A Christmas Gift To You All: 1 Hour and 20 Minutes of Santavision

Yeah. This was a thing.

One of the most demented channels ever to appear on the Sky EPG. Every night throughout the festive season, a luckless drama graduate (presumably) desperate to get a gig on TV (almost certainly) would don a Santa costume and try to fill airtime for four long hours each night. Parents could text in and nominate their offspring for a place on Santa's 'nice' list, or for any kids still not toeing the line at home, his 'naughty' list.

Yep, psychological warfare conducted via a £1.50 text message and a suspiciously thin Santa. To the best of my memory, it lasted through 2008 and 2009 before, oh I don't know, the real Santa filed a DMCA complaint or something. And all things considered, that's a shame. That first decade of Sky Digital still had room for curios like Santavision - they might not have been good, but at least they were more interesting than the dozens of channels clinging onto their moderate ratings grabbers and shoving them out on an endless loop. Generally NCIS or CSI:SVU.

Anyway, here's 80 minutes of pure unfettered Santavision from 2008, with original adverts and everything. Apologies for the slightly shoddy video quality, but I wasn't going to waste a whole DVD-R recording it in Short Play mode.

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Which Premier League Team Is The Most Followed On Twitter? The Answer Won't Surprise You (But Other Bits Of This List Containing Every Team In Britain And Ireland Might.) (A Bit.)

Twitter, eh? It’s a funny old game, what with so many people taking it way too seriously, to an extent that bursts of pure unfettered vitriol and occasional violence can ensue. While it may have been founded with purely Corinthian ideals at the core, it ultimately became a gentleman’s game adopted by too many ruffians for any unabashed enjoyment. Those becapped early days aren’t coming back. Especially not now there’s money in it.

And yet, despite all the droning, the dimwittery and the dickishness, enough of that core remains to keep us coming back for more. It’s often not pretty, participants often spend too long rolling around the dirt in fictional anguish, but there are always those wonderful characters who drag it from the mudbath, wipe away the drek and in doing so bring a cheer to our heart and a spring to our step. When your side wins, it’s wonderful. And when your side doesn’t win, there’ll be another battle along in a few days. And that’s what keeps us coming back. Even though Piers Morgan seems determined to ruin it for everyone. 

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The Top 200 Sitcom Characters of All-Time: 196

Yeah, we know.

196 Jimmy The Jew (Walking And Talking)

So, you’re Kathy Burke (for the purposes of this intro, stick with it). You’ve written a semi-autobiographal sitcom set in late 70s London, and you’ve written in the character of a local drug dealer who regularly gets up in the grill of the two central characters – teenage girls simply trying to make their way home from school. To try and keep things light, you need to cast someone who’d be believable in the role, but who manages to portray that character – someone who the main chars are repeatedly crestfallen to encounter, whose spines are set achill by even a distant sighting of him – in a light, non-threatening way.

That’s a tricky casting decision. There can only be one real option.

Yep. Jerry Sadowitz. And despite all expectations, Sadowitz nails the role. You absolutely buy into him as the local weirdo-you-want-to-avoid-at-all-costs (unless you’re after a wrap of speed), a man you’d not want to spend more than a second more than you need to, and yet he combines it with stupidly enjoyable, non-threatening lunacy. If Leo Baxendale had ever drawn up such a character, Sadowitz is the very personification of such a Bash Street Bastard. Jerry Sadowitz. A stand-up comedian so offensive he was once punched in the face by an audience member after the second joke of his set. In Canada. By a Canadian.

For the record ,Walking and Talking is a lovely little series – short dialogues between Kath (y Burke) and Mary, two Catholic schoolgirls in late 70s Islington as the walk to and from places, arguably kickstarting the entire I’m Successful Now But Look How Rough My Adolescence Was sitcom genre (cf Raised by Wolves and Cradle to Grave, both far inferior to Cradle to Grave). Seek it out, the 99.7% of people who’d missed it first time.

