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Coin this phrase

Is there a word for this?

Why is it that if there is a long running and famous TV series and you have hardly ever seen it, when you tune in to it for only the second time, it is always the same episode you have already viewed?

The Editor plugs his book

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But someone I know was on The Daily Show so it's going on Comment Central.

It's my blog so shut up.

When politicians become puppets

And while we're on the subject of mayoral elections...

Three Line Whip brings us the latest debate played out in Rainbow characters. No subtlety spared in making Ken Zippy...

Alice Fishburn

Why push Pushing Daisies?

So ITV has dropped the second installment of Pushing Daisies, its acclaimed acquisition.

Why? Because it says that there are nine episodes and only eight available slots. So one had to go.
Comment Central to the rescue.

Carefully reviewing the packed ITV schedule we've done something that you might have thought impossible. We have identified ten top class shows that could, just could, be dropped to make way for the extra episode, without, we hazard, damaging this nation's cultural life unduly: 

1) The Jeremy Kyle Show: You Cheated on Me With My Friend, So Prove I'm the Dad!

2) Katie & Peter: The Next Chapter

3) Sally Jessy Raphael: Gotcha! Spying on Dangerous Teens

4) Police Stop! Real-life footage of criminals and ordinary people behaving badly

5) Used Car Roadshow

6) Judge Judy

7) Daily Cooks Challenge

8) All Star Mr & Mrs. Celebrity couples reveal how much they know about each other

9) Loose Women

10) Teleshopping

Glad to be of service.

Have your say on Brown's star quality

So, Gordon Brown was on American Idol last night. Alas, he was not belting out karaoke classics; he was promoting an anti-malaria drive. But, what with the tan, the teeth and the smiles, the performance did have something of the game-show host to it. Stick with this clip through the advertisments and see for yourself:

And while we're basking in the bottled charisma that is Brown on the box, let's remind ourselves of last November's spontaneous outpouring of delight that Countdown had been on television for 20 years:

Well, what do you think?

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Why the West Wing reveals all

Danny previously posted on the striking similarities between this presidential race and the finale of the West Wing. And Matthew Bayley develops the idea still more in today's Telegraph.

Sorkin fanatics can now live the dream as reality. Barack Obama = Matt Santos. Hillary Clinton = Bob Russell. John McCain = Arnold Vinnick

There's really only one question left for this particular fan. Where, oh where, is Josh Lyman?

On a need-to-know basis

Life imitates art in the case of Jack Straw and the bugging scandal. Fans of Yes, Prime Minister will remember the episode where the PM denies phonetapping an MP in PMQs. There's only one catch.  Here's the lead in....

Sir Humphrey: So I gather you denied that Mr Halifax's phone had been bugged?

The transcript continues:

The fact you needed to know was not known at the time that the now-known need to know was known. Those that needed to advise the Home Secretary felt that the information he needed as to whether to inform the highest authority was not yet known, so there was no authority for the authority to be informed because the need to know was not known or needed.

Precisely.

Could Konnie Huq cause recession?

Inspired by Alice Miles this morning, Chris Dillow puts up a brilliant post on the lovely ex-Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq. In it, he calculates the amount of money that her distracting presence has cost the British economy over the past decade. His argument:

Why bother going out to work when you can stay home and look at her?...In this sense, Ms Huq's influence upon the economy has been massively pernicious. Let's do some sums. There are 5.2 million people of working age claiming state benefits. Let's assume that Konnie's appearance on Blue Peter  caused - at the margin - 5% of these to stay out of work. That's 260,000 people.   If we assume these would have earnt £15,000 a year, then the economy lost £3.9bn a year.

You can read the whole thing here. Somehow we don't suspect that Anthea Turner had quite the same effect.

Alice Fishburn

How the West Wing was supposed to end

A number of friends have remarked to me over the last few days that we may be heading for the West Wing election.

The run-off at the end of that great programme was between Matthew Santos, the first serious Hispanic contender for the Presidency, and Arnold Vinick, an ageing Republican with humane views and a strong appeal to independents.

Santos won.

The parallels between Santos-Vinick and Obama-McCain are obvious. (David Brooks has a very good column this morning on Obama v McCain)

So it's amusing to learn that a Santos win wasn't the original plan. And certainly Santos seems quite openly liberal to win the White House. The makers of the show wrote the final series with Vinick as the final winner.

Then John Spencer, the man playing Leo, the Santos VP candidate, died. And everything changed. The producers decided that it would be too much of a downer (to who? I wanted Vinick) to lose Leo and the Santos Presidency at the same time.

