Once upon a time, there was a game called Diamond Mine. It had you swap jewels in a grid and create chain reactions for big scores. It was much fun and so Microsoft hosted it on Microsoft Zone and the game was renamed Bejeweled.

The game became insanely popular—the web’s Tetris—and spawned sequels and versions for many platforms. Clones appeared, including the excellent Zoo Keeper for Nintendo DS, which hugely ramped up the concept’s speed and excitement levels.

Eventually, PopCap retaliated with the stunning Bejeweled Blitz, a Facebook app that was also welded to the iPhone version of Bejeweled 2. The hook: one minute and no waiting for the grid to settle before swapping more jewels. It took the polish and addictive qualities of Bejeweled and smashed them into the exciting speed of Zoo Keeper. Power-ups created frantic, thrilling games, and online scoreboards enabled you to battle friends.

All was good in the land, and they all lived happily ever after… Except they didn’t, because PopCap then ruined its game. If there’s one thing the company should have learned from Tetris, it’s that adding complexity to a simple game screws with the format. And if there’s something PopCap should have learned from online gaming, it’s that level playing fields are important, unless you want to turn your creation into forced grinding depression, MMO-style.

Bejeweled Blitz now has ‘coins’. These enable you to buy ‘boosts’, to attain higher scores. PopCap presumably argues that this rewards long-time players. I’d argue that long-time play is rewarded by added skill and higher scores. All the revision does is provide people who play the game enough to cherry pick cheats to leapfrog others on the high-score table. So rather than being Tetris, Bejeweled Blitz is now Bejeweled MMO, just about the biggest, saddest drop it could have suffered.

When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.

With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mock The Week, it’s a panel show populated entirely by stand-up comedians. There are a few rounds, which aim to showcase the skills of the stand-ups, and it must be doing something right, because it’s now on its eighth series.

The problem with Mock The Week isn’t the show itself, which has now dispensed with awkward rounds from the first couple of series, and concentrates on more quickfire (and therefore funny) rounds and banter. The problem is the performers.

On watching Mock The Week, you might initially be surprised how good the stand-ups are, and how they come up with great stories off the top of their heads at a moment’s notice. But there’s always a nagging feeling that the show’s over-prepared, which becomes more apparent as the show goes on and the responses become more obviously canned and contrived.

Things get worse when you see any of the performers live, and realise that any given Mock The Week clearly largely comprises the performers getting the questions in advance, then figuring out which bits of their stand-up routines they can cut and paste into the show. With the exception of host Dara Ó Briain and occasional guest David Mitchell, Mock The Week always ends up resembling a déjà vu express train, battering you with micro-repeat after micro-repeat if you’ve watched any of the performers’ shows, or even Live At The Apollo.

Ultimately, Mock The Week is still a reasonable half-hour of entertainment, but it increasingly makes me yearn for Whose Line Is It Anyway?, a Radio 4 show that ended up spending a happy decade on Channel 4, before the plug was mysteriously pulled and an inferior US version was produced. WLIIA? was similar to Mock The Week, but didn’t bother with a topical hook, instead concentrating on a number of ‘generic’ games (‘hoedown’, ‘questions only’, ‘scenes from a hat’, and so on) with themes often chosen by the host (Clive Anderson in the UK version) from studio-audience suggestions. Performers would improvise their way through a scene or game until the host decided to move on. While regulars on the show undoubtedly had material or ideas to draw from, you never got the cumbersome ‘trying to weld a chunk of a stand-up routine into a supposedly off-the-cuff TV show’ problem Mock The Week suffers from.

With WLIIA? clearly not being the most expensive show in the world, and there still being plenty of capable UK-based performers (Comedy Store Players, most people who appear on QI, and people like Ó Briain, Mitchell and Jimmy Carr), it’s surprising that the show’s not made a come-back. Sadly, though, producer Dan Patterson reportedly fielded a question about WLIIA? at a Mock The Week recording last year, confirming that it’s not a rights issue holding up creating more of the older, better series—it’s that no British channel is interested. Although there are too many panel shows on the television, I feel that WLIIA? would nonetheless be a great show to bring back to British screens. Sure, it was hit-and-miss at times, but I’d sooner watch a half-hour of genuinely creative and new improvisational comedy than yet another half-hour of clips from a half-dozen stand-up routines.

