Quentin Tarantino’s outburst last week should have come as no surprise to anyone involved in the juggernaut of movie promotion. If anything, it is surprising that it hadn’t come sooner. It is all too easy when watching a five minute long video clip from such an interview to forget the hours and hours – if…
Channel 4’s valiant efforts at major sports broadcasting have met two very particular challenges this week, each testing their capacity to cope with the full burden of an excitable, demanding and very very large public. It’s a classic David/Goliath situation. Channel 4, having spent a good deal of promotional budget painting itself as the rising…
While CBB goings-on may not be great news for John Bercow and his marriage, it looks as though Richard Desmond has scored a PR coup in bringing the franchise to his ailing channel. Thursday’s launch show (peak: 5.6m viewers) has been splashed all over the net as the show’s most watched non sporting programme ever,…
I admire two people. One is dead and one alive. The dead one is the great American showman PT Barnum. He is my muse. Why? Discovering his legacy influenced my thinking on the power of the crowd enormously. Barnum’s majestic stunts were works of genius – they went viral long, long before that word sneaked…
I was asked to comment on the fallout from Tiger Woods’s bad week in the press by the Guardian last week – the resulting article appears in today’s Media section and online under the headline In Need of a Tigerish Attorney. I took a critical look at the way he and his lawyer, Mark NeJame,…
That is the risk Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King seems prepared to take after leading his supermarket through the economic storm to record its best Christmas ever while most rivals struggled. With King tipped to return to his old stomping ground of Marks & Spencer to replace outgoing Sir Stuart Rose as chief executive, the…
I hear that Channel 4 has signed bed shop Dreams to sponsor Celebrity Big Brother, which returns to our screens next month for the first time since 2007. Celebrity Big Brother was “rested” last year following the Shilpa Shetty racism row, so it will be interesting to find out if the show can still interact…
The Independent reported yesterday on the decline in ratings of Richard and Judy since their move to cable and asked me to comment. Here’s an extract of the article, entitled Turning off Richard and Judy. “They have spent the best part of two decades as Britain’s most unlikely TV power couple. Now it seems the…
I was at a meeting the other day where some people were discussing Channel 4 and its rationalisation of Big Brother’s success. Channel 4 has explained that the show originally started off as an experiment, watching a group of strangers interact with each other in close proximity for a number of weeks without any outside…
For all of you who didn’t know why Emily was removed from the Big Brother house early this morning, here is a transcript of the offending conversation. It’s interesting how quickly Channel 4 is reacting to try to manage the fire storm. In the light of what happened to Shilpa Shetty, I’m sure Channel 4…