Category: Australia

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Australia Festivals Media Melbourne New York TV US

MWF 2011

As someone was pointing out in The Age the other day, this city sure loves a festival. Pick any time of the year at random and you can be sure that a festival of some kind will be taking place at that very moment. Just as some world cities are on a permanently heightened terrorism threat status, Melbourne seems to be on perpetual risk of festival. Careful where you stand now–some culture might break out at any time.

Clearly we have neither the time nor finances to attend them all–you’d literally never stop–but every now and again we somehow find ourselves at a disproportionate number of events attached to a particular one. A few years ago it was the comedy festival; another year we binged on short film at the St Kilda Film Festival, and this year we ended up “doing” the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Somewhat surprisingly, every time I would mention to someone that we were seeing the festival’s big international name, Jonathan Franzen, in conversation at the beautiful BMW Edge theatre in Fed Square, I was mostly met with only blank stares (seriously? He wrote The Corrections! He said no to Oprah! He’s, like, really famous…) Well, I’m a big fan whether you’ve heard of him or not, and although I still haven’t found the time to read Freedom (the curse of walking to work means that I’ve lost my novel reading time), I’ve read everything else. He was an entertaining and articulate speaker and the hour flew by. Even the audience Q&A segment (which can sometimes be excrutiating) was very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed Jonathan’s rather endearing habit of pausing to think before answering a question. Clearly this is a man who does not fear an uncomfortable silence. Maybe I’ll start adopting this strategy in job interviews. Or maybe not.

The following night we were back in Fed Square to see the live recording of the ABC’s Q&A (the Aussie version of question time), hosted by the always entertaining Tony Jones–a sort of cross between Dimbleby and a slightly friendlier Paxman. As the producer assured us before it kicked off, it really is live–not for them the luxury of a 10 second delay. Perhaps one might have come in handy, though, judging by the fact that they accidentally put this to air:

That was supposed to be a short pre-show promo in which Tony Jones introduces the panel, but unfortunately someone put the audio feed live just early enough for the unfortunate punchline to the warm up guy’s joke (“…85 year old Sudanese woman”) to be broadcast to Australia’s living rooms. I can’t imagine what people at home must have thought (the setup that they didn’t hear was something along the lines that the makeup artists who were at that moment dabbing foundation on the panel are so good that underneath it all Tony Jones is actually that aforementioned 85 year old Sudanese woman…)

Oops.

Still, all of that did mean that I made my second appearance on Aussie telly: many years ago I randomly switched on Channel Ten to see my stupid laughing head in the audience of that year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala. This time with the aid of the pause button, a bit of Where’s Wally type fun backed up with the knowledge of exactly where I was sitting and what I was wearing I was able to locate myself in the crowd pulling a stupid face. Between the two of us we’ve now appeared on three of the five terrestrial channels–Sal was with a group of girls interviewed by Channel 7 at Flemington many years ago–so that just leaves Nine and SBS. I wonder if we can make it onto the other two? Channel Nine is probably achievable if I hang around on Dorcas Street in South Melbourne for long enough in October while they’re filming the next series of The Block, but SBS could be tricky: I guess I’d either have to go on Countdown or get my kit off…

Our third writers festival event in as many days was an evening of foodie indulgence at the new Vue de Monde up the top of the Rialto tower in the company of chef and owner Shannon Bennett talking about his new guide to New York. It was enough to make me really want to go back to New York–just a shame it’s not quite as accessible from here as it was from London. Still, a lovely evening with some great food and wine. We even got to shake the man’s hand as he signed our book for us.

Categories
Australia Media TV

It’s All Happening In Fitzroy

So there we were, out on a sunny Saturday afternoon for a bit of a walk. we’d already been over to Brunswick Street for a bit a lunch (where there was an amusing incident with a newspaper) and then wandered up towards North Fitzroy and over to Rathdowne Street before heading back towards home. As we reached the town hall, though, we noticed that Channel 9 were there, setting up to film the series finale of their property reality show, The Block.

As we stopped to watch for a bit, we almost literally bumped into presenter Scott Cam, who was pacing up and down practising his lines:

Scott Cam learning his lines...

