…because offkilter animation pioneer John Krickfalusi is now on it. Purportedly.
Though, slightly strangely using the @JohnKricfalusi1 non-de-twume, as the account name @JohnKricfalusi was already in use by, er,
A mostly inactive account, with only six tweets ever, only one tweet since 2009, and the opening tweet was ‘him’ saying a thing his most well-known character says
Meanwhile, the new, possibly-real JohnK account contains several in-progress scribbles from his forthcoming George Liquor cartoon, and a link to the Kickstarter page which aims to fund the project. So yeah, we suspect the new Twitter account IS the real JohnK.
This means two things.
THING ONE: You should probably follow him now. If it weren’t for the popularity of Ren & Stimpy, many of the artists behind Adult Swim might never have found the inspiration to move away from safe, family friendly cartoon fare.
THING TWO: We’ve got an excuse to post a YouTube video of his twisted take on Yogi Bear, a primary colour film noir, if you will – Boo Boo Runs Wild.
Channel 4 have recently been running a series of programmes looking at mental disorders, and the stigma often unfairly attached to them. The most enjoyable of these so far was Tuesday night’s A LITTLE BIT OCD, where nowhere-near-as-popular-as-he-bloody-well-should-be comedian Jon Richardson spoke to sufferers of the disorder, and considered whether his own compulsion for having everything in order meant he was a victim of it himself.
In that slightly attention-seeking “look, we’re suffering too! Albeit at a microscopically low level!” way you know and tolerate us for, we can relate to that. The volume on our TV always has to be set at a figure ending in an even number (unless it ends in ‘5’, which is acceptable because it’s a nice clean number). When scrolling through a web page we’re reading, we have to keep our scrolling so that text at the top of the window isn’t cut off half way. Hard to explain, so here’s what we mean:
On the left, a web page where the scrolling has been stopped in a WHOLLY UNACCEPTABLE POSITION. On the right, order has been restored to the universe and our skin can now stop itching. And really, not exaggerating there – that kind of thing really does annoy us. Even the occasional stray pixel of the tail from a ‘y’ creeping into the top of a browser window just has to be corrected before we can concentrate on reading something properly. Which is possibly why it takes us ages to get anything done.
Anyway, another thing that we often need to correct before going about our day (or putting down the iPad and getting out of bed, whatever) is thinking of an utterly pointless question that no-one in their right mind could really care about, and then having to know the answer before doing anything else.
Usually, Google, Wikipedia or Twitter can provide us with an answer. Occasionally, it’s almost certainly an answer based on guesswork, but that doesn’t really matter. We’ll have a modicum of order in what can loosely be defined as ‘our lives’, and we can move on to bigger things (or getting dressed), secure in the knowledge that we now know when postcodes were first used in Britain. 11 October 1959, if you were wondering. (Though now we’ve looked up which day of the week that was, and it was a Sunday, which makes NO SENSE AT ALL TO US. Gah. Unless it was at 11:59pm on the Sunday for technically reasons, so more or less Monday 12 October 1959. Yes, that makes a kind of sense. Phew.)
Occasionally though, the question will be one that no-one has bothered answering, generally for a very good reason. Which, of course, simply Will Not Do. So, we’ll then have to work out the answer for ourselves.
Case in point, our semi-regular looks at the most- and least-watched TV channels on the British digital gigaplex. It’s been about a year since we last looked at the nation’s favourite and least loved networks, so it’s probably time we updated things.
HOW IT WORKS: nabbing the “digital top 10s” data from the perpetually excellent barb.co.uk for several weeks, working out the average viewing figure an individual broadcast of a programme needs to make that top ten for every single channel, then plonking it all in a great big lovely list. Every channel to report their viewing figures to BARB is included (223 channels in all), and the last weeks of April, May and June 2012 have been calculated, so that no channel receives an unfair boost from popular short-term events like Euro 2012.
