Tiggergate

24 hours of solid Purple Planet partying led to some traditonal festive ill-feeling.

The fate of three of our party is barely known - hopelessly standed in rural Cheshire

in snow, freezing temperatures, and with all taxis booked up for four hours.

Those who drove faired little better, contriving to crash...into each other.

We spent an hour on a railway platform in the company of a bizarre Beetlejuice

lookalike who took exception to my tie - on the grounds of it being 'too papal'

Things looked up with by the appearance of a Ribena bottle that had been

sensibly pre-loaded with vodka.

Natural justice was suspended. We thought we won an oversized Tigger

stuffed toy in a raffle, but, on some a specious technicality, our winning ticket was

deemed 'invalid'. Tigger would have been given a nice warm home in our studio-

but now he'll just have to bounce...bounce...bounce.....to the soup kitchen.

There was an article in Britain's Times Newspaper ascribing the enormous success of the BBC's Wildlife Documentary 'Frozen Planet' to the fact that's it's bleak artic feel was, somehow, a metaphor for our times. There may be an element of truth in this observation, but I think the real deal in this respect has to to be Fenton the runaway black labrador.

Fenton is a serious contender for greatest viral of all time - and will surely give Dog Tease a good run for it's money in the animals category. But Fenton is made of sterner symbolic stuff. Part of its joy is that the owner is so hopelesssly behind the action - his chance of regaining control is nil. That pretty much sums up 2011 whether you're a Prime Minister in Eurozone or a night shift foreman.

Once again, the greatest brains in adland see their Christmas efforts

screened. John Lewis Partnership have hit gold with the Adam and Eve

agency with something bordering on a, gulp, Christian, Christmas message.

At the other end of the evolutionary scale, flogging games consols

is a thankless task - as there can always be severe objections to something

so essentially isolating and vacous, but Nintendo don't care:

Particularly objectionable is the attempt to tie in 'happy families' to

'tonnes of games'. Perhaps you don't want to stay with your damn family at all -

as, oddly, my mother once said.

An enterprising agency should go with this if they've got the nerve.

Have the ghastly family straining to gulp down an overcooked turkey in the gloom,

and sell a package to the Maldives off the back of the back of it.

Meanwhile, Morrisons supermarket, has gone with ex-cricketer,

Freddy Flintoff, reeling off a series of Christmasy cliches with

the payoff line of "People will DEFINATLY COME"

I have yet to experience such Christmas induced ecstasy.

Geoff

I was recently contacted by someone through a US agency congratulating me on the wonderful theme music to 'The Waltons'. It was, however, another Geoff Harvey, born in London in 1935 and was musical director of Channel 9, Australia for 39 years:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0367526/filmotype

Possibly for the first time for a generation, there is a real issue

for production companies in being sensitve to viewer's economic woes.

There is a truism that 'escapist'content is popular in hard-times.

It is equally easy to annoy viewers by showy excess. One programme

that annoyed Chris and I intensely was 'Man to Mantas' in which the

normally affable Martin Clunes felt compelled to achieve a 'life long

ambition' to swim with Manta Rays - a task which needed extensive

travel to destinations such as The Cayman Islands. First broadcast

in early December 2010, when Britain was icebound with daily highs of

around -4C and when millions were coming to terms with the first

modern day low-budget Chistmas, their timing was appalling.

Celebs swanning around should take a tip from their PA's - lie low.

As they catch up with reality, we can expect more productions where

celebs are put in some sort of peril. The BBC has already explored

this territory with the pleasantly disarming 'The World's most Dangerous

Roads' - but the key is probably to ensure that the participants

really are in danger. A needless celebrity sacrifice might cheer us

all up no end.

There's a nice request during the (extensive) credits of the Simpsons movie (2007) -

"we just ask that you remember all our names".

If I'm really impressed with a programme I'll make the effort to see who the

producer/director was - thoughI've never been sure to what end.

But now I'm glad I bothered as I see a distinct pattern emerging.

I soon came to realise that anything on the BBC that was any good always seemed

to be directed by the same person, Lucy Hetherington. But casting the net a bit wider,

an disproportionate number of the best documentaries on British television seem

to have women at the production helm. There was an airing of Landmark Films'

"Baby Beauty Queens" on a new channel last night and I have to admit that the

thought crossed my mind that it was so good that only a woman could could been

in charge. (It turned out that three quarters of the production team were female).

My somehwhat basic analysis is that woman seem to be prepared to let the

subjects of documentaries 'breath' a little - rather than pursuing a dogged editorial line.

Geoff

Have spent the last few weeks working on our latest surround sound project - 4 blu-ray discs of different scenes accompamed by ambient/relaxing music supplied by Purple Planet . See www.bluscenes.com for details. This is the third set of discs we've done - when we've finished these we'll have done 11!

The original challenge with doing surround sound was finding a surround sound card to accommodate the extra sound channels, as of course the in-built sound card of an Mac is just stereo - more difficult to find one than you'd think! The ongoing challenge for me is makng sure there's enough free space on my hard drive (surround files take up an awful lot of space), and the ongoing challenge for my computer is to cope!! Doing this batch of discs in particular I've lost count of how many times I get the message "out of memory - not enough memory to create clipboard". It also takes a long time for my Mac to chug through rendering audio files - I guess an hour-long surround bounce of 55 individual tracks is a bit of a challenge!

Chris