Free Euro 2008 TV Coverage T-Shirt For All Readers Inside

It's the BrokenTV Euro 2008 coverage Wordle:

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Wordle is our new favourite internet toy ever. At least for this week. We'd be tempted to get T-shirts made with this design, if only it weren't for the fact they'd be tremendously out of date by the time they became an actual physical entity. Everyone is quite welcome to print it out and sellotape it to the front of their existing T-shirt though, which is the next best thing.

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Euro 2008: Final Score

The BBC are spending most of half-time in the Spain-Italy match running a feature where The 14 Year Old Boy Who Seems To Have Won A Blue Peter Competition To Become One Of The Anchors For Euro 2008 visits the locations in Vienna where The Third Man was filmed, marking each of the differences between the film and the original novella.

ITV are still treating us to the thoughts of Andy Townsend at half-time for each of their matches.

Yeah, it's long ceased to be any sort of contest. If this were a boxing match, BBC Sport would be idly prodding the twitching corpse of ITV Sport, which lies in a sickening pool of sweat, spit, blood, hair and teeth, as even the most ardent and bloodthirsty of boxing fans are making for the exits horrified at how long this has been allowed to continue. In the words of Alexei Sayle, that's that sketch knackered then.

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Schedule A: Euro 2008 Day, erm, Ten?

After ITV Sport phoning it in for their coverage of the fantastic Turkey vs Czech Republic match, BBC are pulling out all the stops for their coverage of Austria vs Germany. The programme begins with a well-crafted montage of the footballing history between the two nations. Is it just us, or are the BBC the only broadcaster able to put these together without it seeming like a desperate act of hyperbole? Three pundits in the studio (Alan, Alan and Martin), plus Lawro pitchside with Ray (why are they still doing this? What's the chuffing point?) and Mark Bright down in the Fanzone. To the casual observer, this could just as well be the final given the amount of effort they're making with the coverage of the match, the only indication that it isn't being that Austria are involved.

There's an argument to be made that the BBC shouldn't be spending all this money covering the tournament, normally in publications edited by Paul Dacre. Despite mentioning the same point in an earlier post, we've decided that we don't really have a problem with this. Television is a visual medium. If we're going to look at four ex-pros topping and tailing the live match with their thoughts on it, why not have a backdrop of some stunning Austrian architecture? It's certainly nicer than the inside of a studio in London. And the former won't have Andy Townsend telling us that "both teams will be looking to get a result here".

It's also worth pointing out that BBC are showing the matches in HD on all platforms offering such a picture, all Free To Air. ITV have restricted theirs to people who've bought a Freesat box. Tsk.

[BBC Sport +2 points]
[ITV Sport -1 point]

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Schedule A: Euro 2008 Day Seven (Semi-Live Blog)

After conspiring to miss the matches over the last couple of days, we're back in football watching mode. Our attempts to catch the repeat of Germany vs Croatia on ITV4 were hampered by the broadcaster accidentally simulcasting forty minutes of the CITV Channel instead of the first part of the match, which kind of gets ITV Sport off to a bad start for the day.

[ITV Sport -1 point]

Italy vs Romania

It's Andy Townsend again. Do ITV keep him in a box in the corner of the studio or something? Football pundits should be massively insightful and interesting, or at the very least, be known as a legendary (in the football sense, not that they're a talking dragon) footballer. Andy Townsend is, of course, neither. At least drag Ian Holloway or Steve Claridge into the studio, they've got something interesting to say.

[ITV Sport -1 point]

ITV have nabbed an interview with England manager Fabio Capello, but laudably just ask him about the Italian side, and not about England. Somewhat less laudably, they bugger up the widescreen flags whilst doing so, meaning everyone has an elongated face, like Sarah Jessica Parker. Is it bring your kids to work (and then let them do your job) day at Network Centre?

[ITV Sport -1 point]

Meanwhile, we've been trying a new P2P program to try and see what the coverage of the match on Rai Uno is like. Annoyingly, it won't connect, suggesting either too many people are trying to use it at once, or it's too busy sucking all of our bank details out of our PC to bother. Then we tried the Justin.tv feed of an Argentinian channel, but that just seemed to be displaying the Argentinian flag and the component letters of the word 'Argentina' moving around the screen. By this point the match had started, so we won't be getting any foreign punditry action this afternoon. So instead we tried using the 'picture in picture' function of our excellent Topfield PVR to put The Paul O'Grady Show in the bottom corner, just because we can. He was showing two small boys a photograph of an old woman, then putting an old woman wig on. We wait fifteen years to catch up with picture in picture technology, and this is how we use it.

