Yeah, we know. But we loaded Photoshop and everything, so it’s a shame not to use it.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Bullshit or Not: 1. The Daily Mail
The first in what might potentially be a series of infographics.
As is the norm with these things, click for the full-sized version. Those evil profiteering illegal pirate types Wikipedia, IMDB, Last.fm and Amazon, eh?
Sunday, 3 April 2011
“No Flipping” Point In Buying The Region 2 Release, More Like (The Larry Sanders Show Boxset)
If you’re one of our several dozen followers on Twitter, you may have had the pleasure of reading our excited squealing noises about our Region 1 DVD boxset of The Complete Larry Sanders Show. We refuse to apologise for those onomatopoeic tweets, because we remain convinced that it’s – no exaggeration – the greatest DVD box set we’ve ever seen. Not only is The Larry Sanders Show one of the three greatest US sitcoms in history (alongside Seinfeld and Arrested Development), but the bewildering amount of care that has gone into the extras is above and beyond what we could realistically have expected from such a set.
Best of all, the Region 2 boxset has just been released, meaning those without multiregion DVD players can now wallow in the many extras! Except, no. Almost all of the extras have been stripped from the R2 set, meaning UK Sanders fans miss out on a load of smashing bonus features, as well as having to put up with a less attractive box for the set:
So, how much better is the Region 1 version? Well, it’s time for us to take a comprehensive look in an update we’re going to call BROKENTV’S LOOKAROUND CAFE (of the R1 Sanders Boxset).
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
“My Wife Are 17 Years Pregnant” (S4C Viewing Figures)
As part of Operation Get Much Less In Return For All The Taxes You Pay, the coalition government has put in place plans for the budget of Welsh-language channel S4C to be cut by 25% by 2015, 'cos hey, no-one watches it do they? OR DO THEY? The numbers shall TELL ALL.
First up, a quick statsweep.
Going by the figures listed at nationmaster.com, 59,600,000 people in the UK speak English. Meanwhile, going by figures supplied by the Welsh Language Board, a total of 611,000 people currently speak and understand the Welsh language. So, are the most successful English-language programmes attracting a higher proportion of the potential viewers than those for Welsh-speakers? We'll take a look at the figures for one week of the last four quarters, taking in shows from BBC One and ITV1, comparing them to S4C.
(Right after “the jump”, if you’re reading this from the front page.)
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
The Top Ten Simpsons Commercials
Ah, The Simpsons, America’s favourite family. Or, as it's known nowadays, The Simpsonsisnotasgoodasitusedtobe. Which of course is true, but it's fair to say that most new episodes at least contain a good several minutes of sniggerworthy content, mainly at the start of episodes where the writing team throw in jokes that only need to be on nodding terms at best with the plot of each episode. Problem is, the rest of each episode is often filled in with pointless celebrity cameos where a famous celebrity gets to appear, mention who they are, disappear again without really having contributed anything, and then get used all over the publicity for that week's episode so that fans of that celebrity watch it.
However, the Simpsons writing team's ability to keep things cracking along in sporadic thirty-second bursts means that the Simpson clan are still suited to one form of media - the world of corporate nadcupping that is television advertising. Join us now as we take a look at the ten best television commercials starring The Simpsons from the last twenty years. That we could find. On YouTube.
Monday, 21 March 2011
TV Presenter Relief, More Like*
(*No, not in a Jamie Theakson sense.)
Okay, first of all, we concur that the most important aspect of it all is that the largest possible amount of money is raised for good causes. That’s why it exists, and it’s tremendously good at that. Okay? Okay.
Right. Why doesn’t Comic Relief have more than naff all actual comedy in it any more, eh? Yes, yes, rose-tinted noses might forget that the early Red Nose Days had a lot of filler in them (you don’t see that Carla Lane one-off with Wendy Craig and Jean Boht waxing wry in a nightclub washroom cropping up on any ‘best of’ compilations, do you?), but no matter how how good or bad the standard, at least it was all identifiable as comedy. Each fresh Red Nose Day seems to be taken up with yer standard TV presenter types getting to announce dance-offs, boy bands and the like, with any actual comedy restricted to pre-filmed sequences.
