You’ve seen all of the advertising, but what actually is HD television? Marie Kemplay cuts through the jargon on our behalf.

Even speaking as a complete technophobe I must concede that HD television is pretty spectacular, the vivid colours and clarity is really impressive. And the good news is that media regulators, Ofcom, have announced that the next world cup in 2010 and the 2012 Olympics will be broadcast in HD. Imagine seeing Fabio Capello’s tears (of joy or shame) in all their glory.

Although you may think the quality of TV you can get from a decent television set and digital signal is already pretty impressive, HD really does take it to the next level with HD picture quality up to five times more detailed than standard TV. This is because the picture is made up of 720 or 1028 optical lines rather than the 576 of conventional television and the gaps between pixels are smaller, which all translates for the layman into a far sharper image. This is accompanied by Dolby Digital surround sound. All good news for viewers, but not so good for TV stars whose every wrinkle and grey hair will now far more visible.

To view HD you need a HD ready television set, a digital service provider and a HD set top box. If you are on a budget there are basic HD ready TVs available for about £130 and if you have more money to burn top of the market televisions can cost more like £1,500.

There are currently three HD service providers in the UK, Freesat, Virgin Media and Sky Digital. It is important to remember that HDTV is still very new in the UK and while the amount of HD programming available is increasing all the time it is still very limited compared to ordinary television. Currently, Sky Digital is by far the best in terms of the amount of programming available with 26 HD dedicated channels such as 4 sports channels which regularly show premiership matches, 9 movie channels, Channel 4 HD and BBC HD. Sky charge £75 for their set top box as well as £10 a month on top of a regular Sky digital subscription.

Virgin’s v+ box will set you back £99 and costs £5 a month with a virgin phone line. Unlike Sky, Virgin only has one dedicated HD channel, BBC HD, but it does have a selection of on demand HD programmes. The cheapest option and unfortunately therefore the least useful is Freesat which as the name suggests doesn’t require a subscription, but it’s not as simple as they would have you believe. You must either purchase a set-top box or Freesat HDTV television from one of their approved retailers - John Lewis, Argos, Comet and Currys – a set top box will cost upwards of £50, or a Freesat television over £900 and you must also pay for a satellite dish to be installed if you don’t have one already, this usually costs around £80. At the moment freesat only offers limited HDTV programming from ITV and BBC.

If you are prepared to hang back for a while Ofcom has said that HD TV should be available on Freeview by the end of next year and the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are all expected to be broadcasting much more HD television by that time.

Realistically, anybody without a Sky subscription would be better waiting for a year or so when you are likely to pay less for the appropriate equipment and get more programmes for your money.

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Forget Bob the Builder, it’s Joe the Plumber that could fix this election for McCain, explains Marie Kemplay

On Wednesday night another character was added to the presidential soap opera, Joe the Plumber. I’m sure nobody, least of all Joe himself, expected the final presidential debate to focus so much on one voter. Every one of the 26 times good ol’ Joe was mentioned I couldn’t help but raise my hands in despair, is this what the election has come down to; whether one man from Ohio may or may not be taxed more if Barack Obama wins? Worst of all was John McCain referring to him as “my old buddy Joe the Plumber”, when he’s never met him, if he had he might be more cautious about granting him his new found American hero status. McCain had hoped that the 34 year old plumber who accused Obama’s plans to increase taxes for households earning over £250,000 as “killing the American dream” would be his perfect attack weapon. But it turns out 34 year old Joe Wurzelbacher is actually called Samuel, doesn’t even have a plumber’s license and his earnings are way below $250,000 and are unlikely to go above that anytime soon, so perhaps not the anti-Obama hero he had been searching for.

McCain and Obama really came to blows over the negative campaigning that has taken over in recent weeks, Obama was once again forced to repudiate his ties with Bill Ayers, a 1970s terrorist and to his credit he did it very convincingly. Despite McCain trying to take the moral highground, claiming he has always defended Obama when Republican critics have taken it too far Obama delivered the killer line of the whole debate “John, 100% of your TV ads are negative.”

Unfortunately for McCain doing trying to undermine his opponent is the only option he really has left. It’s looking like even, to use his own words, spending his entire life in the service of the nation may not be enough to get him elected.

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With Obama and McCain just 21 days away from the prize of the presidency, Marie Kemplay looks back at political developments during the last week.

63.2 million Americans tuned in to watch John McCain and Barack Obama sparring in the second presidential debate on Tuesday, pretty impressive until you remember that 70 million American people watched last week’s vice presidential debate. “Say it aint so Joe” but it seems that perhaps Sarah Palin and her notorious television appearances are becoming the major draw of this campaign.