Half Time

We've got a working stream of a German channel. ARD, if we can still remember the logo from when our parents had old-school Sky in the early 1990s. It's nice to see that German television adverts are as mental as ever: a couple in a bath at an opera, and a load of people in a shop doing a really bad German language version of 'We Will Rock You' about said shop (presumably). Oh, and Germany have the same Nike advert where a cameraman gets to play for Arsenal - we had wondered if other markets saw the action relocated to Eintracht Frankfurt or similarly localised sports team. And also, the presentation team have bothered going to the stadium. Do you see what happens when you make an effort, ITV? Granted, the match is practically down the road from the ARD studios, but still.

[ARD +1 point]

Today's hackneyed half-time observation: Is it just us, or does Roberto Donadoni look more and more like chief Flaming Lip Wayne Coyne with each match?

That's Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, and not as George Lamb claimed on his 6Music shitfest the other day, Wayne Gretsky. Now, he could have been saying it as some sort of 'joke' with the intent of winding up right-thinking people who don't like his show, who he incorrectly categorises as all being joyless beardy musos. But it wouldn't work as a joke, because Wayne Gretsky isn't well known enough over here for it to be a worthwhile reference. None of his hangers on bothered correcting him, one of them even repeating the error, so as not to invoke the Wrath of Lamb. Bloody hell, eh?


Wondering who that French footballer in the new Betting Company/Retired Footballers Pretending To Do A Proper Job advert is? Not easy to tell for the .3 of a second they're on screen, even though it's the entire punchline to the advert. Our screen grabbing technology to the rescue.

Looks like David Ginola, although as he's largely been out of the public eye (at least over here) recently, it's not immediately noticeable who he is. That brings the number of current underwhelming television adverts featuring members of the France World Cup 1994 qualifying round team who were subsequently blamed by Gerard Houllier for their qualification-buggering draw against Bulgaria to: two.

France vs Netherlands

Putting Mark Lawrenson down for co-commentator duty? Here, at the Wankdorf stadium? Home of football club Young Boys Berne? With his love of making shit jokes? Are they mad? nb. It helps if you read that last bit out in the voice of The 13th Duke Of Wybourne. Will there be one of those moments where Comedy Lawro makes a rubbish witticism, followed by ten seconds of dead air from Motty, after which he carries on as if nothing had happened? We suspect, very much so.

Update: 21.15

Well, a refreshingly restrained performance by Comedy Lawro, and we've really been too busy enjoying the match to slag anything off. So, we'll draw a curtain over today's half-hearted live blogging (aah, so that's why we don't do it very often - we're not very good at it), and bid you all a good night as we sit back for the denouement to tonight's match.

[BBC Sport +1 point]

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Schedule A: Euro 2008 Day Three

Holland vs Italy

Why is it that the BBC use 'Netherlands', while ITV are going with 'Holland'? Anyway, we're with ITV1 for the start of their tournament 'proper', and they've finally got main anchor Steve Rider in front of the camera for this. Andy Townsend is on the pundit rota again, along with Bolo Zenden, who we've been told we look like. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing for us, and we're not entirely sure he's the perfect person to epitomise the flair and total football ethos you'd expect from the Dutch, but he seems coherent enough, and it is only ITV.

We're enormously chuffed with the 'Screencap' TAP for our new Toppy 5810 PVR.

Getting our first proper look at ITV1's title sequence, it's much more impressive than we'd assumed it was going to be, based as it is around the theme of classical music. No-one seems to be playing up the Swiss participation in this tournament, it's all about the Austrians. A shame, because we really do think our Hannibal Brooks running serial idea has legs.

Interesting to see that they're not repeating the trick from Saturday night's game, where a roving reporter was sent to mingle with Portuguese fans in Geneva. Hang on, not Geneva, a bar in London. This could be because the 'interview' with a roaringly drunk Briton acting as surrogate Portugal fan went down so badly ("And here's an Englishman supporting a team at the European Championships. Why have you decided to follow Portugal?" "[drunkenly] Port-u-gaaaaal!" "Why have you decided to follow Portugal?" "[wobbling slightly] Why not! Port-u-gaaaaal!"), or more likely because there aren't any Dutch or Italian pubs within walking distance of the ITV Sport studio.

