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March 28, 2024, 08:56:06 PM

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More info about GB News shows.

Started by Sebastian Cobb, March 10, 2021, 06:59:34 PM

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dissolute ocelot

I think the positive thing to take from this announcement is: who the fuck are all these dweebs? Some people from Sky News which is never knowingly watched outside a hotel lobby, some failed Brexit Party candidates, someone from Guido, someone who won the Apprentice, someone from EuroNews: Dan Wootton from Talkradio is the only vaguely well-known broadcaster, and radio presenters don't always have a great record on TV. Neill is hardly pulling in the big names. Where are Farage or Katie Hopkins or Clarkson?

Also wondering what the station's 70 year old viewers will make of Andrew Doyle making tedious unfunny jokes about non-binary people.

petril

Quote from: dissolute ocelot on March 19, 2021, 10:11:03 AM
I think the positive thing to take from this announcement is: who the fuck are all these dweebs? Some people from Sky News which is never knowingly watched outside a hotel lobby, some failed Brexit Party candidates, someone from Guido, someone who won the Apprentice, someone from EuroNews: Dan Wootton from Talkradio is the only vaguely well-known broadcaster, and radio presenters don't always have a great record on TV. Neill is hardly pulling in the big names. Where are Farage or Katie Hopkins or Clarkson?

Also wondering what the station's 70 year old viewers will make of Andrew Doyle making tedious unfunny jokes about non-binary people.

Farage is too desperate and needy to have it not revolve completely around him, so the rest don't want him. plus he drinks in pubs and smokes for the cameras so that's common pleb scum right there
Hopkins is too far gone to remember any limits so will get them fined or off air or ruined in the public eye
Clarkson is probably well over the middle-aged angry ranting phase for the most part, and has enough to not really need them

it's not going to be much of a thing that matters, just a daft vanity hobby for some old guys to pretend they're relevant

Blue Jam

Farage's time has come and gone. I was sick of the sight of him years ago but I imagine everyone else is too now. Plus Brexit has happened, he's served his purpose, his attempts to remain in the public eye now just make him look desperate. He's no use to GB News now.

Katie Hopkins would be a liability, too unpredictable and too toxic for a channel trying to gain traction in the mainstream and attract advertisers.

Clarkson is pro-EU, has taken full responsibility for his sacking from the BBC instead of trying to blame "cancel culture", and has done a complete 180 on his climate change denial. He's not bullishly right-wing enough for them. He also isn't a talentless hack, or desperate enough to take a job with GB News.

Quote from: petrilTanaka on March 19, 2021, 11:23:37 AM
it's not going to be much of a thing that matters, just a daft vanity hobby for some old guys to pretend they're relevant

I think you're right about this though. I doubt this will have the audience figures and the impact Andrew Neill is hoping for. The whole right-wing grifter thing is in decline now, like Laurence Fox Neill is jumping on the bandwagon as it rolls off a cliff.

idunnosomename

#63
QuoteGB News claims it will be Europe's "most nimble and sophisticated multi-platform broadcast newsroom".


Blue Jam

^^^ ?????? "Brown bread" as in "dead"?

Quote from: Pinball on March 18, 2021, 11:28:25 PM
Channel 236.

Hahahaha, I didn't realise the channel 88 thing was a joke. I genuinely thought it was an unfortunate coincidence, like that time Crispian Mills said some dodgy things about Hitler and tried to backtack in interviews and then Kula Shaker inadvertently released their next single on his birthday.

236? Down there with the fishing shit and the Welsh stuff. Forensic pets and psychic cutlery. Not ideal for a bunch of attention-seekers.

JamesTC

The image they use of Paul Staines makes it look like he has a funny hat on.


Sebastian Cobb

Clarkson's never been or aimed to be serious political commentator in any recent time has he? He's an open tory and reactionary but I figured his articles were tongue in cheek grumpy old man reactionary rants were meant as such. It's mostly crap and not zero cost but I wouldn't see him as a likely contender.

idunnosomename


Captain Z

Quote from: idunnosomename on March 19, 2021, 12:44:21 PM
Why dont torys wear ties anymore

We've all moved on and it's perfectly acceptable in this day and age. Not like three years ago when DISGRACE CORBYN REFUSED to wear one.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on March 19, 2021, 12:36:05 PM
Clarkson's never been or aimed to be serious political commentator in any recent time has he? He's an open tory and reactionary but I figured his articles were tongue in cheek grumpy old man reactionary rants were meant as such. It's mostly crap and not zero cost but I wouldn't see him as a likely contender.

