Eager for Some Peep-Hole Panty Neck-Hurt Action?

Hurrah for Sky, eh? Around 400 channels, broadcasting in numerous languages, at qualities varying from 1080 HD to eighth-generation VHS NTSC-to-PAL, and it’s mostly dirge. On a given day, you can expect to see a dozen repeats of Friends, frankly weird Brazilian variety shows hosted by a club singer in a neckbrace-cum-microphone-stand, and one trillion hours of home shopping.

But, as Jimmy Cricket and his comically mislabelled wellies would undoubtedly say were he writing this blog, there’s more. A few swift presses on your Sky remote can open up a whole new world of viewing pleasure: hidden channels not yet deemed worthy of joining Psychic TV, Gems TV2 and O’seasproperty on the EPG proper. A carefree world where the normal rules of Sky+ do not apply. A grab-bag of content where a channel listed only as a four figure number could contain a pre-launch world of wonder, a screaming test card, or nothing more than blank void. Join us now, as we step tentatively down some creaky stairs (press ‘Service’ on our remote), worry that the batteries on our torch are beginning to fade (press ‘4’), wonder what that noise was behind us (press ‘4’ again), and repeat the secret incantations to open a portal into the netherworld (enter a frequency code from here and add some channels to the ‘Other Channels’ menu, then watch them).

Here are just two of our findings.

Trends TV
11.259 V | Symbol Rate 27.5 | F.E.C. 2/3 | Channel Name: 52117

What is it?

Seemingly due to launch some time soon, we’re not quite sure what the channel’s remit is, but we strongly suspect it’s along the lines of “The Cheapest General Entertainment Channel We Could Cobble Together and Still Qualify for a Place in the Entertainment Section, Where We Plan to Spend Fourteen Hours a Day Simulcasting Quiz Channels”. When we tuned in, the EPG claimed “9pm-11pm Movie Special: A movie show, with a selection of English title movies from around the world”.

What Was On?

What was actually on was some strange sort of American soap-opera/sitcom hybrid along the lines of ‘Mind Your Language’ meets ‘Robins Nest’. And not in a good way, like Soap. It is called Crossroads Café. It wants to be the next Cheers. With luck and the wind behind it, it’ll be lucky to get somewhere near the quality of Springer’s Day.

A cheap set, training film quality acting, more dodgy faux-foreign accents you can shake an episode of Relative Strangers at, and an odd pace that means it’s about 94% bad soap opera, 6% sitcom. The upshot of this is that the half-hearted canned laughter only kicks in about once every five minutes, which feels frankly odd. Pretending you’ve got a studio full of people heartily guffawing it up is one thing, pretending they’ve all been bussed in just to play spot-the-gag is another. It’s clearly made in order to teach The Foreigns to speak English, but we’re not letting it get away that easily. There’s a whole archive of 1980s BBC-1 Sunday morning output that can do the job a million times more effectively.

The action, such as it is, is infrequently broken up with info-breaks in place of adverts. Short sequences on How To Go On A Job Interview, or clips from Crossroads Café subtitled with what the lines were there for (“What is *his* name?” etc) pop up every five minutes or so, bookended by quite probably the worst animation ever (“Three frames of animation for a scene? We’re not bloody Pixar, you know!”). Unfortunately, the huge TrendsTV on-screen logo obscures many of the subtitled headings, so any Johnny Foreigner trying to learn English from these screenings will remain blissfully unaware of what The Queen’s Full-Stops look like.

Ident Watch: A ghastly low quality NTSC’d up CGI effort, with the channel title being beaten roughly about the text by someone having their first ever go at a trial version of Adobe After Effects.

Picture Quality: You know what YouTube videos look like when you make them fill your screen? Slightly worse than that.

Oh dear. Will our next venture into uncharted waters be any better?

Two out of ten.

---

BritShorts
11.426 H | Symbol Rate 27.5 | F.E.C. 2/3 | Channel Name: Brit Shorts

What is it?

It looks to be a soft-launch of a forthcoming showcase for short British films. For now, it is broadcasting a series of short films from what we presume is their parent channel, France’s ShortsTV.

What was on?

Despite the title of the channel, some sort of utterly bizarre French-language animation. A woman visits a dating agency, then gets dressed up as a giant turkey to meet some bloke in an airport who doesn’t like her much. Then another woman travels with Santa (and his little dog) to visit some tiny body builders. She isn’t very happy, but then bumps into some bigger body builders, so she scarpers with them, in another sleigh that was just lying around. Santa gives chase, and turns her into a slug outside the airport seen previously. The dating agency woman leaves the airport, and slips on the newly beslugged-up sleigh-woman. At the airport bar, they all laugh about it afterwards, though. Roll credits.

