Lodewicus Theodoru Oosthuizen

Lodewicus Theodoru Oosthuizen what a name! What a worthy champion. Well done Louis, well done South Africa. That was a nice 92nd Birthday present for Nelson Mandela and a great touch from Louis to mention it in his winners speech. Somehow the final round of the Open seemed a bit of a foregone conclusion and maybe a bit of an anti-climax, but it never really is. Every shot counts and it was brilliant to watch a man that seemed to have nerves of steel enjoying his final round like he was just out for a knock about with his mates. That was certainly some of the neatest driving I can remember watching. Everyone wanted to see him get loads more birdies and the field to give him something think about but they failed and he played the percentages, and did what was necessary. The mark of a true champion.

I was disappointed that Paul Casey could not rise to the challenge. Maybe he too was playing the percentages and waiting for Louis to make mistakes, but the mistakes never materialised. I hope we see Paul win a Major soon, he has the talent and a Major win could just be the confidence booster he needs to become an unstoppable force in golf.

If Rory McIlroy doesn't win a Major in the next five years I will be most disappointed. Rory has talent by the bag full and seems destined for big things. After his amazing 63 in the first round he came in with a torrid 80 in the second but that did not stop him putting in two more excellent rounds in the difficult Scottish weather. If the weather on Friday had been better I think we might have seen this young man taking the Claret Jug.

South Korean amateur star Jin Jeong was for me the highlight of the championship. It was just a pity that we did not see more coverage of his progress on TV. Jin is the British Amateur Champion after his win at Muirfield last month. I would really like to see him match this weekends performance with a similar one at the Masters next year, before he turns professional.

Some new golfing stars worth watching, but it is always such a pity watching your old golfing heroes playing like amateurs. The weather made things difficult for everyone but somehow you expect the older guys to be able to cope better with the conditions than the young ones, but a lot of them never even made the cut. Maybe they have lost the hunger for the fight or maybe they are just no longer good enough but it doesn't matter we still love 'em.

My thanks to everyone involved for providing a wonderful weekends entertainment. One tip to the BBC though; Cut the build up and show the golf. Golfers out at 6:30 and coverage started at 9:00 yet it was after 10:30 before we saw any live golf.

Top Gear Returns

Loved the new episode of Top Gear last night (27/6/2010), but the thing with the Reliant Robin made me laugh my socks off and scared the hell out of me at the same time. As former a motorcyclist a lot of my mates had the damned things and I had lifts in them from time to time. I always felt quite scared going around a corner in a Robin, but if I realised then how easy they were to roll I would never have got in one. The problem is that they sort wallow in to a corner like a boat and as Jeremy Clarkson proved if you did not have a passenger to use as a counter weight a right hand turn could prove disastrous. Of course he was deliberately turning it over but even the Reliant enthusiasts admitted you could turn them over without trying.

The most scary thing I ever saw with a Reliant Robin was on the M6 Weaver Viaduct near Runcorn. I was coming back from a caravan rally on a very windy Sunday afternoon, it had been a long and difficult tow due to extremely high winds. I had experienced more than a few moments on the journey and had seen two caravans that had lost it on the route. I was travelling south west in the inside lane and the wind was coming from the north. The Robin was travelling up the hill in the inside lane going in the opposite direction. As the Robin reached the apex of the bridge a strong gust lifted it completely off the ground, spun it 360 degrees and deposited it in the outside lane almost alongside me. By the time the driver had regained control he was facing the on coming traffic. He was luck not to have been in the path of anything else at the time. As he disappeared in my mirrors he was turning around the right way. I often wondered if that guy ever drove that thing again after he got it home.

Read a review of the first show of the new series in the Telegraph

Patrick Stewart Knighted

Congratulations to one of my personal favorite British actors Patrick Stewart who was knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace recently. Most well known for playing Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek the next Generation he endeared himself to me by doing a magically job of playing Professor X in the X-Men films. As a long time Star Trek and X-Men fan it could so easily have been different, another actor could have ruined both roles but Sir Patrick did a marvelous job. Patrick Stewart is a fully trained Shakespearean actor which has set him up well for his TV and film rolls. As a lover of Shakespeare I have also watched him in various plays and even when he is hamming it up he can pull it off with a certain panache where others would seem unconvincing and fake. I think it is this ability that made him so good as Captain of the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701D). One of the best things I think he has done is to bring 'Trekkies' in to the audience for his Shakespearean performances who would never have normally gone to watch such a thing. An appriciation of fine art, poetry and theatre is sadly lacking in this TV soap generation. Well done Sir Patrick!

Flash Forward & Hereos Axed.

Just in... NBC has killed off Hereos and ABC has killed off Flash Forward. Looks like I will be almost completely giving up watching TV for the foreseeable future. Looks like a diet of reruns of Top Gear on Dave until someone decides to make something I want to watch like a new Star Trek series or something in the style of Blade Runner.

