It won't even hit 200,000 viewers next week - CITV never does (I think Old Skool Weekend is the only time they have). The highest rating show for the week of March 16-22 was Almost Naked Animals, 5pm Saturday, with 166,000 viewers. It's quite obvious that it needs to keep that 5pm timeslot, and be on ITV instead of CITV. Moving it to 8am as they have planned is quite frankly, suicide.
As long as it has a relatively strong following on CITV, I'm sure they will be happy, with most of the revenue for these things coming from merchandise and overseas sales.
Which they'd potentially see more of if they kept it on ITV.
Did STV and UTV push the show as heavily as ITV considering they won't be showing the rest of it? Looks like UTV Irealnd showed the premiere last night but won't be showing the rest of the series.
A bit confusing, CITV are showing episode 2 on Thursday 17:00 which UTV Ireland are showing next Saturday at 17:30.
Episode 3 is on CITV Saturday morning 08:00 simulcast with ITV/STV/UTV.
OK, hadn't noticed that. So UTV Ireland keep it and schedule it properly, though presumably the listing is a mistake as last nights episode was episode 1 & 2.
Space Race.
Alan is on space junk duty. Things take a turn when one of the pieces of debris turns out to be a heat-seeking SAT-MINE that activates and locks onto TB3's heat signature. Alan pulls some incredible moves in order to dodge the mine, but he can only outfly it for so long before exhaustion kicks in. Back on Earth, Lady Penelope and Parker implement a plan to sneak into a top-secret storage facility and find the mine's deactivation code.
They succeed and the mine powers down before TB3 is destroyed.
I saw some of the Mr. Bean Animated Series repeats on CITV a few weeks back, and they were using the 2002 credits style. I haven't seen that version since its original run, as the repeats on channels like Boomerang and Nickelodeon always had a unique style. I wonder if ITV just used the copies that it still had from its original run on ITV1? The website address itv.com/mrbean leads to a 404 error page now.
The unique credits have been used on ITV re-runs before.
I suspect it's a case of mixing the tapes up for the latest re-runs as to the credits.
While we're on the subject of Mr Bean, I happened to see a re-run of live-action Mr Bean on ITV2 today. Not only was it cropped to fit a 16:9 screen and rescanned to fit the action in, but when upscaled on ITV2 HD, looked absolutely dreadful. This doesn't happen when Mr Bean is on ITV3, and he's pillarboxed on ITV3 HD...
While we're on the subject of Mr Bean, I happened to see a re-run of live-action Mr Bean on ITV2 today. Not only was it cropped to fit a 16:9 screen and rescanned to fit the action in, but when upscaled on ITV2 HD, looked absolutely dreadful. This doesn't happen when Mr Bean is on ITV3, and he's pillarboxed on ITV3 HD...
Ah yes, I complained about that on Twitter a couple of weeks back. It's bad enough that they crop it to 16:9, but the pan and scanning is just atrocious. I was hoping broadcasters were beginning to realise that it's no crime showing a 4:3 picture in its original aspect ratio, but they're actually going back and cropping old programmes that are entirely made in 4:3, shot on - in comparison to today's cameras - low resolution video, especially when they're upscaled to HD.
Did STV and UTV push the show as heavily as ITV considering they won't be showing the rest of it? Looks like UTV Irealnd showed the premiere last night but
won't be showing the rest of the series
.
Should've checked your facts, as it looks like you're wrong about that - and that's a good call by UTV Ireland. ITV, cancel whatever's on that timeslot and put TAG there. It doesn't matter that CITV will have aired it already that morning.
I bet they're kicking themselves for not using film in the first place, considering all the international sales and dvds
Some segments of Mr Bean were shot on film, most of the location footage was IIRC, and the rest is videotape. Some location stuff is videotape, even as far back as the first episode so I suppose it was a matter of what was available.
I believe Mr Bean in Room 426 (and Mind The Baby) were both totally on film.
:-(
A former member
You are right.
Never understood why the new years day shop was on video tape along with the mini scene.
After catching up with Thunderbirds Are Go this evening I really enjoyed it. The fast pace kept me entertained and I'm sure that it will with the kids as well. The music I thought was lovely and complemented the action. The sets were magnificent and added to the beautiful visuals. As for the characters I imagine that the idea is to make them look as much like puppets/action figures to hark back to the original - at least that's how it seems.
As for the scheduling it's wrong to put it in the morning only and a Saturday evening slot could have worked well. Looking at the schedule they could have placed it at 6pm with a half an hour YBF episode from 6:30, but hey ho!
I watched it tonight. I thought visually it was stunning, especially the model work. I know that compared to the rest of the shots it's a simple one but there was a shot of Thunderbird 2 crossing water that caught my eye the most, because the water looked fantastic. The CG characters are a little bit lifeless and lip sync suffers in places, but for TV CG it's pretty damn good! Music wise, the score wasn't even close to the kind of unique score that Barry Gray created (lets face it, you could hum every Barry Gray piece, not so much this), but i was very satisfied with it.
One thing i cannot stand is the editing. I understand fast paced, but this didn't give any shot or piece of dialogue time to breathe. There are even points when dialogue is still being spoken as wipe transitions are quickly switching to the next scene. The original Thunderbirds did linger on the model shot porn a bit too much at times, and could feel quite slow, but this is too far in the other direction. I cannot believe for a moment that they did this deliberately because they think kids would get bored if a new shot didn't appear every millisecond! Don't underestimate your audience!
On that note, i have to say the same about the writing and dialogue. It was pretty bland. I understand this is for a young audience, but come on we've seen shows like Press Gang, Dangermouse, Count Duckula, Grange Hill. These were kids shows that kids loved, even if they didn't understand the dialogue sometimes. But adults loved watching them too because they were actually well written! The dialogue in this first episode sounded like the kind of dialogue you would get on mid to late 1990s video game FMVs in-between levels!
I'll persevere with this though, I really want to see the Fireflash episode for example.
