Eurovision 2010: LIVE BLOG

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23:13 Germany wins, and all the songs we like got nowhere. And the UK ended up finishing BOTTOM OF THE ENTIRE CONTINENT, meaning we weren’t even right about that. Mind you, in a roundabout way, Wales beat England (as in Cyprus beat the UK, right at the arse end of the table), which is about as Pyrrhic a victory as you can get.

Anyway, goodnight, and thanks for tuning in! We’ll leave you with a glimpse of much happier times.

 

23:00 Remember when we said the UK would finish second from bottom, right at the start of this live blog?

LOOK ASTONISHED.

22:40 Germany are storming it, despite their entry being so bloody exciting we can’t even remember what it was. Anyway, Estonia’s results are being announced by what appears to be Sasha Baron Cohen’s camp new comic character.

22:24 Ouch. There’s just been an utterly great interval showpiece where the show cut live to dancing flashmobs from around Europe, and about a billion people dancing at a concert in Hamburg. Then they did a slightly weak gag about the main Eurovision boss guy, which didn’t work at all. It went down about as well as when the CEO of whichever company is sponsoring the British Comedy Awards gets to present an award. Anyway, scores! Numbers! Woo! (Exciting food update: the thing we got to eat was: a chilli dog. It was quite nice.)

21:59 That’s all the songs. Coming soon, the only bit we used to watch of the entire evening, because it involves lots of numbers being added up really slowly, and we’re quite geeky like that. Right now though, we’re going to get something to eat. Everyone on Twitter wants Albania to win. We’re a bit worried that having to host Eurovision might just bugger up their economy. Won’t anyone think of the poor Albanian public?

21:31 HOLY FREAKING SHIT. The male host was just doing a piece to camera, when suddenly he stopped talking, and just started staring, blank and utterly emotionless.

His unflinching gaze maybe only lasted about ten seconds, but it was so utterly chilling that it seemed to last long enough for whole continents to form and break away, for entire universes to be born and die.

The camera slowly panned in, as if to press him into reacting, leaving his cold merciless glare looming ever larger on hundreds of millions of plasmas, LCDs and CRTs around the planet. The only faint signs of life were his nostrils, flaring and contracting wildly as his breathing grew quicker and quicker with each passing second, and his eyes, which began to dart around frantically, as if he had just become fully and overwhelmingly conscious that it’s this, this moment right now that will come to define his entire time on this planet, and that anything else he does from this point on will just seem empty, hollow, pointless and futile. As soon as the credits roll in about eighty minutes, he will never again be able to taste the feeling of astonishing power that he has right now. He may be at the top of the rollercoaster ride, but everything from this moment, to the day he dies, will just seem blank by comparison. Every. Single. Thing.

  And yet… his body and face was frozen. Utterly motionless. His eyes darted around furiously, as if they were now the only part of his body not utterly, irrevocably paralyzed by the moment, the biggest moment, his moment. His rigid grin granted a terrified and transfixed global audience a terrifyingly revealing clue towards the huge explosion of fear, paranoia, ecstacy and dread going on inside his mind.

Finally, there was an almost imperceptable shake of his head, and he said “Portugal, there. And now let’s take a look at the next contestant.” It was a moment that had us truly spellbound.

Nah, not really. There was a rubbish joke about Iceland’s volcano and then some more disappointing ballads.

21:24 Romania are on, and they’ve got a cheap-looking perspex two-person grand piano. Their chorus rhymes the word “fire” with the word “desire”. Was it written by a ten-year-old? That should be punishable by a hefty fine and a one-year suspension from the competition, if you ask us. Uh-oh - it also throws the word “higher” in there, too. We’d up the ban to five years for that.

 21:18 There have been more bands on. Albania’s entry was really good, Iceland’s entry was instantly catchy and pretty damn ace, the others were mostly rubbish. BUT! Here comes France, and a jumpy Europop song that is also the nation’s official World Cup song. It’s quite good, and seems to necessitate a load of jumping around, which makes it hard to get a decent screen capture of them.

 OUR TOP FOUR SO FAR: 1. Iceland. 2. Albania. 3. Moldova. 4. France.