The future of television

It has long been a contention of mine that the future of television is that there is no future in television. While I am sure the television companies will still be in the business of making programs as we know them the present system of broadcasting will sooner or later become obsolete. What I have seen in the last couple days does not in any way change my mind.

I was an early subscriber to Sky television mainly due to the small amount of broadcast TV I watched and the large amount of videos I was renting. Working shifts went some way to making the decision to move to Sky as I could not follow series based shows and I had zero interest in variety entertainment or game shows. Sky offered me movies and documentaries 24/7, which meant the box in the corner was of use to me although I still had to record a lot of the films I wanted to see to VHS tape to watch on my days off. My children loved it with cartoons all day there was always one or more of them watching something or other. Eventually I even subscribed to the sports channels when Sky was showing the Ryder Cup and I occasionally watch golf or motor sports, but have no interest in an other sport what so ever.

Things moved on and I obtained a top of the range satellite receiver with built in surround sound. I was therefore seriously annoyed when Sky moved from analogue to digital and I had to use the standard box and route the sound through my stereo system, which had previously been in another room and use the auxiliary connections used to connect another piece of equipment. Eventually I replaced the ageing and ailing VHS recorder with a DVD recorder, which worked well for a while but was fiddly to set up. After about 18 months I fell upon a DVD/hard drive combo at a silly price and started to make good use of that and I was able for the first time able to follow series with some form of reliability.

It was unfortunate that my TV set decided to detonate at around the time flat screens started to appear. Flat screens were still very expensive and so I replaced it with the largest CRT I could find. It is still not very old and probably has at least another ten years of service left in it. So when we made the decision to go for Sky Plus at the end of 2008 we did not go down the high resolution route. Sky Plus has been a revolution in my TV watching. The ease at which I can record series being the biggest advantage. The disadvantages are firstly I am wasting more time than ever watching TV and secondly the hard drive in the Sky Plus is no where near big enough for the requirements of a family of seven. It has though been a step change in the right direction and I for the first time think I am getting value for money for my subscription.

Sky player has been available on line for some time but I only just upgraded to a PC capable of using it. I must say I was sceptical as to how it would work. My Internet connection is poor at best and YouTube videos always seemed choppy before but my Window 7 machine seems to handle them much better. Even so I was amazed when I watched some Sky content in full screen high resolution without any choppiness at all. BBC iPlayer shows occasional choppiness but is almost always watchable and I have occasionally used it to catch up on something were I missed the first episode or something. The quality does not seem to live up to that of Sky Player however. The latest edition to the watching TV on line is See-Saw which has content from BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5. See-Saw has a slight advantage over the previous two I mentioned as the content is not just there for a week and then gone. One series I noticed has 39 episodes you can watch. There are of course other video on demand set ups on the net some of which are legitimate and others illegal. Hulla for example is not available in the UK (unless you sneak in via a US proxy) and is presently jumping through legal hoops to get Hulu UK up and running.

The future of television as I see it is video on demand. I suspect the first thing we will see is a set top box with built in Wi-Fi and eventually every TV will come with some form PC built in. This will in time change both the way we watch TV and the way we surf the net. I have felt that this was the way forward since I bought my first Commodore 64 computer and in some ways it surprises me that industry has take so long to catch on. The technology needed to create the infrastructure has perhaps been a stumbling block, but that is no longer the case. I am pleased to see that others have for sometime at least been thinking along similar lines. Project Canvas looks like it could be the first stumbling step towards turning off the broadcast transmitters and delivering us just the content we want. Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform. Initially content will be streamed to a set top box (similar to that used by digital Freeview viewers) via the Internet. More information on Project Canvas can be found here.

The biggest stumbling block to success is the UK's Internet infrastructure, which probably would not cope under the stress of millions of people downloading program content 24 hours a day. Even if they laid fibre optic cables to every home the Internet service providers servers would be under the sort of pressure that is only seen now during a DOS (denial of service) attack. The truth of the matter is that take up of such services will be slow and both terrestrial and satellite broadcasting will be with us for some time. What does remain to be seen is if Project Canvas gets off the ground how soon Sky and others get on board? Some people will suggest that Virgin is doing video on demand already and in areas with cable that is true, but even with Virgin the vast majority of content is 'broadcast' and in the future the only area I can see that true broadcast has a place is that of news.

I sincerely look forward to the day when I can turn on the TV and not see garbage like games shows or soaps even for a second as I change channels, just menus of what I might care to watch. No more tuning in to the third episode of a show and thinking that it seems interesting but does not quite make sense, and hoping they repeat it sometime. Just thinking about it, maybe some people like to be confused as to what their entertainment is all about or why did anyone watch Lost?