No more mobile phone cameras in front of the telly for us.

England crowbar-o-meter: Referee Howard Webb is at the finals, so we've all got someone to support after all. If his participation leads to an excellent joke along the lines of the caption 90 Minutes magazine used to accompany an aerial shot of the English referee present at the USA'94 World Cup finals, then it'll all be worthwhile ("P. Don, from a great height." We miss 90 Minutes).

Half-time

If you've got a Toppy, and you want to use it yourself, visit here. As you might expect, interlacing does cause a bit of an issue, but otherwise it's splendid. It even uses the programme title as the filename for the screenshots automatically.

ITV have also got their own 'virtual replay' machine, just because the BBC have got one, and both taking their lead from Sky Sports ten years ago. That's ten years! From when the phrase "Virtual [x]" was still worthwhile. As ITV have their digital simulation narrated by Andy Townsend, they lose this particular battle of the gadgets, with the BBC having recorded the dulcet tones of James Richardson for their 'Euro Classics' series of goal analyses.

UK sets will need to press the "Exit" key on your remote to bring up the options once the Screencap tap has loaded, so you can change the 'capture' button from the 'UHF' remote button, as there's no such button on UK remotes.

Hey, what happened to Bet365 groundbreaking offering of live odds in their adverts? Bert Kwouk is all very well and good, but we quite enjoy seeing things like that. Of course, we also enjoyed seeing live odds during matches when Ladbrokes did exactly the same in their Oracle pages over twenty years ago. It was things like that during our formative years that have turned us into such hardened (and useless) gamblers in later life. Don't mess this up for us, Podolski! BrokenTV needs a new pair of everything.

While it's not technically anything to do with the TV coverage, the new Adidas footballs used for this tournament look great on screen, having the appearance during matches of the classic Adidas Telstar. It's a bit of a shame the new ball doesn't look anything like as good in a proper photograph (as below), and 'Europass' is a bit of a stupid name, but on-screen it looks just super. The Adidas Telstar is the Adidas Superstar of footballs, if you will. A reference for people into trainers, there.

Literally Police: "The Italians were literally running around all over the place, there", Andy Townsend. Hmm... we'll let that one pass Mr Townsend, but consider yourself on a warning.

All in all, nice enough coverage of an enjoyable match, with a refreshing change from the BBC's studio technique of having four blokes being annoyingly 'matey' with each other. Bring out The Chiles, BBC! Unless you already have done for France-Romania, because we missed it.

[Edit: Just checked the PVR, and it's Lineker again. He is earning his money this time around, we suppose. We're not going to sit through the 0-0 France-Romania match, though.]

[ITV Sport: +2 points]

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Schedule A: Euro 2008 - **Live Blog**

And here it is. For those who don't remember our coverage of the 2006 World Cup, this is where we view the coverage from different broadcasters, and allocate (and subtract) points according to how good or bad their coverage is. Last time around, ESPN India nicked the prize at the last moment, thanks to the marvellous Duniya Goal Hai preview show (which was as funny as Soccer AM thinks it is), while the stupidly named UKTVG2 had the worst coverage. Exactly the same as what was on BBC One at the same time, only with much worse punditry, presentation and with tons of adverts, thereby making it the most pointless waste of money since Juan Sebastien Veron.

We don't think Duniya Goal Hai is still going, and UKTVG2 certainly isn't (having become the even more stupidly named, if quite entertaining to watch, Dave), meaning that both prizes are up for grabs. In addition to just the BBC and ITV, we're going to check out the coverage of any global broadcasters we can find streaming coverage of. Well, otherwise it'd be a bit pointless. Unlike what we're... oh.

And with the seeds of doubt sprouting in our subconscious, we'd better get on.

SWITZERLAND vs CZECH REPUBLIC

A good start for the Beeb. Martin O'Neill self-effacedly disagreeing with the other pundits. Some very nice on-screen presentation (which might well be from the host broadcaster, but we shall see). Wee Gordon Strachan is there, too. Even the video montage of previous tournaments didn't bother mentioning England, other than that is was hosting the gig in 1996. The only negative was the annoying Liverpudlian child in the vox pop about who everyone is going to support. A promising start, all in.

