Like most one year old's, Pigeon junior gets excited by any music and seems to enjoy moving his body (sort of) to the rhythm (except music that comes out of the disembodied scary box on the shelf, also known as the stereo). Some things get him up dancing immediately - like the countdown music to BBC news on tv for example. But the one thing guaranteed to get him moving more than anything else are the Shapes. It's just a two minute bit from another CBeebies program but he goes crazy when they appear. So how great is it (or perhaps as some weird kind of torture for parents) someone has put up a continuous 10 hours of Shape action on youtube. Guaranteed peace if only for a few minutes.

Plenty of time on my Japan visit to watch tv because of the too-hot-to-do-anything weather and it's reminded me how I'd love to read a comparative study on Japanese vs. English language tv. Commercials in any English speaking country I've been to more often than not show you a lifestyle and then associate their product with it. In Japan it so often seems like they concentrate on showing the product, and sometimes they don't even do that - just a bunch of kids in costumes (giant fruit or anthropomorphised characters) singing and dancing a jingle - very fast with usually with a a micro jingle at the end. In some ways if feels more wholesome or at least less cynical and insidious. Maybe it's related to how short the individual commercials are. Beer is advertised as a thirst quencher - always the actor drinking giant gulps at a time - the gulping sound itself seems vital, just as vital as the large head on the beer. Even whiskey is advertised with the gulping, refreshing sound, and by young women instead of grizzled old Hemminway types.

I was ready to write how the doting and obsessing on Oprah Winfrey's current trip to Australia is so embarassing, bordering on the pathetic. But perhaps if she had decided to go to Ireland instead (bringing with her the studio audience) I can't really say that the Irish tourist industry wouldn't do the same thing. And already all the money the government here has spent on the whole exercise has already been recouped in advertising exposure in America and everywhere else where Oprah is a star. But it's amazing the extent to which every last thing she's done and visited here so far has been headline news, wiping this weeks Wikileaks and Julian Assange news off the front pages of some newspapers. Flagpoles that usually hang banners for arts festivals or other events now have big flags with Oprah on them instead.

Flicking through the channels tonight I was surprised when I stopped at the state broadcaster, ABC, and heard a slightly familiar Irish accent doing some sort of narration. Turns out it was none other than McWilliams himself Seems to be a joint production with Aussie and Irish tv but I wonder what the locals here would make of all the Dublin centric commentary. Not that it matters since they're all watching Australian Idol. ABC program link

Continuing the awful tv streak, "Supernova", a surprisingly bad tv disaster movie set mostly in Sydney, was the best thing on. Awful CGI, unbelievably bad or incoherent Australian accents, and to top it all off, 90's superstars Luke Perry and Tia Carrere. Comments from IMDB (3.6 stars) almost do it justice: "Everything in this movie is absolutely shocking. Ridiculous scenarios, stupid characters, mundane dialogue, if it's bad, this movie has it. But the funniest thing in this movie has to be the massive errors in geography. As has already been pointed out, no one in Sydney seems to have an Australian accent; they're all British, American or badly pseudo-Australian...A section of the film is supposedly set in the Maldives. The Maldives lie no more than six metres above sea level, yet there are gigantic mountains covered in lush rain-forests. Obviously, no research went into these geographic aspects of the movie". There's even a shot of Cape Town's table mountain at the end which kind of shows, along with African housekeepers, that it probably wasn't filmed in Australia, yet alone Sydney. Luckily the world doesn't get burned up in the end as Luke Perry made a mistake in his calculations - using a "+" instead of a "-"

The other night there was the most crazy tv I've had the misfortune of seeing in a long time - a game show like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, only this time the questions to be answered are like "Did you cheat on your ex-girlfriend when you were dating?" and "Did you ever steal from your family business?", all the while those exact people are sitting in the audience. Prior to this, the contestant takes a polygraph so they everyone knows if he's lying or not review, review, review Actually maybe its not the most crazy tv after all - it's just Jerry Springer with big prizes.