Russell Grant deal with AOL reminds me of In Bed With MeDinner

In the mid-90s there was a TV programming on late night LWT that was one of the finest TV shows ever made. It was called In Bed With Medinner and took the rise out of old and usually cheaply-made TV documentaries. It was a great shame when it ended.

In one particularly memorable episode the programme showed something that had gone out live to celebrate LWT's twentieth birthday some time in the 80s. It was excruciating. Nigel Dempster did a piece to camera where in a set-up piece he happened to ‘bump into' 60s model Cathy McGowan. As he did so he said:' It's Cathy McGowan! A star of the 60s and an even bigger star of the....'. And then he stopped. Because he couldn't pretend that she was.

The reason for this rather long and rambling introduction is that I was reminded of the scene when I read a story about AOL partnering with astrologer Russell Grant to launch a horoscope channel. Russell Grant? The last time I saw him on telly I was off school ill, TV-AM existed and both him and I think General Galtieri was eyeing up the Falklands.

According to AOL, the deal showed that the company was committed to working with ‘the world's leading content providers'. Surely that's one of the biggest overstatements going. AOL should have taken Dempster's advice.

I believe celebrity cooks as much as I believe Bono

It's official - it's not just us ordinary folks who are feeling the pinch Nigel Slater and Jamie Oliver are too, according to a puffy press release from Seven Squared, trumpeting the arrival of the new look Sainsbury's Magazine. That's awful news - I'll be starting a whip-round.

Apparently the two multi-millionaire cooks and Sainsbury's Magazine contributors have asked Seven Squared to include more time and money saving recipes because they feel so hard-up, and the publisher has bravely responded in the re-launched issue.

What's more, the new-look features an exclusive interview with the unlikely Sainsbury's shopper Sir Paul McCartney imploring us all to go veggie as this will apparently save the planet; I'm sure that the butchers at Sainsbury's are delighted that McCartney wants their customers to change lifestyles so that they'll lose their jobs.

I know that the monthly glossies are under pressure but I rather fear that the brand message coming from this redesign is incoherent, improbable and schizophrenic, no matter what the focus groups say.

The regional press is not dead yet

It's all too easy to sneer at the local press, with preconceptions of parochial stories of village fetes, speed bumps and planning disputes, particularly if you're a member of the London-based media buying community to whom local papers are largely irrelevant to their personal lives. Unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of the Newspaper Society, it's difficult to make the regional press sexy or cool.

And I have to admit that I was probably guilty of this too - although the Berkhamsted and Tring Gazette is a good read - until I was invited to judge some awards for the Newspaper Society's Advertising and Digital Awards.

Amid all the gloom stories of how the regional press is a bushed flush with Trinity Mirror cutting staff and warning of a severe downturn in ad revenue while Newsquest reporting a 24% drop in profits, I was really surprised and genuinely impressed to see just how dynamic and vibrant the regional press actually is and how far it has come in embracing digital media in a way that has avoided merely bandwagon jumping and added real value to both its readership and advertisers. In fact, some of the content was far better than that found on their national press rivals.

For this, a sector which is viewed with some snootiness, deserves credit and re-evaluation - it's doing its best to prove that there is life in it yet.

TV luvvies talking to themselves

This weekend, in an act of extreme selflessness the television industry will make the ultimate sacrifice and forego its bank holiday break to chew the fat in Edinburgh.

The decision of Howell and so many of ITV’s senior management to make a show a force, rather than don their tin helmets, shows just how much ITV has changed. Beleaguered is a lazy epithet that journalists apply to ITV and it’s not entirely accurate either – despite what wide boys in the City may think, it’s certainly not a bust flush yet. It just needs some help from the government and less pressure from the BBC.

Five's Autumn schedule - room for improvement

It's far too obvious to make a cheap jibe about Five, with its shoestring programming budget and arguable right to exist, so I'm not going to. In fact, with the release of its autumn highlights I thought that the channel deserved an objective analysis of what we can ‘look forward to' as the nights draw in.

Astonishingly, and flying in the face of received wisdom which dictates that commissioning editors re-hash old formats, Five has come up with a brilliant new wheeze - just show a very old series in its original format. In this case, it's a forty-year old series of interviews with people who presumably Five thinks will never lose relevancy, such as Lulu and Cilla Black, by Bernard Braden. This is its headline programme but to whom exactly is this meant to appeal?

Another highlight is Dangerous Adventures for Boys, which to be fair doesn't look too bad, which follows famous dads (if you can describe Todd Carty or Darren Campbell as that) and their sons on expeditions based on the Dangerous Book for Boys. A final strand is a whole raft of property programmes which would have been ‘of the moment' about five years ago.

I'm afraid that this ragbag of disparate programmes indicates the problem with Five - I thought that after it launched its digital channels it would be able to develop a strategy that meant that it no longer looked schizophrenic. Unfortunately, judging by the autumn fare, this still hasn't happened.

A fatwa for Pudsey

Amid all the gloom of rising beer prices and falling sales, there is one event that is guaranteed to warm the hearts of even the most cynical publicans - Children in Need.