Here’s a quick look at the presenters for Red Nose Day 2011 (the proper bit, not the pre-recorded highlights show that goes out at a billion o’clock in the morning, which clearly doesn’t count). Actual comedians in bold:
19:00 - 20:05 Michael McIntyre, Claudia Winkleman
20:05 - 22:00 Graham Norton, Davina McCall
21:10 - 22:00 Dermot O'Leary, Davina McCall
22:00 - 23:10 Lenny Henry, Fearne Cotton
23:10 - 00:00 Jonathan Ross, Claudia Winkleman
00:00 - 00:40 Jonathan Ross, Claudia Winkleman, Jimmy Carr
00:40 - 02:15 Alan Carr, Fearne Cotton, Claudia Winkleman, Davina McCall
Noticeably sparse, aren’t they? And the number of female comedians given the chance to host: zero. All a shame, and while you could indeed claim that maximising the amount of cash coming in is paramount, it does seem to be the case that the vast majority of money Comic Relief makes is raised before the show even starts, with the various crisp-wine-T-shirt-toy-based tie-ins having been running for weeks beforehand. So come on, why not at least treat us to an hour hosted by Jo Brand and Sean Lock? Jon Richardson and Sarah Millican? Vic, Bob and Alice Beer (who isn’t a comedian but hey, the hosts of Families At War, reunited as last)? We’d wager the vast majority of Britons won’t get scared off as soon as they see someone who hasn’t appeared in a bikini on the front of FHM, we promise.
Anyway, while all that was going on, we took the opportunity tweet YouTube clips of actual comedy from Red Nose Nights past, each time something boring or harrowing was on telly (hey, we still think they’d make a lot more money if a £10 donation could give you access to a Sky Box Office channel where the appeal films are replaced with classic comedy clips). And, as suggested by Twitter’s Ian Symes, here they are, all embedded in one Firefox-buggering page, just after the ‘Read post’ link…
Sunday, 20 March 2011
The Internet in 1994
In 1896, one of the first Lumière brothers films, “L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat”, was shown to audiences. The minute-long one-shot showed footage of a train arriving at La Ciotat station, and was shot at an angle which made it appear as if the train was about to smash into the left-front side of the theatre. Reports of early screenings suggest that many members of the audience, what with the entire concept of seeing moving pictures of previously recorded events being previously unimaginable, screamed in panic and ran to the back of the room, fearing that the somehow silent and monochrome train would smush their 19th century selves into person pâté.
Whip-pan to 98 years on, and The Web was the Next Big Thing. While not too many people actually had home access to it themselves, it seemed everyone at least knew of it (“The girls of the internet… rowr, I’d like to go on-line with them!” – H. Simpson). Indeed, many of them might have paid good money to spend an hour at an Internet Cafe much like the one we visited in Wrexham around that time, where they could have spent upwards of ten minutes waiting for a heavily compressed GIF of a cartoon steam train to load. What with the entire concept of being ‘jacked in’ to the InfoMotorway having been unimaginable to the undeveloped 1994 brains of these early adopters, many assumed the postage stamp-sized graphic was somehow real, meaning many screamed in panic and ran to the back of the room, and were subsequently banned from the cafe meaning they had to go to the one in Chester instead. It was an exciting time
Join us now as we take a look at issue one of .net magazine, the first (we think) publication dedicated to all things on-line to hit Britain’s newsagents, from December 1994, back when it was still quicker to read things from a magazine than on the web, and the word ‘online’ still had a hyphen in it. At this point, the internet was how popular?
16.5 million people. That’s not in the UK. That’s worldwide. Jeepers, eh?
Sunday, 13 March 2011
Thursday, 17 February 2011
The Ten Most Sinister Cereal Box Mascots… EVER!
Ah, cereal. If you’re going to forgo that glorious prospect of an extra 20 minutes in bed before work to spend it blearily munching your way through a bowlful of wheat and preservatives, you might as well have something interesting to gawp at. Nowadays, we have Adrian Chiles’ fleshy lava lamp of a face to peer at over our Health Flakes, but what of the people from History’s The Past? Why, they had little more interesting to stare at than the cereal packet they’d just poured from, and the cartoon animal mascots thereon. Sometimes, they were Grreat. Often, they were disarmingly stylised cockerels. Occasionally, they were a triumvirate of onomatopoeia. But, now and then, they would TEAR YOUR BARELY-AWAKE SOUL FROM YOUR TWITCHINGLY LIMP FRAME, or maybe just be a bit rubbish. Join us now, as we spend the boring bits of tonight’s 10 O’Clock Live typing about THE TEN MOST SINISTER CEREAL BOX MASCOTS… EVER.