Nicely, the opening ceremony is being covered in full (we don't think they'd bothered with it in 2006, preferring to bang on about Rooney's injury or something), with Motty commentating on the action in his own increasingly befuddled manner. Even Mark Bright is on co-commentator duties instead of Comedy Lawro. It's a promising opening to the coverage, even if that title sequence wasn't quite as good as we'd thought it would be.

[BBC Sport +1 Point]

Meanwhile, over to Denmark's "Danish Delight" channel (according to the description on MyP2P.eu, though it looks like TV2 on the ident), and they're doing much the same, although quite obviously we can't understand a word. They will be getting a bonus point if Jan Molby is a pundit.

17:00

Motty has just said Jan Koller can "look down Frei's record quite literally". Well, he could literally look down on Alexander Frei's copy of Now That's What I Call Music 9, so technically that's correct in a way, but still.

[BBC Sport -1 Point]



17.50

TV2 Sporten (which is what it actually seems to be called) has Coke-sponsored break bumpers involving a football fan in a bar. His team scores a goal, and so he is about to hug the bloke standing next to him. As he turns around, he notices that the bloke next to him is COVERED IN BEES. After a momentary pause, he decides to hug him anyway. Cut to Coke logo. W the F?

The rest of the ad break confirms these early suspicions that Danish advertising is mental. It's a pity TVU Player won't work for screengrabs.

[TV2 Sporten +1 Point]

Wee Gordon and Ray Stubbs are standing right next to the touchline on the pitch for their analysis. Why they're doing this, we don't know. It's only the fact that Gordon has eschewed the suit expected of BBC pundits in favour of a black leather jacket, and that BBC Sport haven't made them use a stupid little plastic table (as seen on ITV Sport) that save us from deducting any points.

Meanwhile, TV2 News are still using the classic "we don't have any cameras at the scene, just a reporter, so here's a map with a bit coloured in, and a photo of the reporter who is on the phone" technique. Excellent.

[TV2 Sporten +1 Point. It would have been +3 if the photo had been of the reporter pretending to be on the phone.]

And so, as we ruminate on how glad we are we hadn't back Alex Frei for top goalscorer after his adds plummeted from 125/1 to 50/1, we rejoin the second half.


18.20

Here's something that we've always wondered about football coverage during tournaments. When the score update appears at the bottom of the screen occasionally (which is a bit pointless considering every broadcaster keeps the score and time on-screen at all times now anyway), it generally includes a company logo. In the case of Euro 2008, it's Canon. This has gone on since, what, the 1970s, and would generally involve the name of a company you'd expect to have something to do with timekeeping, such as Timex.

The implication of this is that Canon, or Timex, or whoever, are acting as official timekeepers for the host broadcaster. The tasks involved may or may not involve keeping track of the score as well. Surely UEFA would sooner try and keep track of that one themselves. If the representative from Canon is in charge of recording the score and scorers at a World Cup, maybe he'd decide that a controversially disallowed goal by Japan should stand after all. If he's lucky, his lie would become the accepted truth, like how Michael Moore claims Fox News' reporting George Walker Bush as confirmed winner of the 2000 US election just after polling day directly led to him becoming president (and nothing to do with Judge Scalia after all, then). And thereby lining up against Poland in the quarter finals or have carte blanche to start an illegal war on Iraq (yes, we're all about the contemporary satire).

But anyway, that might have had some sort of use in the 1970s. Everyone had badly designed novelty-shaped clocks on their walls (all rectangular and brown, with huge hands), so seeing a digital representation of the time had a real purpose. But now, in Space Year 2008, everyone has digital watches, iPhones, internet-powered time on their laptops, and hey, watches. Can't the logo just be something along the lines of "time by: Bob the sound guy's mobile phone"?

Oh, the Czechs have scored.

Turkey vs Portugal

"No need for hype, here", claims ITV Sport's Matt Smith, just before they go on to spend ten minutes hyping everything up as much as they can be bothered. As TV Cream pointed out, ITV's punditry team are operating from their studio in London, not bothering with the trip to Austria. On the one hand, this shows how little they care about the tournament. They haven't even got Steve Rider in to present their first match of the tournament, which is quite telling. He was busy presenting ITV1's big Switzerland-Czech Republic ratings beater, erm... the qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix, in weekend prime time on one of Britain's biggest two channels.

