The Top 20 Of Everything 2010*

*PART ONE: TELEVISION PROGRAMMES (20-16)

Hello, and erm… Happy New Year. Bit late to be saying that, isn’t it? Hope you all had lovely Christmasses and all that. This is normally where we’d do The BrokenTV Awards Of Whatever Year It Is, but this year, we’re going to do things a little bit differently, and just list our top twenty TV shows from 2010. It’s taken quite a bit of consideration, only for us to then have to re-jig most of the original list upon watching the fifth-best television programme of 2010 last weekend (we’re never very on the ball, it’s fair to say).

But, here it is! Carefully planned then fleetingly written. What will be at number one? How many ITV2 shows will be in the list? Will we include at least one programme we expect everyone else to hate, in order to make us feel all ‘clever’,  ‘different’ and ‘somehow just generally better’, only for several people to agree with us in the comments anyway? WE SHALL SEE as we kick off the list with, hey!, number twenty.

That’s one of those boxes ticked, with a programme filed very much under “mixed critical reception”. Many critics panned BBC Two’s Vexed, with the Metro, New Statesman and Irish Independent variously dismissing it as “rubbish”, “atrocious” and “abysmal”. Given the opening scene of the series, which sees D.I. Kate Bishop (Lucy Punch¹) being shown around a newly-available flat, only for it to turn out that – oh-ho-ho – the property is available because the previous tenant’s cadaver is still being examined by forensics in the front room. At this point, D.I. Bishop’s wisecracking new partner D.I. Jack Armstrong (Toby Stephens) may as well have stared into the camera Peter Griffin-style and declared “Whoa! Looks like this isn’t any regular police drama series after all, eh?”

1Who, along with Jemaine Clement, was by far the jointly-most entertaining person involved in Jay Roach’s Dinner For Schmucks. It’s like they’d been taken on loan from a much better comedy film or something.

Happily, it got much better after that opening expositional splurge, settling nicely into the time honoured Good Cop (Punch), Berk Cop (Stephens) aesthetic. The plots weren’t especially dark or even realistic, taking in events like a kidnapped pop star, or protecting an unlikeable banker in rehab who is been stalked by a hitman (cue events like said assassin poisoning the dinner of the smug trader, only for a compulsive overeater to scoff the plateful of nosh before the intended victim can get to it), and in a year that also saw achingly dark crime dramas like Luther, we’re saying that’s A Good Thing. We don’t even mind that Vexed has made a few “Worst TV Shows Of 2010” lists, as that’s part of the appeal for us. Some dullards like to mock things they deem beneath them, while some people are quite happy to admit they’ve got Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ on their iPod and visit pound shops. Guess which of those two types we are. Clue: we never pay full price for a jar of instant white tea (oh, and we’re happy to drink instant white tea). In summary, then: Vexed is good.

Doctor Who without David Tennant? Surely, ignoring the fact we won’t have to put up with Catherine Tate’s voice and Rusty Davies’ inconsistent plotting any longer, it just won’t be the same? Of course, much like when all the tabloids decided Daniel Craig was going to be a rubbish Bond until Casino Royale actually got made, Matt Smith was a revelation as The Doctor, helped in no small measure by Amy Pond being the best assistant ever (and we know, we’ve watched Doctor Who for six whole years). Plus, well, Steven Moffat.

The fact that Moffat’s episodes are now the norm, rather than a once-per-series treat, hasn’t seen every single episode reach the heights of The Empty Child, The Girl In The Fireplace or Blink, but then you’ll have guessed that by the way this isn’t at number one in our list. Indeed, the latest series hasn’t been without the odd clunker – the episode where the collect-em-all multicoloured Daleks made their debut was practically a fifty-minute toy advert – but the overall quality, helped by Matt Smith being so bloody good in the role you can even forgive The Doctor for wearing a bow tie, has made this the best series of New Who yet. Even the episode with James Corden in it was great, for flip’s sake.

Another one of those shows where you either gave up on it after episode one, or found yourself sticking with it only to discover, blimey, you’re hooked. What could have been a clumsy halfway-house – Simon Amstell, former host of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, plays Simon, former host of a popular BBC Two music-based comedy panel show, but with all the bits you’d expect to be like Curb Your Enthusiasm replaced with heavy-handed sarcasm – works very well, once you get used to it. Like a hot bath that keeps making fun of how old you are.

Yeah, Simon Amstell really isn’t much of a comedy actor, but the fine supporting cast soon makes up for that, with James Smith (from The Thick Of It) putting in a great turn as The Mother’s Boyfriend Who Tries That Bit Too Hard To Get On With Her Son. If we were really lazy, we’d describe it as like The Royle Family, only more “Jewy”. But we… oh, wait, we are that lazy.

Still brilliant. Still underrated. Still never shown on UK telly. COME ON, BRITISH TELEVISION.

Deciding quite which wonderful BBC Four documentary to include in a Top 20 list of the year’s telly is always a pretty demanding task, as there are so many excellent ones that rarely seem to appeal to anyone but us. Sure, BBC Four will throw the odd curveball at us – even we got bored by The Secret Life Of The National Grid – but the marvellous The Joy Of Stats proved just why it’s always worth that weekly wander through the BBC Four listings with a PVR remote in hand.

Hosted by Swedish statsmeister Professor Hans Rosling, and including interviews with the likes of David “Information Is Beautiful” McCandless², this was a delightful look at just how it’s possible to make data sing, just by examining it with the right amount of attention.

2 Or, David “Your Sinclair’s Program Pitstop” McCandless if you you’re old like us.

No reason you should take our word for it, of course. After all, our own graph-fetish is well known to regular readers of the blog. Here’s a clip from the programme, exploring the fortunes of 200 countries, over 200 years, in four minutes.

It’s a YouTube clip of a BBC Four documentary about statistics. It currently has over THREE MILLION views on YouTube. That’s how ace it is. We really can’t wait until Microsoft Excel 2059 is released, when we’ll be able to make astonishingly thrilling bubble charts like that in our very own homes.

 

Okay, that’s our scamper through the first quarter of the list. Just 75% of it to go, before we move on to The Top 20 Of Something That Isn’t Telly 2010. No idea what that’ll be yet. Albums? Hats? Most Shocking Celebrity Moments? Actually, if it did turn out to be that last one, we’re giving you permission to hunt us down and kill us. See you soon!

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The BrokenTV Awards 2009: Part Two

It’s time for the next update of the increasingly untimely BrokenTV Awards 2009. You’ll remember the original premise for these, won’t you? All originally to be done on video, presented supposedly ‘live’ from 1970s USSR, only to be stymied by our lackadaisical attitude and YouTube’s policy of destroying anything using clips of copyrighted material. This explains the stage directions in square brackets, though where we could we’ve included YouTube links to, erm, clips of copyrighted material. Hmm.

So, pausing only to rewrite a load of bumf for the second time because Windows Live Writer crashed and lost loads of stuff once we centre-justified an embedded video link (gagh), we continue with a special…

Patronising Pat on the Head Award

LabRats (BBC Two)

This seems to be up for several Worst Comedy Show gongs elsewhere, but we must admit that we rather liked it. It's a traditional studio-based comedy (good), with a live audience (good), ridiculous plotlines (good) in a situation where anything can happen - a science lab at a university (good). Sadly, it all seems to have been carried out in something of a rush. The script only seems to have gone through a single draft - plenty of the gags in there didn't work at all, and many promising lines would have benefited from being rewritten.

Only a couple of the characters had anything like a rounded character, the perpetually sighing voice of sanity Dr Beenyman played by Chris Addison and Geoffrey McGivern's wonderfully eccentric professor. The others didn't fare quite so well, played by Jo Enright (playing a dim midlander), Dan Tetsell (one-dimensional lab assistant) and Selina Cadell (a Dutch woman. That's as much personality as she was afforded).

Despite the one-dimensional characters, convoluted plots and half-arsed scripting, the show was tantalisingly close to being enjoyable. It certainly stood out from pretty much any other post-watershed sitcom on air in 2008. We would state how a second series could see many of the cracks papered over, and maybe the Lab Rats could show us all what it was so very nearly capable of, but this looks unlikely. By the fourth episode, it had dipped out of the BARB ratings Top 30 for BBC Two – a very poor performance for a comedy zone show with a Buzzcocks lead-in, and was never to return. So, that’s about it for LabRats.

Meanwhile, the following four shows thundered on:

Worst Comedy Show

Little Britain USA

[Illustrative clip of someone vomiting or similar.]

Bloody hell!

Peter Kay's Britain's Got the Pop Factor

[Illustrative clip of Kay dressed as that woman and being rubbish.]

