So. What Did The American Media Make Of That Bit In The Olympic Closing Ceremony With Rodney and Del-Boy In It, Then?

Wondering how the US media covered the bit of the Olympics closing ceremony where “Del Boy” and “Rodney” appeared? Here’s what the New York Times live blog said about them:

Sadly, they don’t seem to have picked up on the BIG news that Eric Idle was (presumably) the first person to say (sing) the word ‘shit’ during an Olympic closing ceremony.

Oh well. Can’t have it all. More of this kind of thing soon, perhaps.

Oh, one more thing. No-one retweeted the best joke we made all night on Twitter, so we’re going to post it here. Now, where out of context it makes even less sense than it did at the time.

Well, we say joke…

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Yeah, Er, Thanks, But…

Our Twitter feed feels slightly tainted now. This is possibly payback for us trying to display a modicum of understanding for the subjects of BBC Two’s Young, Bright and On The Right when we previewed it in last Saturday’s Guardian Guide :(

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The Thursday Film: Oo Vuf Welcome, In Jaaaaaaaam

In protest at Team GB spending a whole day not bothering to win any gold medals, we’re skipping today’s Olympic update. Oh, okay, we couldn’t be bothered. Instead, what might become a nice idea for a weekly update where we ‘curate’ (post a YouTube link to) a ‘fascinating movie curio’ (a film rare enough for its handlers not to have ordered its removal from YouTube).

Today: JAM FILMS (Japan 2002)

Despite our linkbait blog title, this has absolutely nothing to do with Christopher Morris’ extravaganza of ambient stupid, but rather a collection of delightfully skewed short films from Japan. Co-funded by Sega (yes, that Sega),the Jam Films anthology series took works from a number of different directors and basically gave them free rein to do whatever they liked. Which, given these are Japanese film directors we’re talking about, is pretty much a licence to print bizarre money with the yelping face of King Alan Tractors IV on it.

Here, you’ll find the following tales:

THE MESSENGER: the fate set to befall a mobster holed up in his concrete lair is laid out by a mysterious woman.

KENDAMA: a ball and string toy gets mixed up with a bag of onions. Oddness ensues.

COLD SLEEP: A man awakes from suspended animation to find himself on a planet containing the wackiest high school in the world! (Of that particular planet.)

PANDORA: A woman with athlete’s foot consults a mysterious and slightly sinister old doctor, and ends up finding the cure in an unusual place.

HIJIKI: Translated as “edible seaweed”, a criminal takes a family hostage as a siege situation develops. But, who is actually the criminal(s) and who is truly the hostage(s)? Aaaah.

JUSTICE: A bored schoolboy counts the snapping of tight shorts worn by girls jumping hurdles viewed from the classroom window.

ARITA: A young woman has doodled a character called Arita throughout her life, but has no memory of ever doing so. It seems she is not alone. What IS going on?

Jam Films was followed up by “Jam Films 2” in 2003 and “Jam Films S” in 2005, both of which were similarly interesting. Quite frankly, we’re surprised Jonathan Ross hasn’t insisted they get an outing on BBC Four, so instead we’ll be thankful that at least one of them is available to view in full on Good Old YouTube.

Fingers crossed that the others will appear at some point, but for now, sit back and enjoy the glorious oddity that is Jam Films.

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Olympic YouTube Gold Day 5: Oh, You Guys! ITV Live Coverage Of Seoul 1988? Like, As If!

We have to admit, the fakery skills of the YouTube faux-continuity community are becoming increasingly realistic. You can’t even tell this was made using MS Paint and Windows Video Maker AT ALL.

After all, were it not for the fanciful notion of ITV bothering with actual Olympic coverage, we might even have been fooled. Oh RIGHT – as if they were going to pick one Olympics to cover, and then make it one taking place all the way over in South Korea? Chinny reck-ON.

 

 

 

Wait, what?

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Olympic YouTube Gold Day 4: Olympic Grandstand 1984

The first Olympics we can actually remember with any real kind of clarity - Daley Thompson! Zola Budd! “Of course, many of these contestants come from nations without swimming pools.” All that.

