JamesTC

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Spread Christmas.

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Fun though it was drinking in the spready medieval atmosphere of pre-Renaissance deep space.

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>although it seems a bit harsh to lock him up just for nicking the Carpool idea.

They locked him up once just for not helping someone who was getting robbed.

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Never thought ‘Balance of Power’ was particularly poorly thought of. Certainly thought ‘Waiting for God’ was thought to be a lesser episode.

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I enjoyed both of them. I’ll carry on listening to them. It is nice to hear from the perspectives of people who are actively not knowing anything about the show (no spoilers of future episodes) so they take each episode as it comes.

Though some of their theories on why Cat is the only one of his species left are a little disturbing…

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They are waiting until they have aired on Sky. Don’t understand why Sky are taking so long to air the new episodes.

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Can you learn about the world around you by visiting Ganymede and Titan? Yes! But you will only learn small things, and you won’t remember them.

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>So….Starbug in the new Series then?

Doug revealed this back in November.

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ohh yeah… nice..

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Both episodes aired on my computer an hour ago.

Rather good they were too. Preferred the first episode. Would dare say it is the best double episode season launch yet so it is a good omen for the rest of the season.

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Oh, it seems I’m blocked by him too. I have the “Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while.” on Chrome when logged in but when I use IE when I’m not logged in I can see his tweets.

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Hitler was in Series III and IV?

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>He’s already blocked me on Twitter.

Was that when you complained about him moaning on the Series VIII commentary?

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Red Dwarf: Believing it’s not butter

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“Arsehole” has the word “Arse” in it.

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Well most TV both here in the UK and in the US hits a bit of a nadir in the Summer (hitting harder here in the UK because the BBC has decided that everybody wants to watch every single bit of the Olympics and absolutely nothing else). I believe in the US the cable networks take the opportunity of no broadcast TV competition by airing new stuff (I notice Futurama airs in the Summer).

It isn’t till late August that TV starts picking up again (and that is when Doctor Who is supposed to be starting again for a 5 episode run).

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I still don’t think The Big Bang Theory has much to do with the numbers Community gets. When it returned in March it had strong numbers, then Big Bang returned and it continued to have strong numbers (slowly dropping until the nadir last Thursday). When Big Bang in in repeats it gets around the same numbers.

> They would not have ordered more if they didn’t think it was worthwhile.

NBC are part producers of the show (through Universal Television) so they get syndication revenue. The more episodes, the better the syndication revenue. So by renewing Community and putting it on a Friday they have nothing to lose. If it is a success then they get a profit on advertising revenue and yet more on syndication. If it is a failure they can write off advertising revenue loss against future syndication profits.

It will always be a failure on Friday regardless of Dan Harmon staying or going. Not only have recent past attempts by all networks to produce comedy blocks on a Friday proved to be disastrous but it has an anaemic and critically hated show as a lead-in and is up against a stronger comedy block by ABC (which I also expect to fail but not in as spectacular fashion as the NBC Friday comedy block). And most important of all, NBC will be launching 4 new comedies in September and NBC will be trying like hell to make those a success which will mean the other 6 comedies will get much less attention (especially those neatly tucked away on Friday).

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>It appears Sony are going for a total revamp to try and extend the shows run so it reaches syndication.

Community already has a syndication deal in place. It’ll start in Autumn 2013. With these last 13 episodes it’ll have just about enough for syndication (83 is a similar number of episodes as ‘Til Death which was zombified to syndication for three years by Sony).

It is airing on a Friday after Whitney starting September. It’ll fall to lows and will be cancelled along with Whitney. People will wrongly attribute that to Dan Harmon being sacked.

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That I can think of:

Enterprise – Season 4 had the showrunner changed to Manny Coto and it is generally believed to be the best season.

The Brittas Empire – Last two series were okay but nowhere near the quality of the first 5.

Smallville – Changed showrunners from Season 8 onwards and was better for it.

The Simpsons – Changed showrunner a lot:
Season 1–2: Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, & Sam Simon
Season 3–4: Al Jean & Mike Reiss
Season 5–6: David Mirkin
Season 7–8: Bill Oakley & Josh Weinstein
Season 9–12: Mike Scully
Season 13–present: Al Jean

Star Trek – Gene Roddenberry basically walked out at the start of Season 3 leaving the people left to run the show. Being moved to Friday and beset with stinging budget cuts, it was never going to be as good as the first two but I still don’t think it is as bad as people say.

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“Obama – Religion: Probably Muslim”

Though I found the previous version of that much funnier “Claims to be Christian”.

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Well I only know of one true, fair and unbiased Wiki on the entire internet.

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I’m sure Live from Jodrell will be a valuable asset to the team.

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>>It would be like showing Eastenders on ITV2.

>Well, no. It would be like showing EastEnders on BBC Three.

No. It would be like showing EastEnders on a channel with 5 times the average viewership of BBC One.

Argumental went from a channel which expects around a 1% viewership share to a channel which expects 7-8%. It not only meant that Dave got a lovely amount of money from BBC Two buying the show but it also effectively acted as an advert for Argumental when it aired on Dave.

