An Update A Day: Volume Two

It's BrokenTV's 100th post, so what better way to celebrate than post an update that has nothing at all to do with television. But, at least it's topical. Here, indeed, we go.

Of course, we say Live from Athens, but in actual fact we'd merely popped into the Liverpool FC club shop, and whilst there we picked up a copy of the match programme for the Champions League Final. Hey, it's as close to Athens as our budget would allow.

Thumbing through the programme, there's a nice little section towards the end where they've included information on match programmes from all the previous finals, including from the days when (a) football was better, because we didn't have Alan Shearer punditeering on it, and (b) the covers of foreign football programmes were quite often wonderfully mental affairs, often resembling the product of a hyperactive five-year-old left alone with some coloured felt and some scissors, or a propaganda poster from Mussolini-controlled Italy. Here we take a look at

BrokenTV's Five Favourite And Five Least Favourite Covers For European Champions Cup Finals Match Programmes Between The Years Of 1956 And 1985: Part One

We've scanned in all of our favourite and least favourite ones, irrevocably creasing the spine of our pristine new match programme in the process. Which means we probably can't get as much for it on eBay. Damn.

The Five Best

5.
1964 (Vienna) Inter 3 Real Madrid 1

We were in a wonderfully fusty old bookshop today, and this splendid cover really does remind us of a cracking old Penguin Classics paperback, possibly about Smasher Jenkins and the Cup Final Mystery. Hurrah. 82%

4.
1982 (Rotterdam) Aston Villa 1 Bayern Munchen 0

Classic early-1980s. Why, it's could almost be the cover of an old not-quite-official Atari VCS game which merely featured a few faintly coloured blobs moving around a square blob while other slightly-differently colour blobs moved around slowly. That, and a just a dash of the old TSW logo. 85%

3.
1980 (Madrid) Nottingham Forest 1 Hamburg 0

Mmm, nice use of left-justified helvetica on a plain background. Ages before BBC One thought of doing it, and it looks a lot nicer too. 91%

2.
1960 (Glasgow) Real Madrid 7 Eintracht Frankfurt 3
Widely regarded as the greatest final of all time, and what a cover. Evocative of a 1930s edition of Boys Own*, but also incorporating a Superman-type title at the top. We'd love to see them do something like this nowadays. 94%
(*Well, we think so, even though we weren't born until the 1970s)

1.
1959 (Stuttgart) Real Madrid 2 Stade de Reims 0

See above, but this is much more classy. Would be more at home as the cover illustration for a copy of Tiger Comic where 'Golden' Gordon Jordan has just twenty minutes to win Rothermere Wanderers the European Cup... and to stop the Red Menace kidnapping first-team manager 'Gentleman' Sid Charmonderly-Smith, but what can you do. 95%

Tomorrow - Part Two: The Five Worst Covers For European Champions Cup Finals Match Programmes Between The Years Of 1956 And 1985. Also, possibly something someone would actually want to read about what we're supposed to be writing about.

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An Update A Day: Volume One

Yes, we know we've been deathly quiet recently. This isn't because we're too lazy to bother doing any updates (even though we are), because we been distracted because we'd become committed to gradually building up a large bankroll from an initial investment of £10 in online poker, over hours and hours and hours of play, before stupidly spunking the lot up the wall by misguidedly chucking most of it against top pair top kicker in a no-limit game before realising that ThaNutz364 had pocket queens all along because we're not very good at online poker (even though we recently did that) or because we're drunk on £2.99 Home Bargains wine (hic). No, a mixture of having a 48 hours per week day job and trying to cram in a dull degree that might just allow us to eventually stop doing a 48 hours per week day job for something less boring instead means that something has got to give. Quite clearly, it's not a degree in English, so we still don't know how to formulate a sentence properly.

Anyway, we've just found ourselves with a bit of time on our hands, so now we make a pledge to you, Johnny Viewer. For this week, we PROMISE to deliver AT LEAST one update, EVERY SINGLE DAY, for about a WEEK. We've got a Sky+ box 91% full of stuff we haven't got around to watching yet, so there must be something in there worth writing about, yeah? So, what better way to kick off this whole catch-up exercise with a subject matter that hasn't even happened yet, but which everyone else had been bored of talking about two weeks ago...

Day One: Credit Ra(n)ting

That Tony Blairs, eh? For a few years now, his stock reply to being asked about the whole WMD/Iraq/him being a great big massive war criminal directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians question was along the lines of "oh, so you'd rather Saddam was back in power, would you? Eh? Eh?" In much the same vein, we'll generally make a point of addressing any criticism of the BBC by pointedly stating "oh, so you'd rather it was just as rubbish as ITV1, do you? Eh?" With that in mind, it's interesting to see that Auntie Beeb are becoming increasingly like their long-standing commercial rivals, by enforcing bland uniformity to all of BBC One's end credits, starting from the 4th of June.