It was also the first time* the BBC went all out on presentation for their Olympic coverage, right down to their special rings-based BBC-1 ident (above, grabbed from a YouTube video itself pretty shamelessly… let’s say ‘mirrored’ from the mighty TV Ark). There isn’t even a special BBC One ident this year.

(*We are completely guessing here. We’ve never seen the titles for Olympics 72’, ‘76 or ‘80 and they don’t seem to be on YouTube or TV Ark. We’ll operate on the basis that if they were so bloody good, someone would have capped and uploaded them by now. Yes.)

But what of the title sequence for the BBC coverage?

Los Angeles 1984: Olympic Grandstand

A fairly frugal start, with a pretty lo-fi ‘sun’ effect that instantly makes a you bit worried the scary baby face from Teletubbies is about to appear.

Things only improve in quite a modest way, as shots of Famous Olympic Faces fade into view to the opening bars from Vengelis’ most famous offering, in a very mid-80s kind of a way. Come on, BBC! What’s going on, didn’t you get past page six of the manual for your Quantel Paintbox or something?

That’s more like it! A pan over to what were probably termed at the time “3D Computer Graphics”, and a bevelled “BBC Television Presents”. This is more like it. The serif font tells you that this is going to be classy, too.

Pan down with camera facing up, and we see the five iconic rings, from which…

…five more columns emerge. This might look quite comically lame nowadays – yes, we know your microwave can produce flashier graphics than that, even when it’s not plugged in – but we dimly remember being wowed by all this. But then, we were wowed by MODE 7 on the BBC Micro and calculator watches, so y’know.

A slow zoom toward the columns, and a silhouette of an athlete running with the Olympic flame. Quite noticeably this only seems to be animated at about 10fps, but it took a supercomputer the size of Anglesey to generate it all, so shush.

Slow wipe into that mainstay of title sequences – sepia-tinged footage of classic Olympic moments old and new that gradually bleed into colour (“the Games coming to life before your very eyes”, a producer probably announced to his boss in an edit suite, we imagine). Carl Lewis, some steeplechasers, a swimming man, Sebastian “Jam Festival” Coe and such.

Then, it’s our silhouette torch carrier again, this time in front of the official ‘stripey-stars’ logo for the 1984 Los Angeles games, the first point of the titles to give any clue where the while shebang is taking place.

Another pan sideways along the Giraud-shaded Olympic venue, this time to reveal the title of the programme: Olympic Grandstand. As all BBC Olympic programmes should be called. Even now. In fact, especially now, so dads can explain to their offspring about what Grandstand was.

Aaaaand….

FLAME ON. See, now we’re in business.

Cue more footage of the colourful British characters who we’ll be vicariously living through during the two-week Olympiad. Steve Cram!

Zola Budd!

Daley “ZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZXZX” Thompson!

And on to the programme itself, in this instance footage of the Olympic Torch making its way to the host venue in a typically understated Californian manner.

To borrow a phrase from David Coleman, you have to say that’s remarkable.

RATING: GOLD

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Olympic YouTube Gold Day 3: BBC Good Morning Mexico,1968

Remember the concept of British Cynicism? What were all that about? Yeah, we’re getting increasingly suckered in by it all, especially now we’re not distracted by the Team GB football team (which is probably as close as we’ll ever get to seeing Wales in the finals of a major international tournament, yet we still found it hard to genuinely make any emotional investment in it).

One major factor in the London Olympics being so well received must be the excellent BBC coverage. As all talk Stateside has been about the many, many failings of NBC’s coverage (really, not even bothering to show the 100m final live? It happened at about 4.50pm EST on a Sunday afternoon, you clods), many Americans have been proxying up the live BBC coverage. Add in viewing figures of more than 20 million for the Beeb coverage here – as well as the 24 dedicated HD channels* on Sky and Freesat – and you’ve got a fresh clutch of evidence to suggest the BBC really is the finest broadcaster on the planet.

(*Coincidentally, our favourite Tweet Of The Weekend:

Excellent.)

