Just in case you’ve not felt backrubbingly old today, we’d just like to point out that the first series of Look Around You, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz’s wonderful parody of 1970s/1980s schools programmes, began ten years ago yesterday.
Celebrate this fact by taking in the new short film the duo have created especially for the 10th anniversary event at the BFI. It is splendid.
Is that it can often be this beautiful to look at.
A compiled montage from YouTube user kogonada, taking in POV shots used throughout the series thus far, most often from the point of view of an inanimate object such as frying pan or toilet. AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL.
PART THREE of the epic awards bash previously presented in video form here (TV shows) and here (songs). As a special treat, we’ll also list all the awards from parts one and two in text form, for those too darned lazy to sit through about half an hour of esoteric nonsense we knocked up during Christmas week. Tsk, eh?
Don’t worry, this time it’s all in text. No twenty-seven minute long tribute to Granada Jobfinder or anything to sit through.
Over 127,136,643,191,541,302,394 songs were released around the world during 2011. But, say you're going to be stranded on a desert island for some reason and are only allowed to take twelve of them with you. Yes, twelve. we don't know why. Shush. Which twelve would be the ones you should pick? Big ask, we know.
Using COMPLICATED SCIENCE, BrokenTV has calculated the twelve best songs of 2011 (that someone is probably going to chip in with a comment pointing out that at least three of them were actually from 2010 for something, but again, shush). And here they all are.
(Actual video this time. Not just a tribute to 4-Tel.)
Note: the embedded video probably makes it really hard to read the captions. Here’s the full-sized 720p high-definition version.
(We’ve kept the original source video, in case some idiot record company has the entire video pulled. If that happens, please let us know. Thanks!)
Oh, and happy new etc.
UPDATE:
Blocked by YouTube already. Gah. Not to be outdone – not least because the rundown only contains small one-minute chunks of songs – we’ve now made it available to download as a hefty 720p MP4, or as a 360p MP4 for people with more modest needs. Links:
720p MP4 file (227.78MB): Multiupload (8 different file hosts)
360p MP4 file (62.54MB): Multiupload (8 hosts)
In 720p high-definition and everything! This took an unbelievably long time, so here’s hoping the 17 people who’ll sit through it all enjoy it.
Apologies if you have to keep pausing it to read all the text. This was originally a 32 minute epic, before (after uploading the 900MB source video) YouTube kindly informed us that while people who upload entire copyrighted movies without permission can post videos longer than 15 minutes, so bally well can’t. Boo, eh?
Anyway, unlikely there’ll be an update tomorrow, so see you in early 2012 for part two of the awards. Happy new etc!
Merry December 27th, everyone! We hope your Christmasses were all lovely. Ours were fine, apart from the bit where our car broke down four metres away from our front door on the way back from visiting family on Christmas Day, and the weird bit where an old woman we’ve never met before knocked on our front door at 12.37am on Boxing Day morning to ask if we had any alcohol she could come in and drink*.
(*We lied and said ‘no’, but then felt a bit bad about lying afterwards because it was still sort of Christmas. And that’s not just some rubbish whimsy that we made up for comic effect just there, that actually happened. She might even have been Jesus in disguise or something, like in that Fist Of Fun sketch)
Anyway, on to Why We Are Stupid. On a day when the twitching corpse of the art of being funny was dealt the duel hammer blows of THE ROYAL BODYGUARD (really, is it David Jason’s tribute to Ronnie Barker’s similarly disappointing CLARENCE or something? It was woeful) and MRS BROWN’S BOYS CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (there are no words), we finally got around to watching our DVD of THE FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL PRESENTS ZANY ZINGERS AND BONKED-OUT BLUNDERS.
You might be familiar with foundfootagefest.com from the WINNEBAGO MAN episode of BBC Four’s documentary strand STORYVILLE, which aired earlier this year. If not, the film took a look at the antics of a certain Jack Rebney, who spent much of the 1980s as an RV salesman (and if you are familiar with it, it still did. You can’t change the past). More specifically, it looked at the outtakes from a promotional video which aimed to flog said Winnebagos, featuring numerous cuss-crammed outbursts from Rebney, which ultimately made him a cult hero at the aforesaid Fests of Found Footage. If you get the chance, watch it. It is both excellent, and emotionally warming.
ANYWAY. Happily, all of the brilliant clips on the DVD helped us rediscover the ability to laugh, and all was well with the world once more.
Apart from the bit where we remembered how stupid we are.
See, while the majority of the DVD features marvellous clippage from irony-free 1980s instructional videos (how to train your cat to use a toilet, tie-in rap videos for pet rocks, the art of silent screaming etc), there’s a special section of ‘short films’ listed as a menu option. The first of these purports to be an unedited employee training video for a gas station chain going by the name of ‘Gas ‘N’ Fuel. And – we feel compelled to add here - once you’ve become adjusted to the mindset made clear by the previous two hours of otherworldly VHS miscellanea, even the cheesiest moments of it somehow make the utmost sense. No, really.
