Apparently he had been in a car with some mates on the way home, and going around a roundabout a car had pulled onto the roundabout ahead of them from the left. One of them noticed that it looked unusual, and my son got his iPhone out. They didn't get very close, and had to turn off at the next roundabout, but my son did get some shaky pictures of what seems to be a DeLorean DMC-12 sports car...
Trying to take photos in a car which is attempting to catch up with an albeit legendarily allegedly slow sports car is never easy, and the photos go some way to proving this!
Of course, if this was CSI-world, then we would be able to digitally 'enhance' the photos, get the numberplate, see the driver's face, extract a 3D model, notice that the front left tyre was slightly deflated, etc. Unfortunately...
I have had an idea for a new television programme format: 'Have Your Say'. It is based on something which has intrigued me for some time, and I've now realised that it would make a great format for television, so I'm giving it away for free.
The thing that has always intrigued me are the sometimes curious, sometimes inexplicable, and sometimes intriguing decisions that are made by people who have ultimate control over what happens in television programmes. Recent examples could include:
-Why did season 3 of Primeval start out with its main character, but lose him and his love interest by half-way through the season, and then introduce a replacement who behaved in much the same way?
-Why did the Doctor Who publicity machine set up Martha Jones as the next Companion, only to lose her rapidly, and then quickly introduce a different new Companion?
-Why didn't Derren Brown actually explain how he did the Lottery prediction, on the subsequent 'How it was Done' programme?
(I'm sure you have your own questions!)
As you can imagine, there are lots of these types of questions, and whilst TV is full of investigative programmes about customer service, politics, crime, and the paranormal, TV itself is rarely held up to account for itself.
The format goes like this: Program researchers locate and investigate anomalous activity in TV decision making. Reporter presents results and identifies those responsible, who are invited to explain. Public then votes on which explanation they believe.
There's a lot to recommend this format. It uses skills that already exist (investigative reporting), there is no travelling required because the stories are all from the same place that the programmes themselves are made, the public voting will bring in much-needed cash, and the public gets to hear some interesting, amusing and maybe even plausible explanations - plus the public gets a chance to 'have their say' on how acceptable the explanations are!
Finally, some people might be already thinking of another format that already has broad television coverage, plus a voting scheme, but it only happens every few years: Politics.
Every so often, someone says something that indicates that a revolution has happened. Often, the person who says it does not realise the true significance of their words. It happened recently in the Radio Times, a venerable television (and radio!) listings magazine in the UK, and probably one of the oldest such magazines in the world.
In a interview, Julia McKenzie, the latest actress to fill the role of Agatha' Cristie's 'Miss Marple' on the small screen in the UK, said that people would have to get used to her replacing any previous holders of the role. Now I have no problems with the quote, nor Julia McKenzie, and there are people who have called this arrogance, but I'm not one of them.
Instead, I think that it is a remarkable statement that completely misses the point, and in doing so, it reveals some fascinating things about what is happening to television. Why do I think this? Here's why:
Julia's statement says that people have to accept that she is going to be the Miss Marple that they will see on their televisions, but neither is actually true. There is now nothing to stop people watching any of the previous Miss Marples, and so the Miss Marple that appears on televisions could be any one of them - via repeats on terrestrial channels, DVDs, satellite/cable channels that re-run programmes, internet players like the BBC's runaway success: iPlayer, etc. So Julia may not be the Miss Marple that people see, nor do people have to accept her in that role. People now have a choice, and her statement clearly indicates that she thinks they do not. Now this did indeed used to be the case: before video recording became a commodity, and before digital hard disk recording of TV (PVRs, TiVo, Sky Plus, etc), and before the internet, then you watched broadcast television, or you didn't - just two choices.
But things are not like that anymore. There are many ways to watch television, and all of them give people choice where they used to have none. And rather like giving people access to personal transportation devices like cars/automobiles, taking them away isn't going to be easy. The freedom that people now have to watch what they want, when they want to, is going to be very difficult to take away. But there's more to it than that.
People are now used to flexibility in watching television in some ways, but there are other flexibilities that are yet to come. The next digital revolution involves what happens inside a television programme, instead of what happens around it. The coming generation of television will enable us to change what happens inside a programme, what we want to happen, when we want it to happen. Miss Marple will never be the same again!
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