But, as BrokenTV can now exclusively reveal, it doesn't end there. In a move to yet further prevent viewers from switching over at the end of the programme, a late addition to the presentation style guide has been made, in order to ensure that viewers know precisely which type of fare due to be sling in their faces after the next batch of trailers.

That's right. In further move to free us from the Orwellian tyranny of Not Being Able To Tell Exactly What A Programme Is About From The Title Alone, our glorious leaders at Television Centre have come up with the wonderful idea of forcing the programme makers to change not just the title sequence of each programme, but the title itself. Hurrah for the glorious BBC Commissioning Department!

It is proposed that the title sequence for each programme MUST include the title of the programme in the pre-approved Glorious Democratic Helvetica Neue 55 Roman typeface. 'Regular' only, and it has to be right-justified. The example above uses italicised text, which is why the person responsible is now lying face-down in a ditch with seagulls feasting on the diseased brain responsible for such an oversight. ALL HAIL THE GLORY OF THE FARSIGHTED BBC COMMISSIONING DEPARTMENT IN THIS CHALLENGING MULTI-CHANNEL AGE.

This is more like it.

Each show will end like this, until the END OF TIME.

In a further move to retain their digitial audience share, all BBC Three announcers have been instructed to use a "comedy mong" voice to dissuade viewers from flipping over to Footballers Wives' Haircuts Revealed: Extra Time on ITV2, as this exclusive leaked extract of next Tuesday night's announcer script reveals:

"Coming up next on Three, Two Pints Of Lager. Of course, you want to watch that. If you don't, you're just a big spastic. Hnnnnnnnngh!!!"

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We Are Still Alive

It's just that we've been too busy with lots of other stuff lately to (a) write about any television, and (b) watch much television worth writing about. And while we're tempted to go off on a 1500 word rant about how Hitler: The Comedy Years perpetuated the myth that Heil Honey, I'm Home was a terrible piece of television (when in actual fact, it was a rather jolly hi-concept romp, as these YouTube links to the show in its entirety - PART ONE | PART TWO - prove), we're going to have to restrict ourselves to the following bite-sized outburst:

An Open Letter to Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, in All Caps.

IF YOU'VE GOT TO DO THE EXACT SAME JOKES EVERY SINGLE WEEK, PLEASE TRY AND MAKE SURE THEY'RE NOT REALLY, REALLY WOEFULLY FUCKING SHIT JOKES.




Not really worth the wait, was it? Meanwhile, here's a scan of a photocopy of a storyboard for the title sequence for one of the series' of The Morecambe and Wise Show.

We promise to try and be less rubbish next time we post an update, honestly.

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Who Knew?

Well, practically everyone by this point, but we're guessing they're still going to do some sort of 'how we did it' shock reveal at the end of the series.

Thanks to vigilant viewers Stephen Piers and Adam Aitch. BrokenTV goodie bags would be winging their ways towards you both were they to exist and could somehow be sent via email.

Is it time for another picture of a storyboard for a series of The Paul Daniels Magic Show, from the days when magic on telly was better? YES IT IS.

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Raiders Of The Loft Archive: Part Two

Umpteen months ago, a visit to BrokenTV's parents led to the scanning of some old magazine interviews with people who have become more famous since (Bill Bailey, Jon Stewart, and some bloke called Jerry Seinfeld). Here, belatedly, is part two of it. And, for the record, we thought of that title ages before the underwhelming look back at the ITV archive hosted by The Rubbish One Off Of Phoenix Nights. Just to clarify.

Another collection of recovered magazines included a copy of Loaded from November 1995. In amongst the woefully 'laddish' advertisements (Phwoar! What about tits eh, lads? Eh? Tits! Phwoar! Anyway, why not move your bank account to us, we have very competitive rates) was an interview with Lord Harry Hill as he arrives in New York, ready for his first appearance on the Letterman show.

(Readers may wish to click their mouse buttons whilst over the following thumbnails, in order to enlarge the following images into a shiny new browser window. Or shiny new tab, if you're using a modern browser that features the tabulated method of browsing.)

As you might expect, it's worth a read.

Plus it includes some exclusive scribbled artwork of NYC by Lord Harry himself. And an anecdote about Malcolm Hardee kicking someone in the bollocks.

So, how did the whole visit to the USA work out for Harry?

