Hard Copy

Arrested development

Sensitive to the criticism that its factual output consists of little more than camera crews riding shotgun with the emergency services, Carlton announces a new factual series for ITV, entitled Police, Camera, Action! No sleep lost over at Panorama, we suspect ...

You gotta have a dream

UK Living is looking for the new Oprah Winfrey, the old one being a bit out of their price range by several hundred million dollars. Those who want a job consisting of asking brothers why they slept with their sisters, and mothers why they burned down the house with hubby and his girlie magazine collection still in it, should rush to the open auditions being held at Thurrock Lakeside Shopping Centre on 30 June and 1 and 2 July. Or pop a VHS tape into the post to UK Living, The Quadrangle, 180 Wardour Street, London W1V 4AE.

Easy riders

Media men and women in the fast lane need no longer seethe in the traffic snarls between their Notting Hill offices and their Soho lunches. Help is at hand: welcome Taxi Bike, a central London service featuring car- dodging motorcycles with comfy pillions and helmets with built-in headphones - so handy for that call to the boss on the way back from the Groucho. Virgin Air offers the service to its customers landing at Heathrow.

Positive press

Positive Times, the UK's first magazine for men living with HIV and Aids, hits five issues this month. The publication, from the same stable as the Pink Paper and Boyz (the Sun for gay men, but considerably less bright), arrived in the wake of the American publications Deaf Pariah News (just gone under) and Poz (going from strength to strength): from August it will expand from 32 pages into a 44-page colour supplement. Its editor, Dominic Gough, says: "We can't depend on drug company advertising as they do in the States, but we're growing nonetheless." This month's issue includes an interview with the BBC Radio 5 Live reporter Nigel Wrench, "Positive Person", and is being promoted with a billboard featuring HIV-positive cover model Tom Collins.

And after these messages ...

Measuring the effectiveness of advertising will never be the same again. For Dr David Lewis, a leading psychologist, has invented Mindscan, a natty device that transmits signals from the brain, via electrodes, on to a computer screen. Undoubtedly a big technological advance on the current, rather crude way of measuring audience response, whereby signals are relayed from the brain to a device in the hand which then switches over to BBC1.