WhatisNews?

Theatre of News

ITV has relaunched its news programmes with a new "Theatre of News" video wall, a la Sky.

I wonder sometimes how excited real viewers get about these sort of things. Not very, is my guess. Virtual reality and video walls may make news executives and techies go all stiff and moist, but out in the real world people couldn't care less.

Newsreaders aren't generally selected because of their ability to walk convincingly. Most of the time when they go on a perambulation around a studio they look as though they're desperatly trying to avoid standing in dog muck. Mark Austin certainly did on the 6:30 ITV news last night.

And I wouldn't be surprised if all the smoke and mirrors actually irritated viewers in some ways. Just to show off the toys, a 15 second link became a 90 second link as Mark Austin meandered around the set triggering off various bits of graphics and pictures. Yawn.

Theatre of News - mine is bigger than yours.

Book diet

After my recent brush with the military I want to read Jarhead, a memoir by a front-line infantry marine during the first Gulf War. But I'm on a self-imposed book diet, which only allows me to have a splurge when I've read five books. So far this year I've read four...

Next in line.

Wales Millennium Centre sucks...

The Wales Millennium Centre is almost finished and I saw it for the first time in a while last night. It's a building of such stunning provincial ugliness it makes your head ring. Cardiff Bay is not exactly a paradise of wonderful architecture, but even here this brown lump of perfectly realised mediocrity stands out as being below par.

What's all the more galling is that Wales could have had a truly distinctive building. Way back in 1994, Zaha Hadid won the competition to design an opera house for Cardiff Bay. She was bumped off the job after a cabal of philistine politicians, small-minded local business people, rival architects and the media decided her "crystal necklace" was a bit too avant garde for Cymru. Politically as well, the view was taken that an "opera house" was too elitist for Wales. What the country needed was... a rugby stadium.

Of course, Zaha Hadid was never going to go down well in Wales because a) she is not Welsh and b) she is a woman. To make matters worse, at the time she was a "paper architect" with only one constructed building - a fire station in Germany - to her name. Wales could have been the country that had the vision to launch her on her way. But Wales didn't have the bottle. Instead Hadid's first "big" building has just been completed in Cincinnati and the New York Times described it as "the most important new building in America since the cold war."

Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati

So instead of a building that could have put Cardiff on the map (think Bilbao, think Sydney, think LA) we have instead something that looks like a cross between a loaf of bread and an Estonian jail.

The brief to the architects, Percy Thomas, was that the building had to be “unmistakably Welsh and internationally outstanding”. The Welsh bit has been achieved by slapping a load of slate everywhere and having a wall made out of words in that cutesy olde-Celtic style script you find on the side of gift shop mugs.

"Internationally outstanding" - well, as a missed opportunity, certainly. There can't have been many bigger ones.

Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen - roughly translated: "Next Month - Bobby Davro."