10. CRAP BEAR POPS (Super Sugar Crisp)
Hello! I’m a cartoon bear. No, I’m not very interestingly drawn. I’m moderately unsettling, if anything. My name is Keith Jenkins, and I had dreams of stardom, man.
I admit, I failed the audition at Hanna-Barbara, but I’m happy with this gig I was given by the employment agency. “Just go along to Post Cereals Incorporated”, they said, “they’ll find something for you to do.” The first few days were a bit dull, it’s true. “Photocopy these.” “Pop down the Post Office with this.” “Put on this blue pullover.” You know the score. On my third day, though… there was a bit of a kerfuffle. “Oh shit! The William Of Tyre impersonator hasn’t turned up!”, they squawked, “You… newbie! Get in front of that camera!”
I did what I could, but, y’know, minimum wage isn’t that much of an incentive, quite frankly.
9. AYATOLLAHOOPS (Wheaties)
Of course! All American kids are just mad about Iran! Though to be fair, this was the last in a series of ill-considered Axis-Of-Evil-themed giveaways, and after Iranian licence plate giveaway didn’t prove any more popular than the earlier “Saddam Hussein Lookalike Disguise Kit” and “North Korean Movie Director Kidnap And Imprisonment Playset”, General & Mills cut their losses and returned to more traditional trinkets.
8. HANDS WHERE WE CAN SEE THEM, POPS (Crispy Numbers)
An old man lures children to his house with the promise of sugary cereal, and then he gets his organ out and ADD JIMMY CARR STYLE GENERIC MOLESTATION PUNCHLINE HERE.
7. WEARILY EXPRESSED DISDAIN CLUSTERS (Pep Wheat Flakes)
It’s a situation as old as time itself. Your father wants to sit across from you, shooting you a loving but quite frankly disappointed look that says “come on, you’re 24 years old and still sponging off me, using my electricity, borrowing my car, eating MY cereal when you should be out looking for a job”, but he needs to go to work, and can’t stick around until 11am when you finally get out of bed. Luckily, the marketing department of Kellogg’s Pep Wheat Flakes have anticipated this. Buy their brand, and their nominated spokesdad will shoot a warm glare with just that special tinge of disappointment at your offspring, on your behalf.
6. RACE KRISPIES (Sugar Coated Rice Krinkles)
Oh sweet jeepers. We should be thankful they haven’t called them “Lice Klinkres” or something.
5. ASPHIXI-BITS (Alpha-Bits)
Now, this is quite frankly terrifying. Sure, at first glimpse that stylised cartoon child seems happy enough, but just see how crammed his mouth is with Alpha-Bits. That cereal is so dangerously tasty, he’s gone and packed his maw with so many oaty letters he can’t even close his mouth. Forced petrifyingly into a pained grin, his skin grows ever paler, save for a strip of flushed flesh below his eyeline, presumably because his eyes are watering so much. He closes his eyes at the jawcracking agony, barely even able to contemplate that if it weren’t for the air squeezing through the gaps in the letters O and R, he’d already be dead. In one last desperate throw of the dice, he plunges his spoon into the bowl, hoping against hope that the four letters he’ll pluck out of the remaining Bits will be ‘H’, ‘E’, ‘L’ and ‘P’. In perhaps the cruellest twist of all, the letters he manages to fish out of the receptacle merely spell the word “OATS”, the very foodstuff that is rapidly hastening his demise.
A sugar-sprinkled tragedy.
4.THE FLESH OF THE CORN CHRIST (Post Sugar Coated Corn Flakes)
“Hi kids! Remember, when you’re eating Post Sugar Coated Corn Flakes, you’re eating flakes of my actual corpse, or the corpses of my family! Nom nom nom, eh?”
3. CRAZY OLD MAN FROM UP THE ROAD CRISPIES (King Vitaman)
“Hi! I used to be Crazy Pete, from Crazy Pete’s Crazy Cave O’ Carpets. You may remember my wacky TV spots on channel 17, where I’d wear my Crazy Crown and jape around with my wife Queen Quarpet. Then… things started to go a little fuzzy. I’m told I spent all thirty seconds of one live TV commercial shrieking that I’d give away a free Axminster to anyone bringing three dead wasps to the store. Then, the men came, and I had to go away for a while.”