(Spoiler brackets)

Quite obviously, 'Dave' decided to prolong a section of the show where nothing actually happened and which amused absolutely nobody but himself for a large portion of the programme, necessitating Harry getting bumped from the show. Which seems to happen to somebody pretty much every single time we've tried to watch his show. Which is why we can't bloody stand 'Dave' frigging Letterman in the first place. Because he is shit. Which is why, no matter how many times ITV decide to bung it onto one of their digital outlets, it'll always end up moving from a primetime slot to around 3am, before quietly getting dropped altogether.

And relax.


EDITIONS OF PEBBLE MILL WE'D ABSOLUTELY LOVE TO SEE, NUMBER ONE: 29 APRIL 1992

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Old Spooky-Chops is back

Back in the days of BrokenTV’s formative years, when it was less a blog than a page torn from the back of an exercise book scrawled on in leaky biro, it had a really rubbish kind of running ‘joke’ between some of its closest chums. Quite often used to pass the time on the way to another daredevil wheeze involving trees, a canal and a really excellent rope swing, there would be an unofficial contest to see who could improvise the longest, most convoluted joke possible. The twist in the seemingly endless tale being that the punchline had to be stultifyingly and overwhelmingly pointless. And that was about it. Well, it was either that or discuss whether anyone we knew had got the foil Liverpool badge in their Football ’85 sticker album yet. Yes, it really is quite fortunate that Thomas Hughes never decided to write a novel about our childhoods. And not just because he’d died 78 years before we were born.

Anyway, while we don’t remember Darren Brown (yes, we’re calling him that on purpose) being a part of our schoolyard clique, we still have a nagging doubt that he was following us around on those balmy August afternoons with a notepad, because he seems to have based an entire series on that very premise. Confused? Well, here’s our synopsis of the first episode of his new series, Trick or Treat.

"I knew you were going to call me that. Aah."

The episode begins with Darren lurking about outside the house of his victim in the middle of the night. Richard Victim, looking quite remarkably like Tubes from Soccer AM, had previously signed a release form allowing Darren to do pretty much what he likes with him. Subsequently, Darren sneaks into him room at 3am, and shoves another contract in the face of a sleepily bewildered Victim, asking him to sign it. Then, Darren asks Victim to pick one of two cards. One is marked ‘Trick’, where something nasty will happen to Richard Victim. The other is marked ‘Nice’, meaning that something ‘nice’ will happen to Victim. Unbeknownst to Victim, the card he chooses is the one marked ‘Trick’. Obviously, because where would the excitement be in having the first episode end with something nice happening to someone? On Super Edgy Friday Night Channel Four? Eh? With the card picked, Darren sneaks off, rummaging through Victim’s kitchen drawers looking for his passport.

Then, cut to a bit of business involving Choc Rolls, The League of Gentlemen and razor blades, and some adverts.

Part two. We now see Richard Victim ambling into town trying to get a new passport photo taken. Presumably because his passport had mysteriously disappeared the morning after spooky-chops had sneaked into his bedroom, but this isn’t explained fully. Guess what, readers? Darren Brown’s crack squad of prop-makers have only assembled a ‘fake’ passport-photo-taking machine in a location where Richard Victim (and presumably NO-ONE ELSE) is likely to wander. What are the odds, eh? Victim does indeed venture beyond the curtains of the mysterious booth, only to be sent to sleep by the monotonous tones of Darren Brown. What will happen next? Well, he’ll be dragged out of the booth, taken to Heathrow Airport, and plonked on a flight to Morocco. Tee hee!

Some people never learn.

After a further bit of previously filmed business, introduced by a Darren Brown voiceover stating how Americans are much more stupid than everyone else, where Darren Brown tries to pull a psychological trick on some Americans in New York, only he doesn’t quite do it right, but they pretend to be impressed anyway to save his blushes (doing a ‘magic trick’ that needs to end with you stating “well, I got most of the word right!” isn’t really good enough to go on telly, Darren). Back to the show proper.

Richie Victim, still out for the count, has now arrived in Marrakech, Morocco. In a corner of a small shop, a team of Darren Brown henchmen are hurriedly reconstructing the fake photo booth, just in time to confine an almost-woken Victim. At the right moment, the crew all retire to their special hiding places, and the luckless Victim awakes.

At this point, the watching millions can barely suppress a collective guffaw as Victim leaves the booth, finding to his massive bemusement that, no! yes!, he’s now in the middle of a foreign country full of snakes. Looking a bit surprised, he wanders around for a bit, sort of wondering exactly what is going on. And…. And…… Aaaaaand…..