21:03 Turkey’s turn, and a manufactured nu-metal band so very unexciting they make Limp Bizkit look edgy. This is probably as close as we’re getting to ‘interesting’ this year, apart from Moldova’s entry, which is the best song so far. Instead of watching Turkey’s song – which tries to amp up the excitement by having someone pretending to be a robot on stage – we’re looking at more pictures on Wikipedia from Eurovision 2008. It was brilliant. Where’s Rodollfo Chikilicuatre when you need him?

And just look at Slovenia’s entry from 2008:

That’s proper ‘interesting’, Turkey.

20:58 One of the hosts has just given us a (pre-recorded) glimpse at Graham Norton’s commentary booth, and a nice chat with him. This was quite excellently talked all over by Graham Norton himself, dismissing it all for the lightweight pan-continental faff it is. At one point, Norton pointed out that he had nothing to do with the interior design of his booth, and that it was all the producer’s fault. And no wonder, it looks like it’s been vandalised by the BNP.

20:46 Summary of last few acts. Belarus, dull, though we did get to make a rubbish joke about them being called Three Up Two Down, just so we could name check the late Michael Elphick. Ireland’s entry is nicely scaled back, and Quite Good If You Like That Sort Of Thing. We suspect our mum likes this one the best so far. As we type, Greece are up, with a song we’ve now heard twice in one week. First time around, it was tolerable. Second time: annoying.

Why can’t it all be like Eurovision 2008, which was the first one we ever watched in full, with loads of brilliantly demented acts like Laka…

Kreisraadio…

Ireland’s magnificent Dustin The Turkey, which made mention of Terry Wogan’s wig. Sadly, it got knocked out in the semi final, meaning the UK was robbed of the chance to hear Sir Tel explode with mock outrage in the final…

All that, PLUS Seb Tellier, singing the best Eurovision song of recent years. BRING BACK THAT TYPE OF EUROVISION, not the useless frigging rejected Big Fun album filler that the UK is represented by this year. It’s just the kind of song an EastEnders actor in their early 20s would use to launch a pop career, crawl to number 37 in the charts, and subsequently disappear from the music industry completely.

20:39 Yikes. It’s like a The Fly-type teleportation had been tried out by Kenneth The Page from 30 Rock, and somehow Casey Tatum from the Uncle Muscles sketches in Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job and Photoshop’s ‘Gaussian Blur’ tool had both crawled into the booth at the same time. A horrible mutation takes place, resulting in…

20:34 Belgium. A man and a guitar. Boring. We did get a nice arty screencap of it though. Why couldn’t Vive La Fete be the choice for Belgium? Because they’ve got artistic integrity? Ah, right.

 20:29: An earnest entry from Wales, there. Not very good, but we still want it to win. Over on Twitter, the reliably great @lauriepink is doing live sketches of all the entrants. Well worth a look. Better than the uninspired chod we’re coming out with on here. Everyone just uses Twitter now. No-one is even going to be reading until tomorrow, at which point it’ll be out of date. Tsk. We can’t post rambling self-defeatism like this on Twitter! Oh, and Bosnia-Herzegovina's entry is quite good. Not ‘Moldova’ good, but ‘better than the Welsh song’ good.

20:24: Moldova’s turn, as despite being represented by an annoyingly ‘wacky’ berk with a neon violin (he’s just stuck his tongue out at the camera. Have some decorum, man!), and an Aqua tribute act, it’s bloody catchy. Proper late 90s catchy pop. Our current favourite to win.

Ooh, Wales are up. For some reason, the montage seems to be set in Cyprus. We’re still saying it’s Wales, though. It was close as we’re getting to a World Cup finals any time soon.

20:16. What vision of hell is this? Spain’s entry is quite bad, but at least livened up by being performed by a strange amalgam of Jedward and former Bolton Wanderers lynchpin Ivan Campo, backed with disturbing people dressed up as toys. Spain, of course, are one of the countries who didn’t have to pre-qualify for the final, much like the UK. One reason ‘we’ always do so badly is that the UK’s entry is up against a load of songs that were already good enough to survive one phone vote. The main reason the UK always does so badly is that the songs are always unmitigated shite, of course.

Norway are up now. Not a song we’re really going for, but the sort of thing that could well win. It’s not terrible, but the sort of thing that could be the closing music for a slightly annoying Richard Curtis romantic comedy, and as such a song we could never really like.