Good god!

The Kevin Bishop Show

[Illustrative clip of anything from The Kevin Bishop Show.]

Christ’s soupy beard!

Tonightly

[Illustrative clip of Jason Manford looking pleased with himself for crowbarring a joke from his act into a topical news story, punctuating his statement with the words ‘’right’ and ‘yeah’ so the audience keep with him.]

Holy hell!

The Winner is… The Kevin Bishop Show.

Standing out above the others because we actually thought it might be good. Little Britain USA was always going to be woeful, Peter Kay ‘doing’ X Factor wasn’t going to keep anyone with any sense entertained for the whole sixteen hours (though there were enough viewers left at the end to buy the cash-in single, so Kay will be happy), and if Jon Holmes couldn’t save The Eleven O’Clock Show, Manford clearly wouldn’t be up to the task. The Kevin Bishop Show sounded promising. A bunch of TV spoofs, presented in the manner of someone hopping their way through a digibox. That could work!

And indeed, in the Comedy Lab pilot, broadcast the previous year, it worked quite well, but given a full series the paucity of ideas became more obvious.

It’s a shame, because there were a few hits, such as an impression of Harry Hill when he was still a doctor, delivering diagnoses in a decidedly TV Burp-y manner, or Newcastle United being passed through a barcode scanner. For the most part, it was uninspired one-shot gags being drawn out way too far...

It certainly didn’t help that Kevin Bishop isn’t even that good at doing impressions. This isn’t too much of a problem when it comes to Star Stories, when it’s all part of the gag, and anyway each episode is about a particular personality, so the viewers know who he’s meant to be. When the sketches are being thrown out a lot more quickly, we’re left with unsubtle exposition like having a caption at the bottom of the screen saying “With Tim Westwood”, followed by Kevin Bishop saying “I is Tim Westwood”. Oh, and a joke about Professor Stephen Hawking being on Pimp My Ride. Gosh, how challenging!

Best British Animated Comedy

There’s no actual need for nominations here, is there? It’s quite plainly Wallace and Gromit: A Matter Of Loaf And Death. Being entirely serious, for all the cynicism about how “they don’t make TV shows like they used to”, this magical half-hour genuinely deserves to be up there with the finest ever Christmas Day moments of Morecambe, Wise, Barker, Corbett or Trotter. Even if the writing weren’t up to scratch, the animation alone would be more than enough to capture the imagination of a rapturous nation, but the talk easily matches up to the walk. The part where (and I would make some sort of vocal spoiler tag here, but if you haven’t already seen the programme in question, you frankly don’t deserve to live) Gromit elects that the best way to save the day is by throwing the bomb just over the Yorkshire border made for one of the best gags of 2008.

Most surprisingly non-rubbish comeback

Harry and Paul

“Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul” hit our screens in 2007, and was hugely disappointing. Having learned nothing from the abject failure of Harry Enfield’s Brand Spanking New Show (you know, Sky One’s attempt at spending money on comedy from 2000), it repeated the same formula of coming up with a few half-baked ideas (builders who are actually quite cultured, people in expensive shops having contempt for their customers, Polish coffee shop workers being foreign, American tourists resorting to their stereotype, Nelson Mandela being non-PC) and then repeating them over and over without adding anything at all between each outing. Without the benefit of having a several-year run-up to their new series, Harry and Paul (now shorn of both “Ruddy Hell!”, a live audience and Morwenna Banks) re-used all of the characters we’ve just mentioned, added some new ones that were equally uninspiring (elderly Radio 3 presenters who were actually really into hip-hop), and yet... somehow it was rather enjoyable.

It’s quite conceivable that the BrokenTV crew were swayed by the emotional tribute to the late Geoffrey Perkins replacing the credits to episode one, but there seemed to be more of an effort made with this series, as if the writing team realised they couldn’t just surf the national wave of goodwill that Paul Whitehouse elicits this time round. While it was still nowhere near the standards set by Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, pieces like Clarkson Island (commendably acknowledging their inspiration by having the camera do a Google Maps type zoom toward Whicker Island whilst playing out The Liberty Bell right at the start of the sketch) took an idea and really ran with it, squeezing the correct amount of enjoyment from each premise before moving on. And Steve Nallon got to appear as Margaret Thatcher, too.

Dead Set Award for Best British Drama

Dead Set.

That is all.

Best International Drama

Despite the writer's strike, 2008 turned out to be very strong year for US drama. Having to cram everything into just (x) episodes forced the ensured the writers of Lost couldn't get away with scattering the big reveals as thinly over the a season as they have done in the past. 24 went one step further, by taking the year off to concentrate on making Day Seven a proper return to form. Well, fingers crossed, anyway. Our nominations tonight concentrate on shows centred around what seems to be a new angle for American drama - championing the anti-hero. The three programmes up for the Brokie tonight concentrate largely on the antics of a meth chemist, a family of con artists, and a murderer. I could go on about these being representative of a crisis of confidence amongst the American populace after eight years of Republican rule, but I'll probably get pelted with rancid fruit. Here are the nominations, even though you've already guessed what they are:

Breaking Bad

The Dad Off Of Malcolm in the Middle (or The Dentist Off Of Seinfeld, if you'd rather) is fed up with his crappy life. Considering this only meets the US TV criteria of "crappy life" (i.e. attractive, younger, loyal and supportive wife, large house, secure public sector job), you may be expecting something formulaic. But! After being diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, he decides to start making crystal meth, so as to provide for his family after his death. So far, so meh, but as the series progresses, you realise they’re not just going for a lazy shock factor. A very welcome programme that you’d have been a fool to miss because you’d expected it to be a rehash of the similar sounding Weeds.

Why is it US networks always make their programmes seem really unappealing in the trailers, eh? It is well worth watching, though. Trust us.

The Riches

Eddie Izzard proves he's been to a lot of acting classes since being almost as unconvincing as Shaun Ryder in The Avengers. Thanks to the writers’ strike only half a season of The Riches was delivered this year. As a result, viewers were left with a cliff hanger of Eddie Izzard’s eldest son (played by Liverpool forward Dirk Kuyt) running back to the traveller’s camp the family had originally fled from, and joined up with a newly-paroled Irish nutjob who is clearly Up To Something. Infuriatingly, as the show was cancelled due to lacklustre ratings, that’s the end of the Rich/Malloy family, and we’re never going to find out what Something he was Up To. It’s like Crash Magazine being bought out by EMAP all over again.

Dexter

One of those programmes where you want to recommend it to everyone you meet, but when you try to explain what it involves, you realise you’re doing it a complete disservice. “Yeah, so it’s about this blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police, only he’s actually a serial killer on the side. But! He only ever kills other serial killers, and it’s really... I’m not convincing you, am I?” You can’t help but make it sound like an especially forgettable movie shot entirely on video and shoved out at 3am on Zone Horror. It is really good, though. Really.

Dexter really is one of those shows, like Lost, where you should avoid every trailer for forthcoming episodes, as it’s all about not knowing what’ll happen next. This clip avoids that, but doesn’t really seem very exciting. What the hell, watch Dexter anyway.

And the winner is: Dexter.

See. Told you it was really good. Dexter has been a revelation this year, even surpassing the majesty of season two. Considering the feelings of those yet to watch it on British TV (and not, ahem, flying to the USA every weekend to watch it on Showtime), I’m not going to say what happens in it, but each episode makes for a roaringly entertaining hour. Even hugely successful modern dramas prove to be generally predictable – it’ll take Jack Bauer about 23 hours and 48 minutes to catch the bad guys, Gregory House and his team will make at least three incorrect diagnoses before arriving at the actual cure, Gene Hunt and whichever time-travelling partner will arrest the wrong person before finding out the other character introduced this episode did it after all. Dexter isn’t like that. Take everything you think is about to happen – well, the odds are, that isn’t going to happen, something five times as interesting is going to kick off instead. It’s such circuitous plotting that makes Dexter BrokenTV’s favourite drama of 2008. And now that SPOILER REMOVED has happened, 2009 is sure to be just as good, if not even better. Oh, and no, The Wire isn’t nominated.

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The BrokenTV Awards 2009: Part One

You just wouldn't believe how much messing about has gone into the creation of these. Literally months of planning. Weeks of dicking around with Photoshop, AVS Video Editor, Photo Story 3 and the trial version of Sony Vegas Pro. Plus literally several hours of writing. Then, with a heavy heart, we realised that writing thousands of words for our annual awards show then transplanting them a few words at a time into comedy subtitles over dour footage of Soviet politics would be boring for (a) the viewers once the initial joke wears thin about six seconds into the clip, and (b) us, cutting, pasting, resizing, aligning, and adjusting EVERY SINGLE LINE of the subtitles, because video editing programs are hateful little bastards that would much rather you use a tacky starburst effect and Comic Sans for everything.

