses his cool shouting in a very undignified manner after Campbell makes some claims about media bias…

Maybe poor Adam is suffering from a lack of sleep from working some late hours over the last week, which has possibly affected his judgement, or performance, but I’ve found the whole affair rather fascinating. It’ll be interesting to see if there are any more ‘confrontations’ over the coming days.

Returning to the BBC’s Election Night coverage, there were as I said many great tv moments to be found. Paxman, as always, gave value for money, particularly his little dig to David Steel referencing his infamous Spitting Image characterisation of being in David Owen’s pocket. David Dimbleby offered up some gems too, especially his put downs and dismissive attitude to Rory Cellan-Jones and his ‘Social Networking’ angle of reporting. Add to that some slightly bizarre moments thrown up by Andrew Neil interviewing a lot of rich celebrities gathered together for an extravagant boat party, apparently funded by the License Fee, the BBC was still as always the place to be on the night.

Channel 4′s Alternative Election Night, a four hour mixture of live hosts and pre-recorded segments, was also great fun too. I thought all the hosts worked well, and the Charlie Brooker’s You Have Been Watching and Newswipe sections were their usual mixture of razor-sharp satire and intellectual wit. And some schoolboy level humour for good measure. And on Friday night, for those of us still wanting some political humour to make us feel better about the worrying state of our country, Have I Got Election News For You got a great scoop by getting Lembit Opik on the show as one of the contestants. They gave him a hard time, as would be expected, but to be fair to him, I thought he took it in quite good spirit.

So to sum up the Election, there was no overall winner this time around, except perhaps humour and satire. And on that note I’ll leave you all with another YouTube clip, of Paxman having fun with Lembit Opik after having lost his seat…

It was another great episode, taking some funny swipes at certain aspects of the social networking craze, even if perhaps it’s a slightly easy target. It also features some great sequences in a Tron-like environment, when Stan gets “sucked in to Facebook” after all his best efforts to avoid it. The character of Kip is great, and the time he spends with his new “friend” offers up some brilliant jokes. You can see a brief clip from the episode at the end of this article.

As soon as the episode ended, not surprisingly, one of my first thoughts was to see if there was now a “real” Kip Drordy on Facebook, and I wasn’t disappointed. Of course there was, set up hours earlier, although if the page was set up by the show’s creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, I have no idea. I guess probably not, but it doesn’t really matter. As with so many Facebook viral trends, the number of fans is growing by the minute. A few hundred when I first looked, and up to almost 50,000 a day later. This will surely go up further after the episode airs in the UK (tonight) on the Comedy Central channel (Sky 126, Virgin 132).

Become A Fan Of Kip Drordy On Facebook

South Park Season 14 continues for another three weeks before it takes it’s usual mid-season break, and will then return later in the year. Watch it if you can, it’s still the only show where no-one, or no thing is safe from lampooning.

Related Article : South Park S13 Round Up

Well, The Eleventh Hour won me over completely, and I found it to be one of the most enjoyable, and satisfying episodes the show has served up since it’s return. Matt Smith nails the character of the Doctor right from the offset, with just the right amount of eccentricity and humour, whilst the new companion Amy Pond played by Karen Gillan was great, and showed lots of promise, as well as being very pleasant on the eye. The plot when broken down was quite a simple one, but as with any great yarn, it was all in the way it was told. For those familiar with their Doctor Who writers, they’ll know that Steven Moffat has already given fans some of the mosts popular episodes of the last five years, having contributed The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (for Christopher Eccleston), and The Girl In The Fireplace, Blink and Silence In The Library for Tennant’s Doctor. Whilst the main efforts of the writing here were to introduce the new Doctor and companion, there was still plenty of action and thrills as the Doctor has twenty minutes to save the Earth from a bad tempered inter-galactic prison jailer. And save the world he does, with time to spare.

Did the new production team bring a new approach to the show? On the surface, it probably didn’t for a lot of viewers, but scratch a little deeper and I think you can see quite a few differences in style. As the season goes on, we’ll see how much of this is deliberate. The Eleventh Hour started with a pre-credits sequence with the new Doctor hanging on for dear life to a Tardis hurtling out of control over the recognisable sight of London and the Millenium Dome, which really wouldn’t have been out of place in the last (Russell T Davies) era. It was I suppose meant to give it a blockbuster feel, but we’ve seen it all before. In fact, we saw David Tennant’s Doctor fall from an even greater height on New Year’s Day in The End Of Time. Anyway, it’s a fun start to the series, but I’m not surprised the BBC put the scene up to stream on it’s website the week before…

…and then a brand new title sequence and version of the famous theme tune is upon us! Exciting apart from the fact that they’re both a bit rubbish. They seem to have removed most of the tune, or the best parts of it, at least. I didn’t think much to the new titles either, they didn’t look very impressive watching on BBC HD, maybe they looked better on BBC One? It’s not important though, the show has had it’s fair share of stinkers in both departments over the years.