20:10. IT BEGINS. Eurovision 2010 is GO, and after a fashion, so does our live blog (we had a pop-up to update Windows Live Writer, we downloaded it, then couldn’t install it strai… you don’t care? Okay!). Throughout, we’ll also be tweeting, because we’re a multiplatform service. Not much going on yet, though. Azerbaijan are first up, and it’s a bit bland. Expect us to use the world ‘bland’ quite often, going by most of the songs that won through from the semis. We might not even bother watching it, but we want to see how well Wales do. Admittedly, Wales aren’t really there, but a Welsh chap is singing for Cyprus, and not in a bad version of World In Motion sense (“We’re singin’ for Cyprus! Cy! Per! Us!)”).

PREDICTION: The UK’s entry to finish second from last.

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Aah! That’s Who Ed Miliband Reminds Us Of.

Or is it just us?

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LIVE EUROVISION BLOG TOMORROW EVENING! It’s like the World Cup of bland tunesmiths!

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Why Did We Never Get A Flashback Episode For Vincent The Labrador?

First update for a while (hey, the weather’s been really nice lately), so we’d better get something together to prove we’re still alive.

In one of the most thrilling scheduling moves in the history of television, Sky One are showing the two-and-a-half-hour series finale of the majestic Lost at the exact same time as ABC in the (west coast of the) USA, at 5am on Monday morning. Thrilling news, assuming no content-related cuts are made because most of it will technically be broadcast in a pre-watershed slot. We’re seriously tempted to get up early to watch it go out ‘as live’, though it’s much likelier The Snooze Monster will convince us that sleeping to a more reasonable hour and just watching a recording when we can will be more sensible.

If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see just how many people will be watching at that hour. If a decent proportion of Lost’s regular million or so Sky One viewers tune in, hopefully this kind of thing will become commonplace, and we won’t have to avoid all US websites for several days each time a big drama series finishes in the USA. At least in the days when everyone had to wait about six months for big US shows to reach the UK, you had enough time to forget the annoying details you’d inadvertently picked up. Indeed, there’s a very, very slim chance the viewing figures could even go up, what it being the big finale, and there being less of a reason than ever for Lost fans with access to Sky One to download the episode instead.

Anyway, the impending finale is sending the whole internet a tremble with anticipation. Well, some of it. Mainly the bits of it populated by people who ought to get out more, such as us. Here’s our favourite finds so far. We’ll keep our comments here spoiler free, but the links themselves may contain spoilers aplenty. If you haven’t seen the penultimate episode of Lost yet, be wary. Oh, and don’t worry, we’re not including the dreadfully unfunny “LostLOL”

LOVED AND LOST (The National Post)

A superb interactive infographic, taking into account all the characters from each season, and pointing out what happened to them, and (in most cases) how they died. Our prediction: at least one person who everyone presumes is dead, won’t be. Oh, and if the big finale begins by introducing an entirely new character who turns out to be hugely important, we’ll be throwing a shoe at the television. We hate it when they do that.

LOST Re-enacted by Cats in One Minute (YouTube)

 
If you prefer a slightly less geeky way to reacquaint yourself with the main Lostees, this video from Tremendousnews.com is a much quicker way to do so. Easily preferable to getting up at 4.30am to watch Sky One’s summary of the series thus far, not least because that’s presented by Iain sodding Lee.

DHARMA Station Posters (Websitesarelovely.com)

These look absolutely gorgeous, and we’d be tempted to pay for art prints of them if they ever got produced and we hadn’t spent all our money on cake. A full Flickr set of Hanso Foundation-branded posters, each dedicated to one of the Dharma stations from the series. So nice, it’s pretty damn tempting to download the largest quality jpeg of each, print them out on sheets of photo paper, and have them framed. According to Websitesarelovely’s blog, there should be iPhone wallpapers of each poster available from JetPac Magazine any day now.

The Losties (Springfield Punx)

From the reliably lovely art blog Springfield Punx, the Lost cast are given the full faux-Groening treatment. Available in a full desktop wallpaper resolution.

Lost Finale Ecards (Some Ecards)

The end of the series treated in much the way you would expect from Someecards. They cock the shit out of that particular snook, as they so entertainingly tend to do with popular culture.

Lost Cheat Sheet (MovieViral)

Want to make sure you’re remembering every last bit of plot from the previous six seasons? Well, as shown here by somebody with a disturbingly hairy wrist, there’s nothing wrong with jotting down a few key factnuggets onto your hand.