For those too damn lazy to click on the previous hyperlinks (tsk), last time we looked at this kind of thing, the top ten were ITV1, BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV2, BBC Three, E4, ITV3 and Sky1, in that order. Back then, we accounted for +1 and HD channels in the figures – this time we haven’t because it’ll be interesting to see how the timeshifted and high-def channels are performing on their own (and because we forgot to add them up before making the tables below).
Here goes:
So. What does that teach us? No, not that we’ve got too much time on our hands, everyone already knew that. BBC One has taken top spot from ITV1, helped in part by bagging a huge 21 million viewers for their broadcast of the Euro 2012 clash between England and Sweden. There’s a case to point out that adding in figures for ITV1 HD and ITV1+1 puts it ahead of BBC One, but sadly BARB don’t report (at least publically) any figures for BBC One HD, so we can’t make a true comparison there.
Other things of interest: positions three to five are as they were, with BBC2, C4 and C5 remaining in the same positions as last year. With three sets of top ten shows almost entirely made up of Family Guy repeats (yep, really), BBC Three sneaks ahead of ITV2, even if the numbers for both channels are slightly down year on year. Slightly lower down the list, BBC Four is now battling with Sky1 for a place in the top ten. Probably fair to say that a big factor in Sky1’s downfall is Sky’s decision to put the majority of their new entertainment programming on Sky Atlantic (which entirely coincidentally isn’t available on cable – what are the odds, eh?). Not that an impressive roster of new comedy seems to be helping Sky Atlantic much – a year ago their average ‘score’ was 266.35, while this year it’s slipped to 204.10. At the same time, BBC Four’s figure has remained pretty similar (494.35 last year, 492.33 this year).
Channel 4’s decision to make More4 rubbish doesn’t seem to have paid ratings-based dividends. In 2011, the average rating of a top ten show on More4 was 610,000 viewers. For 2012, the endless repeats of Grand Designs and Come Dine With Me are bringing an average of 379,000 viewers per top ten programme. Meanwhile, E4 has held pretty steady, showing that showing nothing but repeats of The Inbetweeners is pretty much as effective as showing nothing but repeats of Friends.
One slight surprise is the increasing unpopularity of G.O.L.D. Back in the days when Sky came through a coal-powered decoder rather than a digibox, UK Gold was about as big as non-Murdoch channels came. Nowadays, a relentless flood of the same two dozen episodes of Porridge, Vicar of Dibley and The Green bloody Green bloody Grass isn’t working so well, with the channel slipping from 195.63 to 133.20. It’s even below Disney Junior in our rundown. Disney Junior!
In other news: StarzTV – a channel comprised wholly of awful R&B music and text messages from people who can’t spell – is more popular than BBC News, Sky Atlantic, FX, Comedy Central and Challenge. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a music channel can still prove to be so popular in this day and age. On the other hand, our fingers are all wet with all the tears we’ve just wept for humanity.
Anyway, speaking of music channels, shall we pay some of them a visit in their natural habitat? More commonly known as “The Fifty Least-Watched UK TV Channels in 2012”.
Last time we looked at this, the least popular channels were (in ascending order) WTF TV, NME TV, Q, Scuzz, Community Channel, MTV Rocks, Bliss, ESPN America, Dance Nation and Men & Movies. How many of them will still be rooted to the bottom? How many of them will even still exist? And why did we title the following graphic “Top 50 Least-Watched UK TV Channels”? Ah well, too late to change to correct to something more grammatically sensible now.
So, while last time around seven of the bottom ten were music channels, this time only three music channels are loitering around the arse-end of our rundown. Some, like NME TV, have disappeared from broadcasting, while some (like WTF TV – since rebranded as ‘Massive R&B’) have stopped reporting viewing figures. In some cases though, music channels have become slightly more popular – Bliss, Scuzz, Kerrang and even MTV Rocks have all risen up the list notably, increasing their viewing figures to match. Apart, that is, from poor old Q, still languishing second from bottom of the list. We can’t imagine how it’s still going really, unless the 17 people who watch the channel slavishly buy everything advertised on it, thereby keeping advertising rates high.