Cue a Santos victory.

Time to take a stand against homophobia

A couple of days back my colleague Tim Teeman asked this:

Why are ITV1 letting Jim Davidson get away with saying homophobic rubbish to Brian Dowling on Hell’s Kitchen about sleeping in the girls’ bedroom and being assigned to pastry work? Dowling, at the time of writing, was being patient. If Davidson was spouting racist slurs, he’d be ejected super-quick.

Today comes the news that Davidson and the show have parted company, following Davidson's talk of "shirt lifters".

The talk, however, is all about mutual consent and the BBC story is headed:

Davidson walks after TV gay row

So what's your answer:

a. That Davidson's departure is political correctness gone mad. Jim was just being Jim and having a larf. For goodness sake have a sense of humour.

b. Mutual consent is about right. ITV should just let the comic walk away and no one gets hurt.

c. ITV are right to confirm that he has been pushed and the headlines should make that clear. This is an opportunity to take a stand against homophobic bullying.

I go with c. Davidson's behaviour was totally unacceptable.

And if you want to understand why it's important to take a stand, read Graeme Le Saux's compelling tale of homophobic bullying on the football field.

I recommend it even for those who don't normally take much of an interest in soccer.

Why I am feeling stupid

There are lots of candidate reasons, naturally. But it's actually a TV show that has left me feeling foolish.

I've just read that Jason Kottke has this to say about the TV show The Wire:

Collectively the best program ever shown on TV, case closed, next topic, I'm not even gonna discuss that with you.

And that Nick Hornby says this:

Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention.

No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

I’d never heard of the show. It’s not widely known or shown here in the U.K., although whenever a new season starts, you can always find a piece in a broadsheet paper calling it “the best programme you’ve never heard of,” and I didn’t know what to expect.

What I got was something that bore no resemblance to Abigail’s Party, predictably, and very little resemblance to any other cop show. At one stage I was simultaneously hooked on The Wire and the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Bleak House, and it struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison.

Yet I've never watched The Wire. Excusable?

Not really.

I regard David Simon's book Homicide, a portrait of the Baltimore murder squad, as one of the finest reporter's books I've ever read. I can't believe that I missed the fact that he's written a TV programme.

So read this.

And this.

Then watch this.

Another thing you wouldn't see on the BBC

American journalists are revolting. First, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski refused to report Paris Hilton's release from jail. Now, CNN's Jack Cafferty has refused to report Lindsay Lohan's recent run-in with the police.

Why does the Shilpa Shetty incident spring to mind?

Murad Ahmed

Friends - a study in evolution and anthropology

Here’s how to get from Friends, the TV sitcom, to a discussion of anarcho-capitalist attitudes in a hunter-gatherer society. Bare with me.

There’s a great episode of Friends where Joey contends that it’s impossible to perform a purely selfless act (the episode was distinctly less profound than it sounds). That even if you do something good with no obvious benefit to yourself, the fact you feel good about the act of giving, means you've actually acted in your own interest. Even at our most selfless, we are in fact selfish. In this intellectual battle, Pheobe struggles to prove him wrong.

Chris Dillow takes up Joey Tribbiani’s baton with gusto, pondering why, if we’re all inherently selfish (communism failed people, get over it), do a majority of us favour a little redistribution of wealth? But he goes further than Joey to answer also, why then do most of us also tolerate an unequal society?

As ever, it’s all to do with natural selection, you see:

In a hunter-gatherer society, leadership and limited redistribution would help ensure the success of the tribe. Good hunters would seek out more food than they could personally eat and share it with the group. The good hunter then gets respect, some leadership and the assurance of food if he hits bad times. And the rest of the group gets more food.

This beats the two alternatives. Hunters with anarcho-capitalist attitudes would die when they got older or hit bad luck, because they hadn't bought insurance. And fully egalitarian tribes - ones that withheld prestige or leadership from good hunters - wouldn't get enough food because they wouldn't sufficiently incentivise good hunters.

Strong egalitarianism and strong selfishness would therefore die out, as they'd be selected against.

Easy.

Murad Ahmed

Hasn't Sir Alan Sugar read Moneyball?

So what about the Apprentice then?

Sir Alan Sugar chose the twentysomething candidate over the thirtysomething finished article. Did this make any sense?

Not to anyone who has read Moneyball, Michael Lewis's riveting book on the Oakland Athletics baseball side.

Billy Beane, the A's manager, pursues a different strategy in the annual draft than his rivals (the moment in the year when baseball clubs pick new players). Other managers pick those who the scouts say have potential. They pick high school players with promise. Beane waits for the players to mature. He picks college graduates much of the time. 