He's part of the Chipping Norton set but I don't think he's ever tried to become a political pundit or claimed to be an expert on politics, no.

I think he's genuinely a billion times more interested in cars than politics and actually not outspoken enough on political issues for GB News. He'd have to say something properly offensive to get cancelled, and he probably wouldn't do that because he doesn't give as much of a fuck about politics and he doesn't need the publicity.

On the surface it would seem like Clarkson and Piers Morgan have a lot in common but I really don't think they do. Clarkson is actually a skilled writer and presenter who genuinely knows a lot about his area of interest while Morgan is a hack, and Clarkson is charming and funny in a way Morgan just isn't.

I doubt Clarkson will ever struggle to find work, there'll always be someone who will pay him to write about cars. Maybe he'll mainly be writing about electric cars in the future, but he'll be in demand. Morgan might get a job on GB News but even if it does take off I can't see it being popular for too long, right-wing populism comes and goes in phases and I think people are getting wise to the whole grifter thing now.

Maybe that's just me and my wishful thinking again though. I really want this whole right-wing grifter thing to just die.

Sebastian Cobb

I think I'd like him a lot more if he just stuck to the car writing, it's the boorish 'worlds gone mad!' articles he does in The Times and The Sun that then get packaged into books that are the most problematic. Although I don't think it's quite the same as alt-right/anti-woke stuff, more of a more outrageous persona that probably came out of him being quite well received on Grumpy Old Men.

Cold Meat Platter


pigamus

LBC is already very popular in this area, so whether there's room in the market I don't know. Maybe radio works better for this kind of grift because you can get to taxi drivers and white van man and so on. But if it's on Freeview... well. Who knows. This is Johnson's Britain after all.

Paul Calf

#73
Quote from: JamesTC on March 19, 2021, 12:27:43 PM
The image they use of Paul Staines makes it look like he has a funny hat on.



I wonder if he regrets the time he spent profiting from an industry that relies on the sale and use of illegal drugs?

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Paul_Staines

EDIT: also, is that a Mallon streak?

Kankurette


Midas

Quote from: Pinball on March 18, 2021, 11:28:25 PM
Channel 236.

Tragic channel number.

Imagine a feeble, doddering geriatric. The scraps of a Christmas turkey. A crumpled page from The People's Friend that's been wrapped around some twigs.

In leathery hands he covets his television remote. He jams the numbers down with trembling fingers, peers at the distant screen with gangrenous desire and watches helplessly with disappointment as his television jumps to channel '23' and then to '6'.

Again and again, for the rest of his life.

Quote from: JamesTC on March 19, 2021, 12:27:43 PM
The image they use of Paul Staines makes it look like he has a funny hat on.



I was so distracted by the guy on the left being some kind of miniaturised, Bullingdon Club version of Michael McIntyre that I didn't even notice that.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on March 19, 2021, 01:00:58 PM
I think I'd like him a lot more if he just stuck to the car writing, it's the boorish 'worlds gone mad!' articles he does in The Times and The Sun that then get packaged into books that are the most problematic.

Yes, I'm not into that stuff at all, I guess it makes him easy money but I can't see it's worth. It's the non-fiction equivalent of the airport novel, something gammons can buy from the airside WH Smith because they forgot to pack any books and they can't be doing with those new-fangled e-readers.

Seeing him on the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? reboot though I was surprised at how good he was as a presenter. I had thought him an odd choice but he nailed that Chris Tarrant thing of being poker-faced and never making the contestants feel stupid, not giving the game away or breaking the tension. He was also nicely self-deprecating with the "Ask The Host" lifeline that was introduced in the reboot. I was thinking about this recently while watching Gordon Ramsay's Bank Balance, noting Ramsay was unable to keep a straight face or stop himself making the contestants feel stupid. That certainly was an odd choice of host. You would never have had Brucie or even Barrymore doing that. That stuff's harder than it looks.

With Piers Morgan I'm surprised at how much work he's managed to get interviewing people despite being terrible at it. I'm not sure how he was ever considered for Britain's Got Talent either- I remember one review saying "Simon Cowell makes you boo and hiss and then want to go down the pub with him, Piers Morgan just makes you boo and hiss", a bit like Steve Fleming's quote from The Thick Of It.

Also I saw it noted that Piers Morgan's Daily Mail columns were the kind of clickbait that invited people to boo and hiss in the btl comments, and the readers loved to hate him until he started all this Meghan Markle stuff, when the comments suddenly went from "Bore off, Piers" to "He's just saying what we're all thinking".

