The best laid plans of mice and Lions…

Hello.

It’s been an interesting old weekend for me so I thought I’d share it with you, Internet. I am rather fond of you and I feel you don’t have enough pointless blogs floating about on you as it is. I’ve also chosen what you will later discover is a brilliantly deep and multi-layered title because I’m a motherfuckin’ lyrical wordsmith motherfuckin’ genius.

Is it because breaded has something to do with genius... which swims?

Firstly, and most importantly, this weekend marked the return of the Lothian Lions from a two-year wilderness that was brought about as a result of my broken bones and co-founder Ollie’s selfish year abroad in super-gay Paris. For the uninitiated, the Lions are a football team formed by Ollie and myself in 2006 who played in the Edinburgh Uni league (no I’m not a student, but it’s cool apparently) and shot to instant fame around the city by acquiring team sponsorship from Big Daddy O’s, a local and fantastically-named strip club on Lothian Road in the city centre. We actually attracted players based on this sponsorship agreement and it turned out to be a great bit of PR for us. We played ok, won a few, lost a few, but most importantly Nick – our team’s resident “lad” – managed to get lucky with a few of the strippers at one time or another which we all agreed was the objective of the team from day one. Nick, your legend will live forever.

Like this but with stripper instead of dog. Oh wait, no. It's the same.

Then I broke my ankle in a tackle (yes, I broke my own ankle, well done there) which, as the team’s star player, was a blow and I think the rest of the lads didn’t really fancy it after that. Well, that and most of the fixtures were cancelled because of waterlogged pitches but I like to think the team would have been too upset to play in my absence anyway. So then Ollie went off to France and I couldn’t be bothered to run the team on my own so it kinda disappeared… until yesterday, where we had our first pre-season friendly ahead of the 2009/10 Edinburgh Uni league season. Very exciting. It was even exciting after the first five or six goals had gone in, and I’m still excited today although the other team apparently got into double-figures. Keeping score is for geeks. The important thing is we’re back, and once our players actually know each other’s names and get used to playing on a pitch that’s bigger than someone’s living room I think we’ll be ok. It’s a plan anyway…

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On-Lions

More lions in the news today, though to a lesser extent of course, are the Three Lions of the England football team who have a world cup qualifier against Ukraine this coming Saturday. The news surrounding this game is that it will be shown exclusively online – no terrestrial TV, no satellite TV, no pubs. Just on the internet, on your computer, in your bedroom, alongside your porn and your CV. Weird thought isn’t it? It’s going to be streaming live on the site www.ukrainevengland.com and will cost you “at least £4.99″ to view. The “at least” part bothers me; just set a fucking price you bellends. Anyway.

I’m a huge fan and exponent of things being on the internet. I love the internet. There are also other factors at work here, such as the fact that the game was originally going to be screened by the now-defunct wanker-operated Setanta Sports. This means that there was a massive amount of money paid for the rights to the game, although Setanta never actually had that money, but it has been promised to and most likely spent by the Ukraine FA or whoever it was that received it. So that money has to be recouped somewhere and therefore charging people to watch the game, while lame, I can understand. Also from an England fan’s point of view, the game is a dead rubber. We’ve already qualified top of this group so we don’t need to win or even draw the game, it doesn’t matter to us. So it seems like a good opportunity to experiment with having the first-ever match solely streaming online for a game that no-one will really be that pissed off about if they miss.

Apart from this kid. He is ALWAYS pissed off.

