Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Meme: My Week in Media

Stuart Bruce has tagged me in a Meme on My Week in Media, so here goes...

What I've Read
I tend to have a few books 'on the go'. The main one at the moment is Tom Bower's biography of Gordon Brown. It's frightening. If half of what he asserts is true, this country should be very frightened indeed. He paints Brown as a half mad, half psycho, full on obsessive. I'm also trying to finish the Reagan Diaries, which I'm finding hard work. They are very poorly edited. I'm a newspaper addict. Every day I get the Telegraph, Sun and Mail delivered and I take the Guardian and Indy on Mondays for the media sections. I also subscribe to virtually every political magazine on the market. I also take STUFF, the PRESS GAZETTE and GQ. This week I have been mainly been reading back issues of GEORGE magazine to get some ideas for THE POLITICO.

What I've Watched
I probably watch less TV now than I have ever done in my life. I have weaned myself off the soaps I used to watch. I tend now to watch most things on DVD. Over Christmas I watched series 3 of LOST and am about to start on HEROES. As I type this I am watching a DVD of Ewan MacGregor's motorbike trip through Africa called LONG WAY DOWN. I was hugely disappointed by the Christmas Day TV. TO THE MANOR BORN was a total let-down. I watchede a great series yesterday called TORN, all about a woman whose child was abducted and then 11 years later she recognised her in a shopping centre. I'm a sucker for things like that - and I love apocalyptic movies like INDEPENDENCE DAY and FLOOD.

What I've Listened To
Disaster has struck. I have 12,300 tracks in my iTunes Library. This morning I found that half of them have disappeared. I was bought an iPod speaker thing for Christmas so I've had that on a fair bit over the last few days. On the radio I'm a Five Live fan. I hardly ever listen to Radio 4. Sacrilege, I know. I've become a great fan of Simon Mayo, who I believe to be one of the best interviewers around. I love Five Live Sport as well.

Where I've Surfed
I have just started using the Google Blog reader, although I really prefer visiting blogs directly rather than using RSS. This week I have spent monitoring a new personal website someone is designing for me to promote my media work - totally separate from the blog. I look at NewsNow an awful lot to monitor political news and West Ham stories.

I now tag Donal Blaney, Norfolk Blogger, The Devil, Dizzy and Ben Brogan

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for meming along, Iain. For those who are interested, you can follow the progress of the meme as it travels here

Anonymous said...

Iain, I'm a great fan of apocalyptic movies too, but - good grief - "Flood" is an awful film. The special effects could have been filmed in my fish tank.

Have you seen "I Am Legend" yet?

Anonymous said...

Heroes: dull. Lost: good. Best thing on TV: Dexter.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Iain, an interesting post - would appreciate updates on your reading, etc.

PS - any advice on how to store tracks in the iTunes library without them syncing on to the ipod would be appreciated!

Anonymous said...

Torymory writes:

I've also been reading the Tom Bower biography this Christmas!

I have a personal angle in that I went to Edinburgh University - a couple of years after Gordon Brown had ceased to be University Rector.
However he was still very much a presence in both the University and Edinburgh political circles and talked about in reverant tones.

I met him for the first time, with my then boyfriend, who introduced me. GB completely blanked me and talked over my head - literally.

I thought at the time "what a rude, arrogant ****."

My personal experience confirms Tom Bowers implication that GB has a problem with relating to women on an equal basis.

Poor Sarah!

The Dead Sheep of Quentin Davies said...

Bower’s book on Gordon sounds dreadful - a wicked poison of people’s minds. It should be banned!

Bower
Is a shower
Who from the truth does cower!

If you enjoyed that poem please visit my blog - an oasis of poetic truths in a Blogsphere of cynics and Tories!

Phil said...

Brown's personal foibles aside, he's more than happy to let the rich get richer, capital run riot, and people's needs crushed beneath free market fundamentalism. So why worry? The Tories don't offer anything different.

Tapestry said...

Why do you need a book to tell you Gordon Brown's a disaster for Britain?

David Anthony said...

Really quite interesting to read through this post in the style of the Fast Show's "THIS WEEK I 'AV' MOSTLY BEEN READING..." ... and so on and so forth.

Anonymous said...

You didn't watch Sense and Sensibility? Good Lord!

Vienna Woods said...

Sorry to hear about the loss of IPod tunes Iain. It's happened to me and almost everyone I know that has one of the beasts. It is one of those irritating half developed devices and software that somehow manage to maintain a market prominence through nothing more than smart marketing. Even Apples own forums adequately demonstrates that this company never sorts problems, just launches a new product. I suppose one could make a distinct comparison to NuLab antics currently.

Anonymous said...

Iain - iTunes tracks don't delete themselves. They're probably still there somewhere, the iTunes library may have corrupted. There'll be a ton of stuff on the support part of the Apple website.

Vienna - the iPod is hardly "half developed" - it's been through several iterations since 2001. I've owned almost every model and have had nothing more serious than a frozen software update which just required a re-set.

Richard Gadsden said...

Ian, Google reader has a brill feature where you can put a "next" button on your favourites, then you just click it and it takes you to the next blog posting in a proper browser instead of inside a funny reader.