“Shall we get a pint and watch?” I asked Sal, and as there was a free table outside The Napier across the street, we sat down with a Mountain Goat Hightail Ale and a glass of Chardonnay and gawped for a bit as a series of cars pulled up and deposited a series of increasingly ridiculously overdressed real estate agents and their hangers on at the steps of the town hall, much to the bemusement of the hipster Fitzroy locals having a fag outside the pub.

Some of these agents were familiar faces to us: we spent the best part of a year going to open for inspections in the area before we found our piece of Collingwood, and I recognised a good few faces in the crowd from those days (including the agent who sold us our house, and who I remember having a massive phone argument with when she wouldn’t pass my offer on to the vendor…)

After the agents came the contestants, past and present, posing for photos on the steps of the town hall:

The Block Auction, Fitzroy Town

The Block Auction, Fitzroy Town

Considering how many people had apparently invaded Cameron Street for the open for inspections, there were surprisingly few members of the public hanging around: just the aforementioned bemused hipsters outside the pub, a few passers by, a couple of kids and us.

As the auction itself was held behind closed doors, we finished our drinks, wandered over to take a few photos and left them to it. As I was taking the last of my shots I turned to my left to see a Channel 9 bloke with a camera pointing it directly in my face. So should you happen to watch the show tonight keep your eyes peeled for a skinny Brit taking his photo of the day…

Josh and Jenna, The Block

Categories
Australia Music

Do You Remember The First Time?

So asked the giant green letters scrolling across the roof of Melbourne’s oddly shaped, boxing ring slash gig venue Festival Hall on Friday night, shortly before Jarvis and his reformed Pulp took to the stage to ask the same question in song form.

Well yes, Jarvis, I do actually. For me it was the 23rd February 1996 (15 years ago–gosh does that make me feel old…) half a lifetime ago on the other side of the world, in what was then the Manchester Nynex Arena, although to this day I’m not entirely sure who Nynex were, and why they were ever sponsoring a music venue in Manchester. This of course was in the days following that little incident at the Brits (Jarv was even interviewed from his dressing room before the Manchester gig by Chris Evans for TFI Friday).

Pulp are one of those bands that I really never thought I would see live again: even when they announced they were reforming to play the Isle of Wight, not to mention Wireless and that surprise Glasto set, all of which we narrowly avoided on our recent trip home, I thought I’d missed my chance.

There’s been some water under the bridge for the band as well as me in the intervening 15 years, but their set on Friday was remarkably similar to the one I saw them play in Manchester, and Jarvis was on good form, at least once he got his shoes sorted: after Do You Remember The First Time? he called back to the stage crew for a change of footwear, blaming the slippy Festival Hall stage. “They’re not orthopaedics”, he reassured us in his Sheffield deadpan as he put his new shoes on, before giving them a little try and announcing “oh yeah, you’re in for a show now…”

And we certainly were. Sadly they apparently played their last ever Australian show at Splendour last night, but I’m glad I was there for this one.

Categories
Australia Finance

My Favourite Transaction

Some time ago my bank here in Australia added a somewhat baffling new feature to all their cash machines. Now, every time I go to take money out, the machine asks me if I’d like to save this particular amount of money as my “favourite transaction” (which then gets saved on the initial screen so you can select it quickly next time).

I’m sorry, what now? I’m supposed to have a favourite transaction? Well I don’t remember them asking the pop stars of Smash Hits that question back in the 80s. To be honest, Mr NAB, before you asked I hadn’t even given a second thought to what my favourite amount of money to take out of my account at any given time might be. I guess it depends.

Perhaps the bank likes to think that its customers hang around discussing this, arguing High Fidelity-style about their top 5s (“…oh man, ‘fifty bucks from my savings account, no receipt, on-screen balance’ is where it’s at. Best. Transaction. Ever.”)

What makes this annoying is that even after you’ve given in and selected your favourite, it keeps asking you. Every time you select an amount that isn’t your favourite, the machine asks you if you’d like to save this one instead. Well if you think I’m so fickle that I want to change my favourite transaction every time I use your ATM, then you haven’t really understood the concept of a favourite, have you?