So, the project was shelved. But all our initial work wouldn't be for nought - we could use it as a sort of 'highlights' package alongside the written awards, playing in illustrative clips of the shows we want to include, along with lovely captions and the like. Sadly no - YouTube's IP cops busted down the video of that while it was being uploaded, citing the use of 'copyrighted material' (even though we're legally allowed to use clips of things, as long as they're under thirty seconds in length).

So, despite being tempted to go around to YouTube's house and letting their tires down, he's the re-edited re-edit of what we wanted to do, followed by the first part of the original script for The BrokenTV Awards 2009.





The BrokenTV Awards 2008

Live from the Federal Assembly in Moscow

[Grainy monochrome footage of a miserable yet prominent communist party leader from the early 1970s. Faint applause is played out over the picture.]

Boris: Hello everybody! I’m Boris Gryzlov your host for tonight's veritable juggernaut of gong-based merriment. It’s been a truly magical year of television viewing over at BrokenIndustries’ subterranean headquarters, if by which you mean the type of wholly underwhelming magic where David Blaine sits in a chair for three months, having all his food brought to him, and he gets a twenty-minute break every hour. But that’s a bit of a gloomy start, so maybe I’d better kick off with our first award. Here to present the gong for Best Comedy Show, it’s top entertainer Gennady Zinovyev!

[Cut to more recent footage culled from the Russian Federation's YouTube page. Now a different but equally miserable politico is in full colour, and he is in a more open-plan parliament building.]

Caption: Best TV Show About TV

Time for the perennial two-horse race between two of BrokenTV’s favourite telly shows of the decade. Both are utterly fantastic, but each year one just manages to outdo the other, and take away the prize in this category. Or at least they would, had this been an actual category in the BrokenTV awards before now. The two shows in question? We’ll I should hope you have guessed already, but to make it easy: it's Harry Hill versus Charlie Brooker. Here come clips.

[Cue clips of ScreenWipe's piece about Noseybonk and TV Burp's When Your Shadow Looks Like An Elephant clip.]

And the winner is... yes, it’s Harry Hill’s turn this year. A tad unlucky for Screenwipe, as the new series has been excellent, seeing the show take in things like Charlie becoming a children’s TV presenter, twenty-five men doing a wee in front of Konnie Huq, and a wonderful episode dedicated to television commercials. However, the judges ruled that Mr Harry and his team keeping up their own high standards within the twin confines of going out on prime time ITV1, and taking on a mammoth twenty-five episode run, is enough to nick the crown this year. Well done Mr Hill!

Caption: Best International Animated Comedy Programme

And now the award for best international animated comedy, by which we mean American. Where’s a sequel to Stressed Eric when you want it, eh?

Family Guy

Still perambulating between the two extremes of "piss funny" and "full of timesome 1980s pop culture references that don't go anywhere", 2008 saw Fam Guy veer more frequently toward the former. Best episode? The one where Stewie, Brian and Mort find themselves in Warsaw, in 1939. Featuring the voice Brian Blessed!

[Clip of the bit where Mort pretends to be a vicar in from of some Nazis.]

The Drinky Crow Show

No, not just because They Might Be Giants did the theme tune. The sort of show that really should have been impossible to convert to the small screen (for people who aren’t comic geeks, it’s based on Tony Millionaire’s utterly demented Maakies comic strips – figures of the two main characters were on the front of Roy’s desk in series two of The I.T. Crowd), this show did the near-impossible and stretched out three panels of manic lunacy to twelve minutes. Also, not many comedy shows star a manically depressed alcoholic crow who blows his brains out about twice per episode. We’ve just come up with the perfect barometer of quality for television programmes. Look at each individual sentence in the script, then mark it against every over sentence ever uttered in the history of television. The higher the number of unique sentences – something we’re going to call a ‘script-whack’, the better the programme. With lines such as “and you must do the same, my sweet monkey, if they have discovered you have released me, they will chop off your head and make an exotic stew from your brains”, The Drinky Crow Show is sure to score highly.

[Clip of Uncle Gabby and his monkey god peering up the toilet at the Cap'n's daughter in front of an unimpressed Drinky Crow.]

The Venture Bros

The most underrated animated comedy on television? There's just so much to love about Team Venture: from the misanthropic former child star perpetually living in his late father's shadow as the main character, to well-rounded peripheral characters like Billy The Quizboy or magnificently monikered femme fatale Molotov Cocktease, and that's before you even get to the actual events of the show. In fact, The Venture Brothers probably has some of the best charactisation of any current television show, with every character having their own comprehensive personality. Not only that, but the animation looks great, especially so given the modest budget afforded by Adult Swim. It would be entirely fair to speculate that...

[Fast forward through the host's extended Venture love-fest, slowing down in time to catch the end of it.]

...limited edtion episode-specific T-shirts, for Christ's sake. Brilliant.

[Clip from final episode where The Monarch is driving to the ultimate showdown with Dr Girlfriend and his minions.]

American Dad

One of our favourite things about American Dad is that even if you took out all the jokes, most of the time you'd still be left with a storyline compelling enough to keep you watching. Been a while since you could say that about The Simpsons, hey? This series is still going strong, which makes it all the more annoying that the only place you can see it in the UK is now on FX, which we haven't got.

[Clip of Steve getting his bison-based revenge on a cheerleader who mocked his girlfriend.]

And the winner is... American Dad. Avoiding the “fire enough pop culture references at the wall and hope some stick” approach of sister show Family Guy, American Dad is going from strength to strength. Sure, it’s less popular than Family Guy, but Peter Kay is more popular than... well, someone good. American Dad also put out the single best twenty-two minutes of television comedy in the past... ooh, three years with the episode “The One That Got Away”. Season four, episode two. Genuinely brilliant. Here’s a clip that does it absolutely no justice, and which does nothing at all to promote the episode.

[Cue clip of Roger meeting the pigeons. Fingers crossed it doesn't get gunned down by litigious.. oh.]

Look out for Part Two soon!

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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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The BrokenTellies 2007: Slight Return

We hadn't forgotten about this. Here are a few more awards from the increasingly inaccurately named 2007 Broken Tellies:

Single Worst Moment of Television in 2007

Patrick Kielty performing the lyrics to Gold Digga, a capella, for a good thirty seconds or so on Live At The Apollo. Yes, including the ‘proper’ lyrics. A truly horrible experience, even worse than when Marcus Brigstocke says something in street patois, because y’know, he’s a middle class bloke in a suit, and he shouldn’t nevar be doin’ no street patois, innit. An ting.

Most Infuriatingly Underrated Pilot of 2007: Biffovision

Saddled with what was very probably the single worst slot given to a new television programme in the entire history of television (at 3.30am, on BBC Three, and billed as a signed repeat of Two Pints Of Lager), Biffovision was up against it right from the start. This was a major shame, as the pilot episode showed a lot of promise, being a slice of inspired lunacy in the vein of Q, Big Night Out and Rutland Weekend.

While it certainly divided opinions amongst the viewing dozens, almost exclusively people who'd been fans of the late lamented Teletext videogame section (although we'd argue it was less like Digitiser, and more like Mr Biffo's Bubblegun website), it was inarguably unique amongst the BBC Three catchphrase-stroke-tedium packed comedy canon. And, given the single show to be broadcast was just a pilot, a series proper could have been packed even more tightly with quality fare. For example, here's a recovered draft of something not included in the pilot (and which itself has become deleted from the internet. Nice try Mister Rose, but our deft Google Cache skills have thwarted up your plan deliciously).

These are all things that happen in the first five minutes of BiffoVision, because we couldn't be done waiting for all of the YouTube video to buffer before taking the screenshots

Sadly, what with the show being loosely based on a pastiche of 1980s kids TV, it was decided that it was unsuitable for modern, hip and street yoof demographic now pandered to by Ver Three, and it was ditched (even though none of the actual jokes required even the merest knowledge of events between 1980 and 1989). Meanwhile, BBC Three’s main source of nightly comedy is the two episodes per night of Family Guy, a show largely comprising of throwaway cutaway non sequiturs featuring various 1980s pop culture references that didn't even make it the this side of the Atlantic.

Luckily, the show is available for viewing on YouTube (start from here), so everyone can bask in the Biffo magnificence.

