English Entertainment
Nick lines up seven new shows for 2003-04
MUMBAI: Viacom owned kids’ channel Nickelodeon has decided to gear up and spruce its programming with seven new shows this year.
Speaking about the initiaitve, Nick’s executive vice president Cyma Zarghami has been quoted as saying: “We’ve been raising our own creative bar, and this season will propel us further forward on behalf of kids. We feel we know kids and their tastes than ever before, and our new series are going to register with them and hopefully yield yet another round of hits.”
First in the line is a live -action series Romeo, designed as the Saturday night Snick lineup. Starring hip-hop artiste Master P and his 13 year old son Lil’ Romeo, the series is about a single father and executive juggling between family and career, says an official release.
The series showcases Master P struggle to raise his four kids and work in the music industry; and the protagonist and the reel life son Lil’ Romeo’s interaction with 16 years old sister, a six-year-old brother and an 11-year-old foster brother is the gist of the story. The channel has already commissioned 20 episodes of the series, which will begin production in Vancouver, Canada, in April.
Also gearing to make a comeback is the Rugrats spin-off, All Grown Up starring all the familiar characters from that hit show as teens. It is scheduled to premiere in the fall.
Third on the agenda is My Life as a Teenage Robot. Yet another spin-off this one is inspired by a short toon that aired on Oh Yeah! Cartoons , Rob Renzetti created My Neighbor is a Teenage Robot .
Apparently, the itsy-bitsy show had a fan following so the channel are making it a series. The animated show is about XJ9/Jenny or Jenny, a robot implanted with what the channel calls a supersensitive teenage heart. Despite important jobs like protecting the Earth from disaster prime on her agenda, like any other teenager, she has her own ideas on how she’d like to live, including going to high school and being able to drive the family car. The show scheduled to begin in this summer has already canned 13 episodes.
With nine nominations out of 10 at the daytime emmies from the Junior JR slots, the channel has a stop frame animated preschooler series Rubbadubers scheduled for an August launch. The 20 episode series series is about bath-toy friends including a frog, a crocodile and a shark.
Another series to be launched for the preschoolers is Whoopi’s Littleburg, a set of three live-action, half-hour specials starring Whoopi Goldberg, puppets, preschool kids and guests including Sandra Bernhard and Rosie Perez.
The kid channel has turned the book series Little Miss Spider into a one-hour animated preschool special Miss Spider and the Sunny Patch Kids. With Brooke Shields and Rick Moranis’ voice overs, the shows is about the adventures of Miss Spider and her husband in search of one of their five children who is missing.
Former Nick stars, Drake Bell from The Amanda Show and Josh Peck from The Amanda Show, Snow Day, Max Keeble’s Day Off have been roped in for the a live-action comedy called Drake and Josh. The show ia a story of teenage stepbrothers Bell and Peck. Bell is a nerd who turns out to be an advice columnist named Miss Nancy and dishes advice in the local school newspaper. The show begins production in March and will run for six episodes.
Also coming up is an animated action comedy Danny Phantom. The lead toon is a 14 year old Danny Fenton, who uses wit and superpowers to transform into a phantom-fighting superhero named Danny Phantom.
The Backyardigans a 3-D animated series that is set in the intersection of three backyards in the afternoon following preschool is also slated to appear sometime later this year
As for fans aged nine to 16 in the US, the channel has announced a casting call on April 5 in Los Angeles for a new programme, Are You All That?: Nickelodeon’s Search for the Funniest Kid in America, The selected child will appear on the Nickelodeon programme All That, a sketch-comedy show for kids.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
