English Entertainment
Ugly Betty bags two Globes in its first season
Mumbai : The stars rained down on the 64th Annual Golden
Globe awards as Hollywood turned out in full force to cheer the best in television and motion pictures held at the Bevery Hilton Hotel. Glittering in diamonds and driving the media frenzy were actors like Drew Barrymore, George Clooney, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Hugh Grant Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Hanks, Salma Hayek, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Dustin Hoffman, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Hilary Swank, Reese Witherspoon and Renee Zellweger amongst others. Over 50 Hollywood presenters were selected by the HFA and Golden Globe including Leonardo Di Caprio nominated for Blood Diamond and The Departed and Meryl Streep a 6 time Golden Globe winner who won the best actress in a comedy for her role of a wicked fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada.
While Hollywood star power takes centre stage at the ceremony the Golden Globe awards is also a time for the best in television entertainment to be honored.And the top honours went to ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy for best television series (drama).
Kyra Sedgwick won the best actress award in a television series (drama) for her role in TNT’s Closer while Hugh Laurie took home the Golden Globe for the best actor performance in Fox’s House in the same category.
Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives both highly watched series on ABC were pitted against each other in the best televisions series musical or comedy. Ugly Betty originally a hit Spanish-language telenovela brought to the United States and shown on ABC, won for best musical or comedy series and its star, America Ferrera, was best actress in a comedy. NBC’s 30 Rock won Alec Baldwin a globe for his performance as the best actor in a comedy.And HBO ensured itself a hatrick of awards with its mini series. Helen Mirren as best actress, Jeremy Irons as best supporting actor and the best mini series was bagged by Elizabeth I.
Helen Mirren has had an exceptionally brilliant run as she was a triple nominee for Monday’s Golden Globe for The Queen and Elizabeth I as well as the television film Prime Suspect: The Final Act.She won best actress awards for playing two Queen Elizabeths: one for the television mini-series Elizabeth I and the second for portraying Elizabeth II in the film The Queen. BBC with its mini series Gideon’s Daughter won Bill Nighy the best actor and Emily Blunt the best supporting actress in a mini series awards.
Tom Hanks presented actor Warren Beatty with this year’s Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for his outstanding contribution to the entertainment field. The Cecil B. DeMille award winners are chosen by the HFPA board of directors and presented each year.
The Disney-Pixar film Cars won best animated feature in the debut category for animation at the Globes.
The 64th Annual Golden Globe Awards is telecast across 150 countries worldwide and is one of the few awards ceremonies to span both television and motion picture achievements.
Each year HFPA members interview more than 250 actors, directors, writers and producers, as well as reporting from film sets and seeing more than 300 films.
Hollywood stars have a special reason to be seen at the Golden Globes.The awards, which are voted on by nearly 90 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are a major stop on the road to the 25 February Academy Awards because winners here often go on to compete for Oscars — the film industry’s top awards.
The top honours in motion picture category were picked up by Babel for best motion picture drama while Martin Scorsese won the best director for his film The Departed giving it a shot in the arm for the Oscars as well.The Academy award has deluded the director despite repeated nominations.
Dream Girls picked up a host of awards including awards for Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy. The comedy Borat won Sacha Cohen a best actor in a motion picture comedy and could throw up some surprises even at the Oscars.
The Oscar nominations will be announced on the evening of 23 January and the awards will be given out at the star studded event on 25 February.
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.