Excellent (And Some Less Than Excellent) LOST Fan Art Merchandise (damoncarltonandapolarbear.com)

We’re a sucker for T-shirts that make people fleetingly think we’re more interesting than we actually are, so this is an interesting thing for us. A site started by comedian Paul Scheer as a place for the best Lost fan art, DamonCaltonAnd(etc) now sells prints and T-shirts containing references that about 90% of the people you know won’t understand. Squares. As you might expect from people making these things (at least partly) out of love for the show rather than a quick buck, the majority of offerings are really rather good. Though we’re not quite sure who on earth would want to buy a T-shirt of DriveShaft, considering DriveShaft were probably the most embarrassingly bad thing in the entire series. Yes, even worse than when an Army Recruiting Office in “London” contained a prominently displayed poster with the word “HONOR” (sic) in big letters on it.

Foggy Memories of LOST (Flickr)

Cartoonist Graham Annable has come up with some adorable cartoons of key moments from the series.

LOST Final Season Posters (Jonnyevesonposters)

A series of gorgeous lo-fi poster designs for the final series, along with similar posters for the current series of Doctor Who, Portal, and lots of other stuff too.

Lots And Lots More Lost Stuff (FlashSideways)

A metric ton of interesting Lost curios can be found at http://flashsideways.tumblr.com. And, we suspect as the last ever episode of Lost creeps ever closer, on an increasing amount of the web in general. Please be at least as good as the final episode of Ashes To Ashes, Lost.

Please.

UPDATE:

Smartarsed but occasionally great webcomic Gunshow has their own take on the Lost finale. (Thanks to Applemask for pointing it out)

Meanwhile, everyone has probably already seen these two YouTube videos featuring Jacob and The Man In Black, but they’re worth putting up just in case you haven’t. The first from Jimmy Kimmel Live (who presumably is really looking forward to taking all the attention away from Leno and Letterman for the first time in, well, ever with his post-finale ABC special…

 

Secondly, the 18th of May edition of Entertainment Weekly’s “Totally Lost”, again with the mythical siblings.

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Pop Video Of The Year!

Is the mysterious 'tykylevits' the hottest new pop sensation of 2010? We say: yes!



More of his brilliantly demented offerings here.

(Discovered via Robert Popper's website.)

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Possibly the last update of the night

Well, it’s past 3am, and it really does look like we’re a long way from a clear result actually happening. And, going by the latest pictures on the BBC, we’re not even going to get the enthralling spectacle of (a) a fleet of tinted-windowed Sports Utility Vehicles circling around the PM’s plane (ostensibly due to security concerns, but we suspect more because it all looks a bit 24-ish), as we saw in the 2005 General Election with Tony Blair…

and (b) the sight of Jeremy Paxman trying his very hardest to annoy George “carpetbagger” Galloway at 5am.

It’s not all bad. We’re reliably informed that while Jon Culshaw actually IS on Andrew Neil’s Big Showbiz Boat, it’s only the unfortunate viewers of BBC NI who have had to put up with him so far. So, you know, things could be worse.

While we might yet find something else worth commenting on (ITV are still doing their rather pointless “Who’s In/Out” thing, even though there aren’t any actual surprises so far), it’s probably fair to say that anything else we’ve got to say can be said through the BrokenTV Twitter account, and that most of you have gone to bed already anyway.

GOODNIGHT, EVERYBODY!

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Hung Parliament Latest

Despite us really suspecting the election is going to end in a slender Conservative majority, the BBC are still reporting that it’s looking like a hung parliament. And, indeed, the swingometer is suggesting this could well be the case.

With that in mind, one of our operatives has just returned from the Commons with some leaked documents revealing just how the deadlock will be broken, in the event of, er, one.

Proposals include:

* A “Political Penalty Shoot-Out”. Five by-elections each, from the most marginal seats the two most popular parties hold. Only two options on each ballot paper, meaning a straight choice, with none of the minor parties skewing the figures.