“But now, I’m back! And I’m bored of carpets. I make breakfast cereal now. It’s nice. Would you like some? Go on, have some. Try some. Have some. HAVE SOME. A-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
2. AAAAAAAGHPLE JACKS, MORE LIKE (Apple Jacks)
“Come on, Billy. What’ll happen if you don’t get your math homework done before bedtime?” “You’re going to lock me in the closet with the scary man from the Apple Jacks box?” “That’s right, I’ll lock you in the closet with the scary man from the Apple Jacks box. For five whole minutes.” [SOUND OF FRANTIC LONG DIVISION BEING SCRIBBLED INTO A NOTEBOOK] “Good boy, Billy.”
1. I AM GOING TO KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP CRUNCH (Sugar Smacks)
Aaaargh! Yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s a bloody true one. Clowns can be utterly terrifying.
AAAAAAAAARGH! Especially when they’re born with eminently prominent disfigurements that – while many people would seek to cover, draw attention away from or have reductive surgery to remove their abnormalities – they prefer to plaster garish make-up over it, so everyone can get a gooooood look at them. Come on, stare! Look at the freak! LOOK AT ME! You were laughing at me before! Why aren’t you laughing now? WHY AREN’T YOU LAUGHING NOW? THIS GUN IS LOADED!
AAAARGH! AAAARGH! AAAARGH! AAAARGH! AAAARGH! AAAARGH! Just… if you were an American kid growing up in the 1960s, and you had to get to sleep knowing you’d be spending part of the morning staring at this packaging, would you get ANY sleep at all? No. No, you bloody wouldn’t. No wonder so many of them turned to drugs when they became 1980s grown-ups.
Those three examples aren’t all there were. BrokenTV can exclusively reveal there was a fourth clown image piloted for Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks, only to be dropped before launch after focus groups deemed it ‘not as scary as the others’.
And here is that rejected box artwork:
“They’re terroriffic!”
(Cereal box images taken from the excellent The Imaginary World. Go there. Go there NOW.)
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
New US Small Cable Channel Sitcom Of The Weeeeek
“Remember when people were content to be unambitious and sleep ‘til 11, and just hang out with their friends, and no occupations whatsoever, and content to just work a couple hours a week at a coffee shop?” “Huh, I thought that died out a long time ago.” “Not in Portland. Portland is a city where young people go to retire.” THE DREAM OF THE 90s IS ALIVE IN PORTLAND.
We’ve just watched the first episode of PORTLANDIA, the new sitcom from US cable network IFC, and know what? We think we’ll be sticking with it. Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s a series where it never really stopped being the 1990s. Where flannel shirts never lost their allure, where independently owned coffee shops remained just about viable, where Al Gore might as well (have) be(en) President Of The USA. And, from a minute in on the clip just below, it’s got a brilliant theme tune (that isn’t actually the theme tune, it’s a song that opens the series, but shush).
Pleasingly, the ninetiesness of the show isn’t reflected by merely throwing in a load of references to pop culture of the age (the only direct ref in the entire opening episode was about The Jim Rose Sideshow Circus, which is easily obscure enough to be permitted), but more about the overall ‘feel’ of the age. Idealistic slackers spend a lot of time ‘inventing’ new pasttimes like ‘Adult Hide And Seek’ or fret so much over the organic nature of the chicken on the menu in a diner they insist on visiting the farm that reared it before ordering their meal. There’s even a role in the opening episode played by Steve Buscemi, the most 1990s actor there is.
Going by the opening episode, it’s not yet mindblowingly hilarious, but then, we have only seen the opening episode, and how many opening episodes of anything are that good? V few. Larry Sanders, yes, but we’re part way through a big update on how wonderful the DVD box set of that is.
Certainly a series to stick with, in essence. If you put a gun to our heads and demanded we make a lazy comparison with two other off-kilter comedy series, we’d run out of the room screaming for the police, but if you asked up the same question more politely, we’d say “a bit like The League Of Gentleman meets Mr Show”. Yes, it’s exec produced by Lorne Michaels, but we really do think it’s more likely to lean towards the comedic standard of 30 Rock than Saturday Bloody Night Bloody Live.
