Category: media

“The jingle, as anyone with a television knows, is a vanishing art form. It is too quaint, too corny, too oldschool for our ironic times. Naming your product in a commercial for your product is just tacky, say advertising executives. Modern pitchmen prefer pop songs that create a mood or spark an emotional association or conjure up some sort of vague but potent lifestyle-oriented craving that, if all goes as planned, attaches to a product and translates to a sale. Which leaves the jingle writers scrambling to adapt to a world that has suddenly turned its back on their wares.”

A Christian group is charging the BBC with blasphemy after the broadcaster aired Jerry Springer, The Opera. Christian Voice national director Stephen Green said: “If Jerry Springer – The Opera isn’t blasphemous then nothing in Britain is sacred.” He said the show was “much worse” than he expected when he saw it and said it portrayed Jesus as a “coprophiliac sexual deviant”. A coprophiliac is someone sexually aroused by faeces.”

“With viewers increasingly abandoning TV for the Internet and video games, studios, and other media outfits are rushing to jump into the fledgling market for cellular video. In just the last month the likes of Fox, Warner Bros. (TWX ), and ESPN have all signed deals to bring everything from sports highlights to comic books to super-small screens.”

The first movie to come out of Iraq since 1979 has opened in London. “Directed by Bahman Ghobadi, a Kurd born in Iran, it is set in an Iraqi refugee camp and features as its protagonists a clutch of local children.”

Some 50,000 complaints have poured into the BBC about the airing of Jerry Springer, The Opera. The complaints make it the most-protested show in BBC history. “Critics say the broadcast has more than 400 swear words, and shows Jesus in a nappy admitting he is ‘a bit gay’. Bishop Michael Reid of the Pentecostal Church in Brentwood, Essex, who is leading the protest by an alliance of Christian groups, described the musical as ‘filth’.”

BBC2 broadcast a live performance of Jerry Springer: The Opera this weekend, and the results were predictable. There were protests, disapproving critical reaction, and at the end of the day, 1.7 million viewers had tuned in to watch the spectacle, nearly double the normal audience for opera on the BBC. Nonetheless, Springer was trounced in the ratings by a popular comedian and a tabloid-style action drama, so the natural order of things seems not to have been disturbed by the choruses of “Jerry ! Jerry!”

“Look at a year-end compilation of year-end compilations and the same titles keep leaping out, as if some secret signal had been transmitted to our movie-critic brains.” Fair enough – we all recognize quality then. But if that’s so, why aren’t the movies critics like best the biggest box office successes of the year? (they’re not)

New York’s film industry is tired of seeing productions set in New York filmed elsewhere – like Canada. So the Big Apple is copying other cities and offering tax breaks for producers. “The new tax credits for New York state and New York City send a clear message to Hollywood producers that film and television shows about New York should be filmed in New York.”

Public-access television – those stations tucked away in a corner of your cable box which are supposed to give the general public a crack at the airwaves, but which more often feature text announcements, low-quality handheld video of elementary school plays, and political rants from marginal-looking individuals with lots of spare time – is struggling to survive in the 500-channel universe. “Today’s access stations are run by small staffs that work primarily to keep programming on these stations,” and in many cities, officials are wondering why they should even bother keeping such channels on the air.

Despite all the music industry’s moaning about the coming apocalypse of illegal downloading, CD sales in the U.S. rose by 2.3% in 2004, and continue to dominate the music-buying marketplace, accounting for 98% of all music sales. UK sales were up 3%, and set an all-time record for albums sold. Legal downloading from sites such as Apple’s iTunes, meanwhile, also skyrocketed in 2004, ending the year with an average of 6.7 million tracks downloaded each week, up from 300,000 per week in 2003.