The Apprentice 2014

The Apprentice 2014 starts tomorrow on BBC1 at 9pm after being delayed because of the World Cup. To get us going we have two back to back shows, one tonight and another tomorrow night. Hopefully that is enough to wet our appetite and get us into the series and its spin off show with the wonderful and funny Dora O'Brian. 

The start of the show has be heralded by a great and funny trailer on the BBC website that uses the Bond Gold Finger theme, which depicts Sir Alan Sugars finger as the gold finger of doom. It a clever and assuming way of introducing a show, that often shows us what is wrong with business in the UK and what is good, and we can see that in the meet the candidates video also available on the BBC Website, which is a another amusing look at the show. Of course a more serious introduction can also be found on the BBC Website, after all business is not all fun, you just have to ask the former bankrupt Sir Alan Sugar about that.

The show is now in its tenth series and most of them have made fascinating viewing from start to finish. This year we start out with 20 candidates for the prize of £250,000 to be invested in a business idea of there choice and to work in partnership with Sir Alan Sugar. Along the way 18 of them will fall fowl of the pointing finger and the words "Your Fired". By the last show in the series only 2 will remain to fight it out for the ultimate prize. Some of the candidates always seem like buffoons who would be better employed as road sweepers than high fliers in the business world, but that is all part of watching the show. 

I'm looking forward to the start of the new series especially after having to wait for the whole of the summer. I just hope it is all worth the wait, which I'm sure it will be, once it gets underway tomorrow.

Nancy wins the Great British Bake Off

Richard Burr was the hottest favourite in history of "The Great British Bake Off" so it came as a surprise to hear the announcement tonight when Nancy Birtwhistle, a retired GP Practice manager, was crowned the winner of the this years show, after her home baked final show stopper.

Unfortunately for Richard it all went wrong in the final after winning the title of Master Baker week after week. Not sure if it was nerve but he was well off his game and although he tried to get it back on the second day his presentation rather than his baking let him down.

After the first day the situation was that either Luis Troyano and Nancy Birtwhistle were in the running for the title of winner of the Great British Bake Off 2014 and in the end it was Nancy's Moulin Rouge cake that stole the show on the final day and saw her passing the winning line.

Mary Berry said of this years series: "You never know how the bakers will be affected as we go through filming week by week, but Nancy remained constant throughout. I think it was her quiet determination that drove her through, and the fact that she never really lost her cool. It was a close run when it came to judging the final, but Nancy is deservedly our winner and I must admit that I have been inspired by her baking. The bakers have been so keen, so creative and the results have been mind blowing. It's been a real joy to judge this year."

Paul Hollywood said after the final: "Nancy has been confident, creative and unafraid as a baker and that showed from the very start. In one of my judgings I called her close to perfection, so that says it for me. This series has been one of the best for me, as we have had great bakers who have built on their baking expertise each week. They have shown both a depth of knowledge and a sense of humour, you really couldn't have asked for a better bunch. 'They have really pushed the boundaries of technique this year."

I really enjoyed watch the show this year it has been great television and some of the creation have been incredable. My favourite was Martha Collison who did so well to come fifth at the tender age of 17, which is 14 years younger than any other contestants when she first appeared on the show. I think she did amazingly well and she going to be am incredible baker when she reaches Nancy's age if she carries on baking.

BBC do it again!

Seems the BBC are setting out to anger people yet again by trailing a new video format that is not fully supported across many browsers including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is an integral part of Microsoft Windows operating system. 

It was while reading a rather interesting news article on cave paintings and after reading about 60% I came to the video that I wanted to watch and suddenly saw the message above. Below this was the following text:

This interactive video is optimised for use in Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers on PC and Mac, as well as Chrome and Safari on iPads. It will not display in Internet Explorer browsers, on iOS or Android mobile devices, or Android tablets. 