Sure, that way he misses some of the very best players, but on average his strategy proves far superior. The confidence of scouts and managers that they can shape players with promise is strong but unjustified by the results.

So Simon Ambrose might prove a good hire or a bad one, but the long-run expected outcome from Sir Alan's strategy of choosing the junior, less well-formed candidate in each series of the Apprentice, is inferior to the outcome he could expect from choosing the better formed candidate.

Which is a long winded way of saying that Kristina was robbed.

(picture: Ian West/PA wire)

I know it's only a reality TV show but....

Good.

Dutch Organs show: Sick? Or the lesser of two evils?

Oh how terrible, was the first reaction. Julia Raeside in The Guardian spoke for our nation:

Endemol is at it again. The streaker on the pitch of the television industry is back in the news thanks to its latest production for Dutch TV. On Friday, De Grote Donorshow (The Big Donor Show) will give three dialysis patients the chance to win a dying woman's kidney. Who lives? You decide. Actually, the terminally ill woman will decide with the aid of SMS input from the viewers. Which taboo subject can Dutch TV exploit next without being taken off air?

Yeah, how sick. How grotesque. How very Endemol of Endemol. And in a rare show of media bipartisanship, The Guardian’s comment pages mirrored Daily Mail stories with headlines like this:

A new kidney would change my life, but I'd rather wait ten years than win one like this

But then our friend Chris Dillow disagreed, and after reading his blog for the past year, it’s possible that Mr Dillow has never been wrong about anything. So it’s worthwhile hearing out his opinion:

Tom Watson says Endemol is "sick." No, Tom. What's sick is that people are dying because of the shortage of kidneys - a shortage exacerbated by the refusal of our managerialist rulers to consider using markets. Endemol is merely publicizing this fact. Whilst there is such a shortage, kidneys have to be rationed somehow. In practice, this means doing so by luck and by medical protocols that discriminate against the mentally ill. It's not obvious that rationing according to popular vote is much worse than this…

None of this, of course, is to defend Endemol. They're doing it just for the money. But we've known ever since Adam Smith that, sometimes people who are motivated by money can inadvertently do good.

And Mike Wallace pipes up with this thought:

Doctors have been up in arms about the idea that the donor should be involved in the decision at all. To quote Prof. John Feehally, formerly President of the UK Renal Association,

"If organs become available after someone dies, health professionals with access to detailed information about those waiting for a transplant make objective decisions about who should receive those particular kidneys."

Except it isn’t, is it? It’s a woman deciding what should happen with her own vital organs—if anyone is going to “play God” about dishing out your internal bits and bobs, shouldn’t you yourself get first go? Professor Feehally’s objection is hardly any different. The idea that doctors can play God seems to be fine with him, even if the same right is perversely not extended to the donor herself.

You see, once you've framed your arguments as pro-free markets, pro-personal freedoms, and anti-Tom Watson, I find it hard to disagree. My righteous indignation has been quelled. Maybe yours will be too if you read both the Wallace piece and Dillow’s post in full.

Murad Ahmed

More nonsense

This woman is a much fêted media psychic.

Life on Mars: the only problem is...

Iain Dale is sorry that the last episode of Life on Mars has been screened. I trust his judgement, so I'm going to try to watch the DVDs.

Iain then offers us these extraordinary observations:

I do have one slight niggle though. (pedant alert) The gold Ford Cortina driven by Chief Inspector Gene Hunt wasn't actually available in 1973. It has a vertical dashboard which were only introduced in late 1974 models. The high rear seats were also not available in the 1973 model. The 1973 models also never had GXL headlights. The whole interior is of a 2000E, yet it is badged GXL(/pedant alert).

He follows this observation with the sentence "But who cares?" This was, I feel, a better question than Iain realised.

The grand Tory conspiracy revealed

One of the best signs that Cameron's Conservative modernisation programme is working is this morning's article by Polly Toynbee.

Hilariously, The Guardian columnist believes that Gordon Brown owes his troubles to a carefully organised media campaign that has been scripted by George Osborne. The latter, behaving like one of those killers on Quincy that can't resist explaining his deviousness while holding his enemies at gunpoint, revealed his intentions to readers of The Times in 2004.

Why is this good news for the Tories? Because being described as a ruthless election machine is a coveted status. Ask Iain Duncan Smith whether he would have objected to being written about like this.

A point on Peter Hitchens

Planning to watch Peter Hitchens's programme on David Cameron tonight? You my wish to keep this in mind.