On the other hand, does it really matter about the surroundings of the people who pop up for ten minutes before kick-off? Going by what we're seeing of other nation's coverage, most broadcasters don't even bother with that. We do strongly suspect it's part of the fact ITV are losing interest in this sort of thing now they've got the Premiership highlights and FA Cup packages back, and that as soon as their deal with UEFA expires, the European Championships could well be shared by BBC and Five. You read it here first.

Gary Neville and Andy Townsend on punditry duties, which isn't quite as good as Hansen, O'Neill and Strachan, but at least Sky's absence in the event means we won't have to put up with the 'opinions' of Jamie Redknapp. We're still docking them a point, because we can't stand Gary Neville.

[ITV Sport -1 point]

Oh, and if you actually are reading this live (and we really doubt anyone is), we're on a half-hour delay because Doctor Who was too exiting to miss the second half of. So now we're going to get crazy with our Topfield's 'skip forward' function.

20.16

We're all caught up now. Nice to see that ITV1's No Hype Zone doesn't exclude them mentioning Cristiano Ronaldo every twenty flipping seconds, whether he's near the ball or not.

20.22

Anyone who'd prefer to see what the Brazilian (we think) coverage of the match is like:

Here you go. Or, if you want to see it moving, visit here. It should be worth it for the adverts, at least.

20.25

It's almost half past eight, and so displaying the level of professionalism you'd expect from BrokenTV, we're going out, so we'll leave the coverage here for today. Hey, it's Saturday. One quick update for the alternate schedule, and we'll be away. Oh, and an update to the league table first.

The BrokenTV World Cup Of Euro 2008 Coverage League Table, 7.6.08

1. TV2 Sporten (Denmark) (2 pts)
2. BBC Sport (0)
3. ITV Sport (-1)

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One Day To Go, And One Day Gone

Schedule A:

Kicking this off a day earlier than we'd anticipated. Because of this very interesting news from MeejaGrauniad. Here's the main bit of it, in case only registered users can view articles from MG:

The BBC has teamed up with Wallace & Gromit producer Aardman to create an animated title sequence for its Match of the Day Euro 2008 football coverage.

Aardman's title sequence, which will run around Match of the Day's Euro 2008 coverage, features animated versions of footballers including Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Ballack, William Gallas and Fernando Torres.

The animation also includes former Holland player and present manager Marco van Basten and Italian former Rangers midfielder Gennaro Gattuso.

It opens in an Austrian opera house and goes on to feature the eight cities that will host matches across Switzerland and Austria from the start of the tournament on Saturday, June 7, as backdrops to the animated players.

Unkle's version of Austrian-born composer Mozart's symphony number 41 accompanies the title sequence.

Splendid stuff. Slightly disappointingly, the animation isn't of the stop-motion variety, but this is a promising start nonetheless. We're kind of expecting ITV Sport to go with the "footage of various landmarks in Switzerland and Austria, with CGI whooshing shapes in the flag colours of competing nations darting around everywhere" approach, but we'll keep an open mind until we see it. We might be lucky, and they've gone with a rolling serial that takes place throughout the tournament, with Gaby, Andy, Ally and Jim Rosenthal recreating key scenes from Hannibal Brooks.

Or, given they can't even be arsed with showing the final, it'll be a piece of card with "Uero 20008" faintly scrawled onto it with a dry felt-tip.

[BBC Sport: +1 Point.]

The BrokenTV World Cup Of Euro 2008 Coverage League Table (6th June 2008)

• 1. BBC Sport: 1 pt
• 2. ITV Sport: 0 pts

Schedule B: Big Brother Ratings Update

5,400,000 viewers for the launch show. Will Switzerland vs Czech Republic beat that? Time, or more likely Digital Spy's ratings roundup, will tell. We're going to get at least one graph out of this year's Big Brother.

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Max Ernst and Davina McCall. Together At Last.

Schedule A: If Max Ernst Worked For Panini

Splendidly, UEFA's own Euro 2008 minisite is rather lovely, including as it does all manner of flash gimmickry. It evens goes has far to include a set of graphs so pointless even we're taken aback. At least if you ever find yourself in a pub quiz, and a bonus question is "what percentage of the Spanish Euro 2008 squad are between the heights of 175 and 185 centimetres?", you'll know the answer.

56.5%.

The best bit as far as we're concerned is a collection of online football stickers, for each squad member of the previous European Championship, erm, Champions.