* A ‘Nice-Off’. The two leaders of the parties with the most seats go through an extra live leadership debate, but this time in front of an audience containing just one person: Mrs Agnes Pardew, officially declared the most undecided voter in Britain. At this point, any kind of tactics may be employed – promises to evict any minor celebrities she might not like, promises to introduce laws that might suit her and no-one else, offers to send her a lovely Victoria Sponge every month for a year, all fair game. At the end of the debates, she casts a solitary vote, and a new ruler is declared.

* The Queen flips a coin.

* Both the cabinet and shadow cabinet to take part in a one-off charity special episode of Total Wipeout. In order to deflect potential claims that the course has an inherent liberal bias, the bouncing balls on the first round to be repainted from ‘all red’ to red, blue and amber.

* An entertainingly complicated “around the world race” between the two contesting party leaders. No planes allowed, in a manner very similar to Michael Palin’s 1989 BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days. Each party leader has just eighty days to get around the globe, with the big twist being that should they both make it back to the Reform Club within the deadline, whichever party leader can produce the most Polaroids of them shaking hands with heads of state from the countries they’ve just passed through, is declared the winner.

* Blow football.

You might scoff at this point, but consider that should any of these proposals be televised live on Pay Per View (we’re informed that David Cameron is currently lobbying for his new chums as BSkyB to get the rights), the UK’s deficit could be reduced dramatically.

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Fashion Trends LATEST from ITV News

The results are in! Gerry Adams and Ming Campbell are both The New Black. Out: tweed, and spinning bow ties.

Meanwhile, it seems that Gordon Brown is BACK. Yes, in capitals.

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Cross-Broadcaster Disparity Update

It’s a bit of an eye-opener, this “watching two different channels at once” thing. While the BBC have cut to results from Putney…

ITV seem to have already decided who’s won that one ages ago, and are concentrating on Kirkcaldy & Cowdenbeath…

While ITV presumably know what they’re doing, it does all feel a little bit like declaring that your team has won the FA Cup, because they’re 1-0 up with ten minutes to go.

 

And as we’re typing this, the BBC are showing the North Down results just as ITV are discussing those Putney results. And yes, we’re accounting for the buffering delay in all this.

FURTHER UPDATE 01:19AM:  ITV have cut to the Vale of Clwyd results, only the returning officer is reading the results out in Welsh. Cue mass confusion. It’s all a bit like that Mitchell & Webb sketch on ‘Padlockigami’.

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That Cross-Broadcaster Disparity In Full

Yes, we’re a bit slow on the uptake, but we’ve just thought of putting the web stream of ITV’s coverage up on our second monitor while we watch BBC One on our proper telly. This means that for the first time ever, we’re actually watching ITV’s coverage of the election results! Yes, you’re right to look surprised and astonished, it ACTUALLY DOES EXIST. It’s not an urban myth!

So, while BBC One are reporting:

Lab: 3, Con: 0, Lib: 0, Others: 2, ITV are running with

8 seats to Labour, and 4 for other parties. That’s thanks to their policy of peering over the shoulders of people at the counts and reporting results as they’re announced, which is ALL WRONG, but still. Physical evidence that ITV do run live election night coverage.

This taken at precisely 00:43, by the way.

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New Low For BBC One’s Election Coverage

They've now resorted to Jeremy Vine taking us on a guided tour of his Second Life house, along with the funny LOL animal pictures he uses to decorate it.

(By which we mean, it’s actually us who are rapidly running out of ideas.)

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Election Night in Screengrabs: Part Two

[23:32] Interesting times at the BBC, with Peter Mandelson being told off for “Tweeting” by Paxo, in the manner of a schoolmaster spotting one of his unruly charges chewing some Wrigleys during a double period of history.

PAXO: “Are you Twittering?”

MANDY, GESTURING TO THE ITEM IN HIS HAND: “No, these are my glasses.”

PAXO: “You’ve got it in your pocket!”

[23:36] Meanwhile, over in ITV1, Ken Clarke is looking increasingly like a Gerald Scarfe caricature of himself.  Note that their on-screen clutter seems to be at a near minimum.

[23:37] A quick visit to CNN (probably the only one of the night, as the Freeview box we can take screencaps from only carries CNN until midnight, at which point it becomes “The Jewellry Channel”. Yeah, fuck you, current affairs! Anyway, on CNN, that annoyingly ‘wacky eccentric Brit’ reporter of theirs is talking to an Electoral Committee representative about how stupid it is that people in what is supposed to be a model democracy can’t actually vote once the turnout gets relatively high. Entertainingly, this leads to him tussling with an anti-war demonstrator who keeps trying to get his placard into shot.

