Posts about movies and TV programmes.
Sad news today that the family of actor Jeff Conaway have taken the decision to turn off his life support machine, after ongoing problems with drug and alcohol addiction.
The news is concentrating on his involvement in Grease
As a little tribute, here is the last five minutes of Babylon 5
Of course the reason you’ll not have heard of them, is because you know them as something else, something that becomes clearer when you realise that the keyboards on Don’t Ya Love Life are being played by a certain Dave Arch, a name familiar to many millions of people as being in charge of the house band on Strictly Come Dancing. Then when you take a look at the Strictly Come Dancing album
At it’s core the Tommy Blaize Band is the same group of singers and musicians that we see every Saturday night on BBC1 during the autumn, but this is them playing mainly their own music and under their own name. Whilst on the show they turn their hands to pretty much any style the dancers throw at them, on their own there is a definite motown, old school feel to the music on the album, with brass sections and an orchestra in evidence on certain tracks. Across the whole album it is easily up to the quality of the cover versions they produce week by week on our televisions.
The album justifiably deserves to do well, and give an excellent bunch of musicians a bit of recognition in their own right, rather than just as the Strictly Come Dancing house band.
You can find the album in a number of places, including from Amazon – buying from the link below gives us a little help funding the site here.
I guess like most people in the current economic climate, we’ve been looking at ways to save a bit of money. We’ve swapped telecoms providers saving on mobile calls, and now on landline costs, made a number of other changes, but one of the things I quickly identified was the Sky TV bill.
We’ve had Sky pretty much by necessity since we’ve moved here since down to a combination of factors about the only transmitter our roof aerial can pick up is stuff from the Crystal Palace transmitter in London. It’s not the best reception at that distance, meaning that reliable reception for digital services is not really a possibility. Since cable services aren’t available to us the only option was satellite TV, which at the point we moved in was Sky.
We started with a single Sky box, but as many people discover, recording from it is an absolute pain. Enter the Sky+ and an extra £10 a month on the bill, plus another £10 a month to have the old box plugged into the TV upstairs with the same channel selection. Then along came Sky+ HD to tempt us further, so by the end of this year when our lock-in ended we are paying over £40 a month.
I identified that we weren’t using any of the extra channels on the upstairs box – the TV was only used to watch CBeebies and the BBC News channel, both of which were available on the Freesat from Sky package, so dropping that would save £10 a month. However things moved on a bit a few weeks back when our original Sky box died. Having looked at the replacement options from Sky I went out and bought a Freesat box, and was pleasantly surprised. Although it has a slightly different selection of channels from Freesat from Sky it did contain the channels we used, and on top of that the box had built in iPlayer support. Unlike the phoney Sky Anytime video on demand service that wastes half of the space on your Sky+ or Sky+ HD box and a whole load of your electricity downloading programmes you didn’t ask it to, or the Sky Anytime+ service that is limited to Sky Broadband customers, this is video on demand for any user on any suitably fast broadband connection using the well regarded BBC iPlayer platform.
Having experienced that, I then started to wonder if we could save any more.
The basic problem is that whilst we could entirely downgrade to Freesat from Sky, we’d also lose the HD and recording functionality which Sky charge extra for. Looking at Freesat they have a wide range of Freesat+ boxes that have the more limited range of HD channels on the Freesat platform and recording functionality, but without the monthly bill. Indeed the Freesat+ functionality is more advanced than Sky+ in a number of areas.
The next question was whether there was stuff we wouldn’t be able to get on Freesat to which the answer was yes, but it was all stuff we could pick up on DVD, BluRay, or was available through Apple TV all for less than the amount we were paying monthly to Sky. Basically we pay for the things we wanted, rather than a large monthly outlay for hundreds of channels we didn’t really ever watch.
So decision made, I then looked around for options. We could directly replace the Sky+ HD with a direct replacement such as the well regarded Humax Foxsat Hdr, whilst that would be a good option, I then came across the Panasonic DMR-BS780EBK Blu-Ray Recorder which would also replace the Blu-Ray player and DVD recorder we had with one unit, with the added benefit that it would integrate nicely with our existing Panasonic TV. Thanks to a generous internet price matching policy from our local Panasonic specialist that gave me a significant saving over the retail, last week I took the plunge, cancelled our Sky subscription and put in the Panasonic box.