Since the 1990s, I’ve written for a lot of internet magazines. Something that constantly crops up is the thorny issue of copyright. Many people make the assumption that if something’s online, they somehow have the right to take it for themselves. Perhaps this is down to the ubiquity of dodgy file-sharing, or the fact that a lot of content online is freely available. Either way, lots of rights are infringed online on a daily basis, and I’ve written many articles that state very clearly how one should always check regarding rights before reusing anything.

If an individual makes a mistake in this area, they can be forgiven (assuming they don’t do so again). Astonishingly, though, it seems the editorial director for digital at one of the UK’s national newspapers doesn’t understand basic rights assignment. This thread from PeteZab’s Flickr account details how The Independent embedded snowy scenes from the UK using the Flickr API, but, presumably, screwed up the rights filter, thereby including images marked ‘all rights reserved’.

What’s shocking here is not that such a mistake was made—oversights happen all the time—but that the editors’s response was as follows:

“We took a stream from Flickr which is, as you know, a photo-sharing website. The legal assumption, therefore, is that you were not asserting your copyright in that arena. We did not take the photo from Flickr, nor present it as anything other than as it is shown there.

I do no consider, therefore, that any copyright has been breached or any payment due. ”

Presumably, then, The Independent will be fine if I start using content from its website (as long as I don’t present it than anything other than how it’s shown on its site), regardless of any assigned rights! Great! Although if The Independent really doesn’t think it did anything wrong, why did it pull the Flickr feed?

Update: The Independent ‘apologises’, and the publication has been invoiced by the photographer.

It’s getting to the point that not a day goes by without some idiot or other trying to undermine the BBC. Usually, it’s the government or the Tories, who in no way use smacking the BBC as a way of engaging with Daily Mail-reading voters. Rupert Murdoch’s another major critic, which is in no way due to him having a massive stake in one of the BBC’s biggest commercial competitors, Sky.

Yesterday, Policy Exchange got in on the act (Policy Exchange think tank calls for BBC overhaul), with the usual slew of garbage opinions. It slags off Jonathan Ross’s ‘salary’ (ignoring the fact this cash paid for the production of his shows, including dozens of Film 200Xs, hundreds of episodes of his chat-show, and his radio show), says the BBC should cut the money it spends on sport (despite the public outcry when the public broadcaster announces it’s been outbid for a popular event by a locked, subscription-only service) and popular entertainment (despite the BBC one minute being told to justify the licence fee by getting higher ratings, and the next being told it’s being too populist, and should therefore be creating niche stuff).

The report also has a go at the BBC’s audacity in reaching out to 16-to-35-year-olds, noting that cash for such programming should be aimed at US import channels Channel 4 and E4. Never mind that BBC Three’s output includes the likes of Being Human. Never mind the fact people under 35 pay the licence fee and therefore should expect at least some programming aimed at them. Never mind the fact the BBC isn’t beholden to advertisers and can therefore take more risks. Nope—shut it down, says Policy Exchange! Shut it all down!

Sadly, this kind of report seems to be the norm these days. I suspect regardless of whatever government the UK ends up with this year, it’ll start dismantling the BBC. And because too many British people are strangely oblivious to the value of the BBC (not only in terms of what you receive on TV, the radio and the web, but also as a public service), considering it a huge rip-off, it’ll end up a shell of its former self. Sooner or later, British television will largely be a thing of the past, with everyone fed on a steady diet of third-rate US television with ad-breaks every sixteen seconds. But, hey, it’ll be free, right? (Aside from the huge subscription fees that people will happily pay because they choose to, obviously.) Of course, the UK will only realise this when it’s too late, and when Murdock is laughing maniacally while sitting atop his solid-gold throne, in the shape of a Sky logo squashing the BBC into a bloody pulp.