UPDATE (02/04/17): The link below is now dead, and this album now resides here.
Found lying at the bottom of a drawer at the now-defunct Peartree Productions…
I’m Alan Partridge Soundtrack (142MB, 256kbps MP3)
In my early teens, access to hardcore porn was a rarity. There was a Joy of Sex on the top shelf which I used to “borrow”, and Cosmopolitan ensured my life would follow its usual route as a sitcom character. Unfortunately, I did spend time writing a BBC BASIC program which would ask for my name, and then provide random dirty responses to my one-handed tapping. This is quite possibly the saddest thing anybody has ever done ever, and I certainly won’t be digging it out of the box of discs upstairs any time soon.
Whatever your opinion on the iPhone 4, it’s hard to disagree that the Retina display is really rather excellent. Phrases like “It looks like print” are cliched, and entirely true. It’s the single biggest reason I’m not buying an iPad this year; no point buying one now, when I suspect one with a Retina-like display will be released next year.
The thing I find most fascinating about it is that it reminds me of when colour depth ceased to be a big deal to most people in terms of specifications. (At its extremes in the early days of home computing, to get the highest resolution on a BBC Micro, 640 x 256, you could only display two colours at once.) As soon as technology advanced enough so that 24-bit, 16.7 million colours in high resolution became standard, the general consumer stopped caring, as that’s the most granularity the eye can make out. Exactly the same is now happening with pixel density on mobile devices; we are approaching – or at, depending on your point of view – the point where it’s impossible for the eye to make out individual pixels, and there’s little point going much further. And whilst Apple may have got there first, this kind of display will surely become standard across all high-end phones over the next couple of years.
Whenever people talk of the old BBC Radio 5 – the one with actual children’s shows on, rather than just sounding like it – the one thing that’s often missed out on is: “How was it sold to the kids?”
In answer, here’s a scan from excellent BBC kids magazine Fast Forward, August 29 – September 4 1990 – sadly, I have lost the aforementioned doorhanger promised on the cover:
I have quite a few old Fast Forward issues here; if anyone wants to see more of Andi “Ask Me Blooming Anything At All” Peters, or Phillip Hodson’s fucking harrowing column, just ask…
My box rummaging adventure continues; as I posted to Twitter the other day, here’s an article from the May 1990 Issue of Acorn User going behind the scenes of the computer setup of Strike It Lucky:
Rummaging through some old boxes yesterday, what did I find? A couple of letters from Central Television, and proof that the Central cake looked just as good on paper as it did on-screen:
This afternoon, between 12:30pm – 6pm, Sky1/Sky1 HD are showing three of the four Futurama movies. (Missing out Bender’s Game, but for various reasons, if you were going to not show one of them, that’s probably the one I’d drop.) Now, you’d think that would be difficult to mess up, yes?
Don’t be stupid. This is television. They can mess up anything.
Something I recorded off the telly last week. It really comes alive three minutes in, although the start is worth watching purely so you get the amusing impression later on:
Well, things have been quiet around here for a while, haven’t they? Whilst we prepare for upcoming “stuff”, take a look at something I posted on Twitter a while back, from 70s Bill Maynard vehicle Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt. (Which, incidentally, has a dodgy pilot, is really good for the first series, and then sadly tails off a bit.) Yep, you’re waiting around for the Yorkshire endcap at the end, although feel free to enjoy the end theme, which proves that Blackadder II isn’t the only sitcom which had different lyrics for the end of each episode…
Immigration. Barely a day goes past without it hitting the news. I would link you to examples, but I’m presuming – if you’re the usual kind of wet liberal that I suspect visits this site – that you might wish to take a break from all of that for five minutes.
Take a listen, then, to the following jingle, from PAMS Series 28 – made for the radio station WABC in 1964: