Being in opposition takes some getting used to. As a former minister, you don’t just lose your job and the enormous resources of the civil service, you also have to watch programmes that you were involved in being gradually dismantled.
You get fed up watching shows with not much care and love, reality programmes where they put people in a house for a fortnight and film them doing everything, or where participants arrive after lunch and do the programme at six.
My mum has recorded all my programmes and not watched one. My dad says he finds it embarrassing.
My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child’s attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.
It worries me that young singers think you can shortcut the training and go straight to fame and fortune, and programmes like Pop Idol have encouraged that.
I was broadcast-struck from an early age; I had saved up for a tape recorder and started making programmes.
We design our own programmes; we take leadership. Of course the donors come in to support us, to complement our efforts. Our responsibility to the donors is about accountability: about how we use that money. If somebody gives you his money, definitely he will be interested in knowing how you spend the money.
Corporate partners help UNICEF fund our programmes for children, advocate with us on their behalf, or facilitate our work through logistical, technical, research or supply support.
I have been determined for the past couple of years to move away from all those Holiday programmes.
When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.
The BBC does a sterling job, but I’d like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying.
Our new programmes have always just been different vehicles for the same sort of comedy.
Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good – like rabbit.
There are only a handful of really good TV programmes, and I’m blessed to be in one of them.
I don’t like going on TV programmes.
It is at programmes organised on the sidelines of temple festivals that you get to see raw audiences who will let you know immediately whether the act has clicked or not. It was those audiences who taught me how to strike a rapport with the audience.
I do think the BBC could do more, but I’ve always thought the BBC could do more – I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.
In India, while there are some initiatives working with and for adolescent girls, there are too few state sponsored programmes for adolescent boys, be it rural or urban.
Architects typically inherit programmes or sites. We maybe twist the programme a little bit, bring our own invention into it, and we feel perfectly happy when we walk away. It doesn’t feel like quite enough.
Put me in a costume, and I’m your man. I must have one of those faces which seems to suit period drama more than modern films and TV programmes. But I’m not complaining, I love going back in time. I feel quite lucky because nobody knows who I am. I can walk about and have ordinary conversations with people.
We have been in the wellness space for more than seven years, mostly through our Zee TV network in America, which offers programmes on holistic approaches to health and wellbeing.
Unlike other flagship programmes, which have been left with unpronounceable acronyms, like MGNREGA and JNNURM, Bharat Nirman struck a popular chord.
Over the past 20 years, I have presented many science programmes on BBC1. But none is, I think, more socially important, or of more human interest, than this ongoing series of ‘Child of Our Time.’
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
After the war, I went to the BBC monitoring service in Caversham, a suburb of Reading. It was a big aerial system to listen to radio programmes all over the world.
The animal birth control and anti-rabies programmes, which are under the threat of being altered or discontinued, need to be strengthened in order to address the issue of the stray dog menace.
I wished they did more things like ‘How’ and ‘Tomorrow’s World.’ Programmes about how things work.
We need more imagination, more innovation and more public financing for projects and programmes that harness the positive energy of young men.
When I was a kid there were a very select few channels – programmes had to have more of a large appeal and they just didn’t offer very much. Now you have a situation where the television world has expanded and there’s hundreds of channels.
‘Bake Off’ is one of my favourite programmes, so I was genuinely a little bit shocked and very excited when I was asked to take part.
By measuring the proportion of children living with the same parents from birth and whether their parents report a good quality relationship we are driving home the message that social programmes should promote family stability and avert breakdown.
One thing Aussie telly does well is slightly different versions of programmes we’ve made. The trailers for ‘Celebrity Splash’ prove they don’t just pick the good stuff either.
The relatively unpredictable flow of funds to humanitarian organizations, and the bureaucratic strings often attached to them, can have a highly negative impact on an organization’s ability to plan and execute programmes effectively. We need to be able to rely on predictable income flows to plan sustainable programmes.
I love cookery programmes.
My mother was devoted to helping people – with my father’s money! – who had great voices but didn’t have the financial means to study music. He and my mum gave away dozens of music scholarships, and my mum opened a school in town, introduced opera to children and created fantastic programmes.
Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost.
I hate Gordon Ramsay’s programmes: I don’t know if he’s been told it makes good television.
The police who did our training said ‘Happy Valley’ is one of the only police programmes they can watch and not burst out laughing, saying, ‘As if you’d do that.’ They think it’s really authentic.
When I used to return in the early morning after late-night programmes, the first people I see on the roads at the break of dawn are sweepers, newspaper vendors and milkmen. Since they were all from my hometown, I would stop to talk to them before going home. So I am quite used to their lifestyle and work.
One of the headaches of high-tech test programmes is having to debug the test arrangements before you can start debugging the things you’re trying to test.
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