Also near the bottom, Wedding TV. Last time around, the channel was sitting in a relatively respectable 136th place, albeit thanks to each programme in their top ten being a repeat of Bridezillas. This time around, they seem to have lost the rights to their most popular show – about half the shows in the top tens for the channel are that big old ratings hitter, um, ‘Teleshopping’.
Bottom of them all though – and the only channel with shows technically rating ‘zero’ making their weekly top ten (though in fairness, it just means shows attracting fewer than 1000 viewers) – is ‘My Channel’ That’s ‘My Channel’.
Admittedly, when we saw that, we did think “oh, it must be on cable only, or at the very least tucked away in the 800s on Sky’s EPG. But no, there it is on Sky channel 203, nestled between E4 HD and Universal Channel HD. And it’s not as if it’s a new pseudo-channel packed with nothing but teleshopping and telephone astrologists, either. Our extensive research shows that it’s been going since 2006, originally called Eat Cinema and targeted at filmgoers (though given the title, we’d have thought it was a food channel and avoided it), After spending the first few years after being rebranded to My Channel showing little but repeats of old (ugh) L!VE TV programmes, it eventually got bought up by our favourite Brazilian TV company Record Media Group, and seems to show mostly original and imported programming. Though sadly no British version of wonderously demented Brazilian variety show Tudo é Possível. Which is a huge mistake, as this clip shows:
Heed our words, My Channel. You’ll be in that top fifty before you know it.
And there you go. Our rundown – and possibly sole remaining original idea – over for another year. Curiosity sated. Bringing order to things. Letting us sleep. Aaah. We can finally relax.
Wait.
Did we leave a teaspoon in the dessert spoon part of the cutlery drawer?
WEIRDLY COMPELLING RETRO ARTHOUSE YOUTUBE OF THE DAY.
Advertising has never BEEN so Madison Avenue-style weird, compelling, and dare we say it, educational as this. A 27-minute long pitch born from the brain of design legend Saul Bass, looking at a 1970 reimagining of the corporate identity for Bell Telecom.
No wait! Come back!
It’s actually – as we said – strangely compelling, even if you’re not a design spod, even going into why certain logotypes are better than others. Even, at one point, fleetingly pointing out the failings of itself. Who knew modern postmodernism is as old as 42?
LITTLE KNOWN FACT: You know the infamous Nozin’ Aroun’ show-within-a-show from The Young Ones? With a young Ben Elton telling us how it’ll be looking at the issues facing YOUNG ADULTS in the modern crazy world of 1982? Well, it was actually based on a Chicago public access show called ‘Teen Talk’ where “the teens get to do the talking, and the adults get to listen”.
Here’s a sample clip from it, with the particular episode in question being about the new craze of ‘punk rock’.
OR
It’s a promo video for the songs ‘Burrow and Bomb’ and ‘I Got News For You’ by California hardcore punk supergroup Off!, starring Dave Foley and lots of brilliant riffs on American television from the early early 1980s.
YOU DECIDE.
Actually, no, you don’t get to decide. It’s the second one of those two things. Quite clearly. It is quite expertly put together, though.
As God said on page 23 of The Bible, “it’s a crazy old world, eh?” When we posted five minutes from an early 1980s episode of World Of Sport on YouTube a few years back, it was yanked off by unseen powers citing copyright badness within weeks. Yet, when people throw complete films and TV shows up there, they’re allowed to exist peacefully for years without getting yanked from the digital mantelpiece. Weird, hey?
One thing that we’re slightly surprised to find on there – entire stand-up sets from top comedians. Entire days worth of observations about airlines, right there for you to watch RIGHT NOW. Here are six of the most interesting you might not have seen before.
Admittedly, if you’re in anyway interested in Python there’s a damn good chance you’ll have already seen this. But then, this is the kind of thing so good everyone in Britain should be made aware of it. So, here goes: SEVEN MINUTES OF MONTY PYTHON’S FLYING CIRCUS RUSHES.
In just seven minutes of clippage there are so many things to enjoy.
