Now Available At Short Notice

It's okay, it looks like she won't go hungry. Skills include: Good public speaker.

Of course, it wasn't as bad as the transcript made it look, but really. Ironically pretending to be 'urban' in those circumstances, while not the cleverest thing anyone has done in the Big Brother house, didn't leave as bad a taste in the mouth as the whole Shilpa business, which was an actual personal attack, and much worse.

The highlight of the whole affair? One of the audience on ...Big Mouth berating Chris Moyles for doing much the same about gay people on Radio One, and garnering nowhere near as much negative press. Just a pity it didn't happen while Moyles was presenting Big Mouth, really. We're wondering how Channel Four would have handled it if this was the week Leigh Francis was hosting Big Mouth (19th to 21st June. Get ready to cancel that Series Link, folks!).

Maybe he could have done his Michael Jackson impression throughout.

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BrokenBrother: "The upholstery is smouldering gently"

"Emily Parr is a Tory voter and considers herself right-wing."

From Monty Python's Flying Circus episode 28:

(Sound of an explosion out of vision. Cut to reveal Mrs Nigger-Baiter's chair charred and smoking. Mrs Nigger-Baiter is no longer there. The upholstery is smouldering gently.)

Mrs Shazam: Oh, Mrs Nigger-Baiter's exploded.

Son: Good thing, too.

Mrs Shazam: She was my best friend.

Son: Oh, mother, don't be so Sentimental. Things explode every day.

Mrs Shazam: Yes, I suppose so. Anyway, I didn't really like her that much.

Hey boys and girls, can you count all of the stupid mistakes we made in the last update?

"We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism."

"Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her"

"We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL."

Pof. As well as everything else, we'd like to state we hadn't seem them doing the 'rank themselves in order of' task before placing that bet. And we'd wondered why the odds were so good. "I'm definitely in the top four of attractiveness", indeed. Of course, it's quite obvious that Emily isn't a massive racist, but really quite staggeringly thick. Of course, anyone who feels the need to introduce themselves to the nation by stating how intelligent they are before they say anything else, very probably isn't.

Of course, today's events have had quite an effect on our slightly tweaked Fame-o-meter. Slightly tweaked because having 'citation needed' as a bonus multiplier wasn't really worthwhile, so we've adapted it to account for the number of times each person has been Googled and found BrokenTV. A bonus of 2% added to their score for each search, limited to a maximum of 20%. That's good news for Charley, because of what we're inadvertently top-Google-ranked for (can't think why), along with Shabnam and the twins (we've given 50% of the bonus points for joint searches to each twin, who now merit their very own bar on the chart).

We're a day behind the highlights shows at the moment, because of a power cut last night, so our current favourite is Laura for displaying a little bit of quiet dignity, with Charley still in the relegation places. It's quite possible Emily would be bottom, but The Big BrokenTV Big Brother Rulebook states that only current bungalowmates are eligible for those positions. This gives us the following scores.

Name	Total
Amanda Merchant	39.90
Carole Vincent	78.00
Chanelle Hayes	36.00
Charley Uchea	100.80
Emily Parr	136.08
Laura Williams	43.20
Lesley Brain	58.00
Nicky Maxwell	57.00
Sam Merchant	39.90
Shabnam Paryani	62.40
Tracey Barnard	40.00
Zac "Ziggy" Lichman	115.00

But what does that look like in barchart form? In super 3D? This:

Woo, eh?

THE BROKENTV NON-BIG BROTHER THING CORNER

It's the DVD boxset we really, really want.

All 692 episodes. 174 discs. Plus, a signed photo of Val "Bea Smith" Lehman. Yours for just £702.68 (not including shipping from Australia). Cripes.

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Broken Brother: Part Three

We've finally got around to watching the highlight shows. All of them. In one evening. Including Friday's live show. For you. Because we care. And because we thought we'd better have something proper to say about it, given we've tried to squeeze a week's worth of updates out of the Wikipedia page for it, the Betfair odds and the Word Count extension for FireFox. Here are a few thoughts that thousands of people have already said on other blogs by now, so we'll keep it mercifully short.