Well, there’s the rub. All that happens then is a couple of captions. The first stating that the crew were watching him throughout all of this, and making sure that he doesn’t come to any actual harm. The second stating that they finally told him what was going on when he found the airport, and he was quite relieved that he wasn’t suffering a massive Life On Mars-type coma after all. But, we don’t actually see any of that. Or how he got to the airport. Or how he discovered what country he was in. Or anything. Just sixty seconds of footage of Richard Victim wandering around being understandably bewildered. That was it. The whole set up, the entire Machiavellian plot involving smuggling an unconscious person through two large airports in major cities, and all they bothered broadcasting at the end of it was a confused bloke in a crowd for around a minute.

I know we should be grateful they aren’t just transmitting continuous footage of live badgers having their faces rubbed into cheese graters, or even worse, another series of Born Sloppy, but really. Jeepers, frankly.

Still, it’s not as if Channel Four have become so monumentally lackadaisical they can’t even spell the name of the person behind the most profitable sitcom in their entire history correctly, is it?

Oh dear.

Still, at least Peep Show is still as excellent as ever.

SPECIAL BONUS TREAT RELATING TO WHEN MAGIC ON TV WAS BETTER, AND DON'T PRETEND YOU NEVER LIKED IT, IT WAS ACTUALLY ENTERTAINING AND GOOD, AND YOU LOVED IT AT THE TIME, YOU COLD CYNICAL GITS

It's a scan of a storyboard for the title sequence to a series of The Paul Daniels Magic Show.

Hurrah!

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YOUR OPTIMISM STRIKES ME LIKE JUNK MAIL ADDRESSED TO THE DEAD

Managing to learn nothing from the mistakes of others, the ‘creatives’ at Sony have chosen to launch their latest overpriced electronic TV game with an advert that might as well be for an insurance company or mobile phone network.

In a nutshell: a man and woman arrive at a crummy holiday resort in the midst of an argument. Then the maid cleaning the room of a kind of John Locke-type bloke in another room conspires to lose a hand grenade, for it to get found by the stereotypically fluffy small dog of the kind of gay man who doesn’t actually exist anywhere outside of low-budget 1970s British comedy movies. Then the pin somehow is pulled out of the grenade, and via a passing foreign footballer and joke stolen from Dave Allen At Large, ends up next to the suitcase of the arguing couple, where it explodes with precisely enough force to destroy the case itself, but not the contents of the case, or any of the surrounding area. As unscathed banknotes flutter all around, stock-foreigner-type-47 utters the three word phrase that you just know took several months of focus grouping, ‘board storming’, and thousands of dollars paid to people who should be killed with shovels, “this is living”.

This is all well and good, except it clearly doesn’t work. At least the Xbox 360 “cops and robbers car chase” adverts had people playing some sort of game with each other (even if it had just got Microsoft a stern telling off from the ASA, despite the fact the ad was plastered with patronising warning messages). This is just a stupid waste of money; figures recently uncovered show that exactly £249 of the PlayStation3’s £425 RRP has gone straight to funding this marketing campaign. And the three times we saw the ‘teaser’ adverts for the campaign (which were exactly the same as the advert proper, the only difference being it didn’t say ‘PlayStation3’ at the end), we’d just assumed the website address was for the re-launch of Living “Not Just For Women Any More, You Know” TV. And even then, we didn’t really care.

If they had learned from the errors of the past, they’d have realised that this sort of thing frequently leads to the downfall of many a brand, extra-especially when all that pops up at the end is a website address. The thinking behind such campaigns clearly being “the consumers will be so energised by our cleverly cryptic commercial, they’re all going to check out the website, and subsequently the product will be sold! We’re so good at marketing!” Of course, in realityville, people stay seated in front of their televisions waiting for the second half of the football to kick off, and by the time they next get around to going on the internet, the 3% of viewers who might have been interested in the advert have forgotten if it was a dotcom, -co.uk, -tv, or if the words had any hyphens in between them, and it’s not really worth finding out. Because, and any campaign-synergisers reading this might want to take note, they were actually only watching television because of the large chunks of programming that occur in between the adverts.

Oh, and minus several trillion bonus points any advertising people who think running such an advert-with-only-a-web-address-at-the-end-that-doesn’t-even-say-what-the-product-is in the cinema is anything other than the world’s stupidest idea. They’re only going to be walking away from that multiplex with an opinion on the film they’ve watched, not in a clamour to see what wowthisisreallyimpressive.tv actually does once the 2460kb Flash intro has finished preloading.

But anyway, this lengthy intro is only here as a prelude to BrokenTV’s Top Three Rubbish Advertising Campaigns That Didn’t Say What They Were Actually Selling, And Which Subsequently Failed Massively. Join us as we don an ironic suit and walk down the road holding an oversized haddock whilst wearing a wry smile to the sound of The Supernaturals, for some reason which we’re not going to adequately explain.