So they’ve added a feature of dubious usefulness at the expense of forcing everyone to click through an additional screen every time they use the machine. Hmm. I’d call that one a UI-fail.

It’s almost as annoying as those Barclay’s machines in the UK that ask you if you’d like an “advice slip”. I’m always slightly disappointed when the ensuing piece of paper that spews out of the machine just tells me how much is left in my account, rather than that I should “dump my partner”, “quit my job”, and/or “never eat yellow snow”.

Categories
Australia Media Shoddy Journalism

Lies, Damned Lies, and Exchange Rates

According to today’s The Age:

RISING living costs and a surging Australian dollar mean it is now more expensive to live in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth than in London, Vienna, Rome or New York.

A startling claim, I’m sure you’ll agree, but something doesn’t quite ring true for me about this. Why should a “surging Australian dollar” make it more expensive to live in an Australian city? A surging Australian dollar might make it expensive to visit an Australian city, but for anyone living there–earning a salary in the local currency–it should surely make the cost of living cheaper. Apart from anything else due to lower prices for imported goods.

So I downloaded the free report (from here) and of course the introduction makes clear that any conclusions you might draw from the report about the cost of living anywhere outside the US are somewhat flawed:

There are two major reasons why a city’s cost-of-living index will change over time: exchange rate movement and price movement. Since a common currency is required in making a comparative calculation, all local prices are converted into US dollars, which emphasises the role of currency
movement.

So, essentially, it’s not a cost of living survey at all. It’s a cost of visiting from the US and paying for things with US dollars survey.

Elsewhere in the introduction, we have this:

Of particular note is the rapid growth in the relative cost of living of Australian cities. Sydney and Melbourne are ranked sixth and seventh respectively and are closely followed by Perth and Brisbane in 13th and 14th place in the ranking. This is the culmination of a remarkable rise in the cost of living in Australian cities over the last decade, a period in which the value of the Australian dollar has moved from around 50 US cents to passing parity with the US dollar earlier this year.

Well yes of course, if you’re going to convert everything back into USD then it’s hardly surprising that if the Aussie goes from being worth 50 US cents to 1.07 USD that would make those Australian cities seem hugely more expensive, relative to the US. It doesn’t mean that those cities are actually that much more expensive for people who live and work there.

The article in The Age concludes with the following:

Melbourne was among the most expensive for a daily business trip at $US760 ($A711) a day – made up of one night’s hotel accommodation, two meals, two taxi trips, a daily newspaper and a drink at a bar. Sydney came in at $US627.

This I find truly baffling. Without subscribing to the detailed city information, I can’t get any more information about how these prices are broken down for Melbourne. All it tells me in the free report is that:

Daily business trip rate consists of one night’s accommodation in a hotel, one two-course meal, one simple meal, two 5km journeys by taxi, one drink in the hotel bar and one international foreign daily newspaper.

Ok, so let’s be generous and assume that the hotel costs you $300 (that’d get you into almost any of the 4/5* major CBD hotels), and let’s allocate $200 to the meals (this is for one person, remember…) The 5km taxi rides shouldn’t cost more than $15 each and even the most expensive hotel bar will probably serve you a drink for under twenty bucks.

Even staying at a top hotel and eating very well, I can’t get much above $550. Where’s the rest of that cost coming from? Unless it costs $150 to buy a “foreign daily newspaper”, it just doesn’t add up.

*

Of course despite the name this isn’t really a cost of living survey at all, as the report itself makes clear:

The Worldwide Cost of Living survey enables human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in 140 cities in 93 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.

Which is fine and all, but maybe our newspapers shouldn’t just be blindly reporting on it as an example of how expensive our city is without making that clear…

Categories
Australia Media Music TV

Having The Most Successful Show On Australian TV Must Be Such A Pain

Funny. Only the other day I was reading an interview in the weekend paper with the host of Channel Ten’s long running weekend morning music video show, Video Hits, which mentioned how profitable it is for the network:

At Ten, Video Hits is seen almost as part of the furniture, having been on-air in various guises for 25 years.