Don't forget Young Mr Grace

John Inman's death is obviously sad. But I am afraid I can't just sit here and take all this stuff about Mr Humphries being the central character in Are You being Served?

The most important character, without doubt, was Young Mr Grace (Old Mr Grace doesn't get out much these days.)

Think about how many bosses's speeches you have either heard or given which are just variants of his immortal line:

You're all doing very well

Are bloggers just "bores in bars"?

A rather odd row is taking place involving, among others, Oliver Kamm, Harry's Place, Iain Dale and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown concerning blogging.

On Sunday, Mr Dale and Ms Alibhai-Brown engaged in a television debate in which he said that blogging enhances democracy and she compared bloggers to "bores in bars". Extraordinarily, Oliver Kamm appears to side with her.

I, emphatically, don't.

I believe in the wisdom of Oliver Kamm. But even more, I believe in the wisdom of crowds. The best way to get at the truth is for a large number of independent voices to be heard with truth emerging out of their free exchange.

But we haven't had this in Britain. Instead we've had, in fact still have, a small tight media and a rigid party system. Everyone rushes to agree a line to take and then reinforce each others errors.

Blogging provides an opportunity to break this up and it has begun to do precisely this.

Are a lot of bloggers simply "bores in bars"? Yes. But:

1. Most of the time these people have more useful things to say than Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

2. If a blogger is boring no one reads them so it doesn't matter anyway.

3. The wisdom of crowds depends on allowing people to contribute their idea to the debate even when their contributions are fatuous.

I am astonished when people argue that blogging doesn't aid the debate, and advance in support of their proposition the fact that many blogs aren't very good. This is, naturally, entirely irrelevant.

Newsnight and the BlogSpat

So last night Newsnight duly ran the story about Colin Challen and Ed Balls that Iain Dale and I have been arguing about. What did we learn?

Well, not a lot really. Colin Challen denied having been offered anything in exchange for standing down in his seat, the Treasury said he hadn't been and Tory spokesman Chris Grayling said he didn't believe either of them.

I don't think this alters the story. It may be, for instance, that Mr Brown was applying the rule of reciprocation that I've written about before. Challen might have been given a role on climate change and resigned out of "goodwill". Either way, I accept the idea that Ed Balls and Gordon Brown have induced him to stand aside.

So why don't I accept that it is a scandal?

Not because I am complacent about scandals, as Iain suggests. I think the highest standards are vital. I would never wish to ignore a scandal or argue that true scandal shouldn't be investigated.

And not because I love the Brown-Balls partnership. I think the reliance of the Chancellor on Mr Balls has not been a good thing and that their relationship is stifling and unhealthy.

My problem is more basic. My problem is that I don't think that moving someone to another role for which they are qualified in order to encourage them to vacate an office is scandalous.

I am not arguing that politicians should be subject to different rules from the rest of us. I think what has happened to Colin Challen is exactly what happens everywhere, all the time in every workplace. And why shouldn't it?

Please, don't just assert it's a scandal. Please don't just say that the Murdoch media loves Gordon Brown this week. Please don't just say that commentariat are cut off. That's not good enough. I need a proper argument.

So please just someone, somewhere explain what's wrong with it and why its scandalous.

That, or just give it up.

Useful list of fictional candidates

Only the other day I was saying:

I know what would come in handy, a list of people who have run for President of the United States in fictional accounts. I wish someone would compile one as a service to the online community.

And now someone has.

Big Brother Breaking News: Has everybody gone nuts?

Has everyone gone mad? Have we totally lost the plot?

Big Brother is just the most boring, stupid, trivial, non-event. It is as interesting as watching CCTV pictures of people buying yoghurt in Tesco.

Yesterday, two women had an argument about a stock cube. This was Breaking News on Sky. The Prime Minister commented. Gordon Brown read out a statement.

Keith Vaz has put down an early day motion. Hasn't he got anything better to do? If he's got time on his hands he could spend it answering the remaining questions about his business affairs put to him by the Parliamentary standards watchdog. It is not surprising that he'd rather talk about light entertainment.

Everyone in Big Brother is being paid to be there. Everyone who goes on it knows the score. There are no victims.

Now get back to work.

The strange reaction to Saddam's hanging

The Press Gazette records that only 25 people complained to Ofcom about the television footage of Saddam's execution, while 1,000 complained about the eviction procedure on Big Brother.

Whether or not you quite agree with this ranking of priority, do you share my view that there has been something strange about the reaction to the hanging?

