Christmas Day Television Musings: All Timings Approximate

Look, if we were at home for the things below, we'd have "live rewound" them. We weren't at home, so couldn't. Which makes this update quite dull and devoid of Topfield screen grabs.

BBC One, 2.29pm. BrokenTV's Dad points out the awfulness of Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris's "Dance Wiv Me", and the family television is tuned to ITV. BrokenTV agrees, marking the first time BrokenTV has agreed with BrokenTV's Dad about pop music since about 1984.

ITV1, 2.51pm. ITV1 broadcasts the part of "Bean" where Mr Bean cheerily waves 'hello' at the hairy biker, only to censor out the bit where the titular Bean receives what Still President Bush recently described as "not using not all five fingers" to wave hello back. Such censorship is all very well in this post-Ross/Brand cultural wasteland you might say, but ITV left the following scenes intact, so the relentlessly cheery icon of Britishness somehow went from good naturedly waving enthusiastic greetings to all of America. to suddenly giving it all The Finger, without any reasoning why this would be the case. Still, it's probably not Christmas Day without ITV managing to bugger it up somehow.

BBC One, 3.09pm. Hurrah for the BBC! They've lined up their best schedule on the 25th of December for a good few years, even with the slightly rubbish Shark's Tale on after the Queen or not. However! If you're basing this schedule largely on the most beloved of all Aardman creations, try not to get the name of the dog wrong in your continuity captions - and it looks even worse if you've been using them in your (wonderful) festive idents all Christmas. "Wallace and Gromitt" indeed! Boh.

BBC One, 6.01pm. BrokenTV's sister reneges on her promise not to talk over Doctor Whom by spending much of the proceding hour going "no, I don't like her", "ooh, is he the new one, then?", and "They should just regenerate William Hartnell". BrokenTV - as the youngest, shuffling in the rickety chair, hurrumphs loudly, to no avail. Merry Festivus, everyone!

BBC One, 8.36pm. "Oh, bugger. We've got home just too late to see Wallace and Gromit from the start."

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An Early Christmas Present to All Readers

Admittedly, one someone else has made. But it makes for an easy update for us. Ahem. It's a webpage hosting a program called: iPlayer Downloader. It allows you to download programmes from the BBC iPlayer, just like Stephen Fry predicted his mum would soon be doing.

If you're anything like us, it might all seem to be written in a special language understood only by people who can remember every word Fred Harris uttered on episodes of Me And My Micro, but skip to the part marked "Pre-built Windows GUI", and you should be fine.

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Scariest Thing On Telly This Christmas? The BBC HD Preview Loop.

Ever concerned about the needs of their viewers, the BBC have introduced a High Definition version of the test card.

Check out that linearity of the grey scale, there. Woo. There's only one problem with it.

They've also resampled the original image of Carole Hersee, so that even more of her terrifying clown is visible than ever. This means our childhood nightmares may return. The ones about switching over to a channel displaying the test card, only to see the hair of the clown fluttering ever so slightly, as if he's realised we were about to switch to him, and he quickly moved back into position. We edge nearer to the screen, checking to see if it's just our minds playing tricks. As our faces are now just inches from the screen, the clown's head snaps suddently to face us head on, his felt eyes burning a message of sheer unimaginable hatred into our now panicked faces, his evil, knowing smile somehow becoming even more sinister.

We back away, now noticing that the photo of the girl isn't actually a photo either, rather she's frozen utterly stiff, her eyes flickering frantically, her hand now slowly making minute circles on the blackboard, desperately trying to write the word "help" with the chalk. But the girl doesn't have the chalk in her hand any more. The Clown has taken the chalk. She won't be writing anything.

We flick to Granada, in a vain attempt to make it go away. Maybe Jobfinder can save us. No, wait, that's crazy talk. This can't be happening. It's lack of sleep. Surely. We flip back to BBC-1, to try and put our minds at rest. Only now the clown has gone, the game of noughts and crosses now abandoned, the poor girl still petrified in both senses of the word. Is she trying to signal something to us with her eyes? Her pupils are gesturing toward the curtain. But, before we can look, there is the faintest patter of clothy stumps. We turn, to see the curtain twitch almost imperceptibly. Utterly shaking with fear and with clammy hands, we inch toward the curtain. It can't be. It couldn't possibly be. It was probably the cat. It must be the cat. It has to be the cat. Didn't our mum let the cat out earlier?

