Last week, Channel 4 broadcast a one off 30 minute comedy by Ricky Gervais entitled “Derek”.

I only heard about the controversy in passing before the show, with some people claiming that it was mocking people with learning difficulties. How you make that decision before you’ve even watched it I’m not sure quite sure, though I suppose you could base it, albeit badly, on the short trailers that Channel 4 had been broadcasting.

In the end, I didn’t find it offensive at all. Or funny really. Karl Pilkington had a few good lines in there but overall, it was reasonably humour free. It was however, incredibly moving. Well worth a watch.

Recently, BBC Three began showing World Series of Dating. It’s a trash TV as it sounds – there are four booths each with a different girl in it, and male constants come on and attempt to date them for as long as possible – if the girl gets bored she will hit the buzzer in the middle of the table and that constant will be out.

Despite it’s lack of any intellectual value however, I’ve found myself strangely addicted. Perhaps because it got me through a long night of illness when there was nothing else on at 5am in the morning and I now associate warm memories with it, but it’s actually intriguing for some reason.

However, I think I’ve figured out the reason why. There is a fine line between “doesn’t take itself too seriously” trash TV and incredibly clever parody, and I now suspect that the show lies slightly past said line.

I could have accepted the fact that one of the girls on the show is called Bambi – it’s a silly name but the reality of our modern society is that it is entirely plausible that someone would call their child that. And if someone did, they would almost certainly wear too much fake tan and end up being on a show like World Series of Dating, so that doesn’t strike me as contrived.

However, given the constant references to this being the British version of the show, something didn’t really fit there. It didn’t seem like a show that would be popular with the American market and a quick Google search confirmed that the show is an entirely original creation here in Britain.

That means that Rob Riggle never presented the US version of WSOD, nor did Bentley Kalu ever referee it. Indeed, Poppy Weathers isn’t even a real person, she is played by Thaila Zucchi, an actor who I’ve never heard of because her acting consisted of an appearance on Big Brother 8 as fake house mate, a show which I stopped watching after it ran out of original ideas (ie, I didn’t watch the second series onwards).

Having these fake back stories and fictional hosts, takes it over the line from comedic trash television to clever parody – and that’s why it’s OK for me to enjoy it . We can safely take the high ground pointing out to those who claim it’s intellectually defunct that “they simply don’t get it.”

I got Sky Go so that I could watch the live Formula One and NFL. I pay for NFL GamePass but unfortunately even though I’m paying a lot of money for it, they still black out any games that Sky Sports are showing.

Overall, I’m disappointed.

Firstly, I can only put it on two devices. Now I have loads – a laptop, a phone, a work computer, a tablet, all of which I would like to use it on depending on situation. But I can’t, because I can only register two devices.

Secondly, they have disabled display mirroring, so I can’t plug my iPad into a TV and watch it on there. It’s just stupid though, because I can just plug my laptop into a TV and do it that way, so they’re not stopping anything.

Streaming has worked quite well though. I was able to stream last Sunday night’s NFL with only a few stops for buffering and it looks pretty good on my 27″ screen.

Having heard another talk about the BBC’s technology side on Sunday, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be a pretty awesome place to work.

While they don’t perhaps have the funds that private sector organisations do, I guess I assumed that being a public institution that would be large and lumbering, risk adverse and slow to react.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, they use Scrum. Scrum is an agile methodology used for developing software in the real world (ie, a world where the client is always changing their mind). But they don’t just use it for software – they use it for managing projects right across the business.

Secondly, they’re really up on technology. The speaker on Sunday was telling me about how they had developed an open source project for parsing Gherkin – a lot of software developers might not even know what Gherkin is!

They’ve also previously developed their own JavaScript library, which was a contender alongside jQuery and Prototype (you know, before everyone accepted jQuery was the best, but then everyone realised you could actually just use selectors and not load any library at all).