To be honest we’ve not really missed Sky. Most of our viewing is on the mainstream channels, we still have both BBC HD channels and ITV HD, Sky is apparently paying large amounts of money to Channel 4 and Channel 5 to keep their “free to air” HD channels on their system only, so although our Freesat box can pick them up, it can’t decode them, but it’s not too much of a loss.
The iPlayer functionality is excellent, and I have used it already – we’re also using it again over Christmas to get around a recording clash. If you do have a recording clash unlike Sky+ the box will try to help you sort it out. For example it knows when the same show is repeated later in the week and will suggest one of these instead, indeed if a recording fails for any reason it will automatically record one of these later showings.
It also knows when the same programme is showing on an HD channel, even if it is at a later time and if you select the standard definition version will suggest the HD alternative. The suggestions even go as far as suggesting other programmes you might find interesting, so for example recording Grand Designs sometimes gives suggestions of other programmes about homes and houses.
Looking at other functionality that the Sky+ doesn’t have, one of the big bugbears is that all Sky+ programmes are locked away on the Sky+ box on which it was recorded, short of opening the box up, physically removing the drive and copying that way there is no way to get the programmes off, even to another Sky+.
No such problem with the Freesat box. Whilst many allow you to archive programmes to USB drives, our Panasonic box includes a DLNA server, I just enable that option and I can watch programmes back on a computer, and if we bought a DLNA TV upstairs we could watch back programmes straight off the box across the network. Similarly I can push videos from my camera, pictures or music across the network onto the Freesat box.
It’s only been a week, but thus far it really feels like the right decision. Whilst there is definitely less choice, we have a lot more flexibility about how and where we can watch stuff, the quality isn’t any less – indeed for programmes downloaded onto the Apple TV the quality is noticeably better thanks to the heavy compression Sky use on some of their HD channels. Best of all though we’re saving ourselves the best part of £500 a year.
If you too are looking for ways to save money, sit down and look at what you’re actually watching, can you save some money by ditching Sky?
Watching the final Strictly It Takes Two last night I noticed something interesting. A look at the scoring chart confirmed that the scoring in week one, the week nobody was voted off, correctly predicted the semi-finalists. More than that it correctly predicts the final three, and the placing of fourth and fifth place to Scott Maslen and Gavin Henson.
The question is, will it correctly predict the placing of the final three tonight?
On the basis of the week one results either Matt Baker or Pamela Stephenson should win it as they tied for first place in week one, with Kara Tointon being placed third. This disagrees with the scoring over the rest of the series where Kara Tointon has consistently scored best followed by Pamela Stephenson and Matt Baker.
As to who we’d like to win, for once though we’d be happy for any of the final three to win, as they would all be worthy winners. Come back tomorrow and see if my prediction based on the week one scores will be correct!
Update: So the results last night were Kara Tointon first, Matt Baker second and Pamela Stephenson third. Interesting in that the judges scored Pamela Stephenson into first place, indeed we were surprised that Kara Tointon got through having noticeably messed up her rather over ambitious show dance.
Whilst Kara Tointon is most definitely the best dancer of the three, on the night she produced two out of four routines that had a rule break – illegal (but unintentional) lift in the Rumba and not enough dancing in hold in the American Smooth – and noticeable mistakes in the other two – losing timing in the show dance and footwork mistakes in the Waltz. We certainly thought that Pamela Stephenson deserved better than third place too.
If you’ve been watching the latest series of The Apprentice over the past few weeks, you cannot have failed to notice Stuart “The Brand” Baggs – he famously said that everything he touched turned to sold on the first programme of the series. He is notable in being the youngest candidate ever to appear on the series, and currently runs his own telecommunications company on the Isle of Man.
This week he finally got his chance to shine, and demonstrate his unique management style. Here we present some of the key techniques he demonstrated, so others can emulate his success.
Sadly, whilst Stuart “The Brand” Baggs was bad, Sandeesh was worse, and despite having sold more DVD’s than Stuart had messed up the budget and pricing and ended up losing by £40.
There’s always next week…