Having been part of the original Sky Atlantic line-up, Walking and Talking is currently available on Sky’s on-demand service Sky Go, and on fancy set-top boxes. So it’s there if you’re giving part of your hard-earned to the Murdoch empire each month. Which is quite handy for us, as otherwise there are no screengrabs from it and Sadowitz seems to have ensured zero seconds of his performance are on YouTube. Though trying to get a screengrab of it from Sky Go meant being told the web version of Sky Go no longer works with Firefox, suggesting we use Internet Explorer instead. AND the same on Chrome. AND THEN in Opera ordering us to install Silverlight. AND THEN claiming Silverlight needs to be updated even through we’ve just updated it. AND FINALLY making us use Internet Explorer like fucking 19th century village idiots. BUT THEN watch several minutes of unskippable adverts, despite it being an expensive paid-for service. Screw you, Sky. We’re going to keep on giving you too much money every month, but now we’re even less happy about doing it. You made us use Internet Explorer in our own home, you swines.

BONUS FEATURE UPDATE:

The Bottom 200 Sitcom Characters of All-Time: 197, 196, 195 and 194. Everyone in White Gold.

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What Has John Cleese Ever Done For Us?

Poor John Cleese. 

It often feels like, come the year 2067, viewers will switch on their televisions (a 742-inch 64K-HD unit thinner than paper, costing just £29 from Space Asda) and be be greeted by the sight of John Cleese's ghost hawking VIPoo or saying This PlayStation 17 Is Dead or something. Death will provide no release from his never-ending alimony obligations. 

But it looks like he has a plan to get out of those financial obligations: “make so many godawful commercials that his army of ex-wives get together and put out a joint statement that they can't bear seeing the man behind A Fish Called Wanda demean himself any further”. At least that's what we presume after his latest campaign, for a PPI claims company. We would say it's the biggest disappointment since finally getting to see one of his Video Arts productions whilst on a work togetherness outing only to find out they're not very funny either¹, but the bar is pretty low by this point. Poor John Cleese. 

^{[1. Of course, the Video Arts films existed primarily to tell you about compound interest or whatever, and throw in a few gags as an afterthought. Adverts are meant to entertain first, and leave you feeling so happy you dash out for a gallon of Perrier without even realising it.]}

"Oh Mark, you gorgeous idiot. Cleese has always done adverts", you tut to yourselves. Yes, we reply, but at least they used to be good. There once was a time when you saw there was a new Cleese advert on and you could safely expect to be entertained for the next thirty seconds. Chris Addison once gave the rationale for his Direct Line adverts that seeing your favourite comedian in an advert was like 'unlocking' a hidden bonus bit of content from your fave comedy series. And he was right (only not about his Direct Line adverts, which were pish). Back in the pre-digital days, getting to see adverts starring Harry Enfield, Fry & Laurie or Peter Cook would be an unexpected nugget of comedy gold in the middle of Ultra Quiz or Paul Squires Esq. Like finding a hitherto undiscovered fudge  amongst the green and yellow flotsam that makes up the final third of a tub of Quality Street. Heck, even Victor Lewis-Smith did radio adverts (for Carling Black Label and VW, as it happens), selling stuff was no big shake. And John Cleese's adverts were up there with the best of them. 

So remember him this way. Here are six ads from the firmament of classic Cleese. 

1. “Squawking Rages” (Talking Pages)

Firstly to an age before the 118 runners stuck on their false moustaches for the first time (and latterly, everyone just looking up phone numbers on their phones), it’s a spot for the Yellow Pages’ Talking Pages service. Need a locksmith in the middle of nowhere? As a retired couple find following a carkey-related mishap following a picnic, that’s a post-picnic pickle nobody relishes. Luckily, their enthusiastic manchild offspring Colin gallops off to the rescue (and to a handily placed phone box) in order to call for help. On his return to the family car, a locksmith – played by Fawlty Towers’ very own chef Terry, no less (aka Brian Hall) - is already performing his particular brand of keyhole surgery.