The problem with this plan is that football isn’t really a sport that lone geeks, such as myself, will want to watch sitting on their own in front of their computers in their bedrooms. It’s something that people watch together, at the pub with a pint or round the house of your mate with the biggest telly. Generally monitors are between 15 and, in minor cases, 22 inches, and usually situated in places that don’t really support loads of your mates gathering together to drink beer and eat pizza. I also object to having to pay £4.99 for a game just because the cretins at Setanta went bust for spending millions of pounds that they didn’t actually have buying rights to matches; I didn’t have a Setanta subscription before and would have still seen this game for free at the pub, so why should I now have to pay? There are lots of problems with this proposal and I think there’s going to be unrest about it. As I say, I’m a great fan of having things streaming on the internet and wouldn’t mind paying for it if it was a guaranteed stream that wasn’t going to die halfway through, but I don’t want it to be my only option. I want to choose to not go to the pub with my friends and instead stay at home, in my room, watching the football on my computer in my pants so that I can stalk people on Facebook and look up midget wrestling (among other things) at half-time.

3 feet, 2 inches of pure destruction

So it’s a nice plan, people who run www.ukrainevengland.com, but I think your best laid plan… might… you know.

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Mouse Trap

We had a mouse in our room on Saturday night and the little bastard kept me awake until 3am. It then managed to climb up actually onto our bed when we finally got to sleep and have a little poo. It’s possibly the most disgusting animal-related thing that’s happened to me since the goat incident that we don’t talk about any more, and I’m not particularly happy about it. For posterity, it didn’t actually go anywhere near us – it was behind our pillows that were slightly off the wall where they usually are, but still… not ideal.

I have now set up a cunning network of traps (read: one trap) in an attempt to capture said mouse and his disgusting feces-based rampage. I actually don’t really have a problem with mice; fundamentally they aren’t rats or cockroaches, which is a massive bonus. They’re still disgusting but in a big old run-down flat like ours you’re always going to get them here and there. Before last night I hadn’t seen one for months – I guess it’s because it’s getting pretty cold in the UK now and the poor little blighter just wanted to cuddle up to us and have a nice warm snooze. No, no, stop humanising it. It’s fucking horrible.

Fuck you Mickey you disgusting bed-fouling prick

So anyway, I’ve got a plan to stop this happening again; an intricate and cunning plan which has lots of clever and tiny details to it but basically revolves around getting an exterminator to come in and poison the little wankers. It won’t work though, they breed faster than 15-year-old chavs in Croxteth so there’s no getting rid of them. Ah well. At least I saw my amazing title through to the end. Motherfuckin’ gay fish yo.

Britain’s web 2.0 future is in the hands of idiots

So my first proper blog is mostly to test out the limits of WordPress and to try to figure out all these little features and widgets and niggles and trinkets. However, seeing as I’m here, I might as well also use it to go on a bloody great rant about “Digital Britain” and its various spin-off issues, and how the people frequently speaking about it in the press are out-of-touch with the realities of the situation. I like to call them “berks”. It’s an under-used insult and one that I feel is nicely appropriate.

Not to be confused with this Berk, who I'm actually rather fond of.

Ostensibly the irritation that has prompted this post has been caused by an article on the BBC website today; a website and organisation that I’ve got a lot of time for, in all honesty. The BBC gets a lot of crap from a lot of commentators but when it comes to leading from the front, at least in a web 2.0 sense, they do a pretty bloody good job. BBC iPlayer is a tremendous addition to an already impressive website, and something that I appreciate being made readily available to me as a license-fee payer despite not having a TV aerial that works. I like being able to watch Top Gear at 11pm, on my computer, while simultaneously playing Football Manager and chatting to friends on Skype and MSN. It’s 2009; men can multi-task now, as long as it doesn’t require us to take our faces away from just the one screen.

However, some berks have today said that the corporation should start to charge for catch-up programming on iPlayer á la iTunes. Now, I realise that hundreds of post-Y2K products having a lower-case ‘i’ in front of them so that they sound more 21st Century is getting slightly confusing and that we also live in a world where making money is most people’s ultimate aim. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to make as much money as possible at every opportunity possible while exerting the least effort possible, and these people are exactly the same. However, they seem to have not only missed the point entirely, but also I would suggest have totally made up some “research” to support their views.

Here is one berk...