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BrokenTV's CultureCheck '08

We've just remembered. What with it being 2008, we're now precisely eleven miles from what is nominally The Officially Most Cultured Place In Europe This Year. We've just checked on Google Earth. So: how much of this culture has seeped southwards and is now coursing through our veins? Given that we're about to post something on the internet about obtaining illicit feeds of foreign television - not very. But still, we'll post further updates if we get around to getting off our arses and going to an art gallery or something.



Yes, we're going to keep posting that image until we've run out of things to give awards to.

TELEVISION-RELATED PUB SPORT OF THE YEAR

Only one real candidate for this, so straight on with the winner.

Winner: Trying To Work Out Which Country The Semi-Legal Satellite Feed Of Live Premier League Football Is Coming From

"Ooh... erm... Norway! No, wait, Denmark! No, definitely Norway! Look, Stig Inge Bjornebye is the studio pundit."

Only of course, it's not that easy any more. Having such obvious clues as a segment along the lines of Canal+'s "Stig Inge's Corner" is a thing of the past. Nowadays, the modern pubgoer must decipher all manner of weird and wonderful logogrammatical systems in order to calculate the origin of the sporting transmissions on offer. This might sound relatively simple to any polygraphs reading this (in which case we'll presume you've found this blog by accident), but the following rules of Working Out Which Country The (etc) apply:

• If you're a regular in the pub, you're automatically barred from playing, because you've probably worked out the answer a long time ago.
• Don't think you can get any clues from the commentary ("Steve Sidwell-san" would be one hell of a clue), as these channels generally opt for either taking the Sky commentary or less commonly (but more entertainingly) featuring no commentary whatsoever.
• The game is over as soon as a dead giveaway clue appears on screen, such as a Coke advert featuring the Olympiacos FC squad appears, or a whopping great South Korean flag on a station ident.
• If at all possible, idiot males in pubs will make Canute-esque attempts to deny they're in the wrong, especially if it involves football in any way.

Which makes the game all the more difficult. Recently during a poker game, BrokenTV found itself in a pub showing coverage of the Manchester United-Everton, Milan-Inter and Madrid-Barcelona matches. It was only when adverts for the state travel agent appeared that we cottoned on. How dare Albania have better football coverage than us?

NOT TECHNICALLY LEGAL BY ANY SENSE TV-RELATED DOWNLOAD OF THE YEAR

Winner: TVUPLAYER (software link)

In a year which has seen the influence of Sopcast diminish under the leather-clad fist of the Premier League's team of ninja-lawyers, the world of Being Able To See Really Low-Quality Video Feeds Of Football Matches That Aren't Even Available On British Telly No Matter How Much Subscription You're Willing To Pay, And That You Can't Even Buy A Ticket For Without Lining The Pockets Of A Scumbag Tout has been looking for a new hero. Luckily, despite falling from favour a few years ago, TVU Player is back, with beta version 2.3.4. It now manages to actually tell if your channel is about to start streaming or not (instead of just leaving you hanging like a big fat fool), proper names for each channel, as well as giving a decent quality feed of non-sporty channels. Such as channels from:

The USA!



Japan!



Or Korea!

As you might expect from the world of streaming TV, timezones play havoc with the concept of actually seeing something that's any good, but a simple bit of Googling pays dividends. For example, a schedule for the US feed of (what is currently, although channels change frequently) NBC's KXAM affiliate can be found here.

And yes, that is BrokenTV's shiny new monitor in those low-quality mobile phone photos. Well, we're impressed by it.

(Moral disclaimer: What with our licence fee and dowry to the Evil Murdoch Empire, we pay over £700 every single year to watch the meagre amount of good television that we do. And that's before all the DVDs we buy. Therefore, we're claiming that we're morally, albeit not legally, obliged to dip out toes into the waters of foreign TV now and then. And hey, due to the nature of TVU Player, we watch all the adverts, instead of magicking them away with our remote control. It's the future of sub-RealPlayer picture quality television, all right.)

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The Broken Tellies 2007: Telly About Telly (Warning: Contains Graphs)

Happy new 2008, everyone. On with the awards.

Best Telly Programme About Telly 2007

The Nominations

Harry Hill's TV Burp (ITV1)

As pointed out on this very blog, during this year's series of TV Burp, it was (at the time) Britain's most watched comedy show. This was probably the first time ITV have been able to boast such a thing since Mr Bean, so it was all the more odd that they didn't even bother scheduling any commercials in the middle of each show, preferring to save the valuable 'number of minutes advertising per hour' quota for Dancing On Ice.

On a whim, we've popped to the ever reliable Barb website, and looked up the viewing figures for four other "Britain's Most Popular Comedy Shows", and taken an average reading for each. We've used the most recent series of each, so the respective shows ought to be at their peak of popularity. Here's the first Official BrokenTV Graph of 2008:

And yes Ricky, we're pretty fucking sure they're the 'right' 5.52 million viewers. So, in summary, TV Burp: popular and good.

Children's TV on Trial (BBC Four)

A pleasingly detailed look at sprog-friendly visual broadcasting over the last 5.7 decades. Each programme looked at a different decade, including proper interviews with people who know what they're talking about, and a refreshing lack of Russell Peters types humming theme tunes and snorting "The Chuckle Hounds! What was all that about, eh?"

Best of all, the series concluded with a group of 2007-issue kids dropping English on the children's television of the past. Possibly to the disdain of those who'd like to claim we're all on the road to hell in a Polish-made handbasket, they generally liked it. Showing that kids nowadays can still appreciate the genius of Johnny Ball's Think Again is something that makes us feel the world actually isn't irrevocably knackered after all.

The Winner:

Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe

Able to switch from ranting furiously (and entertainingly) about the BBC's credit squeezing to a considered critique over the media's handling of the Madeline McCann case in the blink of an eye (except those pieces were about three episodes apart, but bear with us), one-time Your Sinclair's Letters Page Star Letter Winner Charlie Brooker crammed in a couple of series of his Screen Wipe during 2007. Granted, it's a bit of a shame this year's Christmas special didn't get the time to explore the year's TV in any great detail, but hey. It's just nice to see something this inventive, invective and another word meaning "enjoyable" ending in '-tive' on our screens. And yes, we were really chuffed when the Guardian Guide likened us to him, although that's not why he wins this (we just were just lucky that the Guardian Guide found our blog during the short period we were any good, clearly).

It's almost worth having a load of rubbish on our TV screens, if it means we get to see Charlie and his Zeppotron pixies tearing it all apart. (Note to Commissioning Editors of BBC Three: We said "almost", so it doesn't make another series of Tittybangbang or Fuck Off I'm Ginger justifiable.)

Worst Telly Programme About Telly 2007

The Winner:

Anything with Mark Lawson in it, obviously.

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The BrokenTellies 2007: Part Three

Unexpectedly Interesting Wallpaper TV Of The Year

Sumo TV

Being male, Sky Sports News usually acts as a sort of 'screen saver' for our TV set when we're at home but doing something else. Sometimes though, such as when there's an England match that Sky have got the broadcast rights to, they're prepared to drone on about events so inconsequential even we can't be bothered with it. As we're not going to start watching Setanta Sports News until it stops being rubbish, we can often find ourselves turning to Sky channel 144. Sometimes, Sumo will do little other than run 'user-generated content' that isn't even good enough for YouTube (yes, that bad), but quite often their output consists of material from archive.org's collection of public domain films.

This means we can to do Other Things to a soothing backdrop of American public information films, advertisements and propaganda shorts from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s. All of which is the sort of thing that excites us tremendously, which is possibly we shouldn't be admitting in public.

While there's a disappointing lack of Massingham Magic (hey James 'Loaded' Brown! They're in the public domain, too! Come on!), it all makes for a lovely diversion if you're awake near a television on a Sunday morning. Certainly better than watching Tim Lovejoy pretend he gives a stuff about cooking and that no, he certainly isn't sorry he'd left Soccer AM for the sake of a few hundred thousand people willing to watch a programme about the MLS.


Things That Should Have Happened In 2007 But Didn't (But Hopefully Will in 2008)

US Television Networks Biting The Bullet, And Dealing With The Writer's Strike Not By Chucking On A Load Of Re-runs and Quiz Shows, But Rather By Actually Showing Something From Overseas For Once

Well, we could but dream. Given the (relative) success of Extras on HBO, despite 98% of the audience clearly not knowing who Hale, Pace or Dean Gaffney are, maybe the bosses at NBC, Fox and ABC could challenge their assumption that the American public will be scared and confused by people saying things in an accent that isn't American. Maybe, just maybe, a showing of Life On Mars, Jekyll or Doctor Who (or even something from Australia, say) won't cause rioting in the streets of Chicago. If the networks are commendably capable of crediting their audience with the intelligence to enjoy House or Arrested Development, why not this? Hey, and it might stop everyone over there thinking British television is full of little else but Benny Hill and Are You Being Served?.