"That's not very interesting", you might be saying at this point, "in fact, I'm going to throw rocks at your windows, it's so not very interesting. I hate you." Steady on there, champ. Here's just how Interesting After All they are:

Mmm, yeah. You're slurping down those ill-considered words now, aren't you? We're really tempted to post our top ten favourites, along with witty captions about what the frigging heck is going on in each picture, but UEFA's lawyers are probably circling overhead as we type, so instead we'll just add another link to that section of the UEFA website, and retire to a safe distance.

Oh, just one more.

Schedule B: Big Brother Launch Night - Almost Live Blogging!

9.11pm

Erm, we were too busy having fun in multiplayer GTA IV at 9pm to catch it live. So, we're ten minutes behind. Here's what we gleaned from trying to catch up.

Smokers have to do so within a tiny outdoor space, or else. That'll annoy the smugger fag suckers, which on Big Brother is generally at least an eight-way tie.

"Zero tolerance". Possibly to be interpreted as "don't be racist or bigoted". We think the other bungalowmates should be given sharp sticks with which to prod them.

More of an emphasis than ever on contestants being dividing into groups of 'haves' and 'have-nots', it seems. All so that annoying WAG-wannabies can pretend to be oppressed, when they're actually just eight weeks away from two years of guesting on Chris Moyles and attending premières of low-budget British movies.

The new film called Hancock doesn't seem like it's going to have Will Smith complaining about anything being nearly an armful of anything. ("Yeah, we've already pointed that out" - Everyone else on the internet."

The contestants:

* A couple. While they don't seem too bad so far, we predict one of them will be demonised in the press, and there will be pleas from femto-celebrities on BBBM for the 'good' one to leave the 'evil' one.

* The Bastard Offspring Of Johnny Briggs And Gareth From Off Of The Office. Uh-oh. He might be this year's 'wacky' one. A lot of people in the crowd are booing already, although we're really sure a load of that noise is piped in.

* Stephanie. 19. Student. She seems to be an amalgam of Emily Parr and Danielle Lloyd. Chucked out of the house to an uneasy silence? Either that, or will become the most famous person in Britain ten weeks from now. Place your bets!

A quick check on Wikipedia reveals: 'Our' version of Big Brother is also screened on Africa's M-Net channel, and Poland's TVN Lingua. We dread to think what they make of it.

First curve-ball of the night: Secret mission. Mario and Lisa "aren't a couple any more", they're expected to pair up with the other two contestants. Of course, this is pretty much like the first round of selecting on Deal Or No Deal. No one ever chooses "Deal" at £27.50, and the first task of the series is usually pretty dull. Well, in both of the two series' of Regular Big Brother that we've watched.

9.34pm

And we're live! (We've caught up with the live transmission.)

Big Brother's Little Brother is co-hosted by George Lamb. Won't be watching that, then. But if it keeps him away from 6Music, all the better. For us, and society as a whole.

* Rachel. Chatty and seemingly opinionated, but seems quite pleasant. Possible winner? Has "been in commercials", it seems. Loads of those will be getting some airtime on late evening Channel Four over the next couple of months, then. Clever Channel Four.

Can we be bothered to do some graphs about Big Brother this year? Very probably not. We could do one about the comparative ratings between this and Euro 2008, we suppose. Bit of a foregone conclusion.

* Dale. Going to 'nail' 'fanny' in the house. Was 'at' Manchester United. 'All' 'About' 'The' 'Glory'. Move over, George Lamb, we've got a new mortal enemy. We give him three weeks, either until he's evicted, or until he senses the tide of opinion turning against him and he contrives a reason to storm out of the house to make some sort of spurious point.

* Sylvia. Is 'sassy'. "I'm not argumentative, but I do have a sharp tongue," she says. Translation: "I am very argumentative."

Those Wikipedia profiles of the new contestants are building up, despite the fact that no-one knows anything about any of them yet. Example:

"Stephanie. 19 years of age, thinks she is attractive."

* Dennis. This year's camp bloke. Will be hosting a companion show to an ill-judged reality format on E4 by the end of November. Mark our words.

9.50pm

Ad time, so here's more from Wikipedia:

"Sylvia. Dresses trendily........ or not"

Surely that's not in the Wikipedia style guide. "Kate McCann. Infant murderer..... or not."

