The Guardian reports that “BBC activities generated £8.1bn in economic value last year on licence fee income of around £3.6bn,” according to Deloitte. Luckily, the Tories are there to continue kicking the BBC’s face off. After all, we can only have media companies employing lots of people and generating lots of money for the economy if they’re run by Rupert Murdoch or some other pal of senior politicians not publicly funded, because that’s not what Murdoch wants fair and open competition.

Good grief. Adobe’s unleashed a ten-minute moan about Apple (YouTube), blaming Apple for having the audacity to not sit in the 1990s and continue driving its company into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing, driving it into a wall, reversing— (That’s enough of that — Ed)

The video starts in innocent enough fashion, saying how fab it is to credit Adobe’s programmers on the Photoshop splash screen. Then, approximately all of Adobe’s programmers spend most of their screen-time bitching about Apple.

Russell Williams:

At the WWDC, Apple announced that they were not going to do a 64-bit version of Carbon. Carbon is the programming environment on the Mac. They introduced this other framework, called Cocoa.

Yeah, that Cocoa API that was introduced in 2007 at WWDC, and not, in fact, at the very beginning of Mac OS X (based in part on frameworks from NeXTSTEP/OpenStep). Man, there’s no way Adobe could have realised that was the direction Apple was headed in, apart from Apple having said that from the beginning and stating that Carbon was really a ‘bridge’ for temporary backwards compatibility.

John Penn II:

They yanked the carpet out from under the entire industry at that conference.

Aside, you know, from Apple having said for the previous six years or so that developers should be moving applications to Cocoa. In reality, then, Apple yanked the carpet out from people who’d been going “LALALALALA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU” for over half a decade.

Really, the entire whine-fest is summed up best by Seetharaman Narayanan:

It is not practical to rewrite Photoshop.

In other words, the application had 20 years of built-up crud that needed sorting, streamlining and rewriting. It pretty much sums up too much of Adobe these days. Instead of innovating, it adds crap on top of crap. Instead of working with operating systems, it fights against them. And on the sheer horror of a rewrite: given the choice, it’d presumably still be churning out a PowerPC version for the Mac and running it under Rosetta (and then saying Apple “pulled the carpet out from under the entire industry” when the Rosettaless Lion yomped on in).

Every 18 months, I keep hoping the Adobe of old will return, the one that was full of fire and creativity. I keep hoping that Photoshop in particular will be streamlined and Mac-like on the Mac and Windows-like on Windows. But it’s like watching that great band you loved in the 1980s; you always check out the new album, but you only need to listen to the first couple of tracks to get that sinking feeling and realise you can never go back.

Hat tip: Peter Cohen

Whose Line Is It Anyway? remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows. If you’ve never seen it, the show starred four comedians proficient in the art of improvisation. Host Clive Anderson would have the comedians perform in various games, with loose themes and behaviours, often based around suggestions from the studio audience.

Although initially a little pedestrian, the show found its stride during the second and third series, and although it was heavily biased towards American performers by the time the run ended in 1998, it never lost its edge (even if some of the regular performers showboated for laughs a little too often).

The show was reworked for the US in 1998, lasting for around a decade, but the format surprisingly never returned to British screens (although many Whose Line performers appear live as the Comedy Store Players in London). That hasn’t stopped various producers trying to shoe-horn in the concept elsewhere though. Thank God You’re Here made its way over from Australia to ITV in 2007, but lasted only six episodes. Perhaps this was down to the overly regimented structure, based around lengthy scenes and a single game (performer enters unknown scene and has to improv their way through). Whose Line creator and producer Dan Patterson also clearly tried to bring some of the show’s magic to news panel show Mock the Week. Quickfire rounds like Scenes we’d like to see (where performers are given a basic scenario and have to reel off one-liners) are almost direct lifts from Whose Line, but the overly scripted nature of Mock the Week (the performers are stand-ups who typically cut-and-paste most of their responses from their stand-up routines) makes the show a fun enough watch (at least if you don’t actually go to any of the performers’ gigs and realise you’ve heard all the material before) but unsatisfying in terms of a comparison to Whose Line.

The latest attempt at the genre is Fast and Loose, a BBC Two show helmed by Hugh Dennis, devised by Dan Patterson, and with a set-up quite similar to Whose Line. Having heard promising noises about the show, I’d had most of the series sitting on the PVR for weeks, but was thinking it’d suffer by comparison to Whose Line. And it does, but this is the best shot yet at a spiritual successor to Patterson’s original improv show. Its plus-points are many: the performers have a lot more freedom than in similar shows, there are more games and there’s clearly more actual improvisation. There’s also some innovation, not least in a game called Sideways Scene, where the performers improvise on a set flipped ninety degrees by the magic of television—in other words, they’re lying down, but it appears to the audience like they’re in a basic room. The set-up provides plenty of potential for turning basic routines into something surreal and funny.