Then, onto a grainy monochrome effort, again in French, where a car contains four drunken blokes. They soon accidentally run over and kill a boy scout. For a minute, they feel quite bad about it, until the one of them gets annoyed, and starts beating up the corpse. Then they just chuck the body away instead. Feeling that they’ve dealt with the situation effectively, they turn around, only to see the rest of the scout troop wandering along, wondering where boy one is. A rock soundtrack kicks in, as a montage of the men attacking the two scoutmasters begins. Then an argument between the men starts, until they are interrupted by the sound of nearby Gendarme whistling. One of them does a cheesy grin, and the credits roll. Possibly it was from the French version of Jam.

Then, another French short, about a small boy having his birthday party interrupted by half-a-dozen women in leggings. They seem to be acting as some sort of co-stepmother. Retreating to his room, he begins to think about Star Wars. Moving to a Star Wars poster on his wall, we can see he has drilled a hole giving a view of his co-stepmothers’ bedroom. Jump cut. As a track-suited man with an afro peers through the hole at the pervyness therein, Boy mends the head on his Luke Skywalker action figure. The man is so pleased with the view, he damages his neck somehow. Nonetheless, he is still pleased by his experience, and duly pays Boy up. As he walks out of the room, the corridor is lined with more men, eager for some peep-hole panty neck-hurt action. Cut to a conference being given by one of the men from the corridor, now in a neck-brace. As he completes his speech, the other men in the room applaud. They are also wearing neck-braces.

Then, another one started. It looked like it was going to involve an old woman getting undressed for a bath, so we promptly put Match Of The Day on instead. Brr.

Ident Watch: Four shorts in, we didn’t see a single one. Poor show.

Picture Quality: Good. Despite our mobile phone camera making them look poor.

Once it gets going fully, and once there are some shows we can actually understand, this could be one to keep an eye on. Until then, a bit like a non-stop French version of the Japanese Jam Films series. A good thing.

Seven out of ten.

Meanwhile; exciting BBC HD news! They took the BBC HD dog off the screen for tonight’s premiere episode of Party Animals, the new political drama from the people behind This Life. As you might expect, it was basically This Life but about people who work for politicians, and was subsequently terrible. Hopefully, they’ll ditch the logo for some good programmes and hopefully some movies, too.

And what of the Celebrity Big Brother Fame-O-Watch? Well, here you go. We’re not really going to write any more about it now, because it’s all over, so we can stop caring. It’s a bit like how Germany versus Italy is a must see television event if they play each other in the World Cup Finals, but if they’re meeting in a European Championships qualifier, it’s all you can do to glance at the Sky Sports News Infobar to see the result.

So, in summary: blah Shilpa blah blah Jade getting lot of increased attention for obvious reasons blah still won't buy any records by Towers Of London blah. All info taken the morning after the final, but we've not had time to upload it until now. And yes, we *are* still in love with Shilpa Shetty.

Read More

Celebrity Big Brother In Numbers: Part Three

Celebrity Big Brother, eh? Even if you're one of those crushing bores who like to loudly tell everyone within earshot that they've never bothered watching it, because it's ridiculously vapid and tedious, you know (how do they know that if they've never watched it?), you can't help but have heard about the main story making actual proper global headlines. For the benefit of any readers who have only come out of a year-long coma within the last hour, here's what they've all been talking about: "How are the assembled peoples of the CBB house faring in BrokenTV's Celebrity Big Brother Fame-O-Meter after seventeen days in and around the CBB house?"

Well, we've had our crack team of ninja Excel monkeys hammering away at their keyboards for almost ten minutes, and can now gladly reveal their findings TO THE NATION. Apart from the 18% of it who seem to be pro-bullying, pro-racism, or both (ONLY JOKING).



The outlines in white are the standings from the previous round of numberfumbling, reflecting just how well the housemates have done at getting strangers on the internet typing in complete gibberish about them [citation needed] since their arrival in the house. Pop Fact One! Monosyllabic berk and pretend football agent Jack not only hasn't got a Wikipedia page about him, there isn't even a 'create page for this person' link for him. Pop Fact Two! Jackieieieiey's page is already pending deletion at the behest of the Wikimods, which probably says something about something.

So, interested in taking a look at a ranked chart of exactly whose Wikipedia word count has grown by the most? Of course you are. So here we go:



As you can see, Bollywood star (and lady who BrokenTV's Mark X claims is going to be the future Mrs X, in much the same manner Sven-Göran Eriksson claims he's going to be next Chelsea manager) Shilpa tops the list, closely followed by the Lidl Sid Vicious. Credit is also due to now-slightly-less-lovely-than-we'd-thought-a-week-ago Cleo, who has climbed from having no Wikipedia profile at all, to attaining the third-largest wordspurt. At the other end of the scale, one-time 20% of the Jackson Five and all round good egg Jermaine Jackson shuffles along in last place, ahead of Tabloid Carole and Swearing's Leo Sayer, which is a shame, because we've really taken to JJ during the whole recent unpleasantness.

Can we squeeze another graph out of all this? You bet:



Yes. Measuring the figures by increased percentages of verbosity, the Aldi Iggy Pop takes the honours with a remarkable 622% growth since day zero of the CBB house, although it should be noted that with an original Wiki total of, well, nothing, Cleo has technically won this category with her increase of infinity%, except Excel doesn't really like plotting that sort of thing, so we've discounted her from the chart. Leo, Korpulent Ken and Jermaine stutter along in the relegation places.