9.52pm

Either someone has vandalised the Wikipedia page, or the remaining contestants really are Mr Blobby, Sir Paul MCCartney, Mr Beans, Merlin, Sir Wankalott, Rebecca and Barbeque Sue. It's the slim possibility that they're on the level that is keeping us watching. Meanwhile, the new Coldplay single is exclusive to iTunes. We're uninstalling iTunes on our PC, just in case we accidentally buy it.

9.55pm

According to Wikipedia, the new Big Brother logo for 2008 is a "FURIOUS RAGING ERECTION".

* Michael. He is blind, so that's our lazy-but-generally-ethically-okay comedy angle buggered, then. Tsk. Says he has been a stand-up comedian before now, so he should be good value for money. Will anyone think he's only pretending to be blind as some sort of BB task? Cripes.

Wikiupate: According to every lazy student's one-stop shop for research, Michael "looks like sloth from The Goonies". And we thought our opponents on Xbox Live just before 9pm were insensitive, annoying pricks.

10.00pm

* Alexandra. Seems generally intelligent, so we're not sure why some people are booing her.

* Rex. As Wikipedia has just predicted, Rex is next. He's an executive chef. Seems sensible (if a little self-satisfied), and on first impression will last for ages but won't stand a chance of winning.

10.05pm.

Hey, is this in high definition on Channel Four HD?

10.06pm.

No. It isn't. If it's such a flagship show, wonder why not. It'd mean that for the sake of a dozen or so HD cameras, Channel Four could claim to have transmitted 975 more hours of live HD content in 2008 than it would have otherwise.

* Mohammed. Wants to point out that he isn't a terrorist, and is the third contestant of the night to have been interviewed whilst wearing Mr Men clothing. The estate of Roger Hargreaves must be well chuffed by all this exposure.

Wikiupdate: The article is now locked for public editing. Not before time, really. We're a responsible Wikipedia user with a longstanding account (we even added a bunch of correct and verifiable figures to the Euro 2008 Austria Squad article yesterday), so we could go in and type 'penis vagina' two hundred times in the 'sponsorship' section. Shall we do that? Hmm, best not.

* Rebecca. Will be photoshopped onto the body of Vicki Pollard within ten seconds of entering the house (we'd got as far as typing 'Vicki Poll' before the interviewer made much the same point, but we're leaving that in).

10.15pm

One more person to go, and it's looking very much like this will be the last episode of Big Brother we watch this series. Our official stance will be largely the same as that of the Daily Mirror circa 2003, when it became the 'official' Anti-Big Brother newspaper. Although they then proceeded to devote at least three pages to the show every day, which absolutely misses the point by a sodding mile. If you're trying to appeal to people who don't like something, don't expect them to happily read 3000 words on that very thing every day, you chumps. Mind you, it was when Piers Morgan was editor,

* Darnell. He's an albino, and an American (born in, erm, Ipswich). Far be it from us to point out that putting a brash character raised in America in the house along with a couple of muslim contestants is courting controversy, but, well, y'know.

* Jennifer. Seemingly, a young mother who claims to be really devoted to her offspring. So devoted in fact, she's... ah, you know where we're going with that. Also seems to hold what we're going to refer to as 'traditional views'. Why not just chuck Roy Chubby fucking Brown in there, and have done with it?

10.27pm

Last up, Kathreya. Seems nicely jolly, and is sure to laugh along when Justin Lee Collins does an ha-ha-larious impression of her when she's the guest on the Sunday Friday Night Project (not a typo, we're trying to be 'funny' again) the week after she leaves Big Brother. A possible winner, unlikely to have a bad word to say about anyone. This year's The Twins From Last Year.

10.32pm

On Sunday's show - a fake, real, fake wedding. While Germany vs Poland is on BBC One. Yeah, the second one.

The current betting at Betfair:

Shaun - Doesn't seem to be listed
Lisa - 38
Luke - 11.5
Stephanie - 32
Rachel - 14
Dale - 15
Sylvia - 42
Dennis - 25
Michael - 6
Alexandra - 65
Rex - 16
Mohamed - 14.5
Rebecca - 32
Jennifer - 34
Darnell - 11
Kathreya - 9

We've backed Michael, although we suspect Kathreya could take it.


And that pretty much concludes our coverage of Big Brother 2008, unless something really exciting happens. At least until after the final of Euro 2008. And with contestants from previous Big Brothers buggering up a half-decent Muppet Show gag at the start of The Big Brother Launch Night Project in the background, we're going back to GTA IV.

