The Golden Gate Bridge

I had recorded The Bridge, a documentary that was shown on More 4 a few weeks ago, yesterday. It’s about The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco which has become the most popular suicide destination in the world.

All the way through I kept thinking, “How are they doing this?”. The film shows people climbing over the guard rail and jumping. “That must be stunt people.” But if the act of jumping will kill you then no stunt men, or women, would do it. “It must be CGI then?” Nope.

I think that we get so used to watching ‘re-enactments’ in documentaries that it becomes the norm. “So, they just hired an actor who looks like the person that the bereaved are describing?” Not so in the case of The Bridge. It was pretty harrowing to watch as it was. Until you realise how it was made.

CHRONOS CD

For the first time in a long time I woke up hearing the radio instead of switching on a TV.

Ever since I’ve had a television in my bedroom I’ve set the alarm early so that I can have a little snooze and listen to breakfast television. This no doubt started when TV-AM was being broadcast on ITV. There wasn’t much point before that because all you would get was the test-card.

So many years and three televisions later I’ve switched to the wireless, or DAB to be precise. One reason is that I don’t think that the loft aerial won’t be good enough to get a digital signal after the switch over. If it is good enough then I don’t really want to buy a set-top box just for the couple of hours in a morning. And finally GMTV started to get on my nerves. So much so that I’ve stopped watching it altogether. It’s just the same reporters, the same actors, the same boy-bands miming in the studio and even the same adverts being shown at the same time every day. “Does searching for car insurance drive you crazy?” “But will I get 100% of my compensation?” I honestly think that the last straw was Heather Mills McCartney getting, more or less, a full half hour to rant on and on.

Now I just wake up to BBC Radio 5 live.

The Pure CHRONOS CD works really well and sounds great. The display dims depending on the light in the room and you can set the brightness for ‘on’ and ’standby’ modes. It has 4 alarm settings so I have an early alarm for during the week and another a little later for the weekend. Setting the alarm can be a little tricky, the user manual isn’t all that great, but a couple of tests and you get the hang of it. The remote is a little overkill considering that it will be at the side of your bed anyway. The IR beam seems to only work if you are pointing directly at the sensor on the front and at the correct angle. Apart from these little niggles it works great. Clear digital sound, no hissing or crackling and no adverts.

I will miss Penny Smith though, that is the only downside.

Derren Brown

If you’ve seen Derren Brown’s Channel 4 shows or even watched Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was a recording of his 2006 tour, then you know what to expect. He uses “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship” to great effect. And because the shows are 90% audience participation no two evenings will be the same. I’m not going to recount exactly what happened, because I know for a fact that you surfed to these pages for that very reason (see I have spooky mind-reading powers too). If you enjoy the TV shows you’ll enjoy the evening at the theatre even more.

One word of caution - if you catch a Frisbee and go on stage to write an object onto a piece of paper, don’t put “rhombus”. Because I fear that Derren will put a spell on you if he encounters two smart arses on the same tour.

My head still hurts from trying to figure out how it’s all done.

“I just want to burn him at the stake and watch his witch’s heart bubble”
Stephen Fry

“The closest our galaxy can boast to a Jedi master”
Empire Magazine

Freeview

Yesterday I thought that I would check out the new ‘five Life’ digital channel. Ellen DeGeneres has a talk show in the US that I had seen clips of and ‘five Life’ were showing two shows back to back from 4:00pm. The Sony TV that I have has an integrated tuner which needed updating to receive the new channels. I’ve done this before, it just takes awhile for the set to find all the channels that are available to it. This all ran through fine and the picture returned. I selected channel 36 with the remote but the station wasn’t tuned in. Bugger. So I thought that I’d leave it and do some investigating later. I then tried to select BBC News 24, the only ‘extra’ digital channel that I watch, and it wasn’t on channel 80. Double bugger, because I hadn’t made a note of the channel and service numbers so that I could tune it back manually.

The rest of the evening was spent trawling the internet trying to find these elusive numbers for my region. I couldn’t find them. I had already tried switching the set off on the wall for 10 minutes, switching it on with the aerial unplugged, doing the auto-tune to clear out the stations, switching the set off again for 10 minutes without power, plugging the aerial in and doing another auto-tune… all to no avail.

Channel 80 was listing some channel called ’smileTV’ which is only broadcast between 1am and 5am. Brilliant just what I need. I wouldn’t mind but BBC News 24 worked perfectly at lunchtime. I even dug the User Guide out (RTFM right?) to see if I was missing something. No luck.

This morning I phoned the Sony support line. The only thing that they could suggest was that the signal may have been quite weak last night when I was running the auto-tune and that I should keep trying it. They also gave me the phone number for Freeview, which I didn’t use.

This evening I had a walk around to the shop that I bought the set from. I told the guy in the store what had happened and he looked as if this wasn’t the first time a customer had asked about this today. He’s probably gone through this hundreds of times recently.

It seems that the Freeview channels have jumped from being just a plain 2 digit number to being a 3 digit number. This of course screws up the older sets, like mine, that only have room for 99 channels. He said luckily I could manually tune a blank channel and he dug out a print of a web-page. 56 is the ‘channel’ number for BBC News 24 and he said that I would have to try different ’service’ numbers before I found the correct one.

When I arrived home I tried it out and it all worked fine. BBC News 24 was back up and running.

The chap who helped gave me the URL for the Digital TV Group. He said that the page he was looking at was maybe for retail trade only. There is a retail section to the site but I can’t find a page that lists the ‘channel’ and ’service’ numbers for my area. So I think that it’s going to be trial and error to find ‘five Life’.

Penny Smith

A few years ago now I started to collect signed photographs of people that I liked and admired. When I received the photos I framed them and hung them on the walls of my little semi-detached penthouse flat.

I’ve long been a fan of Penny Smith who has been a presenter/newsreader on GMTV for many years. So, I sent the following little note via the GMTV web-site including my postal address.

I am a huge fan of that twentysomething singleton Penny Smith. It would surely make my millennium if I could have a signed photo.

Hugs and kisses,

Carl

I thought at the time that it was short, sweet and mildly amusing. Time passed, as it does, and I forgot all about my little request.

What must have been over a month later I received a brown envelope in the post with a London postmark. I couldn’t think what it could be. I hadn’t ordered anything. It didn’t have any company name or address on it… then I remembered my note to GMTV. My hands were shaking as I sliced open the envelope to reveal an autographed picture of a chunky little leprechaun!!

Maybe I seemed a little too forward in my request for Penny’s autograph. Maybe she told her assistant to send me the wrong picture as punishment. I haven’t had the nerve to ask for another one.

Steve Irwin 1962-2006

Steve Irwin had enthusiasm in abundance. An, all too rare, passion for animals and conservation.

When his programmes were first broadcast on television, you watched them because you thought that at any minute he would get bit. He never did because he knew his subject and wanted to show, you the viewer, what these animals were really like. By the end of one show you were hooked. Just enough to want to watch him again, not so much that you started to wear khaki shorts and utter the word “Crikey!”, in a broad Australian accent, at every opportunity.

Crocs Rule!