Not to mention the pioneering work with iPlayer. They launched iPlayer in 2007 – that is five years ago! I can’t really remember a time before iPlayer now, but I don’t think there was many other people doing it at the time. Not to mention that they also have iOS and Android apps available for it too.

In reality, the BBC is no lumbering institution at all – it’s an fast moving, agile, technology-savvy organisation that must be amazing to work at.

I’ve started using a spare computer monitor as a TV in my bedroom so that I could hook it up to my laptop and stream programmes onto a bigger screen when I wanted to.

However, it’s irritating having to cable everything up, so I purchased an Apple TV to stream directly to it. So far my experience has been on the whole positive, with a few drawbacks.

Set up was reasonably easy, and now I have it up and running, on both my laptop and my iPad I am able to select AirPlay mirroring and begin mirroring my screen onto my TV; it also sends the sound.

That said, not everything works perfectly. Here is how it looks so far:

• Videos in iTunes mirror though there doesn’t seem to be a volume control I can activate from the iPad
• TVCatchUp mirrors but without any volume control
• BBC iPlayer mirrors from my iPad, and lets me control the volume with the iPad volume control
• 4od blocks mirroring from my iPad
• NFL GamePass mirrors from my iPad and lets me control the volume
• Sky Go blocks mirroring from my iPad

It is worth noting that even though Sky think they’re being clever by blocking AirPlay mirroring on the iPad, I can just open up the video stream in a browser on my desktop, full screen it and AirPlay mirror my entire laptop screen.

The built app apps for Apple TV are pretty useless though. They don’t have any apps for iPlayer, 4od, GamePass or Sky Go (and even if they did, I can only have two devices on Sky Go anyway), so I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much with my Apple TV than mirroring a different device to it.

It would certainly be nice if I could use it as a standalone box to watch things on, but until they open it up for third party apps, I can’t see me getting much use out of it that way.

Having been struck down with the flu most of last week, I’ve been spending a lot of time in bed, watching Jonathan Creek.

It’s actually not that old, the first episode was broadcast in 1997, but it’s certainly starting to show its age. Floppy disks, VHS cassettes, an age before you could and would look up everything on the internet – it feels like a historial drama now. Not to mention that the first few episodes weren’t even in widescreen.

It also left me with a very torn feeling – I don’t want to move out of the city but at the same time, I now have a strong desire to live in a windmill. Tough call.

I’m also very pleased to see that they are making a brand new episode of Jonathan Creek, that will appear this Easter as a one off feature length episode!

Just need a new Louis Theroux documentary now and it will be the best Easter ever…

No, he hasn’t announced another documentary.

But he has done what some might consider the next best thing – and produced not one, but two lists of documentaries that he thinks are awesome. I haven’t checked any of them out yet, but I plan to. You can find the lists here and here.

The Simpsons has entertained the world for a quarter of a century. Star Trek has become one of the biggest cultural phenomenons of the 20th century. But there is one TV franchise that has arguably eclipsed them all. That franchise, is Miami Vice creator Dick Wolf’s Law & Order.

While other glitzy shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation focused on solving exciting crimes and interpersonal relationships, one man had the vision to predict that what people really wanted, was a show about the paperwork, procedure and bureaucracy of the justice system.

It’s interesting then, that so many people may not have heard of Law & Order, even fewer will have watched an episode – at least in comparison to The Simpsons, which everyone ever has seen.

But the figures don’t lie. In terms of longevity, Law & Order has provided a staying power that is arguable unmatched by anything else the TV studies of the United States have ever produced.

The Simpsons has produced 24 seasons, with no spin off shows. Even if you throw in Futurama, that only takes them to 28.

Star Trek produced three original series, seven of The Next Generation, seven of Deep Space Nine, seven of Voyager and five of Enterprise, as well as one animated series – giving them a total of 30.

Meanwhile, the Law & Order franchise has produced…

• Law & Order (20 series)
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (14 series and counting)
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent (10 series)
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury (1 series)
• Law & Order: LA (1 series)

That makes a total of 46 seasons, with SVU still going, and that isn’t counting Law & Order: UK which has been going since 2009, and similar versions in Paris and Moscow as well.