NUMBER THREE
Breathe.com (2000)

Real quote from MeejaGrauniad: "My real, real favourite right now is breathe.com. What they're trying to do is be a true lifestyle product. You can do SMS, you can do Wap, you can do Voice . . . it's brilliant." As if anyone ever gave a flying shit about 'doing' WAP.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE AD?
A man walks out of his house in moody Flame-o-vision. Along the way to wherever his destination might be, others join him. Eventually, he arrives at a beach. The only sound is of the massed throng breathing noisily. The voiceover utters the phrase ‘It's amazing what happens when you breathe’. Well, you don’t drop dead, for starters.

WHAT WAS IT FOR?
An ISP, but not that you’d know from the advert. And as such, you wouldn’t then make the decision to move to them for your ISPing needs. And so, it had to resort to the monumentally stupid decision to offer people £50 ‘lifetime’ unmetered internet subscriptions, this at a pre-FRIACO time when most ISPs had to charge per-minute in order to break even.

What sort of company was it? Well, apart from being the kind of start-up that insists on writing it’s name in lower-case, the sort that would come out with the following drivel: "[B]reathe's target audience represents the core of the future modern technology market. They are 18-35 years old and are mostly active mobile socialisers and technology sophisticates, united by brands and media whose values fit with their own. They are [B]reathe's 'Modern Urbanists'." Kind of makes you glad they went bust shortly afterwards, doesn’t it?

NUMBER TWO
Boo.com (1999)

This competition might still be open, you know.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE AD?
A geek dressed in sportswear vomited into a bin. How could it possibly fail?

WHAT WAS IT FOR?
It was for Boo.com, an online sportswear company with illusions of grandeur that went up the wall hilariously quickly. That’s what you get for referring to yourselves as “a gateway to world cool”. Of course, running lots of advertising for your website two months before it actually launches doesn’t help much. More info on boo at Wikipedia.

NUMBER ONE
Scoot.com (1999)

archive.org didn't help us much here. Still, we're quite pleased to have foiled Scoot's attempt to stop us doing this screengrab, by deftly evading the robots(.txt) they'd despatched to destroy us.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE AD?
There were actually lots of short adverts, sometimes several in the same commercial break, featuring people ‘doing’ ‘stuff’, and then remarking how it looks like they need a scoot. Whatever one of those was. Then the brave (i.e. shit) company logo would flash on screen, and six million awestruck viewers would forego the second half of Strike It Rich in order to get their 56k modems to find out what it was all about. In theory.

WHAT WAS IT FOR?
Scoot.com, a sort of proto-118118 directory enquiries and listings service. Except nobody really knew it was that at the time, and couldn’t really be bothered to find out what it was. It’s still going now, but still doesn’t seem to know what it’s there for. Mind you, we’ve ill-advisedly bought a domain name on a whim before now, it’s just that we didn’t have a multi-million pound marketing blitz shortly afterwards (we put up a holding page with a rubbish joke on it, and that was about it).


Yes, all for ill-fated dotcom boom companies that are quite easy to search for. Well, you try remembering advertising campaigns that were so crap no-one can remember them, especially when you’re as forgetful as us. We frequently go to work leaving our front door unlocked, you know, it’s a miracle we can remember how to type in the words for an entire blog post without stopping and wondering whether we left the bath running yesterday evening or not.

But anyway, how should Sony be promoting their new machine? They could start by taking their lead from surely the greatest series of adverts for a videogame console EVER.

Yes, that grainy picture is correct. It really is Lord Eric Morecambe, in a pair of Pac-Man Deeley Boppers, playing on an Atari 2600. Mad props to NOTBBC for putting these links onto YouTube:

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At The Bleeding Edge of Technology With BrokenTV: A Picture Special*

Sky's new TV on demand has launched for Sky HD viewers! We're Sky HD viewers!

"Sky+ has already given millions of people freedom from their TV schedule, helping viewers to enjoy more of the TV they want to watch."

Yes!

"Anytime on TV helps our customers get even more out of Sky+ by presenting them with highlights of the weeks' programmes to watch on demand - shows that they might not otherwise have found and which they can then transfer to their Sky+ box to series link and watch every week."

We like watching programmes that are good! Let's try it out!

So, after a short holiday, the 'having the red button do something from the TV guide' option is back. Anytime TV. We can barely wait to see the list of exciting programmes from all our favourite channels (apart from BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, BBC Four, BBC HD, ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, Channel Four, E4, More4, Film4, Five, Five US, Five Life, Paramount 1, Paramount 2, Bravo, Sci-Fi, UKTV Gold, UKTVG2, Living, Challenge, Hallmark or UKTV Drama, because they're not included in the service) that we'll be able to watch! Oh, and apart from shows like Lost, because Sky don't have the on demand rights to that, either.

