Doctors, the BBC's Birmingham-based afternoon soap opera, made its début in high definition today with an episode entitled 'Defining Happy', marking a first for the BBC, their first HD soap.

I already know what you're thinking... why Doctors?  Yes, there are far preferable and more deserving subjects of the HD treatment, for example, the BBC's HD sport output is woeful and a few more movies wouldn't hurt, but in reality Doctors has been produced in high definition for some time, it just hasn't been broadcast in HD – another one of those weird things the BBC do – so moving the programme onto the HD channel won't have had any real impact on the production budget.  Additional good news, as you can hopefully tell from our example clip, is that the image quality is actually of a really high standard with lots of bold, saturated colours and almost completely free of noise.  HD standards at the BBC are improving of late and this is a good illustration of that.

This is series ten of Doctors and the current cast includes veterans of the programme Stirling Gallacher and Diane Keen, but some return viewers hoping for a feast of high definition loveliness will be disappointed to learn that both Sarah Manners and Corrinne Wicks (aka Dr. Norks, currently touring in The Holly and The Ivy) have left the show - in 2001 and 2005 and respectively.

Doctors is often described as “comfort television”, the sort of thing you'd only usually watch if you're at home sick, unemployed or a student.  Because there are a couple of new stories every day and a lot of guest performers, the show doesn't have the greatest reputation for its acting, but in fairness some of the issues they tackle are sensitively treated and there's none of the gratuitous blood and guts you'll see in Holby City or Casualty.

Because the regular 1:45pm slot on BBC One is outside BBC HD's broadcasting hours, Doctors is being shown in HD at 6pm (with a late night repeat).  Whether it'll hold an early evening audience remains to be seen, although the HD showing of Hollyoaks on Channel 4 HD immediately after might help.

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Doctors, the BBC soap set in Birmingham, makes its début in high definition.

Jade Ewen will represent the UK in the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest after she was chosen by viewers of the BBC's Your Country Needs You ahead of The Twins, Francine and Nicola Gleadall.  Shoehorned into the finals at the last minute having side-stepped the audition phase and personally championed by creepy Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jade seemed to be the favoured choice the moment she first appeared on the programme, and of course, as is inevitable, this has resulted in claims that the whole competition was fixed.  But honestly, do we really care?

Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) and Diane Warren (lyrics), It's My Time, the song Jade will perform in Moscow, had been built up for months to be the UK's magic bullet, a wondrous composition that would shock the entire Eastern Block with its brilliance and once again make us masters of all we musically survey. Null points and finishing last would be a thing of the past.

Well forget about that.  After just the first rendition we knew It's My Time was truly dreadful.  A clichéd power ballad, it goes nowhere musically and is dogged yet further by lyrics that are repetitive and bland.

“Tonight, tonight, it's my time, it's my time, my moment... My time, it's my time, there's nothing I'm afraid of, I'll show you what I'm made of, show you all it's my time now.”  It is instantly forgettable, tragically dated and the screeching climax is just asking for trouble from an amateur performer.  That last point really doesn't matter though, roll out the Beatles, Pavarroti, Elvis, nobody could turn such an awful song into a winner.  According to Lloyd Webber as quoted in the Daily Mail: “I'd had an idea for it and I played Diane what I thought was the chorus. She said, 'No, I don't think you've got a chorus, I think it's a verse.' I thought, 'Oh dear, this is a bad start.' But once I got over that we had pretty much done it. So the whole thing took about two hours.”  And it shows, horribly.  Ironic that it has taken literally months to find a performer, but their song was hastily written on the back of a napkin.  A cynical viewer would think that the whole thing was just another vehicle for the BBC to earn yet more revenue from a show geared around telephone voting.

But let's look on the bright side, here's Jade Ewen being announced the winner, reprising the song, and cracking up completely whilst doing so.  Let's hope she does something similar during the Eurovision Song Contest itself, then at least it would have some added comedy value.

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Attractive!  Buckets of tears, runny nose and hysterics, it can only be yet another TV talent contest winner.  This time, it's Jade Ewen, who will attempt to win the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest with a dreadful composition by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Diane Warren.  Good luck with that one!

If Danielle Nagler and her cohorts at BBC HD are intending to annoy viewers, then they're going about it the right way.  The channel's scheduling is a catastrophe and no amount of half-baked excuses can explain away what are often, completely nonsensical programming decisions.

Carols from Kings is for many, the start of their traditional Christmas celebrations and as a result, holds a prominent place in the BBC's schedules every Christmas Eve.

The only live broadcast from King's College Chapel on Christmas Eve, is at 3pm on BBC Radio 4, a Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  The service shown on BBC Two (at 6:30pm this year) is actually recorded, often some weeks in advance.