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The BrokenTellies 2007: Part Two

Hey, a new template we're almost happy with! But anyway.

Overseas Drama Series of the Year

The nominations:

The Riches (Virgin 1)

Featuring superb performances from Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard (who has come a long way since chewing the furniture in Mystery Men), The Riches saw the Malloy clan - a sort of travelling sideshow version of The Real Hustle - adopt the identity of the titular family. That's 'the Rich family', not 'the Titular family'. You knew that? Oh. The first episode explains how all this comes about, leaving the remainder of the series to seeing how the family cope with their new environs. While that single concept might have been enough to coast along for the thirteen episodes that make up the first series, the writers managed to keep the viewers guessing which way they were going to go next, all the way up to the marvellously circuitous season finale.

Dexter (FX)

Dexter Morgan is a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department. But! He's also a serial killer, who takes out the criminals the cops just can't catch. All of which wouldn't sound out of place on the back of a low-budget straight-to-rental tape lurking in a dark corner of Star Video circa 1986, but luckily this is a more compelling series than our hamfisted summary suggests. The first season deals with the Miami Metro Police Department trying to track down a serial killer dubbed The Ice Truck Killer. Who, it soon transpires, is keen to impress Dexter with his mad slaughterin' skillz.

Lost (Sky One)

While a lot of people have made a point of complaining about the latest series of Lost ("oh, this is just getting silly now" is usually the standard comment that we've heard), we've been as engrossed as ever. For every major mystery that gets resolved (and despite what some say, they do get resolved - try re-watching season two if you need to check how much we've learned in season three), new and exciting questions are brought to the fore. And we've finally found out how John became wheelchair-bound, as well as discovering that the island isn't a very safe place to be if you're from Manchester. There was even time to spend a whole episode doing a tribute to Tales Of The Unexpected, with Nikki and Paulo as the main players.

Minus points for getting Britain wrong, though. We spell the word 'honour' with a 'u', and the Premier League doesn't work by having the same two teams playing each other twice in two days. Duuh.


The Winner

Dexter (FX)

While the first series successfully introduced us to the character, the background and the motives behind the eponymous anti-hero, the second series (due on FX any month now) raises the bar impressively. Without giving anything away - it's precisely the sort of programme you'll get a lot more from if you don't know what's likely to happen, so keep well away from the EPG info box before watching - the writers are about to take everyone on a long and very impressive journey. The main driving force behind the plot for season two (which we aren't going to mention) merely serves as a backdrop to the events that unfold. We've just watched the whole lot in one enthralling sitting, with help from the Xbox 360's new 'stream stuff you've downloaded from the internet to your proper telly' option. Given we have the attention span of excitable puppy, that's quite an achievement.

It's not just us, either. Dexter is currently just a fraction behind Heroes (which we still can't get that excited about, frankly) as the top-ranked show at TV.com.

Just time for a couple more quickies.

Repeat Of The Year (UK)

Yes Minister (BBC Four)

Making a welcome appearance as part of the channel's season of politically themed programming, series one of Yes Minister should provide a reminder to 21st Century TV bosses that pre-watershed comedy doesn't have to be along the insipid lines of My Family or Green Green Grass. As the exploits of Jim, Bernard and Humpy show, they could actually be quite intelligent, and indeed, quite excellent. Similarly, it proves that you don't need a script packed with swears to make something for an adult audience.

Another welcome aspect of BBC Four's re-run of the first series was that it led to us finding the DVD bargain of the year. The complete seven-disc box set, which also includes every episode of Yes Prime Minister, delivered to your door for less than eighteen pounds. Fantastic stuff.

Repeat Of The Year (International)

The Sopranos (More4)

Coming just after the end of the sixth and final season, a weeknightly repeat run of every single episode. All of which means the people who'd missed the first season and subsequently had to spend much of the following eight years wondering what all the fuss was about can now try and join the loop without having to spend an absolute fortune buying the DVD boxsets.

There are two problems arising from this. One, the ending of the entire series has been talked about so much, it's hardly likely to surprise us when it comes around the second time (even Hillary and Bill Clinton have performed a spoof of it). Two, having five hours per week of unmissable drama sitting on your PVR is one hell of a time-thief. Still, it keeps us off the streets of a Friday afternoon.

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The Broken Tellies 2007: Europe's Bloodiest Cockfights and America's Crashiest Car Crashes

Yes!It's time again for our annual festival of brickbats and bouquets. First up - the inaugural brickbat...

MOST ANNOYING SPONSORSHIP BUMPER OF 2007

Ah, programme sponsors. Those cheeky little advertising blighters. All but immune to the growing threat of the PVR menace, they top and tail each part of prime time programming on most commercial stations. Done correctly, they're out of the way in just a few seconds, almost apologetic about the way they're intruding into your evening's viewing.

"Look, sorry about this. It's just... hey, is that a new shirt? Like it. Looks niiice. It's just that, if you happen to be in the supermarket over the next couple of days, and you're thinking of buying some gin, we'd be thrilled if you decided to purchase the brand of gin that we manufacture. It's very nice. Of course, if you don't, that's your decision, and we respect that. Oh, how rude of me. You were waiting for that nice Mister Ramsay, the catering trade's answer to Billy Connolly. Sorry. Here he is. See you in seventeen minutes!"

Done correctly, they're perfectly unobtrusive and peachy. We end up watching about eighteen instances of CompareTheMarket.com's bumpers in one sitting during our regular Friday afternoon mammoth get-around-to-watching-More4's-daily-showings-of-The-Sopranos sessions, and remarkably they don't get on our nerves. Similarly, the Gordon's Gin bumpers during Kitchen Nightmares on C4, or the Hyundai ones during Dexter on FX are politely out of the way soon enough.

However, there's another side to sponsorship bumpers. A darker, smellier side. A growing number of them have taken advantage of Ofcom's newly relaxed code on such adverts, and now they want to be your 'friend'. They'll try to get you on side by being 'a bit chummy'. Unfortunately, that's 'chummy' purely in the sense of the Annoying Bloke From Work Who'll Cheerily Make Shit Jokes About Recently Murdered Children Or National Disasters That Have Been In The News. They'll use every last one of the ten seconds allowed for their mid-show pieces, but they'll try their damnedest to make it feel like a whole annoying minute.

So, what are the worst offenders? We've whittled it down to three. Remarkably, the 118 gimps who pop up during Lost on Sky One aren't included.

The Nominees

RUBBISH ONLINE POKER COMPANY BEGINNING WITH THE LETTERS 'V' AND 'C' (Bravo)

That's right, we're not going to give any of these BASTARDS the oxygen of publicity, with their tawdry "aah, but everyone notices deliberately rubbish ad campaigns, so we win after all, bwa ha ha" attitudes. These bumpers (we keep accidentally typing the word 'dumpers', which seems more appropriate) saw a bunch of comedy all-American - in the sense of British actors pretending to be American - cops making bad cop-slash-poker-related-punning quips.

As one might assume, with there only being a limited range of bad cop-slash-poker-related-punnery out there, they were only able to come up with about four different ones. Sadly, they were run before, during and after pretty much every single programme on Bravo. We wouldn't mind if this was restricted to their normal output of Europe's Bloodiest Cockfights and America's Crashiest Car Crashes, but it was also in every single ad break for Adult Swim. And if you get between us and our fix of Sealab 2021, you're walking a thin line, mister.

HIGH-STREET COMPUTER SUPERSTORE WHOSE LATEST SCAM IS OVERCHARGING FOR FITTING ROUTINE PC UPGRADES, FIFTEEN QUID TO SLOT IN A MEMORY STICK? CHRIST! (Virgin 1)

Barging it's unwelcome way into the middle of the magnificent The Riches, these mini-sketches see a bunch of - and we hate to use this phrase, we really do - office-bound twats making a series of crunchingly PC-related gags. Quite often in an ad-break that appears before we've even seen the sodding title sequence to that week's episode of The Riches, although we can't really blame HIGH-STREET COMPUTER SUPERSTORE WHOSE LATEST SCAM IS OVERCHARGING FOR FITTING ROUTINE PC UPGRADES, FIFTEEN QUID TO SLOT IN A MEMORY STICK? CHRIST! for that.

