Staff recommendations for your sky+ box this xmas

Adrian, our head of planning, does the first of our staff recommendations videoblogs.

I think we might use an actual camera for this next time and not my phone, ahem.
You may need to whack up your volume to hear what he's saying, ha ha!

Merry xmas dear viewers!! (and don't worry - the onair output is still in glorious HD...and not shot on a mobile phone...)

xxx
The Sky Arts Team



More highlights here: http://www.skyarts.co.uk/skyarts/festive-highlights/

Merry Christmas! Roll on 2010...

Tis the xmas season as already the novelty trees are up in Sky Arts Corner. Our giant inflatable snowman is no-where to be seen though. Hopefully he make an appearence, if only for day. He's noisy...so he remains in stored in the tape room.
So, ho ho ho, highlights.....
We've got some fantastic xmas telly lined up across both channels this year.
Sky Arts 1 (also in HD folks!) has:

Sandi’s Christmas Cracker
Sky Arts is taking over Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank on 22 December to broadcast Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas Cracker, a cabaret show that features a glittering array of stars from the worlds of music, magic and comedy, starring the legendary Ronnie Corbett. Hosted by queen of the quips Sandi Toksvig and a house band, the show is a joyous mix of music and comedy. Find out more about Sandi's Christmas Cracker >>
From 8pm, 22 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Johnny Cash Christmas Special 1978
Celebrate Christmas with the Man In Black and some of the biggest stars of the ’70s. Guests include: Kris Kristofferson and singer Rita Coolidge, Steve Martin and of course June Carter Cash. This way for more on Johnny Cash Christmas Special 1978 >>
From 10.55pm, 24 Dec, Sky Arts 1

Soul Power
A verité documentary, entirely composed of footage shot in 1974 at the 3-night long legendary South African music festival (dubbed "Zaire '74"). It shows the experiences and performances of such musical luminaries as James Brown, BB King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, among a host of others. Funk this way for more on Soul Power >>
From 9pm, 25 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Sky Arts 2 (again, also in HD folks!) has:

Metropolitan Opera at Christmas
It’s the countdown to Christmas but forget advent calendars, we’ve developed our own way to tick off the dark days of December. You don’t need the pricey dress, the binoculars and the private box - Sky Arts 2 brings all the glamour and emotion of one of the world’s premier stages into your living room, with 25 stunning operas in December. Click this way to find out the seasonal Met Opera line-up >> From 8pm, 1 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

Elaine Page - Live in Concert
Brand new - this recently took place in Sydney at The State Theatre – a beautiful old Edwardian venue – on 31st October 09 - the first time Elaine Page has been filmed in concert since 1991. All her Broadway hits helped along with a sprinkling of anecdotes and stories from her impressive career. See the full line-up for Elaine Page - Live in concert >>
From 7pm, Sun 20 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

• OTHER UNMISSABLE FESTIVE TREATS INCLUDE

Eating Art
From 7pm, 7 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

Meat Loaf In Search of Paradise
From 9pm, 18 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Songman – The Untold Story of Jim Croce
From 9pm, 21 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Festival! The Newport Folk Festival
From 9pm, 23 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Jewel in the Crown
From 6pm, 21 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD (7pm start, apart from the first night)

Edinburgh Tattoo 2006 (pipes and drums)
From 3.55pm, 24 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

Pinter’s Progress: Philip Saville on Harold
From 10pm, 24 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

Playtime
From 10.55pm, 24 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

Dear Mr Fantasy: A tribute to Jim Capaldi
From 9pm, 26 Dec, Sky Arts 1 / HD

The Fantastic World of Michael Crawford
From 8pm, 27 Dec, Sky Arts 2 / HD

Have a fantastic Christmas everyone - as you're sipping the mulled wine and nibbling the mince pies you can be thinking of our scheduling team here, who are already getting into the month of March 2010!

The three B's - Adrian's Belated Biennale Blog...

Better than two years ago when the blog was posted 4 months late I believe but two years later I'm still tardy...


Back to Venice for the Biennale. Same apartment - albeit redecorated (who'd have thought that things like a table and shelves would be deemed optional in a kitchen...)

Jake's older, so no pushchair, but still more interested in chasing pigeons and eating ice cream than anything else in Venice.

So, the Biennale itself. After Tracey Emin's disappointing British Pavilion I had high hopes for Steve McQueen's film (I thought Hunger was one of the best British films of recent years and one of the best films last year). But it wasn't to be and I left the 30min film disappointed and argumentative - my mother in law (an art historian) disagreed with me and gave me a dozen reasons why it was wonderful. I still disagree...

The Danish and Nordic Pavilions though were something else - their first collaboration and the talk of the Biennale. The first was a house with a "For Sale" sign outside and the signs of foul play inside with a dining table cut in half, a staircase lying in pieces and a message scrawled on a mirror in the hall...

The 2nd part was the house of a gay author - possibly the body floating in the pool outside. What did it all mean? It was there with the "intention of dismantling the national representative model..." etc etc It was also something fun and provocative...

I was warned to be careful taking Jake (my son and pigeon chaser) across to the far side of the author's house by one of the curators - those "Tom of Finland" drawings on the wall (!) but Jake was more interested in sitting in a rather cool swivel chair.

