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.

So you’ve got new iPad killer coming out, and it, for reasons known only to slightly crazy people, dual-boots into Windows 7 and Android 1.6 (two operating systems clearly leagues ahead of iOS when it comes to optimal tablet experiences—again, if you’re stark staring mad). What better way to advertise it than using a badly cropped grab of a Microsoft Office app running in Mac OS X?

In case of deletion, here’s a bit of it:

Nice. The close-up of exciting touch-based workflow in action is also, I’m sure you’ll agree, brilliant and doesn’t look at all like it was faked by a bored unpaid intern:

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

This afternoon’s slice of MAKE CRAIG ANGRY comes courtesy of Wired, whose article In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) should probably have been called Fap Fap Fap Rovioooooohhhh.

There’s something of a cult that’s built up around the Finnish developer’s massive iOS hit (since ported to practically every other platform in existence—I hear there’s a VIC-20 version on the way), and more than a little bullshit.

Before a million Angry Birds fans descend, I’m not suggesting the game is rubbish, nor am I saying Rovio doesn’t deserve some of its success. Angry Birds is a fairly good iOS game, and it’s immediate, usable, polished and cute. The perfect game? Not in a million years—it’s too random (requiring quickfire grind play rather than strategising) and has an irksome linear level structure (which was ‘fixed’ via a 59p in-app purchase rather than enabling users to skip levels they couldn’t solve). But it’s not bad.

What is bad is the reporting that continually goes on about Rovio’s magic formula. Ultimately, Rovio got lucky. They put out a game that users could feel they were good at very quickly (even if they weren’t) and with little effort, and built it around a level and reward structure that worked nicely with the quickfire nature of mobile gaming. Rovio then did some cunning marketing, driving word-of-mouth in smaller territories, before partnering with publisher Chillingo in larger countries. But there’s little innovation in the game (it’s a variant on Crush the Castle, a genre that can be traced all the way back to Artillery on the Apple II) and Rovio ‘Mighty Eagle’ Peter Vesterbacka’s saying the company’s “building an integrated entertainment franchise where merchandising, games, movies, TV, cartoons and comics all come together, like Disney 2.0.” is a pretty bold and odd comparison, for one key reason: Rovio is currently a one-hit wonder, with Angry Birds as its sole hit.

There’s no doubting Angry Birds is phenomenally popular. There’s no doubting many people like the game. But right now Rovio is doing little more than milking the brand until it screams: a tie-in with Rio, a self-published ‘seasons’ version to double-up iOS sales and avoid cutting in Chillingo as much as possible, soft toys, possible board games and animations… The list is growing by the month. What’s not on the list though is Rovio’s Next Big Game and The One After That, the products that would prove it has a magic formula for success. At least Wired recognises this in its article:

Rovio needs to evolve from a studio with strong intellectual property (IP), to being a publisher that isn’t over-reliant on a single hit game. There’s the rub: it took Rovio 52 games to get its first hit. To create a fully fledged entertainment empire, it will need more.

Show me another half-dozen megahits and I’ll file Rovio alongside early-1980s Atari and admit that, yes, these guys do have some kind of formula. For now, though, there are dozens of iOS devs out there offering superior and more varied gaming experiences, and that have to balls to do something different every six months or so. Here’s hoping iOS consumers start seeking them out, rather than assuming gaming ends once they’ve three-starred the latest set of levels in Rovio’s game.

Today is International Women’s Day. But the first news article sent my way this morning was Woman Carries Non-Viable Pregnancy Due To Law (expanded on The Republic). It’s practically the opposite of any kind of celebration, instead recounting how a “Nebraska woman said she was denied the ability to end her non-viable pregnancy because of state law”. Instead, she was forced to go into labour naturally, and her baby died 15 minutes after birth, significantly increasing grief and trauma for both parties.

I find it hard to understand how any modern Western nation can still have such laws in 2011 (abortion law is always a thorny issue, but not even having exceptions is draconian), and attempting in this case to justify them on the basis of the ‘sacred nature of life’ is hypocritical, given that Nebraska also has capital punishment. Either life is sacred or it isn’t. Make up your minds.

Also, in a country that’s supposed to be democratic and a shining example of modernity, it’s depressing how much of the USA (albeit at state level) still considers it acceptable to trample all over a woman’s rights, on the basis of religious beliefs.

Gary Marshall on the iPad 2:

What Apple gets—and what I think a lot of firms don’t—is that most people, the kind of people who are currently buying iOS devices and apps in extraordinary quantities, don’t care about specifications any more than they want to think about how their lunchtime sausages are made.

Geeks forget this. Many in the tech press also forget this. People care about the experience, not the innards of a device.

I wrote along similar lines on TechRadar:

For example, instead of boasting about the cameras in the iPad 2, Apple concentrated on demoing FaceTime and Photo Booth. The company then showcased practical applications of footage taken by the new rear camera by revealing the revised iMovie – an update to the $4.99/£2.99 app.

iMovie is now universal and on the iPad has an interface resembling the desktop release. And as if to drive the point home regarding what Apple really cares about (clue: it’s not gigahertz and gigabytes – it’s enabling creativity), GarageBand for iPad was unleashed, boasting an interface in many ways superior to that of the Mac version.

The point is that technology and specs are all fine, but they only really mean something if you can employ them. It’s no good having a quad-core tablet with 8GB of RAM if the only software available is a slightly knackered version of Solitaire.

This is what every other company in the tech space needs to understand. The killer feature of the iPad 2 launch wasn’t its RAM or its chip-speed; it wasn’t the megapixels in the camera sensor, nor even the tablet’s form; the killer feature of the iPad 2 is that you can do a ton of fun stuff with it.