Ooh, the info screen in the top corner looks nice, plus it's in HD, which is nice. Oh dear, we've only actually 'got' the channels two of those programmes are on. Never mind, Sky themselves have said the service is there to showcase the best of their output, so presumably they've giving us a 'taster' of what is on some of the channels we don't subscribe to. That would be a good and clever way of showing us exactly what we're missing by not upgrading our package. Let's scroll down a bit!

Nicely, it's bothered to chug away overnight recording the HD versions of things we might like to see. That was nice of them. We quite fancy seeing what Casanova is like. Who knows, if we're impressed enough by what we see, we may choose to pay for Sky's two whole channels of HD movies...

Sounds interesting. Can't wait to see what it's like, especially as most of the programmes listed for the bog standard channels are quite rubbish. Which is why WE DIDN'T WANT TO WATCH THEM THE FIRST TIME AROUND. Hopefully, it'll be really, really good. That way we won't mind the fact that the 300gb drive in our HD box will only ever use just over half of its capacity, even though we've bloody well paid for the whole thing. Fingers crossed!

Oh, for fuck's sake. That's the whole thing rendered completely useless, then.

SKY'S ANYTIME TV SERVICE: SOME NUMBERS THAT EXPRESS HOW GOOD IT IS

Number of programmes available to those who don't subscribe to the movie channels: A not very impressive six. Brian Wilson: Pet Sounds Live (Sky Arts), Gene Simmons Family Jewels (Biography), The Dresden Files (Sky One), Unlocking Da Vinci's Code (National Geographic Channel), Poetry: From Pete Doherty to Andrew Motion (Sky Arts), Corkscrewed (Sky One). All others require a Sky Movies subscription. Virgin Media's on-demand service has hundreds of shows, including repeats of Absolutely. Bah.

Number of those we'd want to watch: Maybe the Brian Wilson one, but only then if we're really bored.

Number of times our Sky HD box crashed while exploring the service: Twice. Hopefully fixed soon via a software upgrade, but still quite shoddy.

Overall score, then: 2/10. And that's rounding up to the nearest whole number, and even then being really generous.

GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR SKY HD BOX

Press services. Then '6'.

Change the top option to 'NO'. Then 'save new settings'.

This fixes the annoying 'record lots of rubbish programmes that you didn't want to record first time around, because they're rubbish, as well as tons of stuff you won't get to see unless you give Sky all of your money' bug, discovered earlier today.

(*'Bleeding' as in 'hell'.)

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The 'Bad Old Man' of Updates

Despite what some might say about us being the world’s second-most irate Sky+ users, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes, people send us free beta versions of crisps. This causes us to perk right up.

Like Christmas in March. (Yes, we're easily pleased.)

Yes, beta versions of crisps. Due to the benevolence of the Seabrook family (and due to us ordering a boxful of their wares in the past), we recently received several sample packets of a proposed new range of spicy crisps. Experimental crisps. But, coming from the House of Seabrook, these were crisps of a standard much higher than your regular Walkers. In short, then: the BBC HD of crisps. Which means they tenuously fall within our remit of writing about television but not really actually saying anything about actual television programmes.

There are four flavours in the box, and two packs of each.

Wasabi flavour

Exuding a pleasant spicy smell once the bag is open, you tend to expect more of a kick once you tentatively fling the first morsel through your jaw. Slightly surprisingly, the initial rippled slice of potato packs little of a spicy punch, although the taste is pleasant enough. This may lead one to become complacent, but crisptasters beware: as you make your heady way through the bag, you edge ever closer to the congregation of flavouring lurking on the surface of the lower crisps. By the time have reached the bottom of the packet, the whole experience may have become slightly wearying, unless your tongue has made contact with a crisp containing an especially large clump of flavouring, in which case you may be too busy wondering why you can't feel your tongue any more.

For the interests of balance, BrokenTV’s tasting panel comprised two other persons. Their findings were as such:

“Cor, these are really nice.”

“Eugh. These taste like aftershave.”

Balanced opinion there, we’re sure you’ll agree.

If This Flavour Were A Programme On BBC HD, It Would Be: Torchwood. Eager anticipation and early promise soon makes way for a slight sense of disappointment. You feel resigned to stick with it until the end of the series (or packet) just in case it gets better again, but deep down, you know the whole experience will leave you empty and unfulfilled.

Two Chilli Peppers Flavour

Package design not final, we imagine.

