Month: September 2000

Big Brother UK:

Two slightly alarming new stories from the BBC: Big Brother climax watched by 10 million and Big Brother set to return.

Christ. I’ve started waking up at around midday. I don’t own an alarm clock because I just don’t normally need one, but the prospect of automatically waking up at 9am at the moment to get to work (on Wednesday) is seeming increasingly remote.

Thank God:

Taking advantage of my absence, timeout.com launches the London Shopping Guide. Also launched is the redesigned homepage and Travel, London, London Tickets, Shop sections. I’ve had a lot of involvement in this stuff – and I’ve really enjoyed working on it.

Sorry, old chap, but aibophphobia isn’t a palindrome…

Thoughts on the finalé of Big Brother UK:

• The Adverts
  All this week they have been playing adverts on the TV which have been trying to make it very (absurdly) clear that when you voted this time you were voting for the person you wanted to win, not the person you wanted to be evicted.

• The Sun
  Still not sure whether it’s true or not – does anyone know if The Sun and Big Brother had an arrangement to try to make Craig win?

• The Gay Press
  For the first time, I really saw a hell of a lot of support for Anna in the gay press over the last couple of weeks. It’s like the whole community finally realised that she was in with a chance of winning.

• Anna loses by 1%
  I know that there was a two percent gap between her and Craig, but if you think about it there couldn’t have been a 1% one and still keep to clean integers. If Anna had got one percent more, then they would have pretty much tied for the prize.

• The different edits
  The different edits between the episodes of the last week and the omnibus seem to me to have a less flattering view of Craig in the latter than in the former. Clearly there is different footage in the omnibus as a result of the extra time it has, but it seems much more pro-Anna than the earlier one.

• Speculation
  That the people behind big brother were surprised by the way the voting was turning out, believed it to be an error on the part of the general public, and put out strong adverts to try and rectify the situation. That the reason that they were surprised was because Anna was doing extremely well (possibly because of increasing interest within the gay community). That the final edits before the weekend were used to show Craig in as positive a fashion as possible, considering the situation.

Unfortunately, although the logic seems relatively clear to me at the moment, that could be because I thought that Anna was basically decent, normal, nice, fun and pleasant, while Craig had the wit and charm of a potato.

Where to start? I have so much I want to talk about again – it’s like this holiday has recharged my weblogging glands. Or maybe it’s just that I’m doing something other than work. And I don’t like writing about work.

Yesterday was another relaxing, mildly pointless day. I got up late, mucked around on the net and then went and met Pippa for lunch at Pizza Express off Soho Square. We talked a lot about her recent trip to Egypt, her love life, our various job situations, our friend Rachel in Bristol who we are going to be visiting next weekend, and a variety of other subjects.

We then went and saw O Brother, Where Art Thou? in Leicester Square, which we thoroughly enjoyed. And on the way back to the tube, we went into Virgin so I could pick up a copy of the soundtrack, which is a satisfyingly extreme change of pace for me.

An evening of Big Brother UK TV programs followed, and the day was capped off with a late-night conversation with Kate and Mella about professional matters, and men in America who taste funny.

A quick nod of “yay” to the other Tom at Blue Lines, who has managed that incredibly difficult transition: making a fresh and classy new design while maintaining continuity of look and feel.

Possibly because I work on the Internet arm of an publishing company, I found this article at Wired [“Publishing Without A Net“] to be inordinately interesting. A couple of choice quotes:

“We feel the Internet is still relatively new, and we as a company are being careful as to how we want to deal with it,” said Maurie Perl, senior vice president of corporate communications of Condé Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. “Right now we view it as more of a business opportunity than an editorial opportunity,” she said.

I’ve rebuilt the “Recently” section on the left so that now it reads “Consumption” (which I find more amusing). I’ve also built it as a mini weblog, so that I can type in what I’ve recently been reading / listening to / watching and it appears magically on the page through the medium of server-side includes. So that should mean that it doesn’t get stagnant (hopefully, at least).

Don’t get tense, kids. If you are seeing some strangeness on the page, then it’s just because Meg and I are busy playing “push the envelope” with Blogger.