Once again the BBC have decided to disadvantage licence fee payers that don't happen to have the correct technology that is favoured by  BBC. This time it includes the 70 percent of mobile phones, 30 percent of people that use Microsoft's Internet Explorer and the countless people that don't own iPads. Once again it is clear that the BBC has shown it favouritism for Apple platforms compared to other platforms.

It is quiet disgusting that they treat us, the people that pay the licences fee and don't have Apple products in such a disgusting way. We pay our licence fees to and we shouldn't be disadvantaged in this unfair way over and over again. When will the BBC launch an Android App before it launches a Apple App or is someone such a rotten apple that just don't care about the rest of use that don't have Apple products.

Personally I going to be complaining to the BBC at yet another move by the BBC to limit the services they provide. If they wanted to try something new they didn't have to prototype it on just one set of devices, they should have rolled it out for all of them. We all pay the license fee equally!

Time for BBC Radio 3 FM Broadcasts to end?

According to figures published in Wikipedia the BBC spends around £405 million on national broadcasting excluding transmission costs. This amount of money provides for the programming of all the major stations excluding the BBC World Service which gets it funding from a number of sources. Any one knows me knows I have a love of figures so I started to work out which services provided the best value for money and I started with working out which were the cheapest BBC station to provide per listener hour.

If you take a close look at the graph above, you can do this by double clicking on the picture, you can see how much the BBC spends per radio station per listener hour. The most expensive is BBC Radio 3 at £5.12 per hour and the most economical is BBC Radio 2 at £0.34 per listener hour. If you do the mathematics this make BBC Radio 3 over 14 times more expensive than BBC Radio 2 to provide an hours entertainment. 

This comes about because the BBC Radio 3 has a relativity high budget, as shown in the graph above, and relativity poor share of audience figures, as shown in the graph below. In fact it is the forth highest funded BBC radio station and surprisingly has slightly more allocated to it than BBC Radio 1 which has a much bigger proportion of the BBC audience share.

Clearly in terms of audience share the station is down with the only digitally broadcast stations, with an audience share of about 2.3% which is less than BBC 6 Music, which has 3.6% share of the audience. This is amazingly poor audience share given the resources that are pumped into the station, and one could argue is poor value for money, however the BBC is culturally committed to providing a classic music radio station.

Given the figures it dose raises the question if broadcasting BBC Radio 3 using the BBC's FM transmitters is a good use of the analogue of spectrum the broadcaster has available to them. Especially when it could be allocated to BBC Radio 5 live which has three and half times the audience share. This could allow the reuse of the 693Khz and 909Khz on the medium wave band for a commercial broadcaster who is interested in providing an national talk radio network. 

Personally I think it is a waste of the FM frequencies that BBC has at its disposal. Clearly BBC Radio 3 is a minority channel and has limited appeal, and budget aside, it is not common sense to waste resources that could be put to better use. Of course the BBC Radio 3 listeners would argue that the sound quality is poorer on a digital transmitter than an analogue one and of course they are right, you can never digitally reproduce a perfect copy of any analogue signal unless you have unlimited digital bandwidth. However, the current FM signal, although far better than any AM signal, still suffers from interference that can degrade the quality of the audio you receive, something that doesn't happen with a digital signal.

Already BBC Radio 3 has allocated to it a higher digital bandwidth than any of the other stations broadcast on DAB radio by the BBC, 192kbps compared to 128kbps for the other music stations. This is done to ensure the station has best sounding audio reproduction given the limited available bandwidth. This I wouldn't propose to change, but surely it is time the FM broadcasts came to an end. At some point we are going to move to digital only radio, like it or not, so why shouldn't BBC Radio 3 be the first major station to make the move?

Finally looking at the figures it raises a number of other issues that need addressing by the BBC and it is about time we had a debate about how we want the money we put into radio broadcasting spent, especially in a time when the BBC are having to make cuts due to a freezing of the license fee.

BBC Bigscreen iPlayer closes

Today the threat of the closure of BBC Bigsccreen iPlayer service became reality as people with equipment made before 2011 noticed that their service had been withdrawn by the BBC. The warning appeared that the service was closing appeared about a month ago and perfectly serviceable equipment has now become obsolete.  