As soon as the adventure properly gets under way, everything has a different, and new feel to it. The Doctor’s meeting with the young Amy Pond (played superbly by Caitlin Lockwood – real life cousin of Karen Gillan) and the country village setting create something of a fairytale feeling, and it avoids the trappings of recent series by refusing to tie the proceedings down to any specific time, or year (I’ll return to this point later). There were none of the usual ‘pop culture’ references dropped in, such as namedropping famous pop stars, and when later on the whole world is being threatened by Prisoner Zero, we are spared the over-used idea of using contemporary BBC News coverage and presenters, as we did so much during RTD’s era. And of course, we were spared having to see Cardiff double up as London for the umpteenth time, which was perhaps becoming a little tired.

Naturally there were some things that gave some continuity with the old series. Little things like the Tardis key glowing when it was repaired (first seen in Father’s Day), another mention of The Shadow Proclamation, the psychic paper, and of course the sonic screwdriver all served to remind us this is ultimately the same show we’ve been watching for the last five years. In fact the main thing about it that hadn’t changed was the incidental music provided by Murray Gold, who has provided all the music on the show since 2005. I’ve never been a big fan of his music used in the show, or more to the point, the excess to which it is used within it, so had wished that a new production team might have opted for some form of change in this area. Having said that, I didn’t find it as obtrusive this time around, but do hope that he might adapt his style more as the new series continues.

So from early reviews and viewing figures for Saturday’s episode, it looks like Moffat and Smith will continue to steer the Tardis in the same successful direction it was taken on by Davies and Tennant. The Eleventh Hour served up an exciting, witty script, and Smith himself gave an excellent performance belying his young age, full of energy, enthusiasm and bewilderment. And as well as the regulars, the guest cast were good too, and included a few familiar faces in Annette Crosbie (One Foot In The Grave), Olivia Colman (Peep Show) and Nina Wadia (Eastenders), that could all have gone perhaps to lesser actors on other occasions. Not to mention Patrick Moore as himself.

I said earlier I’d return to the point about what year it was set in, because it could be a rather interesting point that may have an impact on future epsiodes. If you were eagle-eyed enough, or are handy with the pause button on your Sky+, you would have noticed that in the scene where the Doctor is tracing back what he’s seen on the village green, the close-up of Rory (Amy‘s boyfriend) shows his hospital pass as having been issued in 1990. Obviously he’s not old enough to have been working for twenty years, so is this an important (future) plot point, or a mistake by the production team? Is something affecting time, perhaps the ‘crack’ in the universe from Amy’s room? Or something else maybe, Prisoner Zero hints at something, before saying that “Silence Will Fall”? Why was the crack in Amy‘s room, and why was the piece of equipment in the Tardis that the Doctor was looking at when he asks Amy to join him showing a pattern that was identical to it?

Doctor Who continues this Saturday, and there’s a trailer (courtesy of YouTube) below with a taster of what’s coming soon…

Freeview HD currently transmits the BBC HD Channel and ITV1 HD, with Channel 4HD (with S4C in Wales) set to launch soon. Five HD was expected to launch on Freeview in late 2010, but recently had it’s license removed by Ofcom, as they continually failed to commit to a launch date or provide more details of it’s schedule. Reports suggest that the BBC will now take up this vacant slot, so there’s the possibility in the future of BBC1 and BBC2 being simulcast in HD, perhaps. ITV1 HD (previously known as ITV HD) has up until now only been available as an interactive ‘red button’ service for a limited number of shows, but launches as a fully fledged channel (and appearing in TV listings) on April 2nd, showing much of it’s evening ouput in native HD, with the rest upcaled from Standard Definition.

Earlier this year I cancelled my Sky+ HD subscription when it expired, so was looking for something to replace it’s recording features. A friend set me up with a Play TV Tuner for the Playstation 3, which I’ve been very impressed with. The picture quality is excellent, and better than the free channels on satellite (Sky/Freesat) that I was receiving, and the response time on the Electronic Programme Guide is very quick (and can be controlled by the PS3′s Bluetooth remote control). However it has one major flaw, to date, in that it lacks a ‘Series Link’ feature, which is something that has become very hard to live without. The makers promise that this feature will be added at some point in the future, but there’s still no sign of exactly when that might be. It’s other disadvantage is that it will not be able to pick up any of the Freeview HD channels in the UK, as this country opted to transmit them using a newer technology called DVB-T2, with the Play TV built using the older DVB-T standard.

So a Freeview HD PVR (Personal Video Recorder) is starting to look like it might be the solution, and the first ones are set to hit the market next month. A couple of Freeview HD Receivers (with no recording features) are already available to buy, and will also come built in with some new models of Sony Bravia TVs, but among the early models of PVR announced, one that really stands out to me is surprisingly not from one of the familiar brand names in this market, but from newcomer 3view.