As ever, there seem to be three distinct camps in the preliminary rounds of Big Brother. One contains the people who seem quite annoying at first, but after a while aren't that bad, such as Emily, quite rightly top of our Fame-o-meter, or Carole, who seems quite staggeringly different from her pre-bungalow montage so far. Another contains the people who'd seemed quite nice, but soon display themselves to be The Worst Person In Britain As Far As The Tabloids Are Concerned, namely the aggressively vacuous Charley (who doesn't seem to realise that being the first one to leave the bungalow rarely even garners a Conference South level of celebrity). The other, larger group contains the supporting cast who kind of blend into the background; the others, even including Sam and Amanda, who put the twee in twins (erm, does that work? Has anyone else said that yet? Oh).

For the most part, as ever, the contestants aren't in full-on Ooh, Look At Meeeeee, Davina mode and tend to relax into their everyday personalities, meaning they're generally quite difficult to dislike. Unless they're trying especially hard to be disagreeable like Charley. Even Tracey has stop saying "'ave it" every four seconds, thankfully. After watching the first highlight show, we'd prepared a comment along the lines of "how can someone who seems so determined to point out that she's more unique than everyone else be such a horrendous stereotype? Catherine Tate is very probably kicking herself for missing out on Middle Aged Clubber Woman Who Always Does The Same Thing", but that now seems callous and nasty. Bah.

We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism. Despite initial appearances, the twins wouldn't scrape a Level 2 NVQ in Dimwittery, and Charley's more self-centred than anything else. Once The Blokes storm into the house this may well change, but for now it's reasonably well mannered. Which is a polite way of saying "pretty dull". Unless one of the next three bungalowmates to enter is a baboon with toothache, we might well get rather bored of all this.

So: graphs. It's not really worth updating the Fame-O-Meter right now, hardly anything has changed and it might well need a massive reimagining over the next few days. Luckily, galloping to the rescue on a numerical steed comes Ollie from Betfair, who has been good enough to supply us with spreadsheets of Betfair's daily prices since day one of the Big Brother Bungalow. So now, here in glorious Office-2007-o-vision (because we put them together at work) are some nice hot graphs. Hey, they're probably slightly less dull than watching Chris Moyles host Big Brother's Big Mouth.

Firstly, because having everyone on the same graph was like a car crash, the outsiders. Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her. We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL. Charley is struggling in last place on about the same odds as Kieran Richardson signing for Inter Milan.

There's the middle bunch, squabbling for the middle ground like eejits.

And there are the favourites. Fairly surprisingly as far as we're concerned, Ziggy's odds have lengthened, despite him seeming more agreeable as the days have progressed. Carole at second favourite seems a bit of a shock, given that we're sure she'll get bored of it all by the end of the first month and walk, especially if most of the others devote most of their energy to cooing over any new male co-inhabitants. Chanelle seems quite desperate to become this years' Chantelle, and Laura seems like a nice person, but we're sure she's only in the house to give Justin Lee Collins someone to do a piss-poor impression of during The Friday Night Project.

Our prediction: Someone who isn't even in the bungalow yet to win it. But hopefully not before Emily's odds have dropped to single figures and we've made a killing.

Someone who knows what they're talking about's prediction: We've got permission to post the following bit of proper knowledge from Steve, the Betfair Betting Expert.

Keep stakes low. Don't be fooled into the 60% book on Betfair (the winner may not even be in the house yet). With 3 months of Big Brother anything can happen. It won't be as simple as picking the winner Pete from last year. I have managed to lock in (no loss) green book on the winner's market through some trading. Nothing big or worth shouting about but a green book of £45 always makes me smile. Backed Chanelle at 32 as soon as she entered the house and then layed her at 27 the next day. Then laying Ziggy at 7.4 when he entered the house and backing him at 7.8 the next morning.

