Daily Mail rubbish

Just spotted this load of old nonsense from the Mail - "BBC weatherman warns people of Kent to prepare themselves for temperatures of -99C"

Really?

No, of course he didn't.

Sure enough the map showed -99... it's happened a few times over the years and I'm surprised it took the Mail this long to pick up on it.

The live graphics will show a figure of -99 when there's a problem with the data reaching the graphics. Normally it'd be picked up by a human being and corrected to something more likely. That's kind of the point. It's a deliberately impossible figure, obvious to everyone (even Mail readers) that there's been an error.

Even so, that didn't stop the Mail padding out the flimsy story with record low temperatures and raiding the stock images for a picture of Antarctica to help explain the concept. And to think the BBC gets accused of 'dumbing down'.

Strangely the Telegraph ran the same story using instead a great big moon-faced picture of Dan Corbett.

In other news, BBC admit another hilarious weather blunder. This time a typo results in a very hot temperature.

Jesus if this keeps up my sides are going to split.

TV Graphics Showreel

I've just put an alternative version of my television graphics showreel on YouTube. This version includes some clips from the BBC Arabic TV channel branding which was the last project I was working on at the BBC before I left for the good life in Ireland! In most other respects it's identical to the Flash version on my TV graphics web site - and includes clips from BBC General Elections, BBC Weather and various other broadcast design projects.

I'm linking here also to check whether the little hack works to get the high quality YouTube video embedded.



If you want to link to the high quality version of a YouTube video you need to add '&ap=%2526fmt%3D18' into the embed code after 'rel=0'. The 'HQ' symbol doesn't seem to light up - but I'm pretty sure it's the higher quality version that's playing.

Link to the Mike Afford Media YouTube Channel - TV Graphics, Weather Graphics, Elections, Web Video