Yes, there are moments that are clearly there to ‘be’ a funny uplifting respite from the need to keep everything suitably shiny and safe, and lots of moments that are (seemingly) unintentionally ha-ha-bloody-larious (“a toddler could freeze to death in there in just 20 or 30 minutes!”). As the video goes on, the weirdness very gradually gets cranked up and up, but for those as innocently dim-yet-cynical as we, it all seems juuust on the right side of plausible. “Ha ha, those 1980s idiots! I’m laughing at the joke they just did, but not for the reason they intended! I am best with my late-2011 mindset and clothes from 2008 and haircut from 2004!”, you may well be smugly sneering inwardly (if you’re us).
Until… you reach the point that you (we) finally cotton on that – disappointingly, considering much much you’re been silently mocking them with your disparaging thoughts up until then – it’s all an expertly crafted spoof. “Bah, yet… bravo!”, you hiss inwardly. Then enjoy the remainder of the video in the manner of which all the non-stupids had been enjoying it from pretty much the beginning.
And here it is. Sadly, not in full – the DVD version of the film is about twice as long, the extra bits being sufficiently dull to trick you into thinking it’s a real corporate training video – but hopefully enough to entertain you through a little part of the that post-advent period where you really regret polishing off the tub of Celebrations before Boxing Day Match Of The Day had even started.
See how long you can last before realising it’s a spoof! Oh, hang on.
SLIGHTLY SHAMEFUL BROKENTV FACT: BrokenTV’s Mark X has actually appeared in a corporate training film. He played the part of “Office Worker In Cold Storage Depot” when he was 22 years old, and luckily has never ever had to watch the recording of. He also got photographed weighing Quorn for a pamphlet or something on the same day. He didn’t want to do it, but he was ordered to by everyone else in the office because he was the youngest. Hopefully, all the negatives of everything from that day were destroyed in a big fire.
(*Okay, Festivus is technically on the 23rd. Still, shush.)
Have a Merry Multi-Denominational Midwinter Festival, everyone! Back on Boxing Day, or possibly the 27th, hangovers permitting.
Extending our run through of complete programmes that can be found on YouTube for an extra day, we’re going to take a quick dash through American programmes available on the streaming service. To mark the occasion, here’s a photo of Tiffany.
Just in case you weren’t getting depressed how old you are today, we’d just like to point out that Tiffany is now 40 years old. No need to thank us, gramps.
Yep, it’s taken us until now to realise that adding an ‘s’ to the title of this ratings-based strand makes it work much more effectively. See, now it works as both a pun on the title of the 1980s pop rundown show AND as a description of the content of each blog post, as in “the charts show that [whatever we’ve decided is our version of the facts]”*. Some may argue that “The Chart Shows” would be a better title, considering that each update only contains a singular chart, but until they work out our password for Windows Live Writer, there’s nothing they can do about it. NOTHING. (It’s a really clever password, too.) (That’s also a clever pun, our Windows Live Writer password is ‘password2’.) (Oh bugger.)
ANYWAY. It’s no wonder that Warwick Davis’ character was always so defensive, given the way every single stranger he encountered during the run of LIFE’S TOO SHORT decided to be so needlessly unpleasant to him, is it? Conversely, the Christmas episode of REV followed on from the preceding six episodes of the series by being absolutely bloody lovely and excellent. It did irk us a little when the writers went for the clichéd device of “having children do a swear in front of a well-meaning adult”, but that aside it was a genuinely heartwarming episode. Yay.
ON WITH THE OVERNIGHT RATINGS AND THE CHART THEREOF.
It’s probably fair to account that the final episodes of each series aired on a different day to the remainder of the series for each show, and both performed about as well as could be expected after recent weeks. The relatively underpromoted Rev finishes 28.3% ahead of Life’s Too Short ratings-wise. (R. Gervais’s voice: “Aaah, but the BBC have just told me that 7.2 million viewers watched the show in the window of Dixons, so I’m still popular and brilliant.”)
It’ll be interesting to see if LTS performs well enough on HBO** to warrant a second series. The series airs in the USA from the 19th of February. It’s possibly telling that LTS featured (for the most part) British celebrities that the US audience will be familiar with – such as Sting, Cat Deeley, or Right Said Fred. (UNRELATED FACT: Gervais and Merchant commendably kept in most UK-centric references for the US edits of Extras. While the Extras finale had scenes clumsily edited to mention ‘DirectTV’ (sic) adverts and Katie Couric, it kept in jokes that the audience wouldn’t understand unless they knew who Robbie From Eastenders is or who Hale & Pace are.) If it doesn’t impress stateside viewers, it’s possible that even the shared cost of production between HBO and the BBC might not be enough to save the show. Maybe they’ll merge the show with Little Britain USA to cut costs. That would be funny. Ha ha.
(*Of course, we’ve only just realised that the title of the film ‘The King’s Speech’ has a double meaning. That’s ‘speech’ as in ‘a prepared written statement to be read to an audience’ AND in the sense of ‘the act of speaking’. Doh, eh? It’s Hill Street Blues all over again.)
(**Coincidentally, HBO have just cancelled the marvellous Bored To Death, the rat bastards. They are now officially on our enemies list.)
Blah blah TV shows on YouTube blah blah after the ‘jump’ blah blah photo of Tatu.
Is it January yet? Can we stop doing this now?
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Off The Telly: The Best Bits of the British TV Website 1999-2009
Only £16.99 from Lulu.com, any profits going to UK Alzheimer's charities. Plus, it's 678 pages of brilliant writing about telly.