I think this year's show will be one of the most interesting yet. Big Brother wants a love relationship to blossom and I think we will see it. Will it be Chanelle and Ziggy? Odds are shortening every day. I'd give odds of 1.1 they will kiss sometime in the show.

The two prices that have been affected most over the last 24 hours are those of Chanelle and Emily. Chanelle's price got significantly shorter throughout yesterday and she became second favourite at one point however this soon changed after a late night row with Emily over a pair of hair straighteners. Chanelle is back to being third favourite while Emily's price has drifted from 25 to 30.

Tracey and both the twin's prices have all shortened meaning Emily is now the fourth least favoured housemate.

The Big Bouncy Betfair BB Betting Blog is in full here, for anyone who wants to read it. And that's enough plugging Betfair for now. Other betting websites are also available, folks.

More BB07 fun next time, where BrokenTV shamelessly tries to sneak back onto the artistic roll-call, and we try to think about something to write about that isn't Big Brother or a graph.

Pop Fact: We were going to visit the Hay Festival this week. We've ended up doing this. Best laid plans, eh?

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Big Brother 2007 (With Graphs): Part Two

Day three in the Big Brother Bungalow (IT IS NOT A HOUSE, IT IS A BUNGALOW AS IT ONLY HAS ONE FLOOR), and there's a new resident. His name is Zac, he is a male man with a man's penis and testicles, and he isn't a woman.

Okay, we haven't had time to watch any of this (or indeed, any telly at all apart from the England vs Brazil match earlier) since the bungalowmates entered the bungalow. Don't worry, we're not about to become the sort of tiresome bores who wander around shouting at everyone how they don't watch Big Brother, we've got each highlight show and tonight's live show nicely SkyPlussed up for when we're less horrendously busy, and will report our findings in due course.

Luckily, we don't need to have watched any television at all to quickly flip to Wikipedia, Betfair, Photoshop and Microsoft Excel, so stat-hungry BB fans won't miss out on the latest edition of

Before we drop numbers, a few points of interest. Well, we say 'interest'.

• We haven't watched Big Brother for a couple of days. Therefore it would be criminally negligent of us to allocate any bonus multiplier score/penalty for our current favourite and anti-favourite bungalowmates. A narrow escape for the squee twins, we're guessing.
  
  
• Zak has jumped into first place in the betting, mainly because blokes tend to win Big Brother. This is reflected in the results, as he wins the 10% bump that goes with it.
  
  
• Those editing the Wikipedia entry on BB07 are either taking a lot more care and research in their uncovering of everybody's past (or they're just taking everything in the red tops as gospel), as there's a shameful solitary [citation needed] between everyone (for Laura, as it happens). This is clearly unacceptable, and we encourage our readers to add as many stupid claims as possible to the entries for all the bungalowmates.
  
  
• We've switched to the 'clustered bar with a 3-D visual effect' setting for the graph, as it'll give us room for the dozens of new people sure to be added in the next few weeks. And because it'll mean less fannying about with Photoshop to stop it spilling into the right sidebar on the blog. And yes, that was worth mentioning.

So, with no further ado, here come the numbers:

So, Emily and Nicki are still in the lead, but Zac (are we supposed to be calling him 'Ziggy'? Oh well) has zoomed straight into the bronze medal position. As he's a former boy band member, we're expecting lots more tabloid 'revelations' about him (mainly sourced from his agent, we suspect), so he could be a shoo-in for the big prize. Erm, that's the BrokenTV's Coverage of Big Brother Expressed Purely Via The Medium Of Not Very Complicated And Quite Possibly Incorrect Mathematics Special Winner's Certificate, not whatever you get for winning Big Brother, which of course is 'being quite famous for about three months'.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BROKENTV VIEWERS WHO DON'T LIKE BIG BROTHER? THEY'RE PEOPLE TOO!

