After 10 years off our screens, Red Dwarf made a return to the small screen on Dave Television, and I really wish that Dave didn’t bother! Many people thought that Series 7 and 8 weren’t very good; those people will be even more disappointed by the 9th incarnation of Red Dwarf! At least series 7 and 8 were funny even if not anywhere near the quality before Rob Grant split with co-creator Doug Naylor. Red Dwarf: Back To Earth supposedly happens after series 10; Kristine Kochanski is dead and the cast discover that they are only characters in a TV series. At one point; Lister, Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat are driving around in a Smart Car dressed up to look like Starbug 1 around the set of Coronation Street looking for the Actor Craig Charles who plays Dave Lister in the series. Suffice to say that I wish they just left it at the end of series eight instead of resurrecting it just to completely ruin it; I never laughed once in the whole 80 minutes of Back To Earth. One review nailed it on the head with the quote “No laugh track or simply no laughter?” – the three episodes features no laugh track; is this because they didn’t record one or no-one laughed when they showed it to studio audience? Previously I was hoping for the movie to become a reality but after this tripe I’d rather they didn’t bother. Back To Earth may have had the original characters minus Kochanski and Holly but this wasn’t the Red Dwarf I know and love! Sadly Red Dwarf has gone from cult favourite to a complete joke, Well done Dave/BBC/Doug Naylor!
England lost their penultimate World Cup qualifying match against the Ukraine in Kiev on Saturday. England; who have already qualified for the World Cup were poor and deserved to be beaten with Rio Ferdinand taking a lot of the blame for the defeat, the Manchester United defender had a shocking game in Kiev. It’s all academic really as England have already qualified for the World Cup in South Africa. The bigger talking point was the way the game was broadcast; after the failure of subscription television channel Setanta, the Ukrainian FA decided to make the game Internet only with costs ranging from £5 to £12 depending on when you subscribe to the game. Kentaro who streamed the game online said that it had been a success claiming 250,000 subscriptions. I wouldn’t class that as a success as if it was shown on terrestrial television channels it would have had several million more viewers. Having to pay upto £11.99 on top of their TV licence and satellite/cable subscription is too much. Many people didn’t know how to access the game online or don’t have a debit/credit card to pay for the game meant that it’s an even more limited audience than on satellite television! And of course, pubs and clubs couldn’t broadcast the game live unless they have some sort of computer link-up with their big screen television set-up!
We are constantly hearing how Apple Macs are much better than Windows based PCs but now the shoe is on the other foot as the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard has a bug that deletes user accounts including music, movies and files. The bug is caused by “guest” accounts being active while upgrading to the latest version of OS X, apparently it treats all existing accounts as guest accounts removing all data from the profile every time the user logs out. It seems that Macs aren’t so perfect after-all! Maybe Apple poached some Microsoft employees?