The BBC claim that the Bigscreen service was only being used by about one percent of users and that it uses a completely different set of servers from the rest of the iplayer service and that this made it too expensive to run and hence an inefficient use of the license fee. The BBC also claim that the average life of a TV set means even those who had a brand new TV when it launched will probably be looking to upgrade soon.

Marcus Parnwell, executive product manager of the BBC's iPlayer clearly live in a different world from a lot of people if he thinks they can afford to replace a television every 4 years in an economic climate like today with falling standards of living. Although Bigscreen iPlayer was the BBC's first user interface designed for TVs that would work with a remote control its days didn't have be number, it was just bad design that they didn't think how to integrate the new services to be compatible with the old system. Other  streaming providers have been doing this for ages, so it is nothing new.

The people that will be affected by this service change will be those on low incomes and the older members of the population who, for what ever reason, can't afford to up grade their TV or the Blu-ray player, which is the sad thing. The thing is, this move by the BBC systematic of the commercial throw away technological society we live in today.  

The Apprentice - The Final 2013

Congratulations to Leah Totton on winning tonight's final of The Apprentice after another enjoyable series of the long running show on the BBC television after beating Luisa Zissman, which might prove to be lucky escape for Sir Alan Sugar.

She had to fight her way past the buffoons that thought they are the future champions, but in the end showed there egos were bigger than the business intellects. There is drive and ambition and there is being big headed and thinking you know everything and that other don't know better than you, and those that fail tend to fall into that  group of idiots that show all that is wrong with British management. Thankfully Alan Sugar and his team aren't that stupid and they see through the lies and the half truths to see the contestants for what they really are. How do that do that team work, Sir Alan listens to his advisor's and takes what they have said on board before he acts. It is the one thing nearly all the contestants could do with learning and the same thing goes for business in the United Kingdom in general.

Finally one thing I have noticed that since the show is now about securing investment  rather than getting a job with Sir Sugar it has lost it's way a little compared to the original in terms of the people that it attracts. Don't get me wrong I still like the show, but the people that apply don't seem to be of the stuff that the original shows contestants were made of. They don't have the same business skills sets and tend to be just idea's people rather than future business leaders, and that is something that would never have done in the original concept of the show.

Moyles Leave Breakfast Show

Like many I was at a bit of a loss for words initially when I heard that the iconic Chris Moyles Show was to end on BBC Radio 1 today. With audiences of seven to eight million people it has touched the lives of many over the years and woken them up with a smile, and it has been described as the programme that has saved BBC Radio 1.

It his own typical style he shocked his audience by making the announcement live on air and for a while twitter went crazy with tweets about the show. Many people were saying how much they have enjoyed the show, how it was part of their lives and how much they were going to miss it. Others commented on his replacement and how dull the morning are about to become.

The thing that got me was the reason for the change in the breakfast show at the station. It seemed clear, although Chris Moyles wasn't pushed, he was at least nudged a bit along the way, but the boss of the station is keeping quiet on the one. There is a drive at the station to attract a younger audience for the station in the age ranges 15 to 29. This is an audience area that the BBC Trust feel the station is missing out on, although the truth is they probably have little interest in radio and would rather listen to their ipods.

Personally I find this approach to programming is ageist and that something to be condemned, especially given the shows breakfast slot. Radio 1 claims to be the station of new music, this would suggest that the BBC Trust think that only people in certain age ranges appreciate new music, which clearly isn't the case, you can appreciate new music at any age. What they should be concentrating on over the network is the types of music played on the different stations and let the audience find their own home within the network. 

Personally I think the BBC are making a mistake in getting rid of Chris Moyles from the breakfast slot while the show has such a massive audience in radio terms. I just can't see a replacement show getting the same number of listeners in the short or medium term, if at all. This is just an out date ageist approach to programming and that had it day back in the later half of the last century.