MARKET-LEADING VIDEOGAME COMPANY THAT WE REALLY LIKE, AND HAVE HAPPILY GIVEN LOTS OF MONEY TO IN THE PAST, BAH (Channel Four)

Oh, alright then. It's Nintendo. More specifically, The Nintendo Family. Making lots and lots of almost-but-not-quite-risque jokes that pop up before 8 Out Of 10 Cats. Seemingly, they're on a mission to slow the demand for the Wii and DS, so that the shops have time to build up some stock. Hopefully, once that's been done, they can start to run the 'good' adverts. We're tempted to link to Deal Extreme's website, so that everyone can buy an R4 cart for their DS, just to make some sort of point, here. Oh, go on then.

AND THE WINNER IS...

HIGH-STREET COMPUTER SUPERSTORE WHOSE LATEST SCAM IS OVERCHARGING FOR FITTING ROUTINE PC UPGRADES, FIFTEEN QUID TO SLOT IN A MEMORY STICK? CHRIST! (Virgin 1)

Well, hoo-rup-de-do. Despite some pretty stiff competition, the PC upgrade racketeers walk off with the first prize of our 2007 awards 'do'. The panel were swayed heavily by the sheer awfulness of hoping a smug berk answering the question "what are you up to tonight?" with "well, tonight I'm going to save the world, and then maybe win the Indianapolis 500" will actually 'shift' some major 'product'. The rest of their spots weren't a lot better. If you haven't seen them on Virgin 1, we'll put it this way: you know how the 'proper' adverts for This Company are really, really shit? Well, these bumpers are easily eight times as bad.

It's probably on all Virgin 1's other drama shows, too. But we never watch any of them, so we can't be sure.

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Reasons Why Hugh Laurie Is One Of The Best People Ever

1: Using an A Bit Of Fry & Laurie reference while receiving a top award at a major American awards ceremony.

Although this probably means there'll never be a compilation series called The Fry & Laurie Sketchbook going out on Friday nights. With brand new Peter and John sketches. Bah.

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4809 Words About 2006: It's The BrokenTV Awards 2006

Well, better late than never. We did try to get Angus Deayton to host these, as he'll clearly do any old rubbish these days, but he had four cheap clip shows to front for Sky Three tonight, so we're having to read the following off of an autocue in a sarcastic voice ourselves. Onto the first award...

---

Triumph of the Year (Comedy)

- That Mitchell and Webb Sound
A worthy successor to Fry and Laurie, hopefully. While the first series didn’t quite reach the heights of prime F&L, remember that the first series of ABoF&L was a bit on the patchy side, a bit too keen to rely on breaking the fourth wall in place of a proper ending to a sketch for our liking. Mitchell and Webb only did that once in their first series, so the next series should be up there with, say, the second series of ABoF&L, hopefully. Just as long as it doesn’t include any of the weaker sketches from the live DVD, and more of the great unused sketches from the radio series that they haven’t used yet. Constantly happening football falls into the latter camp, obviously.

- Not Going Out
For all the hoo-hah about The IT Crowd returning to the roots of proper traditional studio-audience backed sitcoms, this barely got any credit at all. A large shame, because it was brilliant. Usually, we’d be wishing a pox on any sitcom to pretty much do away with a decent plotline in order to make way for lots more wisecracking from the central characters. When it’s Premier League wisecracking from the gobs of Mack and Vine, all logic collapses upon itself, and you’re left watching the best ‘traditional’ sitcom since Men Behaving Badly went rubbish. If there isn’t an episode of this on Christmas Day 2007, we’ll be sorely disappointed. Trebly so if there’s another episode of Green Green Grass, obviously.

- The Thick Of It
Still as good as ever, which would include the excellent Christmas special, only that’s ineligible, because it was on in 2007. Which means we can skirt around the lack of A Certain Cast Member in it due to Certain Ongoing Events. Phew.

But the winner is…

Still Game

In these days of declining television audiences and an ever expanding portfolio of digital channels, the familiar cry is that there just can’t be any type of programme likely to attract really massive audiences any more, outside of a World Cup. It’s a fair point, and every time a retrospective look at Mike Yarwood, Benny Hill or The Racist Comedians wanders on to our screen telling us how they achieved audiences of ninety-eight million, we’re ready to scream at the narrator “yeah, because there was only sodding World In Action or Albion Market on the other side at the time, live uninterrupted coverage of a tramp picking at his scabs would have got that sort of audience, it doesn’t make it any more worthwhile, and it detracts from the truly great shows of the pre-multichannel age like Morecambe and Wise or Hancock, you great nit” (unless the narrator is Stephen Fry, because he’s ace, of course). After all, has there ever been a show since, say, The Two Ronnies to become a firm favourite of the entire family, ranging from age twelve to eighty?

Ladies and Gentlemen, Still Game is such a show. Having enjoyed the fourth series (the first to get a decent timeslot on nationwide telly), BrokenTV went out and bought the newly re-released DVD sets of the first three series (and since then, four and five). Before long, the discs have been lent out and passed amongst various members of the BrokenTV family, with every single member of all ages delighting in the show. It’s not a perfect state of affairs (we haven’t a clue who has actually got the first four series of the show right now), but a pretty good indication that if a comedy show is ever going to unite our nation ever again, it would be Still Game. Except the BBC would never promote it properly, as there’s no way people will like it, because it’s all in Scotch, and people only understand television programmes if there are at least two people from London in them (except: no members of BrokenTV’s family are Scottish, although some of us have been there). Best comedy of the year, then? Totally.

Triumph of the Year (Drama)

- The State Within
Never mind the ratings. The BBC's conspiracy can quite comfortably be described as "like 24, if CTU weren't in it", which in case you're a bit slow of understanding, is still a very good thing. Despite the reservations we'd had after the first episode (see blog post passim), this went on to get better and better with each new episode, even going on to have an unpredictable ending (an all too rare event in this day and age).

But the winner is…

Life On Mars

Nudging The State Within into second place, especially if you don’t count that not-very-good episode with the hostages in the newspaper office (“I’ve kicked away his gun, now, shall I just pick it up? No, I’m a highly trained 21st century police officer, so lets all just run away and just hope he hasn’t locked the door or something”). Aside from that, a great concept, the right mixture of humour and drama, and all executed pretty much perfectly. And it’s not about to outstay it’s welcome, even if we’d have preferred there be a Christmas special – surely here was a show more deserving of a Christmas Day post 9pm slot than blimmin’ Dibley. They could have had jokes about Mike Yarwood and everything.


Triumph of the Year (Documentary)

- Frontline Football
A remarkable example of (a) the kind of thing BBC2 should be doing more often, and not just the wrong side of Newsnight, and (b) quite why football is the greatest sport there is, overpaid millionaire idiots or not. If you missed it (which wouldn’t have been difficult), Ben Anderson travelled to countries such as Palestine, DR Congo and Bosnia, and looked at how football plays a role in current and past political and religious effects. Notable scene: where the Congolese squad played a friendly match against a non-league French side in preparation for their World Cup qualifying campaign, only to see two of their players subsequently do a runner after the final whistle (with nothing other than the full kit and boots they were wearing) rather than face the prospect of returning to their war-torn nation.

- The Real Hustle
The hidden gem in BBC Three’s shit-covered crown, this endlessly entertaining hybrid of Beadle’s About and Crimewatch is the sort of show that gets anyone really interested when you tell them about it, only they’ll probably never get to see it because every time they put BBC Three on there’s only wall to wall repeats of Two Pints Of Torchwood and a Tittybangbang of Little Britain Uncovered in the schedule.

- The Story Of Light Entertainment
While much of it we already knew (and several interviews were taken straight from Channel Four’s The Showbiz Set, though sadly not including Denis Nordon saying how “fucking wasn’t invented in the 1960s, you know”), we’re a sucker for seeing clips of Bruce’s Big Night. It included revelations along the lines of Little recently falling out with Large, Cannon and Ball performing a new show where their general antics are regularly interrupted with songs about Jesus, and what happens when a radio ventriloquist makes the leap to television even though he can’t actually throw his voice. All in thirteen ninety-minute episodes, and wrapped up with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performing Smells Like Teen Spirit. And you can’t say much fairer than that.

But the winner is…

Planet Earth



Simply stunning. Especially so when watching it in HD, where the majestic sweeping shots are like having your eyes snogged by an angel. Even in bog-standard-o-vision, it was an almost impossibly wonderful piece of television, and well worth the four years to took to complete. Precisely the sort of television that very few networks would even consider making, and one that no-one could ever make as well as the BBC.