That perennial outtake favourite, the false moustache that isn’t sticky enough to stay on
An off-camera Barry Took saying stuff like “stick it together again afterwards…”
A Gilliam animation that we don’t think made it into the series (though we’re prepared to be proved wrong on that, we’ve not rewatched it for a while)
Alternate takes of vox pops
A mock-exasperated Cleese saying “we CAN’T do it again!”, presumably in relation to the French sheep-aviators routine.
A pleasingly out of context shot (in two senses of the word) from the Boxing Epilogue sketch that doesn’t go anywhere really and thereby only adding to the splendidness of it.
Last but by no means least, David Frost’s phone number.
Enough aimless wibble. Watch the video here, via the even-more-excellent-than-before Monty Python Museum.
The Bonzo Dog Band, performing at Belgium’s Bilzen Festival in 1969? Twenty-six-minutes-and-forty-nine seconds of it? Here you go:
Sadly, no performance of “Rusty (Champion Thrust)”, which we – and seemingly no-one else on the planet – think is one of their best songs, but you can’t have everything. Oh, plus they didn’t record it until 1971, two years after this performance. But still. And we do get “You Done My Brain In”.
Today’s LovelyFindFromYouTube™: Mad Dogs and Cricketers, a 1978 film about The Lord’s Taverners, a travelling cricket team of celebrities and former cricketers who would put on charity matches all over the world. Including the talents of John “Three Days In A Row On This Blog” Cleese, Nicholas “Never Ever Bloody Anything Ever” Parson, Willie “M… A… C… ah!” Rushton, Roy “Boys In Blue” Kinnear and Sir Tim “Big In Albania” Rice. Best of all, the film’s introduced and narrated by Eric Morecambe.
For the record, The Lord’s Taverners are still a going concern nowadays, with them being a leading sports charity with the admirable aim of giving young people, particularly those with special needs, a sporting chance. Is there any good reason you shouldn’t visit their website today? Well, we’re ‘stumped’ if we can think of one. And that’s the only cricket reference we know.
Possibly not worth us going into too much detail on this, as we suspect it’ll disappear from Y’Tube before long, but here we have (in full) Les Dawson’s Christmas Box, Dawson’s hour-long Christmas special from 1974.
It features Roy Barraclough, Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and in a neat link to yesterday’s post, John Cleese, seen here playing – oh yes – a short tempered hotel manager dealing with a difficult customer at “the Hotel Splendide”.
As comedy-lovin’ kind of website, we’d heard several times during our teenage years about how John Cleese made a fortune from his company Video Arts, a firm specialising in making corporate training videos. With us being huge fans of Monty Python, it gradually became one of our life goals to watch some of these videos. After all, Cleese had spent the time between Fawlty Towers , Meaning Of Life and Fish Called Wanda concentrating mainly on these things – how could they possibly not be brilliant? All we needed to do was wait until someone invented the Web, then for someone else to invent file sharing software, broadband and/or streaming video sites, and we’d be on them like moss on a tundra.
So, we waited. And waited. And… waited. And then, someone invented UK Nova. “Excellent!”, we’re assuming we probably thought around that time, “the Video Arts stuff is sure to crop on there soon”. Except, of course, none of it did. We assumed, due to Cleese keeping a specially trained team of radioactive lawyers guarding all the tapes, what with it being his nest egg and all.
Whip-pan to several years later, and us being at a Welsh Assembly-funded course for people seeking self-employment. Part of the course involved watching a Video Arts video on managing a budget! Starring John Cleese! And Dawn French! It was made in about 1988! How could it not be hilarious and brilliant?
Well, as you’ll have guessed, it wasn’t. Because, not wholly unsurprisingly, it wasn’t meant to be. It was a training video, and the stuff you were meant to remember afterwards was cashflow-related, not gag-related. Even the bits that were meant to be funny, weren’t very. Oh dear, eh? Still, explains why no-one bothered sneaking them onto the internet.
Well, at last someone has, and fortuitously it’s not bad at all. Not a standard Video Arts video (which is probably why it was allowed to sneak out), but rather a talk given by Cleese on Creativity. Some quite useful things in there, it’s fair to say, and happily he throws in a mixed bag of lightbulb jokes AND an anecdote about writing Flying Circus along the way.
