Sarah Harding: 'I'm ready for Dating In The Dark. Are you?'

It's the perfect opening gambit (although quite how you can get 'ready' for pitch black romance, we're not sure).

We wrote a little about one of Sarah's recent interviews promoting the new Sky Living show last week, and seeing this new advert, it all looks very classy indeed. Sarah nails up a door and sticks tape over the edges to make absolutely sure no light can get in. She's certainly thorough, that girl.

And all this to the sultry tones of Dusty Springfield singing The Look Of Love. Amazing.

Catching up with Outcasts - Episode 6

I'm still loving absolutely loving Outcasts, it really is the best thing on TV at the moment. I think it's such a shame that the BBC have been so quick to move it to a late night Sunday slot just because it hasn't achieved good ratings/good public feedback. The BBC is supposed to be all about championing challenging new dramas and introducing them to new audiences, so by being so limp-wristed at backing Outcasts at the first time of trouble, it really goes against this. Hopefully they'll still have the faith to make a second series, because quite frankly, there's so much more to Carpathia and its characters that I want to find out.

As it stands, we've got only a couple of episodes left to tie everything up, a rather large feat considering the dramatic end to episode five as another landing ship was revealed, floating in high-orbit over the planet. And even more chilling, Julius was in contact with it. His creepiness goes without saying; whether it's his quasi-religious speeches or silver-tongued persuasiveness, he represents himself as the ultimate manipulator.

In Episode six we got a fascinating exploration into the introduction of the idea that there are 'things' out there on Carpathia. We saw Tate 'seeing'his children, convinced they were real and not a hallucination. And now everyone sees a creepy duplicate of soldier Josie Hunter. Her kids can tell something's not quite right, and so can we, already underminding the immense swell of emotion we felt when she stumbled safely home from the dangers of the desert.

One line got to me more than any other this episode though, when one of Josie's kids tells us the fake Josie that kidnapped them 'wanted to know what love was'. This sent a chill right down my spine, similar to how I felt when I saw the skulls and bones Stella uncovered in the previous episode. We have to remember that although Outcasts has kept many traditional sci-fi elements on the back-burner, what we have here is essentially, that good old staple - an alien. A being not of Earth. Whether it will be truly 'revealed' this series remains to be seen though.

Other highlights this episode were a couple of ACs breaking into Forthaven and turning all the lights off; the sight of a disembodied hand surging up through the sand to claw a tunnel under the perimeter fence was thrilling and acted as a nice little parallel story to all the Josie Hunter stuff.

I'd like to give mention to the series' brilliant music too; the main theme and the various variations of it are beautiful and fit the look and feel of the show so well.

On air/On sale - When the public just won’t wait

Picture the scene.  You’re cruising down the road in your car and hear a song you love on the radio.  Maybe it’s a long awaited comeback from one of your favourite artists or maybe it’s a brand new act.  Later that day you sit down at your computer, load up the iTunes store and search for the track, only to find it’s not out for another month.  Instant frustration!

But times are changing - Take pop darling Britney Spears and her brilliant new single Hold It Against Me as a case in point.  The song premiered on January 10th and went on sale in the US the next day.  But in the UK, the single originally wasn’t set to be released until February 20th, a whole five weeks later than the US.  But due to overwhelming public demand, record labels Sony and Universal decided to bring the release date forward and make the single available to download on UK iTunes.

They call this new system On air/On sale, and while sounding like one of those fancy ‘buzzword’ slogans marketing types dream up in offices, it may very well represent the future of music.  In other words - now, if you want Britney’s latest slice of hot, catchy-as-hell dance-pop, you don’t have to wait an age for it (Please do download it by the way, it’s properly amazing).

The system has already been used extensively in America; and as television, school slang and the Iraq war have shown us, where America leads, Britain usually follows.

Interestingly, the whole situation of delayed release dates in the UK has also thrown up the bizarre situation of what I like to call ‘budget versions’.  As there is a huge demand for big new singles, there are companies out there that specialise in quickly pumping out versions of these songs and putting them up on iTunes so that music fans eager to download the real version of the song will often accidently download the ‘budget version’.  This system is essentially a factory of mediocrity, as it were - an endless stream of cheap imitations that are never as good as the real thing, but that continue to thrive because people simply aren’t willing to wait.  They want their new music, and they want it now.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of downloading one of these budget versions by accident, or just had a listen because you want some cheap laughs, you’ll know these awful ‘cover’ versions are voiced by poor karaoke singers belting the lyric out over backing tracks that sound like they’ve been cooked up in someone’s bedroom on an economy-price keyboard.

Clearly there is an issue with release dates.  While the traditional method of playing songs on the radio for a few weeks to build up demand before they go on sale has its merits, the music industry has shown itself time and time again to be a thing of constant change.

Maybe the moves made by Sony and Universal simply represent the next element of change.  With 99% of the UK singles market now comprised of digital downloads, a system of On air/On sale is looking more and more likely to become a reality.