"I am made of felt and I haven't got any legs or feet. I just have these two stumps and a piece of chalk. But I'm still going to GET YOU."

So now, all that, in glorious 1080p. Yeah, thanks a frigging bunch, the BBC.

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Adventures Of Two Unconvincingly Fake CGI Snowmen and a One

Our oath to update the blog every day in December was always bound to falter, what with us spending the last three nights at different Christmas shindigs, and the last three mornings nursing fragile heads. Right now, a stomach that feels like a ten car pile up on an icy M62 prevents us from making the 'comeback' post anything too strenuous, so we're pleased to see the nicely-timed final part of Applemask's wonderful look back at festive BBC Christmas idents. This time, with end credits you can actually read! Or at least you would, were they not in a weird font. Nonetheless, splendid stuff, and the three parts together make for an enjoyable way to kill half an hour if you're stuck in bed with a killer hangover and a moderately-charged netbook within grabbing distance.



Interestingly, for the most part we can remember seeing most of the BBC2 idents in the clips, but not many of the BBC1 idents. Oh hang on, not 'interestingly', the other one.

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Don't Diss The Hart

Last night's Screen Wipe was excellent, as might be expected, but we've a straw to pick with guest contributor John Comedian (oh, alright, we don't know his name). Sneering at the ineptitude of David Liebe Hart (who, as the cool kids all know, is also a part of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim) just doesn't work, because that's pretty much his deliberate 'gig'. It's like dismissing the work of Tommy Cooper, because he was rubbish at magic. Or us, for writing this blog.

Here's audiovisual proof of the first part of the above. Tim and Eric make an appearance on Hart's "Junior Christian Teaching Bible Lesson Program". Utterly surreal, and quite marvellous.

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What Merry Hell Is This?

Well, there hasn't been a new low for television in, what, six months? Or if you read The Mail or The Express, about three days. But anyway, earlier on today we took a wander through the Sky EPG to see if it's worth resubscribing after six months away. The main content on the Family Package channels was the usual fare of The Simpsons, Open All Hours, Keeping Up Appearances, Robin's Nest, Road Wars, The Vicar Of Dibley, Roulette Nation and the like, so we decided against it, but not before stumbling over channel 885 (yes, we went that far up trying to find something interesting). On there, we found something quite interesting. Though not necessarily in a good way.

Taking up most of the afternoon on WatchmeTV.TV - a channel in the wastelands of the 'Specialist' section of the EPG* - is a four (FOUR!) hour show called Santavision. That's it just up there.

(*'TV Guide' > "0 More..." > "7 Specialist". It's third from bottom of that list, just before Psychic TV and the OceanFinance channel, neither of which we are making up. No, genuinely.)

What happens on Santavision? Well, here's what we think has happened. One of the companies behind the highly dubious "How Many 0's In This Picture PHONE OR TEXT NOW £2.50 PER CALL" "quiz" "channels" has realised the bottom has completely fallen out of that market, possibly since The Real Hustle on BBC Three ran a special episode showing everyone how to set up your own dubious "quiz" "channel" on Sky. In a big panicky mess, the people behind the channel have had a great big brainstorming session with their entire team of media creatives.

After three hours of lame suggestions ("Erm, what number am I thinking of? Text in your guess, and win fifty quid!" "Guess my postcode and win a Blu-Ray player!" "Eighty-six cups and a ball - text in now!"), a meek voice belonging to someone at the back of the room who hadn't spoken for half an hour and was desperate to seem part of things whimpered out the words "Santa's Grotto, but on the telly?".

You have all disappointed Santa. I kicked a reindeer when I heard of what you've done.

"You dolt! How are we supposed to cash in on that? You berk-brained buffoon!" shreaked the alpha-est of males in Meeting Room 2A.

"Pfft... I don't know. Get parents to text in the names of their children, and we'll read them out on air?"

At this point, Tom "Tommy" Tomlinson, CEO of QuizgasmUK.tv and HotAuntiesLive18PlusOnly.eu looked at his watch, glanced over to the pair of baliffs furiously ringing the doorbell through the frosted glass, sighed and whispered "look, it's probably an idea to stop talking for a bit now. That's the best we're going to get, I say we run with it. Now, the back door is locked and bolted, yeah? Anyway, you ring round the presenters on our books, and see who won't mind doing it."