After an extensive hiatus, in which it was basically ended but then it turned out that none of the actors really had much to do, Red Dwarf returned with a ninth series in 2009 with Back to Earth. It was disappointing.

Thankfully, when it returned for a full six episode series in 2012, it was much improved. Instead of trying some kind of clever, existential plot, they just made six episoded of The Dwarf, as if nothing had changed. THe result is that it worked! Six more classic episodes added to the series, without ruining the legacy.

I’ve finally finished watching the new Jonathan Creek.

Overall, I thought it was OK, trending towards disappointing.

Mainly because he doesn’t live in a windmill anymore. That was the best bit. You can make the argument that they can’t just bring it back after a long break and pretend nothing has happened, but if we’ve learned anything from Red Dwarf X, actually you can, and they should have done.

The first layer of the mystery was good, and while it wasn’t as far reaching as “great”, if you watch back on the original episodes, it was only really series three to hit it out of the park – the rest were about as good as this one. The second layer with the secret assassinations seemed a bit over the top too.

I was also disappointed that there was no nice ending where he decided that settling down was all nonsense and he was going back to solving mysteries in a windmill. But, despite the lack of a windmill, he will be returning to our screens next year, in a new full series.

Is anyone else rather gutted that Jon Stewart is coming back?

Jon Stewart is a great host for The Daily Show and I enjoy watching him on it. I also blogged about it a few years ago.

But having said that, John Oliver is a brilliant!

You might have already seen this…

The best was yet to come though. When John Oliver took over as guest host for two months while John Stewart was away directing a movie, he truly came into his own. Check this out…

I’m going to go as far as to say I think John Oliver is actually a better host of the show.

I don’t watch much TV. Who has the time? Then people talk about box sets as if it is still 2007 and we all have DVD players. But Game of Thrones is proving to be one of the rare exceptions.

I’ve now watched the first two series and it quickly turned into a love hate relationship. My favourite characters keep dying. It’s very annoying. You get attached to someone and then his head comes off.

But as the same time, a medieval drama with dragons and snow zombies – what isn’t awesome about that?

Last Wednesday, Sherlock returned to our screens after two years.

It was an okay return. But I was less of a fan than most. Firstly there was the endless comic relief. I do not remember any from the first two series. It was a series detective show. Now you have Anderson is the crazy comic relief character. Not to mention everyone spent a great deal of time laughing at John’s mustache. Because anyone with a mustache must be an object of ridicule.

Secondly, the sweeping cinematographic changes made it feel like not-Sherlock to me. The first two series had a very distinctive style that stamped their brand on the episodes. This one departed from that significantly.

Thirdly, the mystery was not very good. It was almost an afterthought that they plugged into the story half way through. It was mostly about Sherlock turning up and all the personal drama surrounding that. You can say “that is fine, lots of shows do that”, but most shows produce more than three episodes per series. To waste one everyone hugging and making up, with a small mystery thrown in on the sidelines resulted in an episodes that felt crowded but unsatisfying to me.

That is not to say I did not enjoy it. It was very funny. But it did not possess the enthralling Sherlock qualities that I fell in love with.

Louis Theroux is my favourite documentary maker. When I read in the BBC Magazine that he had moved to LA and was planning on making some documentaries on his experiences there, I awaited them with much anticipation.

They were not my favourite documentaries he has ever done, but still enjoyable. The dogs one was fairly predictable. It also puts in perspective the destruction of a giraffe in Denmark. One pound in South LA is killing dogs by the dozen on a regular basis. Why are people not up in arms about that? Not to mention all the animals we eat…

End-of-life care helped explain how the United States manages to blow quite so much money on healthcare. Some of the people in there were correct – why not try everything to fight for life if you have the choice? But on a societal level, you do have to wonder whether those resources could be better spent elsewhere. It must be a tough decision for the people who make those kind of budget calls.