Here you go. It's a test card. But wait, it's got Frank Sidebottom in it, and it's live action, and it's excellent.

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Big Brother 2007 (With Graphs): Part One

Now, we don't usually watch this, but in the interests of our viewer, we're going to try and stick with it for as long as possible. Our comprehensive review of the first instalment of the UK's most drawn out audition for fronting your own short-lived E4 series runs thusly.

Broadcasting equivalent of standing in front of the class and admitting what you just did aside, the show kicked off with a rundown of the rumours about the new series that aren't true (and which, presumably, had been leaked to the press by the production team in advance of the new series to maximise the viewing audience). Then we saw inside the house and... some other stuff happened and we kind of lost interest a bit.

What we need is to somehow distil each component (or housemate) into a series of numbers. It's the only way our fractured minds will be able to make sense of the screeching masses in need of a dignity transplant. That's why we've adapted our ranking system from the Celeb Big Brother to take in a whole new set of rankings, with bonus multipliers and everything.

Here's how it works:

As with our earlier system, the basis is the amount of words written in Wikipedia about each contestant. But! As a tribute to the way they keep on adding spurious trinkets to the house each time that everyone generally ignores because they're sunbathing instead, the following bonus multipliers are due to be applied to each word count:

+10% for each [citation needed] displayed in the contestant's Wikipedia rating – unverified facts are always fun

+20% for the current Betfair favourite to win

+10% for the second favourite

+5% for the third favourite

+10% for whoever we like the bestest of them all at any given moment

-15% for whoever's really getting on our tits

(You'll just have to imagine us reading the above bit out loud in a kind of faux-really-excited voice, just like Davina does on her tour of the house.)

We're really tempted to dock everyone an extra 10% for there being a new Trident Gum advert in the first ad break of the new series, but that would just be unfair. If you want to play along at home, our Excel formula for working out all of this is =SUM(B4+((B4*$C$2)*C4))+((B4*$D$2)*D4)+((B4*$E$2)*E4)+((B4*$F$2)*F4)+((B4*$G$2)*G4)+((B4*$H$2)*H4). Write that down. Of course, we reserve the right to add extra accumulators as the game progresses, especially if we can get an easy joke out of it.

So, what does that mean for the tenants of the Big Brother Bungalow?

Sam and Amanda Merchant

An annoying noise with four legs, the twins automatically won our vote as Most Annoying Person so far, docking them 15% of their word count of 47. Score: 44.65

Lesley Brain

Depending on whether the others see her as some sort of mother figure, or just some old woman with illusions of grandeur, will last a week, or ages. She still won't win, though. Score: 41.80

Charley Uchea

Despite getting booed, she seems relatively nice. Our current favourite, gives her points a boost all the way up to: 53.90

Tracey Barnard

Oh shit, it's Donny Tourette with a vagina. The bookies seem to like her, but we can't see her winning. We're betting she'll storm out of the house to make some sort of laboured 'point' within the first month, and claim it was something to do with a more pressing need to 'have it' elsewhere. Three [citations needed] give her score a boost, though. Score: 52.65

Chanelle Hayes

Who looks about as much like Victoria Beckham as we would if we just did our hair like hers. The second lowest score: 26.00

Shabnam Paryani

Quite extroverted, but in a way that isn’t too annoying. Yet. We suspect she could fall into the BrokenTV favourite column with the wind behind her. A bit of a shame that she’s currently last in the rankings, really. Score: 24.00

Emily Parr

Seems quite nice, although we’re not quite buying into the ‘indie’ personality until she mentions someone a bit more leftfield than Pete sodding Docherty. We’re tempted to offer her a bonus 25% if she can name more than one Pixies album, then we’ll see. The current leader, helped along by three [citations needed]. Score: 100.10

Laura Williams

Flying the flag for Wales. Seems okay, could turn out to be a ‘character’, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Time will tell. Score: 66.30

Nicky Maxwell

Another relatively normal person who could well sneak into our favoured housemate category. It looks like they’re going for a controversy-lite series this year. Well, unless they chuck Freddie Starr in there at some point or something. Score: 82.80

Carole Vincent

Ah, there we go. It’s Millie Tant. Harsh, but fair, we feel. Score: 37.20

In summary then:

Expect regular updates when we get around to watching our Sky+ recordings of the highlight shows, or not if we get really ticked off with the whole idea of this. Hey, we’re not getting paid for this, you know. And if anyone’s expecting us to sit through Moyles, they can bally well piss off.

