The Second Best Television Programme Of The 00s

Back in the 1980s, when we were tiny, Yes Minster always held a strange kind of fascination for us. BrokenTV’s dad used to love the show, so we got to watching it quite often, and while we couldn’t really understand many of the jokes, or even why the funny bits were meant...

Read More

The Third Best Television Programme of the 00s

It seems to be pretty much agreed upon that the first decade of the 21st century has been a bit of a golden age for US drama. Buoyed by the success of programmes like The Sopranos and Oz in the late 1990s, premium cable networks were more willing than ever to commission challenging...

Read More

BrokenTV’s Pop Pocket: Hot Chip

We’ve been too busy emulating Bernard Black from the Black Books episode where he was locked out of his shop, and had to find ways to keep himself warm and entertained on the streets of London overnight, today. If you replace “locked out of his shop” with “waited for our car speakers to be replaced”, and “streets of London” for the less exciting “nondescript...

Read More

The Fourth Best Television Programme of the 00s

Prett-ay, prett-ay, prett-ay good. In his 1997 book “Facts and Fancies”, Armando Iannucci told the fictional tale of fifty-two year old electrician Peter Manion. Manion was a man who had volunteered to undergo a pioneering neurosurgery, placing a microchip containing a selection...

Read More

The Fifth Best Television Programme of the 00s

Baffy-waffy-bim-bam! We’re back! Much like competitive diving, some television programmes really deserve to be scored by the difficulty level the programme makers have set for themselves. In the case of TV Burp, there are numerous obstacles between ‘it’ and ‘being really...

Read More

It’s BrokenTV’s Pop Pocket!

Yeah, we know we’re not meant to be a music blog, but this is really good. It’s the (edited) video for the new Babybird single, directed by Johnny Depp (you know, him off Benny & Joon). It’s a great video, and hey, an utterly brilliant song too, packed with all the swirling wordplay we’ve come to associate with Stephen Jones and his special songwriting...

Read More

Radio Times, December 2010

A lot of people seem to be agreeing with us on the whole “Mark Thompson hacking off the BBC’s minority interest limbs” affair, going by the way the blog’s hit counter has gone up over the last few days. That’s a bit of a shame in a way, because we’ve completely changed our minds...

Read More

The BBC Cuts: Thundering Idiocy Special (2)

Another aspect of the BBC cuts announced today is that, as expected, BBC Worldwide is likely to lose control of magazines such as Top Gear and the Radio Times. Of course, we remember the days when BBC Worldwide used to announce new projects frequently, no matter whether they’d...

Read More

The BBC Cuts: Thundering Idiocy Special

So, we’re sitting at our PC, cobbling together another half-arsed picture-based update to the blog, because it’s easier than writing stuff. Firstly, we notice that MTV2, once a brilliant music channel playing an eclectic range of music videos, from a variety of genres, that...

Read More