Triumph of the Year (Other Stuff)

- Videogaiden
Only shown on Scotch BBC-2, of course, which is a shame as it was very probably the best videogaming TV show ever. Actually, no ‘probably’ about it, seeing as the competition amounts to little more than annoying fourteen year olds saying a stilted “this game is good because the gameplay and the graphics are good”, other annoying fourteen year olds saying a stilted “hello Games Marstah, can you tell me how to get past the second level of Toejam and Earl?”, and Iain Lee. Interesting to see VideoGaiden already has it’s own pale imitation on Channel M already.

- Ricky Gervais Meets Garry Shandling
We Had To Watch It Through Our Fingers!!!!!!!1 The sight of someone who clearly genuinely believes every bit of gushing praise the Radio Times seems fit to bestow on him (even though he’s only actually done fourteen episodes of a very good television comedy before calling it quits, and twelve not so great episodes of another one), being put in his place by someone who co-created and made 89 (vidiprinter: EIGHTY-NINE) episodes of one of the greatest comedy shows ever made. And only after the former decided to go snooping in the fridge of the famously private latter (on camera) before even meeting him. Some say it was too uncomfortable to enjoy, but it was certainly preferable to the Christopher Guest self-congratulate-in. And we’re sure if Garry Shandling had needed a script at some point from his personal assistant, he’d have said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but Gervais couldn’t be bothered whining about that sort of thing.

- Frank Sidebottom's Proper Telly Show In Black And White (with repeats in Colour)
On Manchester’s Channel M, of course. Only, what, thirteen years after the demise of Frank’s Fantastic Shed Show (it was the first ever TV show to feature Mrs Merton, y’know), he’s back, with the best programme title of the year. And yes, only the repeats are in colour, although luckily there seem to be so many of them, they’re the ones you’re most likely to catch. The only sign that the papier-mâchéd one is really knocking on quite a bit is once you see his wrinkled hands grasping a Thunderbirds colouring book and such, so he generally gets away with trotting out the same old shtick, especially as it’s still refreshingly entertaining shtick involving pickled stormtroopers and the like. Even if the sight of David Soul dancing around wearing Little Frank’s face is possibly the most alarming thing we’ve ever seen on a locally based digital TV channel.

But the winner is…

Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe



Minus points for using the phrase "A Very [X] Christmas" just before we were going to use it for a weak joke about not getting to see A Very The State Within Christmas because of poor ratings, but this was ace. Everything Victor Lewis-Smith should have gone on to do after TV Offal, instead he decided to do lots of rubbish documentaries with Keith Allen in – [looks to camera] he’s doing another one, y’know. In fact, it’s what BrokenTV would be like if it was on telly, and any good. Faint praise, there.


Triumph of the Year (US)

- Lost
Still excellent, even if it is now on Sky, who insist cramming the schedules with Iain Lee fronted vehicles for D-list slebs (at that’s D-list by Sky One standards, which is very, very low) droning on about “a polar bear! What was all that about! And Hurley never loses any weight, and you never get to find anything out, and what about The Others! What are they all about?”. At least they finally seem to have cottoned on to why people download TV shows (because it’s better than having to wait six months to see them), and the second half of Lost: Month Three will go out just a few days later than the US broadcasts. If Channel Four had realised that, they might have gathered enough ad revenue from season two to be able to afford season three, but they were too busy thinking of vehicles for Russell Brand.

- The Venture Bros
Sadly missed by anyone who doesn’t stumble into it by accident at around 1am weeknights on Bravo, where it may or may not be on at random, this is one of our finds of the year. Everyone go out and buy the DVD from Amazon US, it’s only about six quid. It’s got Patrick Warburton in it and everything.

- Tom Goes To The Mayor
Sadly missed by anyone who doesn’t stumble into it by accident at around 1am weeknights on Bravo, where it may or may not be on at random, this is one of our finds of the year. Everyone go out and buy the DVD from Amazon US, it’s only about six quid. It’s got Bob Odenkirk in it and everything.

- American Dad
This is getting better at a rate inversely proportional to the rate Family “Man, this is worse than the time I [event relating to minor 1980s celebrity]” Guy is getting worse. This is proven by the fact it is now the sole programme in the BBC’s prime slot for imported comedy on a terrestrial channel (after Match of the Day 2 on Sundays around midnight, as long as there isn’t snooker or cricket on), which Family Guy ended up in a similar slot on BBC Three, with new episodes being shoved around by repeats of Two Pints Of Lager and Tittybangbang. A sad fate for any once-great show.

But the winner is…

My Name Is Earl



Genius. A major network sitcom that manages to avoid any of the obvious settings (“Ok, so what’s this new show about? Another collection of sassy single flatmates and their experiences with dating, or the other type, a dysfunctional family?” “Well, neither.” “I don’t understand”). It completely evades the “character A says something, character B makes sassy putdown, everyone laughs” template used too often on both sides of the Atlantic (Green Green Grass, My Family). A script that always leads you into thinking they’re going to take a joke one way, then hitting you with a much better gag from out of nowhere. And after all that, it avoids the easy route of trying to be self-consciously ‘dark’ by managing to be uplifting and generally heart-warming. It features one of the best collections of actors ever found in a sitcom since Larry Sanders. And, to cap it all, each episode ends with both male leads chatting whilst sharing a bed in a delightfully innocent Laurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise manner. And the second series is twice as good as the first one was. Even better than Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm combined? Astonishingly: yes.


Best Channel of the year

- BBC HD

It looks better when it's bigger, honest.

It's like a wonderful 'secret' channel, a bit like having one of those boxes that could decode BBC Select in the early 1990s only about a billion times more ace. It might only be on for about four hours a night, but it offers up the following wonders:

(a) There's a wonderful new BBC ident that only the people special enough to have HD can see (i.e. us), which is much better than the circle-based BBC One idents that go on for too long.

(b) Generally one episode of the wonderful Planet Earth on every single night, which is fine by us.

(c) A second chance to see Not Going Out, which is the best new 'proper' sitcom since, as we’d said, Men Behaving Badly went rubbish. And again, it looks utterly gorgeous in high definition.

(d) The Beeb making the decision to simulcast their big Christmas films on the HD channel. Why buy a Blu-ray player (or, heaven forbid, a PS3) and all of your films again (for £25 each), when you can just have them included in your licence fee for nothing? And now live FA Cup matches too. Gawd bless the Beeb.

Bad points? The permanent on-screen logo is quite annoying, especially when there's a film on, but as it's only a trial service that only a handful of people are special enough to see, we'll let it slide. And it's a shame the new series of Doctor Who isn't going to be in HD while boring old Robin Hood is. We don't want to see Keith Allen’s face in that much detail, thanks.

Worst Channel of the year

- ITV1



For going from disaster to disaster. For trying to steal viewers from the first week of Channel Four’s The Paul O’Grady Show by screening old episodes of The Paul O’Grady Show. For ditching new home-grown children’s programming completely, without having a clue what to replace it with. For ditching comedy programming almost as completely, and hoping Harry Hill will hang around for an long as possible. For responding to plummeting ratings by vowing to spend less on future programmes with which to bring viewers back. For showing the same film on two consecutive Saturdays. For even messing up coverage of the World Cup, the most sure-fire of all ratings bankers. For keeping an audience share artificially high by pumping out ever increasing episodes of soap operas, knowing there’s nothing else worth showing. For devoting every night’s output to ripping off your viewers with an insultingly phone-in competition that virtually nobody can actually phone in to. Although, of course, they still pay for all attempted calls. Still, at least Poker Face was quite good, eh?

Nathan Barley Memorial Award For Unjustly Maligned Comedy Programme Of The Year

- Saxondale
Better than the second series of I’m Alan Partridge, we’re saying. Of course, because it didn’t feature a character called Alan Partridge, everyone hated it. But then, everyone is wrong.

Disappointment of the year

- Time Trumpet
Why did that Humpty Dumpty Talks To Armando Iannucci show on BBC Four the other night not mention The Armando Iannucci Shows, eh? They mentioned this enough, and as much as it pains us to say so, by AI’s own high standards, it was pretty awful. The sort of thing we were happy enough to watch once, and will never feel compelled to watch ever again. Thing No-One Seems To Have Noticed: lots of people have mentioned how ‘the assassination of Tony Blair’ bit was cut from The 2007 Terrorism Awards as it was 2 Extreme 4 Da Telly, but not that it should have been removed anyway as it would have buggered up the joke about Tony Blair seeing out the rest of his days wandering aimlessly around Iraq trying to sort it out.

- Doctor Who
Way to stop people enjoying your show, RTD, by padding out three brilliant episodes with nine or so rubbish ones. Still, at least Rose has gone now.

- Torchwood
Clue Club, only with more swearing, shagging and neon. Also suffers from only being any bloody good 18% of the time.

