I’ve flown BA a few times over the past few years, and, almost universally, the service has been mediocre. BA’s problem is that it thinks it’s a luxury carrier, when it’s in fact a middle-of-the-road airline. Staff are regularly rude and unhelpful and the planes reasonably tidy but ultimately a little weatherbeaten (or, rather, ‘passengerbeaten’).

Today’s news that BA’s going to charge for seating preferences (BBC: British Airways sets seat charges) suggests it’s going to be easyJet before you know it. From October 7, you’ll pay £10 to choose your seats on a short-haul economy flight, £20 for a long-haul flight, and £60 in business class. Want to book those slightly roomier emergency exit row seats? That’ll be £50, please.

Astonishingly, however, what this charge won’t enable you to do is book when you place your order. BA now states you’ll be able to book between 10 and four days before take-off. Therefore, what they’ve done is shift the rush for seat booking from 24 hours prior to departure to 10 days before departure, adding a financial transaction in the middle (which, no doubt, will cause people to lose seating preferences when BA’s system does its regular overload hissy fit).

What I don’t understand is why BA can’t simply enable you to book your seat when you buy your ticket. Surely, with the air travel industry being in trouble, it would make sense to fully book planes as early as possible. If your ‘reward’ on BA for booking a year in advance was the chance of a better seat—even if you had to pay extra—that would make perfect sense. As it is, BA’s current decision has all the hallmarks of the earlier dumb decision to adopt “ethnic liveries”, cunningly massively diluting the brand in the process.

I today discovered The Fly is being re-remade. Cronenberg is to return to the property that he worked on in 1986, which was based on the 1958 original. My question is this: what is the point? 1986’s The Fly is still a great film, and even the special effects remain of a very high quality, due to the reliance on puppetry rather than then-embryonic computer graphics.

I therefore don’t understand what a remake would bring to the party. There’s a pretty huge gap between 1958 and 1986 in terms of film-making, but not nearly the same gap between 1986 and today. Also, the story isn’t really strong enough to sustain sequels, and so unless it’s radically altered, The Fly will remain self-contained. And although CGI has moved on in leaps and bounds, it mostly still lacks a feeling of reality—CGI creatures typically lack gravity, a tactile quality, and feel slightly out-of-place.

But this is apparently the season to take advantage of 1980s nostalgia and drop the risk factor significantly. It’s safer to remake Robocop and Flight of the Navigator, The Karate Kid and Short Circuit. But in the cases where the original films remain fine, it all seems terribly pointless and wasteful.

Before I start this post, I should say that I like Touch Arcade a whole lot. It’s one of the few iPod gaming sites worth a damn, and I read it every day. But the most recent review made me annoyed, and here’s why:

“If you like killing zombies and having the screen of your iPhone filled with zombie blood, chances are you will enjoy iZombieland.”

Sorry, but what? I’m getting increasingly irked by reviewers not providing a full opinion and just relying on your existing knowledge and experience to encourage you to make a decision regarding the quality of a product they’re reviewing. (In this case, I was hoping the reviewer was being wry and ironic, but that sadly doesn’t appear to be the case.)

By all means tell me if something’s good or bad, and tell me why. Be constructive and helpful, and draw on your wealth of experience in your field to inform me about buying decisions. But don’t tell me: “If you like BANANAS and you like FIRE, and you like watching BANANAS ON FIRE, chances are you’ll like the new movie Bananas On Fire: Barbecue Disasters!

“But when the six-foot banana lunged at me, I was horrified. It was self defence!”

“Madam, you could have just hit him with the flamethrower. You didn’t have to flambé the giant fruit. And what the hell are you doing with a flamethrower in your kitchen anyway?”

“Our microwave is broken.”

“Oh.”

You might be aware that Lily Allen is now using her opinions on IP infringement to get herself press and further her career single-handedly saving the music industry by telling everyone that file-sharing is bad and evil (BBC News: Lily wades into file-sharing row).

However, here are some tips for you in the future, Lily, when you start arguing the toss about rights infringement and what other artists have to say about the subject:

1. Don’t misrepresent the opinions of your peers. When you referred to The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) and claimed “These guys from huge bands said file-sharing music is fine,” you might want to ensure that’s actually what they said. If, for example, they said pretty much the complete opposite, you might end up looking a wee bit silly.
2. Don’t rip off other people’s content. When you’re on a crusade about IP infringment, it’s probably not a good idea to infringe someone else’s IP, by, for example, copying and pasting their blog posts. Do this and you might end up looking a wee bit silly.
3. Don’t infringe other people’s rights. When you’re informing people about the evils of rights infringement, it’s probably not a great idea to rip off other people’s IP by scanning in newspaper articles and posting them on your blog. Do so and you might end up looking a wee bit silly—doubly so when your Photobucket bandwidth is exceeded and said articles can’t actually be read. (Although I guess this at least deals with the IP issue, since the stuff you ripped can’t be seen when your account’s down. MAJOR WIN FOR COPYRIGHT!)

For the record, as someone who’s been smacked hard financially by file-sharing (albeit with books rather than music), I do have some sympathy regarding dealing with file-sharing in some manner. However, government proposals to boot people off the net won’t do it, nor will celebs on their high-horses.

Content providers need to figure out some way of monetising file-sharing, and, most importantly, to simply encourage more people to buy content instead of copying it. People should be rewarded for doing so, rather than—in many cases—being seen as potential criminals (such as with rights ads on DVDs that can’t be skipped) or gouged for every penny they have (as with £1.89 single-TV-episode downloads on iTunes).

Hat tip for some of this post: the ever-fragrant Gary Marshall on TechRadar.

A few years back, I bought a new car. I knew roughly what I wanted, but there were a few different models available, and so I test drove a bunch of them before making a decision. The garage in question knew full well that I’d be making test drives despite possibly not buying from them. And they didn’t charge me a penny.

If you’re thinking “well, of course they didn’t, idiot,” you might be in for a shock if the completely staggering stupidity in the music industry goes up another notch. And that’s because, according to CNET, the music industry now wants money for previews played in the likes of the iTunes Store.

Yes, that’s right—those 30-second previews that you use to see whether you want to buy a track are, according to David Renzer, CEO Universal Music Publishing Group, ripping off artists and labels, due to them not receiving ‘performance’ income.

So, essentially, people in the record industry want you to pay to see whether something is worth buying from them. They are mistaking ‘advertisements’ for ‘performances’, or, to put it another way, ‘abject stupidity’ for ‘common sense’. I’m sure if anything’s going to lead to a resurgence in the music industry, paying for previews is it. No, wait—the other one.