2. “Shut up, Wogan” (The BBC)

Fifty-eight quid! Nowadays, most of the monthly cost of a Sky package largely packed with adverts, repeats, imports that Netflix rejected and adverts. Back then, it was the annual outlay for the Licence Fee, the shock of which sends a bearded Cleese spiraling into a pub. As Cleese complains about the meagre returns anticipated from his £58, wondering aloud ‘what have the BBC ever given us?’ (see where they’re going with this?) a parade of BBC Faces point out what a damn good deal it was. Michael Horden, David Attenborough, Steve Davis, Moira Stewart, David Dimbleby, Bob Geldof, Ronnie Barker and the mighty Ken Campbell. A pretty clever piece of business all round, not least in giving the audience enough credit to ‘get’ the reference from a film never (at the time) shown on telly and which had been banned from cinemas in several parts of the UK.

3. “What was that shot of a lizard?” (Schweppes Tonic Water)

Schweppes! There’s a product you don’t see advertised on telly any more, eh? A delightfully meta campaign, the first few spots feature an off-camera Cleese bemoaning contractual tussles, the lack of a suitable tagline and the financial impact appearing onscreen might have on his impending divorce settlement (plus ca change, eh?). Then onto the commercial proper, a deliberately daft Diet Coke pisstake featuring a betrunked Cleese cavorting with young lithe beachgoing types on an expensive beach. And that wasn’t the end of it – subsequent spots simply re-edited the beach-bound bits into a Christmas advert (tinsel wrapped around male models, shot of a turkey inserted haphazardly into the film etc), then with an apologetic Cleese voiceover expressing regret that his body had been so sexy nobody noticed what the advert was for. That’s all followed by an arty monochrome pastiche of those oh-so-enigmatic fragrance adverts. Top stuff.

4. “Who needs to be right all the time?” (Compaq)

An American ad campaign this time, with a series of commercials for the IBM-battling business machines on offer from Compaq. A much more mixed bag, with Cleese taking on a variety of ’character’ roles alongside his regular Sardonic Englishman persona. Still, there are spots where John compares the Compaq Portable 2 (with 4.1 megabytes of memory) with a dead fish, where he expresses amazment at a computer being made from 386 chips and 32 bits of a bus and shooting a computer expert in the neck with an arrow, As pointed out in the documentary film Silicon Cowboys (on the rise of Compaq, and thereby only really of interest to especially bloodyminded geeks like us), the Cleese adverts helped Compaq become a major player in Silcon Valley. And even open a factory in Scotland.

5. ROBOCLEESE (Sony Betamax)

There’s something exciting about seeing adverts for obsolete tech. From the ad for the Commodore CD32 where playing Microcosm makes a robot explode (probably at disappointment after discovering FMV doesn’t distract from what a shoddy shoot-em-up it is) to this oddly compelling promotional film announcing the Sony Betamax. And here’s Cleese muscling in on the act, with a series of adverts for that very Sony Betamax range. We could have gone for this one – which pretty much anyone could have done apart from the funny walks bit – but we’ve gone for this slightly disturbing relic instead. A mechanical CleeseoidZX83 (our name for it) tells us how wonderful Sony’s new video recorder is. Not the best advert, admittedly, but the impending obsolescence makes it worth seeing.

6. “Still, I expect there’s some snooker on another channel.” (The SDP)

Speaking of which, here’s a party political broadcast from the SDP. Everything above applies here, too. A snapshot of 1980s politics that certainly sounds reasonable enough – a heartfelt plea from Cleese about the need for Proportional Representation on behalf of Dr David Owen’s party. In it, Cleese mocks the general tedium associated with such broadcasts, but goes on to put forward a pretty reasonable argument in favour of PR, apart from the bit where he whizzes through the Single Transferrable Vote part in a confusing half second. It’s much more interesting than most other PPBs, however. There aren’t any montages of party leaders with shirt sleeves rolled up or anything. Blimey, eh? One thing you can’t deny here, Cleese truly believes in what he’s selling here. Pity that it all went so bedly wrong once Cleese’s party got their wish in 2010, really.

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