"But, we'll still need that killer USP."

"OH FOR CHRIST'S SA... [reverts to a whisper] Yeah, the kids go on either a 'nice' or 'naughty' list. Now, does anyone know Enormous Ken's mobile number?"

This is what we're speculating could have, yet quite certainly didn't, happen. We'd better cover our backs, as this'll probably turn up on the first page of Google hits for Santavision UK.

There'll be no Wii Music for the above children this year.

Yes, that's right. Santavision UK. A fairly disinterested presenter, dressed as Santa Claus, asks for parents to text in the names of their children, putting them either on a list of "good" or "naughty" sprogs. In a way, it's genius. Little Timmy won't clean his room? Have Father Christmas tell the viewers in every Sky household throughout the UK and Ireland just what a little bastard he is. That'll get the little shit picking up his Lego set in no time. Best of all, you can even pay to expose Little Timmy's reluctance to eat sprouts over the web! It costs just £3 of your child benefit to give your unruly offspring nightmares from now until the 25th? Barg!

The way it's presented is shambolic, even by the standard of Sky channels in the EPG stratosphere. For no reason at all, Santa will stop talking, leaving the channel with dead air for twenty or thirty seconds at a time. It doesn't seem to be the case that he's expecting adverts to be running when he does this, as every ad break is preceded by him saying how "Santa needs a little break now, boys and girls. This means there's at least a 30% chance of people happening across the programme for the first time, only to be welcomed by a mute Mr Claus staring unblinkingly at the viewer, all the while forlornly wishing he'd taken his mum's advice and took that short-term deal on Gems.tv instead.

Note how "Santa" is so heavily bearded, the tots hopefully won't realise when a different actor starts his shift.

Why stop there, though? If this proves to be as much of a ethically-objectionable hit as "quiz" "channels", ITV are sure to leap onto the wagon. Overnight's could be committed to having Brian Off Of Big Brother reading out a list of viewers' personal nemeses. "And with the clock coming up to 3am, let's have a look at the list of your nominated unrepentent girlfriend gropers! Gary from Sheffield, you really shouldn't ought to have done that, you fucker... [chuckles] that's from Pete and Michelle!"

While it might not take late-night ITV back to the halcyon days of Bea Smith, Alain Delon and James Whale When He Was Good, it's certainly better than repeats of Loose Women. Or, at the very least, have the Loose Women reading out the shitlist, with their audience making noises appropriate for each misdeed. At the end of each week, the scoundrel that elicited the most outraged reaction could be brought on to answer three simple questions, express some cursory remorse, and possibly walk away with a Freeview+ PVR. Job done.

How come it's only £1.50 by text, but £3 on the web?

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Must Be The Russians!!!!1

It's December the 15th already! That means we've gone through half of the month without even posting one embedded YouTube clip of Bad BBC VT Engineer Acting.

Phew, that was a close call.

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A New Game For Everyone To Play

On last night's Strictly Come Dancing, this apparently happened:



We didn't see it as we were watching the new Richard Herring DVD, which is ace, but it seems there was a bit of a cockup with the voting, and the show ended ten minutes early, to be filled with trailers. We're genuinely disappointed with not seeing this, as we love it when telly goes wrong (as opposed to when our telly goes wrong). But anyway, the BBC have made a mistake - who is going to pretend they're the most outraged even though this clearly doesn't matter at all? In these situations, there's usually a three-way clamour to 'be' the most offended between the user comment sections of YouTube, The Daily Mail and Digital Spy. We've taken ten quotes from the three - can you use your skill and judgement to work out which quote is from which source?

It's a bit like the final round of Every Second Counts, only there's no teletext TV on offer*, and coding the whole thing so it's a proper interactive quiz is clearly beyond us. There are four quotes from Daily Mail Online, and three from YouTube and Digital Spy.

(*My, how excited we were to discover the 'secret' Ceefax page that had the Every Seconds Counts logo on it, so it could be displayed on the telly the contestants could win. They didn't just plug a BBC Micro into it, they actually put the whole page on proper Ceefax. The Beeb did things properly in those days. In case any of our readers are planning on time-travelling back to 1988 to see what we mean here, it was on page 196.)

The quotes:

"WHAT A JOKE! I pay my license fee for this fix?! I feel cheated!"