- Cracker
Like Howard Kendall’s second tenure at Everton, you could always sense a great big let-down was coming, but it didn’t make the end result any less disappointing. From being the best ITV drama of the 1990s, to a bog-standard 00s interchangeable ITV1 ‘gritty’ crime show that would usually have Robson Green in it. And don’t get us started on Wire in the Blood (oh, okay then: “Wire in the Blood? Annoying director who wants to be David Fincher in the dreary crime ITV1 crime drama, more like. See, told you not to get us started).

- Robin Hood
Not very good, was it? That’s what you get if you pick Keith Allen to be in things. Have they learned nothing from Roger Roger?

- Rob Brydon's Annually Retentive
It's (another) British version of Larry Sanders (minus ten points). It has Rob Brydon in it (plus nine points). It's on BBC Three* (minus five points). It's based around a fictional panel show instead of a chat show, because everyone stopped trying to do new chat shows as soon as "trying to copy David Letterman" was replaced by "trying to copy Larry Sanders" (a tentative plus two points). It features minor celebrities playing unconvincing portrayals of themselves (minus eight points). It includes Rob Brydon trying to play himself as a nasty, bitter version of his real self, who does little more than bitch about the guests on his show

*Thought for the nanosecond: is the BBC Three ident the beeb's version of Channel Four's Red Triangle, mainly there to warn viewers that the comedy programme are about to watch isn't going to be very good, and they'd be better off bunging UK Gold 2 on instead?

- Spooks
We've tried, we really have. We tuned in to the two-part special opener for series five, hoping that we'd just been watching it wrong on each of the previous occasions, but no, we still hated it. A few dips into the latter parts of the series had the same effect. Of course, maybe it's our telly playing up, which makes Spooks only *seem* like a load of poorly executed style over content, not as clever as it dearly wishes it is pap. It's the Poundstretcher 24.

- Being able to watch American TV as it really is over the internets
Oh no! Instead of being wall-to-wall quality shows that are good enough to see Arrested Development get cancelled, it’s full of rubbish Springer knock-offs, attempts at ‘be’ing the new CSI and tedious local news! You lied to us, liberal media!

But the winner is…

Extras



Or, to use its full title, Extras: The Taboo Of The Week Show. We’ve got loads we could write about it here, but we’ll restrict ourselves to this – what with the amount of time Ricky Gervais spends ‘ironically’ boasting about how many awards he has won, do you think he’s had time to notice he hasn’t won a single one for Extras yet? Granted, Ashley Jansen and Stephen Merchant have both picked up gongs for acting in it, but no actual awards for the Fat Bloke From Reading™. Actually, maybe that’s why he punished Ashley Jansen by making her character do nothing more in the second series than saying something she shouldn’t to the person who the Ricky Gervais character had just told her something about, which she clearly shouldn’t actually say to them, at least once every episode.

I'm Sorry, Are You Still Here? Award For Pointlessness

- Mock The Week
Still, once Merton naffs off from Room 101 to make way for Dara “Err” O’Brien (you’ll see), they won’t need to keep making up cheap new shows just to give him something to do. Now with added Andy Parsons, to make absolutely sure no-one is going to watch it. Until then, there’s a new run of this to look forward to (i.e. avoid).

Surprise of the Year

- Someone BrokenTV knows appearing on Dragons’ Den
He got more money off them than he’d asked for too. Good on him. We’ve beaten him at poker, you know.

- Some artwork BrokenTV’s Mark X knocked up in five minutes filling the screen for a few seconds on one of Channel Four’s biggest shows of the year, Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word
To be fair, that’s probably more of a sign how far the channel has fallen in recent years. He wouldn’t have been let anywhere near 4 Computer Buffs, that’s for sure.

But the winner is…

ITV employing Michael Grade
You see, until that point, we were convinced they're pulling some kind of "we'll make lots of money if the channel goes under" The Producers tax dodge. Still, what with them replacing all children's television with repeats of Inspector Morse this week, we're not that sure we were wrong.

DVD of the year

- The Armando Iannucci Shows
About damn time, too. Arguably the finest programme AI has put his name to, we’re saying, and a welcome reminder of where his flights of fancy can take a (loosely) sketch-based comedy show after the disappointing Time Trumpet.

- The IT Crowd
While the programme itself might have been a bit of a curate’s egg, the DVD package more than made up for it. It’s the first time we’ve ever been more impressed with the menu screens of a DVD than the remainder of the content, but that shows how easily impressed we are by references to old Spectrum games. The rest of the disc is a delight, too, with a Ken Korda documentary about the making of the series (a pity the episode with Adam Buxton is was one of the weaker ones), and excellently, the option to have subtitles in 7337.

But the winner is…

Still Game Series 1-5 Boxset



See above. It’d be the best thirty-five pounds you spend on a DVD set this year. All the shows you didn't get to see because you don't live in Scotland.

The Harry Hill Award For Only Great Programme On ITV1 All Year

- Harry Hill’s TV Burp



“…and a happy new year.“

Movie Of The Year

- Re-Cycle
Despite what everyone else says, this is our Thai horror flick of the year. Other reviews range from middling to woeful, but they’re all wrong, and we’re right. We suspect everyone else had just been watching it wrongly.

- Borat
Of course. Who’d have ever thought we’d see Madonna mentioning Peter “Chicken Lollies!” Baynham on live TV, eh?

But the winner is…

Renaissance



Despite uniformly mediocre reviews, we found this Anglo-Franco-Luxembourgish (it’s a word) animated film noir thunderously entertaining. Top tip: watch the subtitled French version as opposed to the UK dubbed version. While it will make you look like a pretentious twerp, it does improve the movie.


Worst Overall Thing of the year

- Bo! In The USA
After reports that Leigh Francis wanted to move away from the whole Bo! thing (and, well, into things like A Bear's Tale, so, erm...), we get this. Way to push that envelopem Leigh. Of course, it's as bad as you'd expect, but if he was put in a show with decent writers capable of coming up with more than repeating the same three jokes over umpteen series, he might not be too bad. 'Might'.

- Green Wing

We really want to like this. There are loads of people in it that we like in other shows, like Olivia Colman, Tamsin Greig, Mark Heap, Sarah Alexander, Mrs Brittas, That One Who Was In Hippies and The One Who's In Those Barclaycard Adverts With Him. And every time we try to watch it, we're ready to kick in the screen after about three minutes. We've always said that a good television director should be like a good referee - if you don't notice his (or her, Mike Newell) presence, they're doing their job properly. As with so many things in life, we're proved inarguably right and handsome by the existence of Green Bloody Speedy Up Slowy Down Arty Arty Wank Smug Wing. Which is nice in a way, but in another more accurate way, not nice at all. And stupid fawning articles in the Radio Times and G2 probably written by Mark Lawson aren't going to win us over.

- The Catherine Tate Show
At the end of The State Within, every flipping week, voiceover bloke just has to chip in with "(Chuckle) Well, obviously you'll all gutted because you've just missed Catherine Tate, but don't worry! It's repeated on Sunday night, so you can watch it after all! There's no need to thank us, American Dad's the only programme on tonight's Sunday comedy zone that isn't a repeat, so we'll shove it the other side of midnight for you", and a little bit of us dies. Still, ha ha! Bovvered! Hahahahahahaha! That's what those 'chavs' talk like, isn't it! Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! (Dies.)

- Christian O'Connell's Sunday Service
- OFI Sunday
Bring back Wogan. Or at least repeat all of the better interviews, in full. You know, without a squawking D-lister popping up every five seconds, gushing about how “and then he said he like screwing!!! I was like, aagh!!!” as opposed to just letting us find that out for ourselves. It’d be much more preferable to past-their-best or not-as-good-as-they-clearly-think-they-are berks trying to ‘do’ a new TFI. Especially in the case of Chris Evans, who didn’t bother finding out why everyone stopped liking TFI Friday the first time around.

But the winner is…

Culshaw on the Deal or No Deal birthday show.



There was one bit where he actually came out of character and commented on how the game was going in refreshingly earnest terms. Then he messed it all up by going back into his terrible impression of Noel, although because he's not very good, it didn't sound any different to his own voice (like most of his impressions), so no-one really noticed. There were probably worse things on TV last year, but cleverly we kept well away from most of BBC Three’s output, so were able to avoid them.

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Phew. Well, as the happy winners go away with their gongs, and the unhappy losers scream as we turn the firehoses on them, it's time to say goodbye from another (checks scrap of paper), er, the first Annual BrokenTV Awards. See you all again next year, unless we've got bored of doing this blog by then, or you've got bored of reading it. Bye!

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