The most thought provoking I found was the sex offenders episode. It was pretty clear that nobody thinks these people deserve a second chance. However, if you are going to adopt that kind of attitude, why let them out of prison in the first place? Or put them to death. That is something the US still does of course.

I do not know how this compares to the UK system. I can, for example, get a list of all the sex offenders in my area from a handy site called “UK Paedos Exposed”. However, this seems to be built from user submissions, rather than state-published data. That is a pretty sick website, but not on the same level as the state-run database you can find in the US.

This is available from the UK government, but only if you are a parent or carer and want to check a specific individual. However, The Sun newspaper claim to have plotted every convicted sex offender on a map.

Meanwhile the open access in the US, as Theroux points out, leads to apps like “Offender Locator” that allow you to find them.

Premier Sports is a television channel that nobody has ever heard of. It’s an add-on to Sky Sports, for an additional monthly fee. Which is really annoying because they have had, for the past two years, exclusive coverage of the Ice Hockey World Championship finals.

Luckily they have now added Premier Player, an online streaming version of the channel. It costs £9.99 per month. Sign up was painless and we were able to watch it straight away. You can use as many devices as you want, but you can only log in with one device at a time, so you need to make sure you actually sign out if you want to switch devices.

Quality was not great. There are only so much you can expect when you stream a web feed onto a 42″ TV. However, I get good results with Sky Go and iPlayer. The results from Premier Sports were noticeably not as good, especially with the graphics and semi-transparent overlays. However it did offer a continuous stream whereas the free HD stream of a Finland channel we found kept cutting out every 3-5 seconds.

Overall, I am fairly satisfied. It would be great to get a higher quality feed. In a decade or so I imagine we will look back and consider how crazy it was that we watched anything in this resolution. But it was watchable and the whole process was pain free.

Dan Petro explains how he did this in a blog post and talk.

Madness in the Fast Lane is a BBC documentary that Louis Theroux recommended. It tells the take of two Swedish sisters that one day ran across the M6, repeatedly getting struck my vehicles. One of the sisters then went on stab a man to death.

The style was very odd as it reminded me a lot of Brass Eye. There were lots of unnecessary caption slides, weird music and blurry camera effects. It felt rather cheesy. But the story was certainly an interesting one. It was just mad (literally, according to the court psychologists).

Without a satisfying conclusion to the story though (there has not been one in real life), all we can really take away from it is that Swedish people are crazy.

I recently watched the BBC documentary, The Super-Rich and Us.

I am getting more left wing as I get older, and I think I am now of the opinion that we should take a cap, saying £10 million, and anyone worth more than that should be lined up and shot.

Well, maybe not that. At least without legislation that allows us to take take control of their wealth. However, if someone did murder a tax-avoiding billionaire, I am not sure I would be able to judge their actions as immoral.

It is also worth watching the TED talk by Nick Hanauer on why plutocrats such as him need to be stoped.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first TV show was called Cook on the Wild Side. In his first series he converted a truck into a “gastro van”, which the back folded out into a complete kitchen for him to cook from anywhere. He then drove round the country foraging for food and cooking it up.

There was a surprisingly amount of illegal activity in it, which was amusing. He tried poaching, trespassing and raiding supermarket bins. He went everywhere from inner city London to the highlands of Scotland. In seemed quite realistic in that a lot of his attempts, especially fishing, just did not work.

In the second series he used a boat that he sailed up the canals and even included a bike with a pedal-powered stove so that he could leave the water whenever he needed.

While the series was highly entertaining, I also took away two practical tips. The first is that you can eat common garden snails. Literally you can just pick them up and fry them. Though you may also want to cleanse them for a few days before doing this. Gorden Ramsey has a great video on this as well:

Secondly Hugh recommends a book called “why not eat insects?” and then goes on to gather up woodlice from a wood and then fry them too. Apparently they taste like shrimp. I like shrimp…