Lorraine Heggessey, CEO of Talkback Thames (the illustrious company that brought us such “entertainment” gems as WAGs Boutique and Dale’s Supermarket Sweep) and Steve Hewlett, a man whose views I generally agree with despite him being associated with The Guardian but who has got it all wrong this time, both think that the rich, undertaxed general populous of Britain should be made to pay for catch-up online programming like that found on iPlayer.

The fundamental problem with this is that it’s not a viable way for them to make money – and let’s get this straight, they’re not thinking about the BBC’s revenues when they suggest that iPlayer should charge for shows. Heggessey in particular knows full well that her company can’t start trying to charge for catch-up programmes online if the BBC don’t set the precedent. Not that I can believe anyone would pay to see a repeat of Minder.

However along with some gems from Hewlett* comes some startling research from Fremantle Media, who are by complete coincidence the company that own Hennessey’s Talkback Thames. The research apparently concludes, and I quote,

“Research carried out by Fremantle suggests that people would be willing to pay up to £2 for certain shows.”

...and here's another

I’d be very keen to find out exactly who was asked and what questions were put to them for Fremantle to come up with this conclusion, because I reckon I could do a straw poll that would blow their research out of the water. My single question would be,

How much would you be prepared to pay to watch BBC TV shows online using iPlayer, bearing in mind that they are currently available online and on BBC television for absolutely nothing?

I’m pretty confident that everyone within a one hundred mile radius would come up with the same answer. The question isn’t what do you think a show is worth, rather, how much are you prepared to pay for them when your license fee means you’ve already paid to watch them on your television? It’s absurd. Some will argue that having catch-up TV still costs more than not, which I appreciate. However the BBC rakes in a good £3.4bn each year from license fees, so I think they can probably just about scrape the barrel. And, to be fair to the corporation, they have said in that same article that they have no plans to start charging for iPlayer content. Quite right too.

ITV aren’t complaining because they stick ads into their catch-up and live online streams, and for me this is the way for companies like Talkback Thames to make their money. By forcing people to start paying for programmes that they are currently getting for free they’re only going to succeed in alienating their online audiences in the pursuit of bottom-line – and this is the absolutely fundamental problem with all the people who are making these ridiculous suggestions about how to police or charge people when they’re using the internet. You can’t just cut people off for downloading things illegally because it’s not that simple, and you can’t just start making people pay for services that they’re currently getting for nothing because the very nature of the web means that there’s almost always some other means of acquiring the material you want. Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it has so many opportunities for creative people to make money – depressingly, it appears that the people in the media industries that we have revered as being the height of creativity for so long are just as lazy and stupid as the rest of us.

Ooh! Ooh! I've thought an ideas!

The other thing of course is that there’s no sign that catch-up shows being made available online for free is damaging anyone’s revenues; all that’s happening is that some people who don’t think they’ve quite got enough money already have spotted an opportunity to try to squeeze a bit more out of the resources they have available. What they don’t seem to realise is that they’re not ripping off Generation X or the baby boomers any more: they’re dealing with Generation Y here, and we know far more about all this than they do.

*Gems from Hewlett include: “At iTunes prices, I would pay” and “The BBC never thought it was appropriate to give away DVDs, so why should catch-up be free?” Well, perhaps because DVDs cost money to manufacture, burn, package and distribute you cretin?

Initial posterino

Hello internet. I thought I should introduce myself properly… I’ve spent so much time looking at you over the years but have never plucked up the courage to really say anything. So this is it, I hope I get it right…

Will you go down on me? Oh, no, I mean go out with me! Shit.

Well that’s that fucked already. It’s only uphill from here.

Hello internet. I thought I should introduce myself properly… I’ve spent so much time looking at you over the years but have never plucked up the courage to really say anything. So this is it, I hope I get it right…

Will you go down on me? Oh, no, I mean go out with me! Shit.

Well that’s that fucked already. It’s only uphill from here.