Having gone to the trouble of recording the service in HD, why then, wasn't it shown on BBC HD at the same time as the BBC Two broadcast?  Well, the channel was tied up with a simulcast of BBC One's Toy Story 2, and for a change, that's was a sensible choice.  However, clear thinking is only available in small measure at the BBC and they have a ridiculous rule of not showing anything in HD before the SD broadcast, so instead of shuffling the schedule around and avoiding yet more repeats - of Wind in the Willows, Jools Holland (not again?!), Shrek the Halls and The Electric Proms - anyone wanting to see the carols had to wait until 11:45pm or for the repeat at 3:10pm on Christmas Day... just when the channel should be showing Shark Tale, the BBC's big afternoon movie for Christmas Day.

At Christmas the schedules are full and it's difficult to combine the output of two SD channels – BBC One and BBC Two – into one HD channel, but come on, the endless repeats have to stop and some flexibility be introduced.  Carols from King's wasn't live, so who would have complained had it been shown in HD at 4:15pm and in SD at 6:30pm, other than the old farts at the BBC Trust?

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All Sky receivers, including Sky Plus and Sky HD boxes have, under their picture settings menu, a contrast adjustment.  There’s some confusion about which is the best Sky contrast setting but if you have a Thomson-manufactured HD box, I always tell people that “Low” is definitely the one to go for, regardless of whether you’re viewing on an LCD, plasma or in a dark or light room.

The goal is to feed your display the best possible picture, then adjust it to your taste or accurate, ISF calibrated levels.  No amount of fiddling with the controls on your TV will restore image information already discarded by an incorrect contrast setting in the receiver itself.

Contrast Low (562.77kb)

Contrast Medium (606.53kb)

Contrast High (599.97kb)

Once you get past the fact that Emily Deschanel’s complexion doesn’t hold up to HD scrutiny (Clearasil anyone?) you’ll notice that the Thomson's “High” setting makes noise in the image more apparent, but also ‘clips’ the highlights in the windows behind her.

‘Clipping’ is the term used to describe when the lightest areas of an image become too bright and lose detail.  Imagine looking at the bulb of a torch, when it’s turned on you can no longer see the filament – it’s still there but it’s too bright to see.

The “Medium” setting also has slight clipping, but the “Low” setting preserves all the highlight detail and produces a more neutral image, exactly what your display deserves.  It also produces results that are almost identical to that of the raw transport stream (the broadcast itself).

Contrast Low (674.31kb)

Contrast Medium (676.21kb)

Contrast High (710.63kb)

Our second example uses a frame from the new BBC HD channel ident sequence, and we’ve included a histogram to make it a little easier to see what is going on, useful if your computer monitor hasn’t been calibrated.  If it has, then it’ll be easy to spot that a large amount of detail in the waves just above and to the right of the logo has been completely lost with the Thomson Sky HD receiver set to a “High” contrast setting.  Notice also how the histogram is unnaturally flat.

Visually the “Medium” setting looks much better, but again, the histogram shows that the brightest parts of the image are clipped.  With the Sky box set to “Low” however, none of the highlight detail is lost.  You might feel that “Low” makes images a little dull, but as you can see from the histogram there is available latitude to add a little more contrast to the image using the controls on your display, without sacrificing any detail.

It's worth mentioning that the contrast control on Pace-manufactured Sky HD boxes appears to be broken in the current software version, both the “Low” and “High” settings are dreadful, so stick with the default “Medium” setting for best results if you own a Pace.  Amstrad boxes are also problematic in this area, they're all stuck on “High” and the output does not change regardless of the setting in the menus.

Oh, and in case you're wondering who manufactured your Sky HD box, that information can be found via "Services" -> [4] "System Setup" -> [5] "System Details".

Friday Night with Jonathan Ross made its high definition debut last week with guests that included Kelly Brook and The Mighty Boosh.  Ross, a self-confessed technology junkie, opened the show by telling viewers that they can see everything in HD...

...and that would include everything that is currently wrong with the BBC’s HD output.  Viewed at 1080i, throughout the entire programme there were invasive levels of video noise (similar in appearance to film grain) and as a result, clearly visible macroblocking whenever there was camera movement or a shot comprised large areas of the red studio set.  While the video noise is the result of sub-standard production values, the macroblocking can be attributed to the BBC’s aged encoders, which once stood tall but are now patently struggling, especially in the face of such poor source material.  Our WMV HD clip from the Kelly Brook interview has been resized to 720p in order to make the download more manageable, and yet the noise and compression artefacts are still fairly obvious.

Friday Night with Jonathan Ross is a studio-based show and as such shouldn’t pose anything of a challenge; the controlled environment should allow the BBC to produce pristine HD images and if they can’t, which is clearly the case, then that simply isn’t good enough.

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Download Windows Media HD - 720p 160MB

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Kelly Brook in HD on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, complete with video noise and macroblocking, unfortunately.