But although I’m digressing much like the vice presidential debate, Tuesday saw no real fireworks, no real knock out blows and nothing really new from either candidate. Several polls taken afterward have shown American viewers think that Barack Obama won and if I have to come down off my fence I’d tend to agree.

Obama, in general, backed-up what he said with facts, for example knowing the price of petrol in Nashville went down really well with the local press – $3.80 by the way. His points were in general a lot clearer and well defined, whereas McCain seemed to rely more on populist phrases to get by such as “We are Americans. We can, with the participation of all Americans, work together and solve these problems together.” A lovely sentiment but not particularly explanative, his overuse of the phrase ‘My Friends’ at the start of what seemed to be nearly every answer was also pretty grating. In fairness to McCain, Obama did his fair share of question dodging; for example when asked about social security and Medicare (American medical insurance scheme) reform Obama started talking about taxes.

The real headline is that the debate did nothing to change the status quo and the tragedy for McCain is that he really needed to put in a dazzling performance. The American press had been expecting him to go into this debate all guns a blazing, especially as the ‘town hall’ format of the debate was meant to favour an old-school politician like him. While some commentators have said that once he started walking around the stage and addressing the audience he looked strong and purposeful, for me it just reminded me of how woefully old he is, and, I hate to say it but the word doddery came to mind. My friend kindly added that his walk and mannerisms reminded her of Homer Simpson.

McCain in my opinion also made two serious bloopers; firstly referring to Obama as “that one”, although in the context of a political debate that sort of language may seem pretty innocuous some quarters of the American press have accused him of racism, not particularly helpful when he’s behind in the polls. His ill judged claim that: “I’ll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I’ll get him. I know how to get him.” Is perhaps the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. For all his talk of America needing a “steady hand at the tiller” such a claim does not strike me as coming from such a person.

The problem for both candidates is that these are very testing times and both parties are clutching at straws to find solutions to vast array of both domestic and foreign policy issues. McCain suggesting that “energy independence” – possibly his second most used phrase in the debate - could solve America’s economic woes is a bit unrealistic to say the least. Obama seems to be taking the Gordon Brown route of stressing the importance of ensuring that “ordinary families” are fine, ok, but what about everybody else?

Unfortunately for television viewers and voters two candidates struggling to outline solutions to increasingly complex problems doesn’t necessarily translate into an exciting election campaign. My overall assessment of the debate matches that of the online news site, The Drudge Report “Boring!”.

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Up to his knees in mud, Peter Moore discovers that The Duke Spirit are still playing rock music the way that it is supposed to be played

There is little better to raise the pulse than a big, thick guitar riff. Now, I am thinking of the kind of thing that used to exist before Thatcherism, when shaggy haired men in skinny denims and unbuttoned shirts used to dispatch a flurry of notes that would cause the fillings to shake in your teeth and your eyes to water as if you were at a funeral.

Apart from a handful of notable Americans, the majority of today’s musicians seem to have forgotten the importance of such a musical device. We get pastiches of pop and this, and rock and that – dance and rave mix with disco and rap and whilst the gloomy indie drudge is incessant, the riff seems to have become somewhat maligned.

This is why, stood knee deep in a field of mud about three weeks ago, I was glad to discover The Duke Spirit. Clad in miserable tight leather jackets, the engine room of the band was equipped with two guitars, a bass and a drummer, the kind of thing of which a traditionalist like Noel Gallagher would utterly approve. In front of this was Leila Moss, a hopelessly attractive blond parody of what Baby Spice might have looked like if she’d been raised in the north of England, inhabiting a role at the front of a rock and roll band that was always going to draw glib comparisons with Nico.

Still, as the rain held off, The Duke Spirit proved to be about the best thing I saw during the weekend’s music. Moss, with her ballerina’s gestures and cheerful conversation, whipped a half drunken crowd into action and behind her the band chopped away at their instruments like woodcutters in the forest – finding just enough groove, just enough edge and throwing in a few damnably good riffs.

So, thanks to The Duke Spirit for rekindling my hope for the British rock bands, the majority of which seem to have got lost recently on the musical highway, caught in odd musical alleyways that distract them from the essential characteristics of a good rock song.

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Peter Moore decides that the BBC’s latest mini-drama is a welcome improvement on Sunday night timetables of old.

