Euro 2008 is just around the corner, and in tribute we're going to adapt one of the best things about every large international football tournament. A regular sighting in listings magazines around the time of the knockout stages is the wonderful alternate schedule. Seemingly designed with a primary purpose of confusing your nan, these are schemed up by the schedulers at BBC and ITV, as they won't have been able to divvy up the matches while the listings mags are going to press. With this in mind, your typical Wednesday night's viewing on Granada could be an episode of Des O'Connor Tonight, or it could be Yugoslavia versus West Germany. BBC might go with 'Winners Group A' vs 'Runners-up Group F', or you might get to see Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. And after the match, you might get to see a bonus repeat of Only Fools and Horses (Grandad vintage, natch), or there might be extra time. A penalty shoot-out, and that late showing of Steptoe and Son Ride Again may just be shunted back twenty minutes.
All very thrilling, we're sure you'll agree.
In tribute to this, we'll be offering a choice of viewing on BrokenTV. For each update, we'll be offering a bon mot or three about Euro 2008, but alongside your staple diet of telly-related miscellanea. You know, being sarcastic about adverts or going on about Big Brother. It's win-win! Well, if you consider reading half-baked opinions on football and television some sort of victory, that is.
All very thrilling, we're sure you'll agree.
In tribute to this, we'll be offering a choice of viewing on BrokenTV. For each update, we'll be offering a bon mot or three about Euro 2008, but alongside your staple diet of telly-related miscellanea. You know, being sarcastic about adverts or going on about Big Brother. It's win-win! Well, if you consider reading half-baked opinions on football and television some sort of victory, that is.
Schedule A: BrokenTV's Euro 2008 Betting Guide
Win money, on us. A lot of people (including us) like to put a few shillings on the top goalscorer for each international tournament. Very few people (not including us) make a nice little profit out of this, and generally they'll be bookmakers. But: not this time!
With judicious use of cut and paste, we've Excelled up a list of all the players in the squads. We've then worked out their international goalscoring rate (i.e. goals divided by caps), and sorted the list accordingly. Then, we've added lookup tables for the current odds at both Betfair and William Hill, to arrive at the current odds for each player finishing as the top scorer. Here are the top forty goalscorers (according to our system) due to take part in Euro 2008.
With judicious use of cut and paste, we've Excelled up a list of all the players in the squads. We've then worked out their international goalscoring rate (i.e. goals divided by caps), and sorted the list accordingly. Then, we've added lookup tables for the current odds at both Betfair and William Hill, to arrive at the current odds for each player finishing as the top scorer. Here are the top forty goalscorers (according to our system) due to take part in Euro 2008.
(NL = Not listed in betting.)
So, while the top two players in the list can be safely discarded, the current favourites in the betting (Torres and Ronaldo) don't look quite so appealing. Annoyingly (for us, at least) the odds on Alexander Frei have dropped rapidly (he was listed at 100/1 a few days ago), so we'll be backing Huntelaar and Podolski. You might decide otherwise, but whatever happens, here's to a good tournament.
Schedule B: Pop Video Of The Week
Justice - DNVO
Not only is it from possibly our favourite album of 2007, but the video lovingly recreates tons of 1980s video company idents, American TV idents (most obviously, HBO) and movie title sequences. Wonderful, and much better than the "ooh, so very shocking" promo video for Stress from the same album.
(Betting update! We've now backed
£5 on Podolski at 30 (potential winnings: £145)
£3 on Johan Elmander at 410 (potential winnings: £1,227)
£2 on Marcus Allback at 670 (potential winnings: £1,338)
That's mainly because we expect all those odds to plummet, so we can lay off the potential winnings. This is about the point we discover each of those players are banned for the first five matches of the tournament.)
£5 on Podolski at 30 (potential winnings: £145)
£3 on Johan Elmander at 410 (potential winnings: £1,227)
£2 on Marcus Allback at 670 (potential winnings: £1,338)
That's mainly because we expect all those odds to plummet, so we can lay off the potential winnings. This is about the point we discover each of those players are banned for the first five matches of the tournament.)
2 .:
Yeah, alternative schedules are brilliant, although we won't get many this year, because the Beeb and ITV have already divvied up two of the quarter finals - I think ITV have the first and the Beeb have the second, so ITV can show Corrie at the usual time(s) on Friday. I think they've also already divvied up the semis too, so we only get two alternative schedules throughout the entire thing.
So, there's another reason to dislike McClaren/Toshack/Smith/McLeish/Sanchez/Worthington/Staunton.
Boo. Although from what I remember, the glory years of Alternate Scheduling are in the past anyway - where once you'd get two large box-outs of equal size (one with a picture of the tournament mascot in it, so you know which one has the football in it), nowadays you're likely to get a tiny box-out at the bottom of the page, essentially saying "*Oh, and if we're not showing the football, we'll fling on four episodes of TV's Naughtiest Blunders or something. Anyone who doesn't like football will be watching Big Brother, or so we're lazily assuming, so it doesn't really matter what we put on. We might as well broadcast two hours of a close up on Michael Grade's penis and testicles for all the good it'll do to the ratings. Hmm... no. He probably wouldn't be up for that."
Except not quite as interesting as that. A far cry from those halcyon days of Jim Pope telling us to prepare for Schedule B.
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