Category: tv

When is a radio show not a radio show?

Sara Cox

If you’re like me, when you picture a radio presenter in your mind, you see them wearing a big pair of headphones, sitting (or standing) at a desk, speaking into a microphone and occasionally pressing buttons.

Although the age of DJs actually ‘spinning discs’ is long gone, most of the rest still holds true… or so I thought.

Last week, however, while idly browsing iPlayer, I came across Sara Cox’s Sounds of the 80s.

Not such an 80s classic
This goes out on BBC Radio 2 on a Friday night from 10pm – midnight and it seems fairly popular.

Ostensibly, it’s just Sara Cox playing lots of a-Ha, Wham!, Billy Ocean and Madonna to dance around to, or so I thought.

You see, this radio show is also available to watch. Now we’re not talking a webcam in the corner here – I mean Sara Cox standing in a proper TV studio facing a camera delivering her script. Continue reading “When is a radio show not a radio show?”

How Enid Blyton helped shape an early CRM system

image

Customer Relations Management feels like a very modern element of how to run a successful organisation, but it’s not a new invention.

When the legendary Biddy Baxter started at Blue Peter in 1962, she set up what she called a ‘Correspondence Unit’.

Enid Blyton
As she explained to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs, this unit came about as a result of an experience she had with Enid Blyton.
Continue reading “How Enid Blyton helped shape an early CRM system”

Proof that the human race is not very adventurous

GrainsI’m currently reading Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind, which helps understand how our brain copes with all the information we take in and how to improve our brains.

Then I came across this quote:

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

This figure (originally quoted in Bill Bryson’s At Home: a short history of private life) just goes to show how narrow-minded we are as a race, and also how difficult we find it to break out of the norm.

As an example at the opposite end of the spectrum, research from Nielsen in 2014 showed that despite having – on average – 189 TV channels to choose from, Americans watch only 17.

What’s even more interesting is that this figure (17) hasn’t barely wavered in 5 years, despite a huge leap in the number of available channels.

We cannot cope with any more information!