Jake was fascinated by a lot of the work - the trashed kitchen and staircase kept him occupied for ages as he tried to work it out and the body in the pool didn't bother him either - and his toy Pinocchio even made an appearance in a couple of the Pavilions... oops. Then tragedy struck. He got left in the loo and, when Bekah went back, someone had nicked him - which is pretty poor. That left it up to dad to leg it across Venice - harder than it sounds - to find the stall that was selling them and then "find Pinocchio" by the time we get back to the apartment. Skin of the teeth but did the deed and "found" the lost toy.

The last images of Pinocchio before his tragic disappearance

The Polish Pavilion was a real surprise and really cool too - a video installation with the screens appearing to be windows behind which ghostly figures appeared in silhouette...

Slight mishap when Jake spotted a ball which was part of an installation and gave it a kick ("when is a toy not a toy? - when it's a piece of an installation" doesn't really register for a four year old) and then later another small ball that was part of an installation made up of toys, balls and wool - kind of a kitten's wet dream - got a little nudge before we could stop him. Got away with it and moved swiftly on.

The Arsenale part of the Biennale (held in the old dock buildings) opened with a stunning piece - you walked into a dark room and there were beams of light coming down from the ceiling in A Matter of Life and Death style which, when you get close, are actually pieces of wire stretching down... it's quite beautiful

A video work by two Barcelona-based artists - David Bestue and Marc Vives - which is part of their Actions at Home piece was brilliant. A slapstick film with gags paying homage to the likes of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy it drew a huge crowd and was one of the highlights. I found a clip youtube but unfortunately it's not subtitled in English - but you can get the drift...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNXP1qu5RQA

Stumbled across a real treat when we turned the corner and found some Chihuly glass sculptures which were amazing especially when seen against such a dull backdrop as the concrete pavilion buildings

What else sticks in the mind? The nightmarish cafe - firstly a bureaucratic nightmare along the lines of Terry Gilliam's Brazil where you have to select from a dot matrix scrolling menu before you get to the counter and then pay and then collect the food (which you've only just seen although you've already had to order it). But best of all was the decor - garish highlighter-pen style fluorescent colours and angled mirrors giving it a mildly emetic quality.

What else? The Peggy Guggenheim museum is one of the best galleries in the world with a stunning permanent collection including works by Kandinsky, Pollock, Ernst, Magritte, Kapoor, Calder and Klee. It also had a brilliant exhibition called Gluts featuring Robert Rauschenberg's sculptures from his Oil Gluts series made from car parts, garage signs etc. One of the US interns told Jake that one of the pieces looked like Wall-E which is one way of getting kids into art and Jake spent the rest of our time in this wing telling other visitors about Wall-E.

Less impressive was the Franois Pinault Collection which is an amazing building but hardly inviting as, on seeing Jake, we were effectively followed from room to room by a black suit-clad guard with an earpiece. Some reading this will think "fair enough" given Jake's "interaction" with the balls in the Biennale but we certainly kept them on edge as we walked from room to room. There's some amazing pieces here - a great Jeff Koons and a really beautiful Murakami but it's like someone with a lot of money has worked through a checklist of modern artists and picked up a piece by all of them regardless of the quality.

I leave you with two things

First, a chair that looks like an arse (well, it amused me) and secondly a weird idea for a kids toy...

Our lovely new buses :-)

We're launching another HD channel!

It won't launch properly until 4th May but to hold onto the EPG numbers that we want (very important behind-the-scenes information this!), we're showing content from both Sky Arts 1 and Sky Arts 2 across these HD channels at varying hours/days for the next couple of months, just like we've been doing with the old Sky Arts HD channel.

You'll have your Sky Arts channels all lined up next to each other:
256 - Sky Arts 1
257 - Sky Arts 2
258 - Sky Arts 1 HD (simulcast of 256, but in full HD on programmes that were shot in HD)
259 - Sky Arts 2 HD (simulcast of 257, but in full HD on programmes that were shot in HD)

We hope you're as thrilled as we are with the news and come May 4th we'll have 2 fantastic HD channels on your EPG.
And now that Sky has the amazing deal of Sky+HD for £45 you've no excuse to not see and hear (5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound in some cases!) our content in stunning high definition. Enjoy!

LIVE opera...and live behind the scenes too! See La bohème as you've NEVER seen it before! Only on Sky Arts 1 and Sky Arts 2. Wow, we're good...

We're bringing you a world exclusive...the Sky Arts channels are showing a live broadcast from London's Coliseum...but this is no ordinary live broadcast...
Sky Arts 1 gives you incredible access to what goes on backstage while an opera is being performed live and Sky Arts 2 gives you the actual opera performance...with HD viewers able to watch this simultaniously on Sky Arts HD in stunning clarity of sound and vision.

For more...go to the Sky Arts website feature page about it.

We're pretty excited about bringing something like this to TV viewers - hopefully we'll not only make the opera fans very happy but possibly interest some viewers who've never really experienced opera before.
This is the whole production, warts an' all, as they say. If the leading lady's dress rips backstage then you'll see the panic as the wardrobe team try to stich it up in time to make her cue! Or, perhaps, nothing will go wrong and it'll it be a well-oiled, slick night of flawless movement between the stage and wings. We'll see....!

La bohème live from 7:30pm 2 Feb '09, Sky Arts 1, Sky Arts 2 and Sky Arts HD