 

So, how did the BBC cover the Olympics in the past? From behind a series of beige desks in London we imagine. Anyway, much more importantly, what were all the title sequences like? Were they all CGI? Were the titles for Moscow 1980 made from monochrome wireframe vector graphics? Where the Los Angeles 1984 titles a cheekily reworked version of the attract mode from Konami’s Track & Field arcade machine? And so on?

Let’s find out via the magic of Typing Quite Obvious Keywords Into YouTube’s Search Box...

Mexico 1968: You Can’t Spell Cheap And Functional Without ‘Fun’

A slide that doesn’t even count as ‘animated’ unless you’re being hugely charitable, containing as it does the rising rings and the words plonking themselves into place one by one. And, erm, that’s it. Well, unless you’re counting that timeless Sports Report theme, but to modern ears (well, ours) that only makes it come across like a pisstake of Olympic coverage from an episode of Fantasy Football League.

We do get a split screen dual clock and Frank Bough, though (see top of page). Plus, the fun of all the action taking place while any right-minded Briton is soundly asleep makes it all seem a bit more international, if you ask us.

Okay, we’re making excuses. A poor start.

RATING: KNOCKED OUT IN AN EARLY HEAT

 

(Another trot through Olympiads past tomorrow, chums!)

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Olympic YouTube Gold*: Day Two (*Still Soon To Be Retitled “Quadrennial Sporting Occasion YouTube Shiny Brown” Under Threat Of Legal Action)

Second-division Hanna-Barbara characters: this is, as Martine McCutcheon might say, Your Golden Moment. It’s an episode of 1977 cartoon ‘supergroup’ Laff-A-Lympics! With fondly remembered characters like, er, Dynomutt, Taffy Dare, Hokey Wolf, Blabber, Junior Creeply and Orful Octopus!

Basically, it’s Wacky Races, only without the ‘being any good’.Here’s episode one of it:

OLYMPIC-BASED TWEET OF THE DAY THAT WE THINK SHOULD HAVE GOT MORE CREDIT THAN IT DID SO WE’RE RE-POSTING IT HERE: “Just switched to the rowing on BBC Olympic 47. No arguments at all, just some blokes in a boat. Rubbish.”

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Olympic YouTube Gold*: Day One (*Soon To Be Retitled “Quadrennial Sporting Occasion YouTube Shiny Brown” Under Threat Of Legal Action)

Hey, it’s all going really well, isn’t it? Even all the people who’d been bleating on about how it was going to be rubbish have been pretty quiet. So, what better time to pick out some of our favourite Olympic-related TV moments from the digital wilderness? And nothing at all to do with how it’ll mean we can queue up a week of blog posts in a spare hour on Saturday afternoon, no really, honest.

TODAY! Spine Milligna’s classic “The Irish O’Lympics” sketch from (if memory serves*) A Series of Unrelated Incidents at Current Market Value.

(*After someone uploaded it to UKNova. We’re not THAT old.)

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The LG 42LM660T: A Television Review For The Rest Of Us

You know the score. You have your eye on a new TV set, partly because your current television had, er, someone live-pause it on a shot of Gabby Logan for an hour meaning there’s some incriminating burn-in stuck there, and partly because if you want to watch Netflix on your current set you have to do it via your Xbox 360 like some kind of caveman. After all, hey - what IS this, the first half of 2012? Get with the times!

So, you find a likely model available at the retailer of your choice. You check that the number of HDMI slots on it roughly matches up with the number of things you want to plug into it, and then seek out an online review.

“BLEH BLEH BLEH CONTRAST RATIO BLEH BLEH INKY BLACKS BLEH BLEH TRUMOTION CLEAR PLUS 600MhZ BLEH DISCREPANCY ACROSS DISPLAY BLEH DELTA E 3.4 BLUGH BLAGH BLAGHGH”

Before you can ponder whether an average discrepancy across display of 13% is a good average discrepancy across display, you’ll probably be nursing a headache.

Someone needs to write a hardware review of the rest of us.

And that someone is us.

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