“It’s one of the most profitable shows on the network”, she says.

[The Age Life And Style, July 2, 2011]

Two days later, up pops new Ten CEO Lachlan Murdoch to cancel it.

It seems an odd decision to me, as surely it must have been a relatively cheap way of filling a lot of airtime. I wonder where the nation’s viewers will have to turn now to get their fix of music videos and sport.

Oh. That.

Even odder, though, is this quote at the end of that article from The Australian:

Mr Murdoch, who flagged the cuts earlier this year, blamed rising costs in news, the multi-channel Eleven and Ten’s hit show MasterChef Australia.

Quite. Having the single most successful reality ratings juggernaut on your books (which must surely pull in significant sponsorship revenue if the incessant product placement is anything to go by) must be such a burden. I’m sure the other free-to-air networks–who have been relentlessly throwing their own imitations at the TV wall in an attempt to make one stick–must feel your pain.

Categories
Australia Media Politics Shoddy Journalism

Dear World’s Media

I know I shouldn’t expect people to, like, know stuff any more and I know it doesn’t really matter, but I post this here because:

1. I can’t believe that I seem to be the only person in the world who has noticed; and
2. It’s not often that that English degree I spent three years studying for comes in handy.

According to the story on the front page of today’s The Age, and apparently every other media outlet in the world, President Obama, speaking at a white tie function at Buck House last night, “concluded his toast with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III“:

Obama concluded his toast with a quote from Shakespeare’s Richard III.

‘To her Majesty the Queen, to the vitality of the special relationship between our peoples and in the words of Shakespeare, ‘to this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

Except he didn’t, did he, because that quote isn’t from Richard the third, it’s the John of Gaunt, “This Other Eden” speech from Richard the second:

This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England

(Funny how he left out the bit about “against the envy of less happier lands”, can’t think why…)

It’s the sort of thing you might expect a good sub editor to pick up.

Oh. Oops. This is the sort of thing that happens why you sack them all, isn’t it…

Meh. Richard II, Richard III. It’s all the same thing really isn’t it?

Categories
Australia Customer Service UK

Your Call Is Important To Us

I was transported back to an earlier time, last night, as I sat listening to hold music being told that my call is important but that all the customer service agents are busy right now, and I realised that I don’t really do this any more. Much as I loved living in London, it seems as if I was always hanging on hold trying to sort out some problem or other. I still remember the time that I spent so long on hold to Homechoice/Tiscali trying to sort out some problem or other with my broadband that I listened to an entire Leona Lewis album before someone answered. Happy days…

But I can’t remember the last time anything like that happened.

Maybe this is the real reason why I haven’t been blogging so much since we moved to Melbourne. There just isn’t enough to get pissed off about here (and on the rare occasions when I have to call my lovely ISP, iinet, they even do this wonderful thing where you just hang up and they call you back, and then use the caller ID to pull up your account details before you even start talking to them…)

Of course it goes without saying that the company I was on hold to was in the UK: I’ve decided that it’s finally time to extricate myself from the company that hosts my other web presence. Originally this was hosted by an excellent small hosting company called Freedom2Surf, who I picked about 10 years ago when I first set up that site in a vague attempt to make it look like I’d done at least one extra-curricular thing at uni that I could put on my CV. And they were great for about 5 years, until they got taken over. And taken over. And taken over again. Following the most recent takeover they have been completely rebranded and I now find myself a customer of Talk Talk Business.

I’ve moaned about them before, but general laziness has always kept me from doing anything about it. But with the latest rebrand the old F2S website account area is gone. I used to be able to log in and check my account details, see past invoices, and update my account settings, address and billing details. Now I have the My Talk Talk Business Portal, which provides almost zero functionality. I can log in to this and see that I have an account, but that’s about it. No invoices, no pricing, no indication when my hosting or registrations expire–everything just leads to a message telling me to phone a UK 0800 number if I want to do anything. That’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, though, given that I live on the other side of the world now and it’s not massively convenient to have to call someone in the UK whenever I need to do something…

I can’t even update my address details because their wonderful portal has been coded to accept only UK postcodes and phone numbers. Oh and when they rebranded they also sent me a letter in the mail to my house in Australia containing my login password, which they had apparently been storing in plain text all this time. Oops.