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Least Collectable Collectable Ever

When the postman makes his way up the sixteen flights of stairs to the BrokenTV office with our usual selection of junk mail, we're always happy to see one of our magazine subscriptions lying on our doormat. Such is the situation we found ourselves in this morning, as our bleary, bloodshot eyes noticed the unmistakable clear plastic wrapping of something that wasn't an offer to join a slightly different car insurance firm. Will it be When Saturday Comes? Retro Gamer? Viz? Biscuits Weekly?

Oh. It's just the bloody Sky magazine, packed with the usual selection of advertising leaflets that fall out onto the floor, and about 95% of the magazine proper taken up with adverts for things we wouldn't possibly want. But wait! What's this?

Oh, silly cynical old us! This is no ordinary free magazine we throw straight in the recycle bin! It's a SPECIAL COLLECTORS EDITION with a picture of one of the Simpsons on the front. Right we're not going to unwrap it, we're going to leave it sealed, and who knows, maybe, just maybe, in a few dozen years from now, it'll be worth... as much as one new British penny.

Really, what the point of pretending something is collectable when 8,175,999 other people are receiving the same thing through the post as well as you? Gah.

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An Update A Day: Day Six

Here's a YouTube clip we'd uploaded a while ago, but don't seem to have mentioned here. Which is a pity, as it's blimmin' great.

It's from an episode of LWT's 'An Audience With Jasper Carrott' (no relation to the later LWT celebgasms of the same name), where, in a departure from his usual shaggy dog stories, Jasp goes off on one about Monty Python. All done in an affectionate way, of course, and interesting to see because we haven't really seen him do something like this in anything else. The main point of the routine revolves entirely around one of the Python sketch most people don't even remember - that's proper reference comedy for you.

Of course, it'd be nice to see more repeats of his topical output. The clips from '...Lib' and '...Confidential' that have cropped up on Paramount's repeat showings of The Jasper Carrott Trial have all been excellent, so why not show them again? The fact that they were related to various news items from the early-to-mid 1980s didn't stop UK Gold repeating Carrott's Lib in the mid 1990', and very welcome they were too. Even if the routine sniggering at the contents of the Protect And Survive leaflet would have seriously freaked out our terrified-by-seeing-Threads little minds if we'd seen it go out at the time of it's original transmission. Come on, ITV3, Paramount Comedy, hell, even Men and Motors, pull your commissioning fingers out and get it shown (or, more realistically, UKNova).

Of course, the very moment we get appointed to the BBC Trust (WHICH WILL HAPPEN), we're going to make damn well sure there's a TV equivalent of BBC7. All Comrade Dad, Cool It, A Kick Up The 80's, Morning Sarge, Q, Comic Asides and I Lovett, all of the time.

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An Update A Day: Day Five

Yes, it's very late, and yes, it's nearly 5am on Saturday morning (hey, we've been out drinking copious amounts of alcohol and driving 65mph go-karts all day, and thankfully not in that order), so you'll have to excuse a slightly half-hearted Update A Day update for today.