A good chance you’ll have recently seen this, what with it having been featured on the likes of Boing Boing and Brainpicker recently, but as we’re clearly the equal of both those sites (ahem*) we’d better include it too. Don’t want to fall behind the other members of the digerati, after all.
(*The spoof DVD piracy poster we did years ago actually got featured on Boing Boing once, you know. Back in 2007 it was, when we were still any good. We didn’t get credited, despite the blog’s URL being visible on the jpeg. We’re not bitter.)
Is this thing on? Hopefully, after the CATASTROPHIC failure of us scheduling posts properly the other day, our One Post Per Day Policy is now working properly and you’re reading this on Tuesday 10th July at, ooh, 7pm. If so: hello! We’re writing this four days ago. Did Andy Murray win the tennis? Did people keep wrongly claiming that no Briton has featured in a Wimbledon final since 1938, because seemingly all the British women who did just that don’t count?
Today’s delve into the digital depths of yesteryear is this, via maximumfun.org and The Monty Python Museum, a PBS pledge drive from 1975. It’s quite excellently titled “Eleven Great Nights On Channel 13”, and we must admit that the whole idea of PBS pledge drives has always fascinated us. So, on the one hand, it’s a bit like Children In Need but without the ‘helping children in need’ bit. On the other hand, it’s a bit like Children In Need, but without the mood-deflating clips of said needy children. Plus, with these all being local PBS stations, it was all on a small enough scale for there actually people in the studio answering phones and taking pledges, so need need for cutaways to whatever Dallas’ version of Mike ‘Smitty’ Smith Up The Telecom Tower would have been.
Anyway, if that’s all very boring for you (not wholly surprising), this DOES have the added bonus factor of the clip being an interview with the Monty Python team, there partly to plug the as-then-waiting-for-a-distributor Holy Grail. As that earlier link to The Monty Python Museum suggested.
Bon appetit.
Don’t you just wish regional TV in the UK needed events like this? I mean, the regional opt-outs in Telethon ‘88 were all well and good, but no-one got the chance to phone up and personally speak to Bob Greaves. So unfair.
[Speaking of The Mike Sammes Singers – which we will in a few sentences – you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of excellent TMSS collection Music For Biscuits. And reading publisher Trunk Records’ lovely piece on the great man’s work. “Fine Fare”, we’re sure you’ll agree. A-ha-ha.]
Yesterday’s talk of ITV past somehow somehow let several hundred words fall from our fingers without mention of the most memorable event for our first five years on this planet.
(Reader’s voice: “What’s that? The death of Elvis? The Silver Jubilee? Panini launching a sticker album all about motorbikes, even though you hated and still hate motorbikes, but were fascinated by all the motorcycle manufacturer logos for some reason, you strange, troubled little child, you?”)
Well, very close with that last one, but no. It was of course: this, probably The Mike Sammes Singers’ finest hour.
“I’m winning, Mildred!” “What ARE you doing?” “I’m playing with myself.”
Amazing to think that there are children growing up who are so young, they never even got to see Have I Got News For You when it was on BBC Two. All that they know is it being on BBC One, clips that were on YouTube months ago and jokes about Eric Pickles being fat*. Because that’s the first thing you’d leap to on a satirical news quiz and you’re tasked with lambasting Britain’s questionable alliance between two political parties who failed to win a General Election, isn’t it? ISN’T IT Oh, and probably Micky Flanagan guest hosting or something equally horrible.
It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time there were enough comedic legends doing the rounds so that you’d occasionally get an absolutely killer pairing of guests jostling for position between Ian Hislop at his most scathing and Paul Merton at his very funniest (and of course the best host the programme has ever had, despite all The Unpleasantness).
Case in point: 11 December 1992. The guests: Peter Cook and Douglas Adams. PETER COOK and DOUGLAS ADAMS.