It’s not all good news though. In an attempt to not rip off Whose Line wholesale, there have been some odd additions. Every other game has host Hugh Dennis ‘finding out more about the performers’ by asking them questions—time that would be better spent on actual games. And of the games themselves, there aren’t enough of them. There’s also a bit too much scripting evident, and some of the performers forget themes when they switch genre, instead moving directly into basic parody of a movie or TV show (rather than integrating ideas from said shows into the improv). This would be fine if the same genres and shows didn’t crop up regularly throughout the show.

Still, it’s early days yet, and the show’s had a mere eight episodes to make its mark. In those eight episodes, it’s managed to beat the first series of Whose Line in terms of laugh-out-loud moments, if not in terms of balance. It’s the first time it’s felt like Whose Line was alive again and I’d certainly like to see more (especially with extra games and fewer scripted moments), although I remain wondering why no-one’s bothered to resurrect Patterson’s original show, since it’s clearly a concept that still has legs.

The BBC is generally well regarded outside of the UK, and some of its shows—including Doctor Who and Top Gear—are torrented like crazy. When Apple TV rentals yomped on in, it appeared the BBC was one of the very few non-stupid corporations in the field, since it joined Fox and Disney in offering content for Apple’s device, rather than whining about how Apple was somehow ‘devaluing’ their content. (Hello, Warner Bros.! I’d still love to know how 99 cents per episode is worse than eight bucks per month for everything through Netflix!)

Now, director general Mark Thompson says things are going to be taken a step further. An international version of iPlayer will “definitely” launch in 2011 and will cost “a small number of dollars a month—less than 10” (source: Journalism.co.uk and others).

It remains to be seen how many holes end up in the schedule, but it’s likely the BBC’s own content at least will be made available through the player. It’ll be interesting to see whether the organisation making it affordable and readily available will encourage non-Brits to fund the service, or whether they’ll still consider “less than 10” dollars too much outlay and continue to torrent.

The BBC’s having to apologise to Mexico (BBC News) after Top Gear did an episode in a very Top Gear manner, taking the piss out of Mexicans in a low-brow, vaguely xenophobic way. This, apparently, has caused “outrage”, for some reason, because, clearly, Top Gear is a serious news programme and not just three blokes arsing about and wanking over car porn.

One of the few sane voices on the spat, Robert Llewellyn, says:

One of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met was a Mexican architect. He wasn’t lazy, he didn’t wear a poncho, he cooked some of the best food I’ve ever eaten and he was a gentle, non judgmental kind man. I also know if he’d watched Top Gear the other night he would have laughed because he wouldn’t be threatened by such inanity. He would have known that the three middle aged men in jeans had not a clue about Mexican history and culture, he would know what they were really doing was revealing their own ignorance and frail self worth.

Llewellyn’s post seems to swerve between whether Top Gear was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that the episode was merely embarrassing. The bigger argument, though, is should the BBC be self-censoring? It’s one thing for the news to carry on in this manner (almost unheard of in the UK, although some US channels, like Fox News, do this kind of thing all the time), but should television be sanitising an entertainment show? And if so, what about comedies?

Last year, Stephen Fry said there was such a culture of fear at the BBC that it was shying away from taking creative risks. And, indeed, even the man himself has been hit, with the Japanese embassy complaining over a section of a recent QI that featured a discussion on the nuclear bombings of 1945. While some of the comments were undoubtedly in poor taste (such as Davis quipping that bombs had bounced off survivor of both blasts, Mr Yamaguchi), it’s insane to think this sparked a minor international incident. Even more crazy is the tone of the BBC’s own report, which adds:

And Stephen Fry expressed amazement that the Japanese trains were still running after the blast.

Indeed he did express amazement, but that wasn’t him being derogatory—he was amazed at how the country managed to deal so well with being bombed twice by brand new, deadly weaponry. That’s not something to be apologetic about in the slightest.

Still, lucky no other countries ever portray the British in a stereotypical fashion or make jokes at our expense, eh? Man up, BBC. The Top Gear thing wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t, in the context of the show, anything to apologise over; and that QI—the best-mannered, most intelligent, most interesting panel show around—also finds itself in a similar situation is nothing short of maddening. Sometimes it’s like the BBC wants to find itself being the British PBS in a decade’s time.