Could he be made GB News' Royal Correspondent? Oh gawd.

Sebastian Cobb

Yeah I was going to describe them as 'fathers day books', I imagine lots of them remain unread.

I'd forgotten he was on the Millionaire reboot.

Blue Jam

Unread beside the toilet. Yes, "Fathers' Day Books" is a fair description too. Given as a gift along with a card with a golfer on it or a fart joke or a pint of beer because that's what dads like isn't it fuckit this'll do.

Mr Farenheit

Quote"I want to stop people being left behind. We need a levelling up across the country – there's more to the UK than London"

"They also share our vision to reach out to non-metropolitan audiences beyond London and engage them in our national conversation."

"GB News will be staunchly independent. That is our point. Our investors know this, our journalists will know it and so will our viewers. We aim to serve British communities who feel poorly represented by mainstream television media, especially outside London."


Where will GB News be based?
The GB News headquarters will be in Paddington, London.



Blue Jam

I won't link to it, but Dan Wooton has just written a rant about how the woke brigade are killing free speech is "the biggest issue of our time", in his new column for the Daily Mail, ahead of starting his job as a presenter on GB News. Some silencing and deplatforming that is.

steveh

I reckon Murdoch's new channel, UK News TV, is going to be more of a concern.

GB News will probably make a splash initially but then the economics of it will start to be a problem, especially as it's a stand-alone operation and unlike Fox News and the like in the US it won't be able to rely on pay TV subscription revenue. It'll probably then get watered down and absorbed into co-owners Discovery, who despite their chief shareholder's political views won't want it to be that radical to avoid the reputation risk to their other properties.

Murdoch though has deep pockets and won't care if it runs at a loss for a long time, has years of experience with Fox News (the boss of the new channel is the former Fox News VP), the ability to share costs and staff with his UK papers and political connections he can be certain will do his bidding. Unlike GB News it's going to be available via a TV app rather than on Freeview, cable or satellite which I think puts it under a different Ofcom regulation regime meaning it may not be subject to the same impartiality regulations.

An tSaoi

Quote from: Kankurette on March 19, 2021, 02:53:33 PM
Clarkson also voted Remain.

Not only voted Remain, but also made a video promoting Remain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drlJ2jgn4LE

It must be a rare genuinely-held position, because being a remainer would be very unpopular with a lot of Top Gear types, and it would have been much easier for him to adopt a Brexit persona to appease his fans. Fair play to him I suppose.

dissolute ocelot

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on March 19, 2021, 12:36:05 PM
Clarkson's never been or aimed to be serious political commentator in any recent time has he? He's an open tory and reactionary but I figured his articles were tongue in cheek grumpy old man reactionary rants were meant as such. It's mostly crap and not zero cost but I wouldn't see him as a likely contender.
Clarkson has made some dubious comments about immigrants and had a history of mildly racist jokes, as well as the usual right-wing moaning about strikers, trade unions, cyclists, etc. Here's an archive of his Sunday Times columns - he does seem to delight in saying offensive things and then turning it around, so that it's not clear where he really stands on an issue. He goes on about how trans people aren't really a significant issue just children pretending and the figures are made up, then says, but I'm sure it's really awful for the one genuinely trans person in Britain and we should be nice to them. He mocks the youth of today, then goes into "but we were the same when we were young". He'll ventriloquise anti-immigrant sentiment and then disappear in a completely different direction, occasionally to mildly humorous effect.

Anyway, he's far too successful for GB News.

Kankurette

Quote from: Blue Jam on March 30, 2021, 02:52:08 PM
I won't link to it, but Dan Wooton has just written a rant about how the woke brigade are killing free speech is "the biggest issue of our time", in his new column for the Daily Mail, ahead of starting his job as a presenter on GB News. Some silencing and deplatforming that is.
The woke brigade aren't the ones trying to ban people from protesting.

Sebastian Cobb


Darren Grimes is very much the UK's Milo. "Cheers for the help, but you're a fucking oik. You don't belong in Chipping Norton, fuck off."

katzenjammer

The very definition of a useful idiot

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: Huxleys Babkins on April 16, 2021, 07:51:37 PM
Darren Grimes is very much the UK's Milo. "Cheers for the help, but you're a fucking oik. You don't belong in Chipping Norton, fuck off."

I've said this multiple times on here but I reckon he's the work-experience-kid/boss' son version of Paul Joseph Watson.