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Community has been renewed for Season 4. It will be 13 episodes (I assume with the possibility of ordering 9 more).

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For some reason, I was reminded of this.

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It has been deleted.

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I was rather hoping for Tuesday/Thursday.

On a Friday it has Have I Got News For You as direct competition since presumably both will start at 9.

Suits Season 2 will have started by then so they’ll hopefully bolster each other in the ratings with adverts for one another.

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I can’t live without my Paul Ross canvas print.

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Kryten should hide Baxter’s hooch in their shower. That’ll show ’em.

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I never realised until now, they mention that he has one eye in the opening scene of BITR2.

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How long did it take Rob Grant to watch The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse?

91 minutes.

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Listy vindaloo? It’s not gonna to work.

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Community has been sold into syndication starting in Fall 2013. This basically means that a Season 4 is a dead cert. Sony would be throwing away money by not licensing the show to NBC at a cheaper rate (and making it worth NBC’s time suffering the relatively lower ratings for a final ~22 episode season).

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Community will be renewed. It is near the magic ~88 episode number for syndication.

Sony, the production company, sold ‘Til Death to Fox for a cut down price so they could get it close enough to 88 episodes and syndicate it. These days in American TV, syndication is the main driving force. Sony will sell Community to NBC at a low enough price so NBC make a profit from ad revenue and Sony can make back any net loss with syndication.

30 Rock on the other hand I am very afraid for. It is doing similarly badly in the same timeslot. When Community returns it will move ahead half an hour and hopefully improve but the damage may have already set in. It is already syndicated and it is produced by NBC (which is generally an advantage) but the ratings really are dipping quite low. I guess the only saving grace is that while 30 Rock doesn’t skew young enough it does skew to a richer audience which might be desirable to advertisers.

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Maybe Doug could get Kylie to hum it all for him?

She has a bad cold so she won’t be able to do it.

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E4 should give a try airing it.

Still meaning to get into this. Been recommended to me by a few people.

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And!

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I did try and cut out stuff that is in general not very popular. Stuff like the repeating “See you in ten minutes” and I cut an entire section out of the Dino Burp/Sick/Diarrhea bit.

In general I don’t think people like the bit where Kryten sneaks the time wand back onto Red Dwarf in his head but I like it too much to cut it.

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There’s a really bitchy blog from the time series viii aired which I can’t find now (although I’m sure there’s a link somewhere on G & T) about how many IQ points you’d have to lose to laugh at Rimmer saying ‘we’re finished’ for the third time.

You’ll find if you carry on watching a few more seconds that I’ve cut out the third “we’re finished”!

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Why, what’s on?

Brand new old Have I Got News For You.

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Yeah, I did think it originally opened with the basketball game which was why I originally tried it out that way.

Though I think it is better to the ethos of the episodes (originally being titles ‘Captains Office’) to open there.

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I originally kept the basketball game but I realised I could cut an extra 3 minutes by keeping the original opening and having the punishment to Ackerman be spud duty. I wouldn’t have been able to get it under 30 minutes otherwise.

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Pics or it didn’t happen.

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Did some people watch Back in the Red pt1 twice? Were the missing millions from Only the Good’s audience expecting a repeat that never happened? Is the rapidly falling ratings an indication of the dive in quality of the show? Or is it because the show was moved around in the schedules?

I believe BARB remove a certain percentage of viewers to account for repeat viewing.

From the first 6 ratings I think the series had basically levelled out at around 6 million. Both Pete Part 2 and Only the Good… would have scored in or around 6 with a Sunday repeat.

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SoundableObject: On those Series VIII ratings, Pete Part 2 and Only the Good are only listed as being on one day. Weren’t they repeated? Or were they only repeated over a week after their first broadcast, and hence not within the period covered by those figures?

Yeah, the last two episodes had no repeat figure within a week of broadcast. A shame since it looks like the last two figures are really bad when in actuality they are in line with the rest of the series. Plus ‘Only the Good…’ aired out of usual slot so it makes its performance all the more spectacular.

Makes the BBC position on Series IX seem quite idiotic. But of course we all knew that.

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To add to what Pete has said, the BARB figures are Live + 7 day so it includes catch up figures via DVR (iPlayer isn’t included for BBC programmes yet (well aside from the iPlayer on Virgin)).

That is why I included the overnights on the BTE list. The overnights are far more important than the overall final figure for a commercial broadcaster (and it is the other way around for the BBC, the BBC don’t care how or when people watch, just so long as they DO watch it).

The overnights figures for BTE (adding the 8 airings over the 4 days) all push 2 million which is utterly spectacular.

The final figures are still important for BTE, they give us an indication of how much of an audience is there for Dwarf, whether they watch it live or later.

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Just checked again and the figure is correct. Third for the week on BBC Two (behind Buzzcocks and Gardeners World).

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Yeah, in the Re-Mastered version they changed it to make it funnier.

I was wondering how long it would spot someone to find the typo.

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