"The BBC have ripped off everyone who voted and spent their money."

"once again the BBC have hoodwinked their viewers."

"It's a complete swizz and we the public are being played for fools by the BBC."

"They should have showed the test card."

"Terrible from BBC, why still allow the judges to vote at such a late and important stage."

"It just scuppers my confidence in the BBC when they go and do something like this."

"Get rid of the licence fee its a con !"

"What a con! I can't believe the BBC is playing games again in phone vote shows."

"I'm not convinced it's the collapse of British broadcasting as a few people on here have suggested."

Blimey, that last one was a bit of a surprise, eh? The answers are in the comments section.

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Pre Awards Show Off

Both regular readers of this blog may recall that we generally round off each calendar year with several thousand words essentially slagging off those who have disappointed us over the previous fifty-two weeks. A bit like Frank Costanza every Festivus, come to think of it. If there's any room left over, we'll probably mention the things that we liked, too. You know, ground breaking revelations like "Peep Show was good this year", that sort of thing.

Generally, we'll spend about thirty seconds tapping in some spurious headings and then putting them in bold, to try to get away with calling the entire thing a kind of "awards" ceremony. In truth of course, there are likely to be twice as many brickbats as bouquets, and it's all a rather limp excuse for a slightly tired old blog to recapture the form that once saw it get a two word review on the culture section of the BBC website. We might even chuck in a few swears, so we can pretend to ourselves that we're like Charlie Brooker.

This year, things are going to be different. We still expect to be in a White Lightning-fuelled fug for the duration of the festivities, as tradition dictates, and we'll still be putting out a spittle-flecked diatribe about how Balls Of Steel hasn't been cancelled yet, but with one notable difference. In an event we'll probably end up trying to pass off as a tribute to the early Stoneybridge sketches from Absolutely, this year's BrokenTV Awards are venturing into the digital age, and will be presented in video form. Yes, really.

We can legally use clips from the shows we mention, just as long as they're under thirty seconds and/or for review purposes (we think), so it can almost be like a proper Awards gig. Oh, okay, it won't even be near to a proper awards gig, but at least it can't be as bad as the year Jack Docherty hosted the BAFTA film awards. Luckily for Jack, that was when it was on Sky, so no-one watched it. With Lady Fortuity on our side, it'll even be better than this year's British Comedy Awards, but that'll hardly be a stretch. As long as Kevin Bishop doesn't burst into our front room in the middle of it and start acting like a colossal twat, that's pretty much a given.

In any event, we've prepared a trailer for The BrokenTV Awards 2008. As you might expect from the levels of professionalism we've displayed in the past, it hasn't got anything to do with television. To be honest, we were mostly toying with doing stuff in AVS Video Editor 4 for the preview video. Anyway, as it should have finished uploading by now, on with the trailer:



While putting that together, we've come up with a couple of questions that we'd more than welcome answers to. If anyone can help with any of the following, please leave a message in the comment section.

ONE. Blimey, AVS Video Editor 4 is rubbish. We've only got it because it was free for a day on (the occasionally excellent but mainly mediocre) GiveawayOfTheDay website. It never quite does what we want, it crashes infuriatingly often, and doesn't allow us to put a text overlay on top of an image overlay, which is annoying as we wanted to slap witty captions on top of the screens in the above clip. Does anyone know of any other, better yet relatively cheap (or free) video editing progs for Windows? Please bear in mind that we will despatch teams of snipers to the streets of anyone saying "Windows Movie Maker".

TWO. Hmm. Now we've said all this, we'd better come up with something to put in it. Does anyone have any interesting ideas for award categories, either 'best' or 'worst'? Or even some nominations that could go in any of the obvious ones? Don't worry, we've already accounted for The Kevin Bishop Show.

oh, and also:

THREE: How do you add YouTube videos in 'high quality'? I didn't see any option for it when uploading the above vid. Nice to see you can now type in all the details while the video is uploading, though.

FRIDAY'S UPDATE

We've just realised, we didn't do an update on Friday. So, here it is:

Hey, the new BBC One Christmas idents are quite good (and certainly better than those penguins), though we can't help but feel the idea is a little bit familiar.

There, that'll do.