Compared to the (as far as we’re aware) unique choice of Wasabi flavouring, the Chilli flavoured crisp market already has a clear leader; Pringles Gourmet Thai Sweet Chilli & Lemongrass Flavour, a tube of which can frequently be found on the desks of the BrokenTV office. Are Seabrook about to encroach onto the territory of someone they clearly shouldn’t be dicking around with?

Well, no. There is a nicely distinct chilli flavouring to the Seabrook effort that is lacking in the brand with the moustachioed mascot, more akin to the taste you get when you pluck and consume the chilli pepper topping from a pizza. And, unlike the non-existent spiciness of the Pringle offering, it’s quite splendidly fiery. Providing the snack makes it to the marketplace, this could be the culinary soundtrack to many a Saturday afternoon spent in a cramped pub watching an illicit foreign feed of Premiership action.

If This Flavour Were A Programme On BBC HD, It Would Be: Expecting more of the same old, same old, only the find that things are going to be every bit as wonderful as you were secretly hoping, but had been afraid to express. Wales beating England in the Six Nations it is, then.

Mustard flavour

It’s mustard flavour. We hate mustard. Will this catch us by surprise, and prove to be enjoyable? No. These crisps are horrid.

If This Flavour Were A Programme On BBC HD, It Would Be: Hotel Babylon. You’re expecting it to be woeful, but you decide to check it out anyway. You know, just in case. But no, in the same way Hotel Babylon ‘stars’ Dexter Fletcher, and once guest ‘starred’ Chris Moyles, Seabrook Mustard Flavoured Spicy Crisps have mustard in them, and taste of mustard. Pleh.

Oriental Flavour

Quite a vague description of what is to come, wouldn’t you say? The list of ingredients on the back of the pack is certainly one to get the BrokenTV taste panel either salivating, or running for the hills. Cayenne, Pimento, Cinnamon, Fennel, Star Aniseed, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder. Yes the aroma released when opening the packet suggests that things may not be so bad after all. They might be tame enough to feed to a tiny little kitten, one might wonder. Five crisps into the packet, and you soon realise that they’re about as tame as being strapped to the bonnet of Ford Mondeo and driven face-first right through a selection of stalls in a Mumbai spice market. Only in a really, really good way. We’d suggest you have a drink handy.

If This Flavour Were A Programme On BBC HD, It Would Be: The HD broadcast of Kill Bill: Volume One. In short: The Winner.

How you can play this game at home.

If, for some ungodly reason, you’ve never bought a box of Seabrook crisps direct from the manufacturers, and you haven’t been sent a box of beta crisps, how can you get a wonderfully piquant crispy fix? Our preferred method is quite simple, and can be played at home.

What you will need for this hobby:

One packet of Sharwoods mini prawn crackers with chilli

One tub of Tesco spicy mango chutney

Our new readers may want to get used to this sort of thing. Or depart, never to return.

Method:

Simply dip the former into the latter, and then eat. Mmm.

If Doing That Were A Programme on BBC HD, It Would Be: Not Going Out. Given the ingredients (which, for the purposes of comparison, we’re going to say are Lee Mack, Tim Vine and Andrew Collins), you’re hoping this is going to be a very enjoyable experience. And it is. Hurrah.

Number of packets of crisps consumed while writing this update: 3.5

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BOÎTE DIABOLIQUE MUST NEVER DIE

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"It made once the turn of the world since and now it returns under our latitudes" (DVD Piracy, Part Two)

Blimey, eh? We lose our internet access for a few days, and what happens when we're not here? The entire internet (i.e. a few well known blogs) goes BrokenTV crazy (i.e. mention us, and the hit counter goes up for one day). If Google fancy buying us out for several squillion dollars, please leave a comment.

Why has this happened? Partly because Kotaku mentioned our Lost: The Spectrum Game spoof, which was entirely unexpected as it was pretty much a throwaway gag. Simultaneously, several blogs have picked up on an anti-anti-piracy advert we put on the site almost exactly one year ago:

BoingBoing have mentioned it, Wonderland have mentioned it, even one of France's most popular technology blogs (as far as we can tell, anyway) have posted it, among others. "C'est un coup de McFly," apparently. Plop that last site into Altavista's translation engine to find out what that means, and you'll get the super bonus of a copy of this blog translated into French, then back into English: "the insufferably smug Payne family cuts Christmas has big comedy gravel bank of aspirin."

But, something we'd forgot to mention at the time, was that we'd actually chased up the story, as if we were proper journalists or something. The fact that we'd promptly got distracted by a shiny object and never got around to telling anyone proves why we're not the Blogger equivalent of Cassandra, but we now aim to rectify the matter.

RECTIFICATION BEGIN.