Okay, we’ll admit to wearing slightly rose-tinted ironic hipster glasses a bit, and are willing to recognise that your standard early 1990s HIGNFY episode would have someone like Tony Slattery or Jerry Mayes MP on it, AND you do get guests like Armando Iannucci cropping up on modern-era HIGNFY. But still. Peter Cook and Douglas Adams!
Shall we watch? Let’s watch.
At least until the YouTube link above these very words features the dread words “copyright claim” due to legal bastardry. It’s like The Man doesn’t want us to remember how good it could still be.
(*See, during THAT episode, it was Cyril Smith who was being made fun of for being fat. Ah, a different age.)
After we, erm, appropriated (okay, shamelessly nicked.) a cartoon of Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebilng from the website of top comedy mag Mustard yesterday, we got to reading their interview with Commander John Lloyd. In that interview, mention was made of the episode he co-wrote (along with Douglas Adams) of surreal Anglo-Dutch kids cartoon Dr Snuggles.
That very cartoon series is possibly one of our earliest telly-related memories, right up there with being scared when Kenny Everett burst through the Thames endcap, our parents being impressed that we could read Pages From Ceefax at such a young age (28 years old, we were, a-ha-ha-ha-ha), and not quite grasping why our BBC regional news was Midlands Today even though we lived in north Wales.
Now back to modern-day us, and we were already aware that Adams and Lloyd had scripted an episode of Yoop Visch’s animated opus, but never expected we’d ever get to see more than a grainy tenth-gen VHS clip of it on a clip show. It couldn’t be on YouTube, surely? At least not in full.
Oh, how wrong we were. Only in a good way for once, and not at all like the time we thought lemon-flavour Original Source shower gel might taste like the filling of lemon meringue pie.
In the episode, Snuggles MD (voiced by Peter Ustinov, no less) goes looking for a river. SPOILER: the river is hiding in a cave, having undergone an existential crisis. Nope, we’re not joking.
Part of what we think was ITV’s first ever children’s TV strand – the unnecessarily threateningly-titled “Watch It!” – this jostled for position amongst the likes of Vicky The Viking, On Safari and The Book Tower, yet it’s Snuggles which really seems to have stuck in our memory. Seeing the part of this episode where cube-shaped chunks of the ocean have been stolen, we realised we still recall several parts of this episode with slightly unsettling accuracy, despite being about four or five years old at the time. That might not seem much to you, but speaking as a television blog who can barely remember how to wear shoes without iPadding up a video tutorial app each morning, that’s quite remarkable.
Is it any good? Well, don’t go expecting anything to rival the majesty of Dangermouse, but it’s certainly a cut above the landfill Hanna-Barbara fare being spewed out of America around that time. So, worth watching? We’ll say so. But hey, judge for yourself:
HISTORY LESSON FOR YOUNGER VIEWERS: You know comedy ‘podcasts’, yeah? Where the likes of Richard Herring, Marc Maron, Aisha Tyler, Ken Plume or The Nerdist guys interview a comedian for so very long it takes about four days commute to even listen to one podcast? Well, we had those in the 1980s too, except them they were called ‘chat shows’, and were just the same except you couldn’t listen to them on the bus unless you’d sneaked a telly onto it.
A prime example of which is this, from the quite criminally never repeated (COME ON, BBC FOUR) Bob Monkhouse Show in 1985. Bob’s guest is Peter Cook, who in a move that seems near-incomprehensible to our 21st Century minds, hasn’t really got anything to plug, but is mainly there to run through a classic Cook & Moore sketch with Lord Bob playing Dud’s interviewer role. Lovely stuff.
We were about to type “why can’t we have a TV show about comedy like this nowadays”, but then we remembered it’d probably involve Mark Dolan asking Mickey Flanagan about how wacky it is living in the East End, and died a little inside.
Yeah, long time no post. Probably time to rectify that, though admittedly our limited amounts of free time and talent mean our in-depth coverage of important affairs might not appear too often just yet. But, we’re going to try and do at least one update PER DAY for as long as possible. Just so we don’t fall off the internet.
Today’s update: just EIGHT days to go before the first part of the first half of the final season of the greatest television drama of all-time. And we don’t mean New Tricks. Evidently.