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Campaign Magazine Mess Up

Campaign Magazine have published a list of the ten worst television commercials of 2008. Except, because it's December, they've called the article "Campaign's top 10 turkeys of 2008", the chumps. Most of the choices make sense, some of them don't, and there's one glaring cock-up. Here's the list in full. You'll note that they've missed out the godawful one with CGI germs being voiced by Rik Mayall (doing his 'Young Ones' voice, badly) and Tony Robinson (doing his 'Baldrick' voice, really badly).

1 Gillette

Federer, Woods and Henry chew up the furniture. But then, that's what all sports stars do when asked to do an advert, anyway. More notable would be the choice of bringing in Thierry Henry, being promoted using old footage of him playing for Arsenal at Highbury about four years ago. We suspect it's going to be a similar situation with the FIFA games, and Henry is replaced with Landon Donovan in the US campaign, the Hungarian version stars Balázs Dzsudzsák, and so on.

2 Specsavers

Edith Piaf sings about cheap eyeglasses. This advert reminds us of the sketch in The All-New Alexei Sayle Show, where 'Lex, dressed as Piaf, performs a version of the song about such laments as "I should never have bought that horrible Arsenal away shirt, the one with the yellow splotches all over it", so it's clearly not the second worst one of the year.

3 Renault

Woeful dubbed couple in a showroom. We could go off on one here, about one of our pet theories. Dubbed adverts. You want our money? And yet you can't be bothered spending a couple of grand re-filming three people from the country you're trying to sell to? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

4 Warburtons

That stock advertising character Foreign Businessman In Britain trotted out for the first time in several years. Not even remotely racist or anything, or notable in any other way. And Warburtons still insist on not putting their bread in plastic bags, meaning it goes stale ten minutes after you get home from the shops. Boo.

5 Country Life

The John Lydon one. Which is meant to be terrible, surely? That's the point. Of course, we'll bet hardly anyone who saw it can remember what the actual brand of butter being promoted.

6 Kellogg

With Dame Kelly Holmes, and which we haven't ever seen. We know we could just click on the YouTube link on the Campaign page, but we've managed to contain our excitement.

7 Orangina

Disturbingly 'erotic' dancing CGI animals. The idea for which the creative director at top agency Burble, Burble and Twatt came up with by visiting furry groups in Second Life when he should have been getting a proper job.

8 Premier Inn

Lenny Henry pisses on the memories of everyone who liked him as Delbert Wilkins. The sad demise of the man who popularised the term "well 'ard" long before the Walford-based alsatian.

9 Samsung

Some Chelsea players doing a really shit advert, but one which crucially can be put out in Dubai without being redubbed, so Sumsung will be happy enough.

10 DFS

The Nickelback one that can give you both ear and eye cancer. This is where Campaign have really messed up. This isn't just the tenth worst advert of 2008. It's the worst thing ever broadcast in the name of marketing in the history of ever. Trying to pretend your sofas are somehow 'cool': a stupid idea. Trying to pretend your sofas are somehow 'cool' by having some gits from a talent agency doing air guitar: a really stupid idea. Trying to pretend your sofas are somehow 'cool' by having some gits from a talent agency doing air guitar to Nickelback's "Rock Star": Well. Take Mike Smith and Dick Rowe passing on signing The Beatles to Decca. Multiply that by ABC turning down The Cosby Show because they thought no-one would want to see the antics of a wealthy black family. Multiply the sum of that by ITV Digital and New Coke combined. You are now one-tenth of the way to the level of sheer and spectacular stupidity shown by the 'creative' who came up with this idea.

Really, it's so bad, we're just not going to make bloody sure we never buy a sofa from DFS, we actually spend every Tuesday afternoon going to our local branch with a tape recorder and performing the most revolting of dirty protests in the shop doorway to make bloody sure no-one else feels like buying one from there either. There's nothing like seeing us writhing around on a pavement in just our pants, rubbing ourselves with our own mess to the tune of "Rock Star" to make you consider that Furniture Village might be a better option.

While it's a long-standing tradition of BrokenTV to avoid naming companies responsible for terrible adverts, in this case we're going to post a load of links to the DFS website, in the hope we show up in the web stats. With an ounce of luck, they'll click on the link to this page and see what we think of them, what their actions have made a once-proud blog resort to, and then do the decent thing and fold the company, just in time to prevent their 2009 campaign, which is exactly the same, only they're using "Rock Star" by fucking Pink.

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