The annual Friday-night schmaltzfest where desperate BBC presenters show just how game and benevolent they are by indulging in cringey ‘entertainment' skits under the guises of raising money for a ‘good cause' has become a particular low-light in what I guess the BBC must claim as evidence of its PSB commitment.

While I'm sure that there are some decent and well-meaning people involved in the Children In Need organisation and that some youth organisations have benefited from funds raised, I personally find the whole TV event totally cloying, mawkish and forced. The pub is therefore a much more attractive option.

Among the ‘good causes' for which funds have been raised, it has emerged, is a school in Leeds which funded and shared premises with a bookshop that radicalised young Muslims and where two of the 7/7 bombers worked.

After the phone scandal, where callers were incorrectly charged when trying to donate money, and now this, isn't it time that the BBC did what ITV did over a decade ago with its Telethon and put Children in Need and Pudsey out of its misery?

Sky is in danger of turning into a public service broadcaster

Sky's decision to continue to invest in Arts with a second arts channel, Sky Arts 2 is both surprising and welcome.

At the same time as the BBC seems willing to spend licence fee money on everything that the commercial sector already supplies - such as local news and entertainment - and precious little on the worthy stuff that Lord Reith would have wanted it to go on, Sky is filling in the gaps.

I have to admit that Sky Arts is not necessarily my idea of an interesting view, but it is to some people and it's shameful that the commercial sector is the one that is now providing it because either the BBC can't or won't. Sky News is also a vastly superior service to the BBc's alternative.

Given that this week research was released showing that less than half the population are happy paying the licence fee, the Sky subscription is looking increasingly like much better value.

Kinky and crap

At the same time that Sky is relaunching Sky One (again) it appears that Virgin Media TV is still trying to find a positioning for its free-to-air rival ‘entertainment' channel Virgin1.

One of Marketing's more sensitive journalists (Ed) stumbled across a programme that seems to exemplify the problem with Virgin1 - Kinky and proud - and he is still recovering from the experience.

At 9.30pm last night the channel transmitted this show featuring a deviant who puts a neck brace, mouth bit and arm-binding device around his semi-naked middle-aged partner and leads her around pretending she's a horse. Apparently, according to the ‘trainer, he gets a kick from imagining having sex with the horse.

This sort of rubbish is indicative of the problem with the expansion of multi-channel television - small programme budgets lead to broadcasters buying the cheapest and seemingly shocking content for the very reason that they want to shock so that they register somewhere on the EPG.

But surely there's a line somewhere that shouldn't be crossed and that's got to peak-time family viewing time on free-to-air entertainment channels. Virgin Media needs to realise this, although I don't fancy its chances of trying to find a genuine reason for the channel to feature on anyone's viewing repertoire.

Cut Michael Grade some slack

It's difficult not to have some sympathy for ITV - as its executive chairman  Michael Grade points out in his announcement of its interim results, the broadcaster is ‘not immune to wider economic pressure' hence the news that its profits have fallen 28% this year.

Despite the gloom, Grade and his executive team have done a relatively good job in improving ITV's content and cutting costs without impairing its quality - certainly better than his predecessor ever managed. It seems a shame then that the economic downturn should, through no fault of ITV's, mean that more cost-cutting is in order. We can only hope that Grade manages to continue to do this without an adverse effect on ITV's on-screen appearance.

September is the cruellest month?

Oh dear. September looks like it's going to be a stinker if you work in commercial television. With ITV's interim results out on Wednesday it's not surprising that ITV is being singled out as the expected biggest loser with drops in excess of 20% year-on-year, what should be more worrying is what's happening across the TV market as a whole.

Last year's Rugby World Cup meant that ITV had a gleaming September and the lack of any programming to match that will understandably mean that this year the month is not going to look so rosy. But what's the excuse for Channel 4, Five, Sky and IDS? And what does this mean for the rest of the year? Visibility is too poor for there to be any certainty.

It seems that the only business doing well at the moment is Boston Consulting Group, which has been drafted in to oversee cost-cutting exercises at both ITV and Sky. Wouldn't it be depressing if C4, Five and IDS also followed suit.

Mind that promotional stunt!

As media owner stunts go, Clear Channel Outdoor's decision to send an ice cream van to Haymarket Brand Media, home of Marketing, and dish out free Flake 99s was - although welcome - somewhat odd.

The promotion was to highlight Clear Channel's ‘dynamic' digital LED screens and its forthcoming dedicated in-bar network of HD digital poster sites, called Socialite. Quite how 70s retro ice creams, aerated to the recipe of Hilda Margaret Thatcher, relate to the cutting edge of digital outdoor technology, I'm still not clear but the van managed to attract enough punters to be judged a success.

Without wishing to appear ungrateful, one of the most apparent and immediate signs that the media market is screwed (other than half-empty restaurants) is the cutbacks in promotional spend. Although sometimes they are so lavish and over-the-top to almost appear vulgar, I wonder when - or if - we'll see the days of foreign junkets for product launches again.