Luckily, you won't have to excuse anything at all. Despite everything, we've pulled out the stops to give you a SOLID GOLD YOUTUBE SPECIAL UPDATE for the weekend. Oh yes. It's magical. It's fantastical. It's the greatest thing we've found on YouTube after the Richard Massingham public information films that we'd put on there ourselves. What can it be? It's more majestic than we could ever have imagined. It's...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpfEK9oeq80
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE_D61oob4Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mChHhP9KA_U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbqeOyjRYHg



That's right, the first ever episode of Prisoner Cell Block H, in full, in four parts. Yes, while it might well be some way away from the Lexie Patterson* Golden Age, it still had Vinegar Tits (indisputably the greatest ever name for a character in a recurring drama), Lizzie Birdsworth, the mighty Bea Smith, and of course officer Meg Jackson.

(*We're not ashamed in saying Lexie Patterson is the character in a soap opera we have fancied the most out of all the soap opera characters we've ever fancied ever. Yes, even including Charlene Mitchell and Beth Willis. She'd be around 47 years old now. We probably still 'would'.)

The Freaktastic last episode is up there in full as well, as are several other seminal episodes. If nothing else, at least it gives us something to use our internet for now the football season has ended so we don't need PPStream any more.

Six hundred BrokenTV bonus points are on offer for anyone who can point us in the direction of a YouTubed copy of the episode of PCBH where Lexie gets off with a 'garbo' so she can claim she's up the duff so she doesn't get knifed for being a 'lag'. You don't get this sort of plotline in Emmerdale, you know.

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An Update A Day: Day Four and a Bit

To: PepsiCo, Inc.
700 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577

Dear Pepsi,

I feel I must complain to you in the strongest possible terms about what has happened to me upon consuming some of your popular Pepsi Max soft drink. I shall start my story from the beginning, and with pictures.

En route to a local bar with a few of my multi-ethnic model agency colleagues, I noticed a can of your 'Pepsi Max' soft drink affixed to a blue bar, somehow suspended in mid-air just in front of me. Although I can't be fully sure, from my position by this blue bar, each end of the bar seemed to be labelled - one end as 'xam', the other with 'orez', not quite sure why. In order to be fully sure what I saw in front of me was not some kind of urban mirage, I elected to pick up this can, at which point the world around me began to spin at an alarming rate.

Desperate to steady myself, I grabbed on to the only thing I could still see clearly - the magic hovering can affixed to the blue bar. This did little to help my feeling of extreme motion sickness.

Unsure what else could be done at this point, I decided to take a drink from the can, in the hope that the carbonated liquid inside would somehow calm my nerves.

This is where things took a turn for the worse. I found myself propelled to an alternate world, where suddenly I was completely unable to move my arms, legs or body. My eyes darted nervously around, hoping somebody would be able to help me. Unable to utter a plea for help, I could do nought but bobble my head around furiously, in the desperate hope that someone, anyone would understand my predicament.

In a mixture of relief and abject panic, I noticed that I was situated in front of two young women who appeared to be giants. I had no way of knowing if they were somehow responsible for my being in this desparate situation, if they would be able to save me, or if this was just the beginning of something much worse. I continued to flail my head around, unable even to mouth the word 'help', hoping against hope that they were benevolent girl-giants. O! Sweet relief! They appeared to have noticed me, and the look upon their face seemed to be one of understanding. Surely they would be able to help me.

My relief was all too short lived. Their expressions seemed to turn to one of mocking joy at my entrapment. They did little more than taunt my helpless form by laughing in my helpless face, even going as far as kissing me, in some sort of depraved display of jolly glee. As my confused form tried to signal outside of the vehicle I was trapped in, just in case there was anyone else who could possibly help me, the evil girl-giants drove away, far away, far from any possible hope of rescue.

It is now three weeks since that original experience, and I remain trapped, affixed to the dashboard of the car belonging to the two giantesses. I cannot bring myself to relate the experiences I have had to endure since my initial capture, but suffice to say that I feel this entire experience hardly qualifies as 'maxing' my 'life'. As such, I must insist that you change the slogan for your current promotional campaign to something along the lines of "Pepsi Max: Run The Risk Of Inhabiting A Nightmarish World Where Your Entire Body Is Somehow Substituted With A Plastic Figurine And You Suffer A Series Of Torments Where You Long For Nothing More Than The Sweet Release Of Death", which I feel would be more accurate.