  Much to the amusement of his interviewee.

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Daily Show Edit News [Election Night 2010]

On April 29th, The Daily Show took its second glance at the 2010 UK General Election, wittily adapting a running joke of theirs in order to name the segment “Clustershag To 10 Downing” (omitting ‘Street’ for some reason. Those Americans, eh?), mentioning the second leader’s debate, but mainly centring on the Gillian Duffy Bigotgate ‘scandal’. It was all pretty much as enjoyable as you could expect from an American comedy programme looking at British current affairs, what with the show using the word ‘England’ to mean the entire United Kingdom, making jokes about tea, Susan Boyle etc.

One missed opportunity we feel would have been the point where Jon Stewart threw to ‘Senior British Correspondent’ John Oliver (you know, from the only good episode of Armando Iannucci’s ‘Gash’, one of many attempts to ‘do’ a version The Daily Show over here). He did a nice little piece, even throwing in a mention of the BNP being racist dicks, but we can’t help but feel it could have been improved by Jon Stewart introducing the analysis with “and now, over to our Senior British Correspondent… Wyatt Cenac”. Wyatt Cenac (or any other non-British Daily Show contributor) could then come on, toss out some more generic stereotypes, both could giggle for a bit, only for John Oliver to wander into the back of shot, wearing an Eric Morecambe-issue overcoat, flat cap and carrier bag.

“Whoa! WHOA! Are you guys talking about our general election?” would interject Oliver, “I was just off home, because you gave me the night off, but I could have done this segment!” Cue the two American comedians looking comically shifty, before finally admitting they were hoping to use the segment to trot out lots of lazy generalisations. And then, back to the original script. Mainly containing more lazy and wrong generalisations. Hey, us British, yeah? We’re all about the metric system, aren’t we?

BUT ANYWAY. Much of the second half of the show was taken up by an interview with Sir Michael “You’re Only Supposed To Give Jim Morrison And His Band Oral Sex” Caine, who was doing the chat show rounds to promote mediocre Brit-em-up Harry Brown. After a few minutes of banter about the film, it being a bit like Death Wish, and Jon Stewart politely laughing a bit too much at Caine’s not-remotely-funny quip about Harry Brown being “Clockwork Orange Now”, talk turned to the 2010 UK General Election.

EXCEPT, on the More4 broadcast, this discussion was quite abruptly edited, presumably in order to keep with UK regulations on political bias (Caine, of course, having put in an appearance alongside David Cameron earlier on in the election campaign). Here’s what More4 viewers got to hear:

CAINE, FINISHING A STORY ABOUT BRITISH COUNCIL ESTATES WHILE GESTURING TOWARDS THE DAILY SHOW AUDIENCE: …you got all these people, I been watching you, what you been doing with our political system…

STEWART: Here, here in this country,..

CAINE: I’ve been watching the show, you know…

STEWART: We’ve got to cut the feedback there, I dunno why we let people watch the show…

CAINE: Yeah, I was watching all that. I’m gonna tell Gordon Brown all about you.

STEWART, EXPRESSING FAKE SHOCK: Don’t!

CAINE GIGGLES

STEWART: Don’t!

CAINE: I’m gonna! I’m going back tomorrow, he’s gonna hear!

STEWART: I…

[AWKWARD JUMP CUT]

STEWART, TALKING ABOUT GORDON BROWN: Has this, in England… has he just bottomed out? Has support for Labour just…  has the incident with this woman just…?

CAINE: You know what happened? It’s television. There’s a party, the Liberals, they were, I mean, they were a joke.

STEWART: The Lib Dems?

CAINE: The Lib Dems. Well, now Nick Clegg came on, who was always treated in parliament like the sort of tea boy.

[STEWART LAUGHS, THE AUDIENCE GIGGLES]

CAINE: Once they got on television, the three of them got on television, he walked away with the show!

STEWART: It’s like the Nixon-Kennedy debates! Gordon Brown really looks like “I don’t need make-up! I’ll go out here and do whatever…” and then he started sweating, and the whole ‘thing’.

CAINE: Yeah, and then Kennedy wiped the whole floor with him. That’s what Nick Clegg did with the other two!