3view will have a 500GB hard drive, dual tuners (enabling you to watch one channel whilst recording another), an eight day EPG, pause and rewind live TV, and all the features you’d expect from a normal PVR. It also offers many other exciting features too, including Opera Web Browser supported internet connection (delivering YouTube, Facebook and Twitter on your TV) and networking capabilities allowing it to play video files (including AVI, MPEG-4 and MOV) stored on external devices, such as a PC. BBC iPlayer integration (a very useful feature starting to be implimented on Freesat PVR’s) is also promised as coming soon (as are many other features), but it should be noted that a minimum broadband speed of 2Mb will be required for that and all other internet features. The box is due to be launched at the end of May (in time for the World Cup) with a RRP of £299, complete with cables. The company have also since announced a dedicated controller to launch shortly after that will work in a similar fashion to a Nintendo Wii controller, pointing it at your TV screen in a directional fashion.

Also of interest to some might be the recent launch of the Freeview HD TV Guide on iTunes, a free app for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. It offers access to the full programme guide for Freeview, including the HD channels. You can customise the listings to your personal preference, and perform searches by genre, title, or even by ‘Twitter Picks’, as well as being able to see if a programme is actually made in HD.

To see if you live in an area that currently picks up Freeview HD signals, you can perform a post code check on the official Freeview HD website.

The cheapest entry point to the Freeview HD platform is the new Bush DVB680 coming out on March 31st, available to pre-order from Argos at £99.99 (usually £149.99).

The Sarah Silverman Program airs on Comedy Central, and is a sort of satirical sitcom following the life of Sarah and her friends and family. Quite often bizarre and surreal in it’s approach, it often touches on subjects that most comedians would steer clear of, including religion, racism and sex. Political Correctness is certainly not something you’ll find in the show, or her very popular stand up comedy routines. As if to keep with the surrealism of the show, her onscreen sister is played her real life sister, Laura Silverman. The rest of the main cast are made up of Laura’s boyfriend Officer Jay McPherson, and Sarah’s neighbours, a gay couple called Brian and Steve who are a couple of pot-smoking geeks.

A huge success in the States, it performed well in the ratings as well as drawing lots of critical acclaim. And as it’s popularity grew, so did the list of famous people lining up to appear on it. Season Two saw guest spots from Christopher Eccleston (spoofing his role as Doctor Who), Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher (from The Mighty Boosh), and spectacled singer, Lisa Loeb. One of my favourite episodes was when Sarah started running over any Osama Bin Laden lookalikes (who she thought were the real thing) with her car, with the result being a hospital ward full of injured people with long, grey beards. Also very funny, but likely to offend some people, was her meeting God, and embarking on a romantic relationship with him. Not to mention what happned nine months later…

Although not quite the household name she is in her homeland, you may well have seen Sarah in a long and accomplished tv and film career, having appeared in There’s Something About Mary and School Of Rock, to name but two. If you’ve never seen the show before, try checking it out. The third season should be coming to Comedy Central very soon, or the first two are available on dvd from most outlets (Season Two only in the US for now). And of course if you’re a fan of the songs, don’t forget From Our Rears To Your Ears. Comedy cds made something of a resurgence with Flight Of The Conchords, and although Sarah’s songs are perhaps more childlike in their style, they should still have you laughing time and time again.

The company was co-founded by Peter Gabriel in May 2007 with the intention of creating somewhere for people to listen to music for free, whilst allowing rights owners and artists to still get paid. This was done with an ad-based model, that attached adverts to the beginning of each song you played. Since then they have built up a library that now has over three million songs, and presumably that’ll grow by at least twelve more on February 15th when Gabriel launches his new album of cover songs, called Scratch My Back.

As well as we7 Premium, they are also promising we7 Premium + to be launched very soon that will also include a mobile phone service, intitially only supporting the Apple iPhone and Google Android handsets. Sounds like they might be giving Spotify some serious competition in this area. I look forward to seeing what they offer, and hope they don’t forget to include support for scrobbling to Last.fm.

If you’ve listened to the Sunshine Playroom Jukebox on this site before, you’ll already be familiar with we7, and I’m pleased to say that it’s been updated again with a totally brand new selections of songs. Head on over to our Jukebox page to hear great selections from Len, Medicine, Brian Eno, Tricky, Big Audio Dynamite, and also the theme song from Channel 4′s True Blood. Press play, leave it running, and enjoy. Sit back and listen, or open up the page in a new window by clicking the link and carry on doing something else while it plays. Enjoy. Haven’t got time to listen now? No problem, pop back when you do. I’m planning on leaving each playlist up for a week or two, so it’ll be there for a little while.