So it’s time to sort this out: unfortunately I just paid for a new year’s hosting and registration before the rebrand, but as a first step I thought I’d try to get the .co.uk domain that I have registered with them (www.pastemagazine.co.uk) moved over to my other (cheaper, better) host (who are probably preparing to sell out to Talk Talk as we speak…) so that they will be the ones who bill me when it comes up for renewal in a couple of months. 20 minutes of hold music later, and having been passed between 3 departments, I finally get through to someone who can help me:

“Oh yes. You need to send us an email to request that, as all cancellations have to be in writing.”

Thanks. Wonderful. Thanks so much for writing that on your website… Now can I have the last half hour of my life back?

Categories
Australia teh internets

Crikey! OzBargain Wants To Give Away My Email Address…

So I was signing up for an account at consumer-discounts-website OzBargain, when I happened to notice something a bit odd in the terms and conditions I was agreeing to…

Terms and Conditions of Use

Account Inactivity

After a period of inactivity, OzBargain reserves the right to disable or terminate a user’s account. If an account has been deactivated for inactivity, the email address associated with that account may be given to another user without notice to you or such other party.

I’m sorry, what? If I don’t use my account for a bit you are going to re-assign my email address to someone else? My email address? Have you checked with Google on that? ‘Cause I don’t think they’d let you give away my Gmail address to someone else…

Or did you just copy your terms and conditions from someone else without checking whether it made any sense in the context of your website…?

Categories
Australia Media

Channel Nine Sucks The Big One

So there was I thinking, as I walked home from work last night with Test Match Special in my ears courtesy of Radios 4 and 5 and my iPhone’s 3G connection to teh interwebs, that with 8 or so overs still to play at the end of the first day of the first test in this year’s Ashes series, that I’d make it home in time to catch some play on the TV.

WRONG! Of course I was forgetting that this is Australia, where the TV networks have a cavalier disregard for their viewers. “That’s an awfully long ad break”, I thought to myself as I switched on Channel 9 when I got in. I remembered where I was when the ads continued even as Test Match Special started to talk me through the next over, and then Channel 9 returned from their ad break to the end of their half hour nightly news bulletin and the start of their shabby, tabloid telly evening magazine show, A Current Affair. Over on their second and third free to air channels, “Gem”, and “Go”, they were showing some even more important and unmoveable telly: The Flintstones and The Nanny.

And here was me thinking that Australia was a sports obsessed sort of place. Apparently not: cartoons, reruns of ancient sitcoms, and Tracey Grimshaw are more important than the only broadcaster with the rights to show The Ashes live actually, you know, broadcasting it live all the way to the end of play.

Australia’s free to air networks have form in this department: I’ve seen Channel 9 do it before for other cricket matches, Channel 7 just love to cut away from the Aussie Open (which, of course they also have exclusive rights to broadcast live) to show Home And Away, and heaven help the AFL fans in this country, who almost never get to see a game live on free to air telly, with most of them showing with half an hour or more delay (heaven forbid that Channel 7 might have to move Better Homes And Gardens…)

Frankly I’m amazed that the sports-mad Aussies put up with it. Of course I’m well aware that not everyone likes sport, and there would surely be plenty of people annoyed at missing their nightly news bulletin to see some blokes in white throwing a small ball at each other, but the issue is that no one else has the rights to show this stuff, because the right of the free to air networks to dick around with their coverage is enshrined in Australia’s “Anti-Siphoning Laws“, a piece of legislation designed to ensure that key events like the Melbourne Cup, the Aussie Open and the big Cricket matches remain on free to air. Unfortunately although the legislation ensures that at least one of the free to air networks will always get the rights to show these events, it doesn’t apparently require them to actually show the event, live and in full.

Not that I’m the world’s biggest fan of the Murdoch empire, but at least his channels show things live and stick with them all the way to the end…

So it looks like I’ll have to fill in the gaps with Test Match Special and whatever streams I can find on the interwebs.

[And the less said about England’s performance so far, the better…]