[MUCH MORE SUBTLE JUMP CUT]

CAINE: The whole political situation in Britain is absolutely different from anything it’s been in a hundred years, and for me at least, and for British people, it’s fascinating, ‘cos you really don’t… they election’s next… Friday?

Only one day out, Michael. Still, that’s one less vote for the Conservatives, we guess. (And hey, it mirrored a funny joke we made on Twitter the other day). That second jump cut is handled much more subtly than the first, by the way. The first has the obvious ‘white flash’ effect most often used when skipping past Jon Stewart’s throw to the second Com Cent ad break. The second edit has no such white flash, and can only really be picked up by noticing that Caine’s statements either side of it, along with his mannerisms, don’t go together at all.

So, what was actually said? It’s not easy to find out, as the video of that interview on the Daily Show website is annoyingly blocked to UK residents. However, thanks to Hotspot Shield, we’re able to circumvent the pesky region protection on the entire (utterly fantastic) Daily Show archive, and transcribe the hidden bits. Here, with the SUPER SECRET PARTS re-added, is the full transcript of that part of the interview. Though, if you’re in the USA (or you’ve got Hotspot Shield installed and activated), you can see it for yourself here.

Parts deleted from the UK More4 edit in red.

 

CAINE, FINISHING A STORY ABOUT BRITISH COUNCIL ESTATES WHILE GESTURING TOWARDS THE DAILY SHOW AUDIENCE: …you got all these people, I been watching you, what you been doing with our political system…

STEWART: Here, here in this country,..

CAINE: I’ve been watching the show, you know…

STEWART: We’ve got to cut the feedback there, I dunno why we let people watch the show…

CAINE: Yeah, I was watching all that. I’m gonna tell Gordon Brown all about you.

STEWART, EXPRESSING FAKE SHOCK: Don’t!

CAINE GIGGLES

STEWART: Don’t!

CAINE: I’m gonna! I’m going back tomorrow, he’s gonna hear!

STEWART: I have a feeling he’s gonna be unemployed soon anyway, he’ll have the time to come over here…

CAINE: Hopefully.

STEWART: Have, have you been… has this, in England… has he just bottomed out? Has support for Labour just…  has the incident with this woman just…?

CAINE: You know what happened? It’s television. There’s a party, the Liberals, they were, I mean, they were a joke.

STEWART: The Lib Dems?

CAINE: The Lib Dems. Well, now Nick Clegg came on, who was always treated in parliament like the sort of tea boy.

STEWART LAUGHS, THE AUDIENCE GIGGLES

CAINE: Once they got on television, the three of them got on television, he walked away with the show!

STEWART: It’s like the Nixon-Kennedy debates! Gordon Brown really looks like “I don’t need make-up! I’ll go out here and do whatever…” and then he started sweating, and the whole ‘thing’.

CAINE: Yeah, and then Kennedy wiped the whole floor with him. That’s what Nick Clegg did with the other two! I mean, people are fighting back now, ‘cos they’ve looked at the Lib Dem policies!

CAINE AND STEWART BOTH LAUGH

STEWART:  “Oh, that’s the tea boy guy!”

CAINE: “Oh, is that what he was gonna do? Oh, well maybe we won’t vote for him…” But anyway… the whole political situation in Britain is absolutely different from anything it’s been in a hundred years, and for me at least, and for British people, it’s fascinating, ‘cos you really don’t… they election’s next… Friday?

So, there you go. As we’d said, those parts were presumably cut to fit in with the UK’s broadcast impartiality rules, though it’s interesting to note that the episode in general (as transmitted here) only really poured any notable volume of scorn on Gordon Brown, not the other two party leaders, and even then, it wasn’t boiled to an especially damaging temperature. From the censored More4 edit, it comes over more like Nick Clegg is getting an endorsement from the programme, whereas in the US edit, it’s Cameron who comes out on top, if only because of the way he isn’t mentioned. At all.

At least  the term “clustershag” wasn’t censored, despite The Daily Show’s 8.30pm slot, and despite Film4’s trails for “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” asterisking out the offending ‘other S-word’ at all times of the day.

In any case, edit news, there. Election results night live blog is SO on.

(Actually, we prepared this update two days in advance. It’s pre-recorded, just like Channel Four’s election night episode of You Have Been Watching. But our point stands.)

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