Taking the contact address from FACT's binary white elephant website, we fired off the following missive:

From: [BrokenTV]
To: info@piracyisacrime.co.uk
Subject: Important piracy question

Hello.

Speaking as someone who has a collection of over 300 legally-bought DVDs, I've got one important question to ask you. If DVD piracy is such a crime, why do you insist on punishing the people who go out and buy their DVDs legally by making them WATCH A STUPID PATRONISING UNSKIPPABLE ADVERT, TELLING THEM NOT TO DO WHAT THEY HAVEN'T EVEN DONE, BECAUSE THEY'VE GONE AND BOUGHT THE BLOODY DVD FROM A SHOP, EVERY SINGLE BLOODY TIME THEY WANT TO WATCH ONE OF THEIR LEGALLY BOUGHT DVDS? Genuine question, mind.

It's almost as if you WANT them to start downloading movies and TV shows instead, just to avoid getting patronised to within an inch of their sanity every time they fancy watching an episode of My Name Is Earl or Rising Damp. You see, the point of trying to make people PREFER buying their DVDs legally, is to make buying them legally preferable to getting a bootlegged version down the car boot sale or firing up a bittorrent site.

Don't worry, I'm not about to start doing that, I'm just going to start buying region one versions instead. What with them being cheaper, having better extras, and not containing the visual equivilent of a gestapo officer banging on my door every time I watch a film, demanding to see a receipt for the DVD.

In summary: at least make the infuriatingly condescending things skippable. Really. If I wanted to be lectured at in my own front room, I'd move in with the Revd Ian Paisley.

Yours,
A Really Annoyed Consumer.

Three days later, the following reply rattled our inbox:

Dear [BrokenTV],

Thanks for your email. We do understand your feedback regarding anti-piracy trailers on legitimate DVDs and we are sorry that you feel this way.

The reason this is the case is that, from our extensive research, we know that many people who buy counterfeit products also buy legitimate products. Therefore, the placement of anti-piracy trailers on legitimate DVDs is still an essential way of targeting those who also buy pirated copies.

We are, however, reviewing our message and hope you can be patient while we do so.

Best,

[Someone Just Doing Her Job]
Communications Manager / Assistant to Director General

Well. We don't know about you, but we're utterly placated by the above mail-merged reply.

If, and let's be really generous with our figures here, 30% of the people who buy legitimate DVDs decide that paying a whopping £4.99 for a proper copy of Batman Begins is a frankly horrid state of affairs. Instead, they wait for the next car boot sale to come along, and spend £4 on a pirate version in a badly photocopied sleeve from there instead.

Now, all FACT have to do is wait until the evil 30% of the DVD buying public sit down to watch one of their few 'proper' DVDs. Presumably these are second hand DVDs they shoplifted from a Cancer Research charity shop, or maybe they just burgled someone's house for them, it doesn't really matter. As soon as they get past the unskippable copyright warning, they'll be faced with the anti-piracy trailer. How will they react?

QUICK QUIZ TIME!

Once Johnny Evil30%ofDVDbuyingpublic sees the FACT anti-piracy trailer, which of the following is he going to think?

(a) "Tch. They're right, of course. I wouldn't steal a car, or more accurately, infringe upon the copyright of a vehicle manufacturer, and then make an exact replica of someone else's car and use that instead. That's a perfect example of something I would never be likely to do. I feel shamed. I'm off to HMV to buy fifteen copies of X-Men 3. I only hope Jesus will forgive me."

or

(b) "Tch. That's quite annoying. I'm glad I usually watch pirate copies of DVDs, where I don't have to put up with that. I think I'll just stop buying DVDs from shops, and download them instead."

THE ANSWER IS...

It's (a), obviously. No, it is. Why? Because if it isn't, FACT (or Industry Trust for IP Awareness, or whatever they're calling themselves this week) are a bunch of massively stupid idiots who are clearly incapable of performing the sole task they have been appointed to do.

Now, we feel pretty bad about being nasty about their actions, especially as our poster is being passed around the internet like a sordid classroom scrawling of the teacher with a penis on his head. If, like us, you feel FACT have done exactly the right thing in assuming every single person who buys DVDs is a criminal, and talking down to them as such, why not get in touch with them? You can do so by emailing the following address: info@piracyisacrime.co.uk.

Don't forget to tell them how super they all are, and how if it wasn't for their actions, we'd all be off murdering puppies about now.

As for us? Well, we've noticed that a lot of child abusers tend to drive cars. With that in mind, we've decided to lobby Parliament and the motor industry into introducing a new measure. With any luck, from next year, every time you start the engine of your car, you will be forced to listen to a graphic three minute speech about child abuse before you can actually go anywhere. Don't like the sound of that? Tough shit, it's for the greater good.

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