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Schedule A, and Schedule B

Euro 2008 is just around the corner, and in tribute we're going to adapt one of the best things about every large international football tournament. A regular sighting in listings magazines around the time of the knockout stages is the wonderful alternate schedule. Seemingly designed with a primary purpose of confusing your nan, these are schemed up by the schedulers at BBC and ITV, as they won't have been able to divvy up the matches while the listings mags are going to press. With this in mind, your typical Wednesday night's viewing on Granada could be an episode of Des O'Connor Tonight, or it could be Yugoslavia versus West Germany. BBC might go with 'Winners Group A' vs 'Runners-up Group F', or you might get to see Mel Brooks' Silent Movie. And after the match, you might get to see a bonus repeat of Only Fools and Horses (Grandad vintage, natch), or there might be extra time. A penalty shoot-out, and that late showing of Steptoe and Son Ride Again may just be shunted back twenty minutes.

All very thrilling, we're sure you'll agree.

In tribute to this, we'll be offering a choice of viewing on BrokenTV. For each update, we'll be offering a bon mot or three about Euro 2008, but alongside your staple diet of telly-related miscellanea. You know, being sarcastic about adverts or going on about Big Brother. It's win-win! Well, if you consider reading half-baked opinions on football and television some sort of victory, that is.

Schedule A: BrokenTV's Euro 2008 Betting Guide

Win money, on us. A lot of people (including us) like to put a few shillings on the top goalscorer for each international tournament. Very few people (not including us) make a nice little profit out of this, and generally they'll be bookmakers. But: not this time!

With judicious use of cut and paste, we've Excelled up a list of all the players in the squads. We've then worked out their international goalscoring rate (i.e. goals divided by caps), and sorted the list accordingly. Then, we've added lookup tables for the current odds at both Betfair and William Hill, to arrive at the current odds for each player finishing as the top scorer. Here are the top forty goalscorers (according to our system) due to take part in Euro 2008.

(NL = Not listed in betting.)

So, while the top two players in the list can be safely discarded, the current favourites in the betting (Torres and Ronaldo) don't look quite so appealing. Annoyingly (for us, at least) the odds on Alexander Frei have dropped rapidly (he was listed at 100/1 a few days ago), so we'll be backing Huntelaar and Podolski. You might decide otherwise, but whatever happens, here's to a good tournament.

Schedule B: Pop Video Of The Week



Justice - DNVO

Not only is it from possibly our favourite album of 2007, but the video lovingly recreates tons of 1980s video company idents, American TV idents (most obviously, HBO) and movie title sequences. Wonderful, and much better than the "ooh, so very shocking" promo video for Stress from the same album.

(Betting update! We've now backed

£5 on Podolski at 30 (potential winnings: £145)

£3 on Johan Elmander at 410 (potential winnings: £1,227)

£2 on Marcus Allback at 670 (potential winnings: £1,338)

That's mainly because we expect all those odds to plummet, so we can lay off the potential winnings. This is about the point we discover each of those players are banned for the first five matches of the tournament.)

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EURO 2008: Homoerotic Website Of The Day

Here's a riff we can run with for quite a while. Liverpool have just signed Swiss international Philipp Degen from Borussia Dortmund on a free transfer. So far, so Jan Kromkamp, you might be saying. But! Philipp and his twin brother David share the quite magnificent Degen Brothers Website. Behold, for you are but one click of the mouse away from DegenDegen.com. Oh, yes.

Phwoar, eh?



Heterosexual males! Thought you were going to see out today without having to re-evaluate your sexuality? Think on!



Now, every time you need to minimise those windows to click on the icon for Firefox, you can get yourself some hot Degen twin action.



Or take in some hot DegenChat.



Sadly, the link to the Degen online store isn't working, so we'll be having to sit through Euro 2008 without the official DegenDegen.com tight black T-shirt we were hoping on buying. We'll be having to make do with an unofficial bootleg one. Bah.



Rest assured, we'll be registering our displeasure on the Official DegenDegen Forum.

Quite clearly, this is all excellent. We've just checked, and degendegen.co.uk, degendegen.net, degendegen.eu, degendegen.biz, degendegen.info, degendegen.me.uk, degendegen.org.uk, degendegen.ltd.uk, degendegen.org and degendegen.mobi are all still available. If we were slightly more drunk than we are now, we'd be tempted to do us some cybersquatting right about now. That, plus we're still paying off the fees for registering andriyvoronin.biz.

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