Tony actually started life as a 14 minute short film (which will be included on the dvd release), one of many made by Gerard and Peter, who are in fact real life cousins. And keeping this as something of a family affair, Gerard also enlisted his brother Matt Johnson of The The to supply the film’s atmospheric soundtrack. The film received it’s first screening at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, and has recently aired at the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah, and has already been compared to Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and Taxi Driver, putting it in good company.

The soundtrack to Tony by The The, as mentioned, will be available to buy as a download first, with a lavishly packaged cd promised to follow. All instrumental, you can hear some snippets from it via Radio Cineola, which is a new monthly fifteen minute “radio” broadcast from Matt, which you can stream from the official website, or buy each one at higher quality from the website store. Each broadcast promises to feature upcoming The The material, as well as digging in to his personal archives for some real rarities. Another project he has in the pipeline is an album called The End Of The Day, which will feature many new versions and variations of The The classics. Few details have been made available as yet, but if rumours are to be believed, it should feature a cover of August And September by the equally wonderful Elbow.

Tony – London Serial Killer continues to receive great reviews everywhere, so look out for it in the coming weeks and try and check it out if you can.

The project started life with plans to make a sitcom around the idea, but both the BBC and Channel 4 turned it down due to it’s controversial nature, so Morris turned to Warp Films for help to take it forward. The two have collaborated in the past on the BAFTA winning short film My Wrongs 8245–8249 & 117, and Warp‘s record label having released some of his other work with cds of Blue Jam, and more recently On The Hour. However with there still being a shortfall in the budget they could stretch to, Warp sent out a request to his fans by e-mail asking for donations from £25 to £100 to further finance it, with the reward of getting to appear in the film as an extra as way of a reward. In the end, donations weren’t required as Film 4 stepped in and with funding finally secured in May 2009, filming finally began in Sheffield.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Jihadis

It’s obvious, with the nature of the British media, that Four Lions will evoke some strong reactions and outrage from certain quarters, but it should be noted that Morris carried out very extensive research for three years before embarking on this. He spoke to police, secret services, terrorism experts and perhaps more importantly, hundreds of Muslims, and the film intends to show up the ‘farce’ of terrorism with the aid of satire. No stranger to controversy, Morris was famously demonised by a large part of the tabloid press in 2001 after the airing of a Brass Eye special on the subject of Paedophilia (partly written by Charlie Brooker). Members of Parliament jumped on the bandwagon, even though they admitted they hadn’t actually watched it, calling for it to be banned and never shown again. It was hugely ironic to most people who did watch the show, as it was exactly this sort of tabloid hysteria that was the programme’s satirical target. To their credit, Channel 4 stood by Morris, and the show, and even gave it a repeat showing shortly after.

After it’s Sundance debut, a general release is yet to be confirmed, but The Guardian website unveiled an exclusive clip from the film today. In the meantime, if you’re not sure whether or not Four Lions is for you, I’ll leave the last word to Chris Morris himself who summed it up well with this…”Most of us would dearly love to laugh in the face of our worst fears. Why aren’t we laughing at terrorists? Because we don’t know how to, until now.”

Warp Films Website

Something that was frustrating about the old version was the exclusion of any of the HD channels, these are all now present and correct with their own dedicated section. The whole design has been updated, and as well as an improved guide, you now have the ability to choose, and save your favourite channels. As everyone probably knows, Sky have rather a lot of channels, so you don’t want to be scrolling through hundreds of them just to find the programmes you’re looking for. You can edit those favourites to your heart’s content, and rearrange them in any order you like. All the Sky EPG information is available, and not only can you send your Sky+ box an instruction to record a show, you can also search the TV listings for any alternate showings that might be coming up.

To be able to get your iPhone/iPod Touch to set the Sky+ box to record, you need to have a Sky iD and then go through a simple setup procedure by visiting the Sky Website. Once you’ve done that, it doesn’t cost anything to send a request, apart from your usual data usage costs included in your mobile phone tariff. You need to send any request at least half an hour before a show starts, and your Sky+ box must be connected up to your phone line.

There are still some improvements that I feel could be made. You can change the layout view to ‘landscape’ on the standard channel listings, but rather annoyingly you can’t do this for the ‘favourites’ view. Hopefully this can be added in a future update. It’s a minor niggle though, the app responds much quicker than it did before when searching and scrolling, and the new features I’ve mentioned makes it much easier to use in general. With it, you should never need to miss your favourite tv show ever again.

You can download the free Sky+ app at the iTunes store here.

For the ultimate tv buff, I’d also recommend the TVGuide.co.uk app, which seems to carry more in-depth information and summaries about each show.

Haven’t got time to listen now? No problem, pop back when you do. I’m planning on leaving each playlist up for a week or two, so it’ll be there for a little while.