Cheers,
Ian Bloke.

PS. Oh, and "help", obviously.

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An Update A Day: Day, erm, Four

Yes, yes. So much for 'an update a day', but BrokenTV's computer decided not to work at all yesterday, which messed things up a bit*. Today, it seems to be working, but the CPU fan has gone a bit haywire, doing nothing for a while, then running constantly while the CPU temperature climbs up bit by bit. While this is pretty annoying, by running Speedfan, we can keep tabs on our computer's 'core temperate', so we can switch it off just before it explodes. It's at a nicely safe 59°C right now, so let's see if we can get a couple of updates out before it explodes, potentially killing us all in the process.

(*And then we realised that us saving an early draft of this update just after the original means that the "published by" date is messed up, which makes the above slightly nonsensical. It's actually now the 24th of May.)

(PART TWO)

Of course, you'd think what with all that time we spent standing outside John Lennon Airport over the last few days, selling the printouts of this Wikipedia image to fat men in replica shirts, we could afford a new PC. You'd be wrong, because it turned out everyone had cleverly paid us with printouts of this Wikipedia image. Those loveable scallies. But anyway, it's time for:

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

CPU temperature still at a non-explody 59°C, but we'd better press on all the same.

5.
1976 (Glasgow) Bayern Munich 1 St. Etienne 0

A horrid shade of brown (although they were probably aiming for 'gold'), the Pac-Man typeface (which doesn't work an anything other than a Pac-Man cabinet), and two large flags stuck into, as far as we can tell, Cornwall and southern Denmark. And the main illustration? The UEFA logo. It's this sort of lackadaisical approach that M Platini is working so hard to revamp. Speaking of which, what price monkey referees for the 2009 Final? 57%

4.
1972 (Rotterdam) Inter 0 Ajax 2

It's a great big anthropomorphic European Cup. In a way, we kind of respect the quickly fashioned scrawl presumably done by the 1970s Dutch equivalent of rubbish Daily Mirror cartoonist Tom Johnson, but in another more accurate way, couldn't they have come up with something a bit better? It's a European showpiece, for flip's sake. 52%

3.
1961 (Berne) Benfica 3 Barcelona 2

"Meu deus! I have kicked my penalty so wide it has not just gone over the bar, but out of the entire continent! A not very accurate representation of it, to boot!" etc. 44%

2.
1969 (Madrid) Milan 4 Ajax 1

Tsk. If this was from the early 1950s, we might have let it slide, but coming up with something this tacky in 1969? It looks like it could just as easily be the cover of a pamphlet on farming subsidies issued at an EEC seminar. 26%

1.
1973 (Belgrade) Ajax 1 Juventus 0

Aieeeee! Our eyes! Now, we can't be sure, partly because we're too young and not sex perverts, but this is probably taken from a generic design of all manner of early 1970s pornography. Especially so when you notice that the figure at the top of the cup silhouette looks like a kind of "18+" disclaimer sticker. At that font used for the team name - so horrible it even makes Comic Sans look quite good (and not the typographic equivalent of a 'comedy' tie worn by an annoying middle-manager who reckons he's a bit 'wacky' it really is). Despite what Life On Mars told us, life in 1973 wasn't all Morecambe and Wise Keep Britain Tidy posters and crimes that weren't committed by the person you'd thought they were going to be by, but rather by the other person introduced to the storyline at about the same point as the original suspect, some of it was quite horrid. 12%

-

And so, with our feature on old football programmes which we'd thought was going to turn out better than it did (no, it wasn't the comedy goldmine we'd originally anticipated), and our CPU code temperature explode-o-meter now sitting at 64°C, we're going to sigh resignedly, click on 'publish post' and hope for the best. Maybe our catch-up feature a bit later on (we said an update per day, and we mean it) will prove to be better.

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