Politicians and commentators seem to be furious that someone shouted "Boooooo, down with dictators" or whatever, while ignoring the fact that Saddam was hanged. Now, Saddam and I don't have quite the same way of looking at things, but I am pretty certain that if I were in the same position as he, I'd be more hacked off at being executed than I would at being heckled while it was happening. Then again, perhaps that's just me.

Both John Prescott and David Cameron excused themselves from commenting on the execution, because that was a matter for the Iraqis, before condemning the booing, which apparently is open to foreign criticism.

I'm obviously missing something.

My Nick Robinson rule

When I worked in politics, I used to number among my rules of media engagement: "Never be interviewed by Nick Robinson".

At the time, Nick was just starting his career on-screen and so the advice struck those to whom I gave it as odd. But I would explain that years of knowing Nick had demonstrated that if your argument had an inconsistency or weakness he would find it extremely quickly. I think this view is now a standard one. He is simply the best.

So I am very much looking forward to his new programme Decision Time, the first  (sorry, second) installment of which goes out tonight. It will look at the way in which governments make difficult choices.

The edition will deal with Iran and Nick previews the arguments on his blog.

It seems that Sir Malcolm Rifkind will argue that we need sticks as well as carrots to deal with the Mullahs, but would prefer the latter to the former. If I've understood him correctly from this short summary, then he is quite right. A policy of providing carrots will not work without accompanying sticks, as European policy over the last couple of decades has shown clearly.

Listen to the programme and then read this - Kenneth Pollack's very worthwhile book The Persian Puzzle

Quiz question: what do ITV's programmes and educational standards have in common?

Graeme Archer produces this witty rant about the quality of ITV quiz programmes. He regards the failure of participants to cope with simple probabilities as a sure sign that educational standards are declining.

But surely, Graeme, having a sample size of two quiz programmes and no comparison group.....

Not to be sneezed at

Did you see the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David refuses to shake hands with Ben Stiller because the latter had just blocked a sneezed with his? Well, their relationship never recovered.

I learn from this intriguing article by Glenn Reynolds about hand sanitisers that Donald Trump loathes the handshake greeting

I think it's barbaric, shaking hands, you catch colds, you catch the flu, you catch this, you catch all sorts of things

So as flu season approaches, the big question must surely be: should handshaking be suspended for the Winter? And what should replace it? A bow? A nod of the head? I favour a Germanic click of the heels.

Robbie Millen

Unreality television

Travelling in by tube this morning, I saw an advertisement for a programme on Living TV entitled Jade's PA. The prize, if you succeed with various challenges, is to become personal assistant to former Big Brother participant Jade Goody.

This prompts me to frame this challenge - can you think of a worse assignment than PA to Jade Goody?

James Baker on The Daily Show

This morning Chris Ayres writes about the rise of The Daily Show. And if you want to understand how a comedy programme could be displacing the serious news shows that it lampoons, then you could do worse than watch this interview with former Secretary of State James Baker.

Doughty fighters

If you haven't been to the 18 Doughty Street site, you should. I think it's an important development.

Tim Montgomerie (the man behind conservativehome.com) and Iain Dale (of Iain Dale's diary) have established their own television channel, putting out programmes over the internet. On the first night of 18 Doughty Street TV they boasted an exclusive interview with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

Inevitably, the channel isn't high budget, but the main presenters are very professional. Will it succeed? That's a different question.

I think independent internet television production is about to become extremely important. 18 Doughty Street will come to be seen as a pioneer effort. Current affairs broadcasting with an explicit political agenda will soon be making a big impact on politics.

However, what makes conservativehome, for instance, both well read and significant is that it relays news that you might otherwise miss altogether. It goes down to a level of detail that a print publication can't afford to because if it did, it wouldn't have a big enough audience to be economic.

I don't know the economics of 18 Doughty Street TV, but I think that if even a few people are going to watch low budget programmes on their computer, they will need to be told things that they wouldn't otherwise find out. Through debates in detail on topics the major news outlets gloss over, for instance. This sharp focus will limit the viewership but give it a steady audience and real political significance.

Good for nothing

Who says nothing good ever came out of America is a good question. Who actually does say that?

Five is launching a new channel that will only broadcast American shows, and it does so by appealing to our supposed anti-americanism. Inevitably, the adverts have already drawn complaints.

Perhaps they thought that if they ran an ad with the slogan "Who says nothing good ever came out of Five" too many people might identify with it.

There's life after The West Wing

I am already looking forward to the arrival in the UK of Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin's new show, Studio 60 on Sunset Strip.

The first episode has just been shown in the US and the reviews are in. It's looking good.