I’ve got rather bad memories of Sunday night television. As a child I came to despise the horribly cheerful theme music of the Antiques Roadshow, whose merry pipes always seemed an ironic reminder that the weekend was almost over. Apart from that it was The Last of the Summer Wine, with its stale plots and successions of old men roaring uncontrollably through the Yorkshire countryside in bathtubs.

My Sunday nights around the television never properly recovered, and since I’ve tended to reserve the evening for the pub or a book. Last night, however, whilst waiting for the scheduled broadcast of Match of the Day Two and a satisfying victory against West Brom, I decided to sit out an hour beforehand – coming across Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

According to a recent poll Thomas Hardy’s late Victorian novel is amongst our favourite, ranking 26^th on the BBC’s recent ‘Big Read’, flanked by The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and Middlemarch by George Eliot. That said, I’ve never managed to plough my way through Hardy’s story of a country girl with a desperately cursed love life – probably scared away from the bookshelf by the thickness of Hardy’s tome that numbers 592 pages over 40 fat chapters.

Luckily for me the BBC have taken a kitchen knife to the novel and reduced it to a more digestible size – last night’s episode was the second instalment of a four part series. In the lead role is one of the most talented young actresses in Britain, Gemma Arterton. Only graduating from RADA last year Arterton has barely paused since, first making her debut in Stephen Poliakoff’s Capturing Mary and subsequently appearing in Guy Richie’s RocknRolla and Oliver Parker’s St Trinians. A promising future is expected for Arterton who not only possesses the industry’s essentials of being young, beautiful and talented – but has already completed an outing as a Bond-Girl in the forthcoming Quantum of Solace.

It’s a rightful treat for all of us when the BBC gets around to producing an adaptation like this. The costumes, the script and the quality of acting usually tend to surpass the standard of a Hollywood film and what’s better is that you can enjoy it for free (forget about the license fee for a moment). If you want to revisit or catch the first two episodes of the drama, then they are currently available on BBC iPlayer and they come with a Select Digital recommendation. Sunday nights all of a sudden are looking a little better.

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Untried and untested?

The video that is doing the rounds on the Internet this morning is one of the Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon. The star of Good Will Hunting and the Bourne series of films stated that he felt that the nomination of Sarah Palin as the running mate for John McCain felt like a ‘bad Disney movie.’

Having gone from a position as governor of a small town in Alaska, Mrs Palin has risen quickly through the ranks in American politics. Two years ago she was elected Governor of Alaska and at the end of August she was nominated by McCain for the position of vice president.

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Arriving with the advent of a new political season, comes a wonderful political scandal from Australia

If you feel the urge, then today is a fine day to take a stroll along Whitehall and up to Parliament Square. The area is buzzing with action and colour as MPs drift back into the city after the summer holidays, fresh with the latest briefings under their arm and whispering hushed plots of betrayal and ambition.

Now is the perfect time to start turning our attention back to politics; and although we have to wait a little while yet for Black Rod to start knocking at the doors to the Commons, we haven’t been kept waiting for a new political scandal – and this is a rather amusing one which has arrived by way of Australia.

Newspapers and blogs around the world are reporting that just three days into his new job as the Police Minister for New South Wales, Matt Brown has been forced to resign by the state governor after he decided to dance atop a sofa dressed in just a pair of underpants.

The Guardian reports that Mr Brown was only appointed to his role at the beginning of the week, and decided to celebrate his new employment with an impromptu party. Doubtless swept along by something strong in a glass, Mr Brown danced away ‘to techno music on a leather couch in “very brief” underpants.’

State governor Nathan Rees demanded Brown’s resignation after the minister first attempted to deny the claims, later claiming that: ‘Embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe it.’ Meanwhile, Mr Brown himself was a little less forthcoming, only responding with the cursory reply, ‘I made a mistake and I am going to cop the consequences of that mistake.’

Clarifying the situation, Mr Rees revealed that, ’ I subsequently put it to former minister Brown late last night that there are too many reports of you in your underwear for me to ignore. He (then) conceded that he’d been in his underwear, and that gave me no option but to demand his resignation.’

Perhaps the antics of Mr Brown could be a harbinger of what’s to come from Westminster over the next few months. The prospect of our Mr Brown donning an elephant thong and grinding away in the cabinet table may be a little too much to hope for, but there is bound to be a political scandal or two brewing beneath the surface.

Whilst the politicians purport to be concentrating on the important issues and getting down to the grit of society – there is always going to be a scandal to fuel the tabloids and knock them off course. Australia’s Mr Brown has lit the way: who’s going to topple next?

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