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How television made money
A brief account of how network bosses make money from Dan Lyons at Forbes, aka Fake Steve Jobs: What the fuck is a television network? It’s a system of affiliates designed to help carry a broadcast signal across the wide continent of America on airwaves and into television sets owned by millions of people. In…
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Big Brother trouble
The ratings crunch hitting Big Brother has nothing to do with the entertainment possibilities of putting a group of young people in a house and filming them for TV. MTV started doing it back in 1992 with a show called the Real World, and they’re just casting its twentieth series. But MTV is a niche…
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British TV’s phoney trust crisis
The campaign to restore trust in TV is a phoney crusade – less to do with concern for the audience than about protecting brands and reputation. When my dad was in the Military Police, he would caution errant squaddies with the words: “anything you say will be taken down, screwed around with, and used to…
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Fake phone friends
A final personal anecdote to re-tell in the TV fakery saga…A few years back I was the phone-a-friend for Michael Aspel and Carol Smillie on the Xmas “Celebrity” edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Someone from the production team called me before the show. They told me to let the phone ring three…