Meanwhile, two thoughts about events of the last 48 hours:

THOUGHT ONE: We’ve only just watched the eviction show (and only the first of the two), but we reckon Jade came out of it about as well as she could. Internet chatter suggesting she was faking her reaction once the penny dropped, but we don’t think she’s that good an actress, she seemed quite genuine. Channel Four are more at blame for not taking their course of action much earlier. And clearly, she wasn’t racist in the first place, but being a pretty horrible proud-to-be-fick bully isn’t much better. It would have been nice if she’d had the gumption to realise how she was coming across to the viewing public, or preferably not acted in that way in the first place, if Shilpa was more than happy to forgive and forget, everyone else really should too. And the duplicitous Danielle is much worse, anyway.

THOUGHT TWO: Nice of Channel Four to state that Jack didn’t call Shilpa a four-letter racist slang term (there are some words we don’t want appearing in our search keywords list, thanks), and that he’d only called her a c-word. Call us old-fashioned, but calling a perfectly friendly, well-mannered, polite and all-round nice woman that word is one of the few things in society that still offends us, so it’s hardly an improvement. nb. This only doesn’t apply if you’re playing a character called Hank Kingsley in an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, but in every other instance we’re prepared to demand pistols at dawn.

BrokenTV's prediction for the final week of CBB: Jack to whimper like a lost puppy for two days then scarper, Shilpa to suddenly get no votes for the next round of nominations but mainly because they've all guessed what's going on and not because she's ace and lovely, and the viewing figures to tail off dramatically as the housemates become suddenly reticent to say or do anything in any way controversial. And Dirk to win.

Read More

Big Brother Race Row EXCLUSIVE: New Development

In the latest development in the Big Brother racism and/or bullying scandal that has clearly put the WORLD on the VERY BRINK OF WAR, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie have just released the following statement.

"Our concern has rapidly mounted about the broadcast behaviour of individuals within the Big Brother house. We are totally against all forms of racism and bullying and indeed this behaviour is entirely at odds with the brand values of our good selves. As a result we feel that as long as this continues we would like to retroactively change the name of our jolly 1970s BBC situation comedy for which we are so well known, to its original working title Superchaps Three. Thank you."

Superchaps Three, earlier today.

Read More

Celebrity Big Brother 2007. In Numbers. Part Two.

Next week: did the victims of 9/11 bring it all on themselves because they chose to work in a tall building? Dermot O'Leary investigates, and takes the side of whoever has the same agent as him.

Read More

Words With Which People We'd Previously Disliked Utterly Redeemed Themselves: Part One. Of One, Probably.

"I'm not fucking waiting hand and foot on some fucking moron and her family."

We still wouldn't buy any of his records, but yeah. Fair dues. If we didn't have a tenner riding on it*, we'd stop watching it right now, to be honest.

(*We've 'sold' some of our bet on Shilpa, transferring some to Danielle (hoping her odds drop, so we can make a quick profit), and the rest to Cleo (because she's clearly going to win, because she is ace). Hurrah for the betting exchange system!)

Read More

Celebrity Big Brother 2007. In Numbers. Part One.

Even though we can't stand 'normal' Big Brother, what with it basically being an audition for screeching idiots who want to present a soon-forgotten show on E4, we can't help but get drawn into the celebrity version of it. In CBB, the participants don't need to make as much of a scene of themselves, because once they walk out of the house, they're happy enough to get back to their luxurious Sydney apartment/Kensington flat/panto in Morecambe, having received a fifteen minutes of fame more than they'd previously budgeted. The 'normal' Big Brother contestants are for the most part there as an attempt to kick-start a career of getting mentioned in Heat and maybe getting to shag a thick footballer. The celeb contestants are just happy to get on a popular television show one last time, and anything after that would be a bonus. So, we can enjoy it more.

Plus, of course, it gives us something to talk to girls about, without us having to hope they like football, Ridge Racer or Tatu.

But how to quantify our emjoyment of Celeb Big Brother without sounding like a bunch of big girls? Follow each sentence cooing over a bitching session by a former model with a discussion about rugby? Place an ironic winking smiley at the end of every paragraph? No. The answer is this: graphs.

First, for our regular viewers who might not know/care who has gone onto the Ceeb house (Yes, we said Ceeb. It'll catch on), here's a quick rundown:

Jermaine Jackson (Member of global chart-toppers The Jackson Five)

Ken Russell (Director critically acclaimed movies and Lair Of The White Worm)

Danielle Lloyd (someone who is married to a West Ham player)

Jo O'Meara (From out of S Club 7)

Leo Sayer (Performing artist who has had top 40 hits in each of the last four decades, and who fell off a treadmill on the pilot episode of Families At War)

Shilpa Shetty (Bollywood star)

Carole Malone (Tabloid columnist)

Donny Tourette (Either a shit new Paul Kaye character, or in an actual rock band, we're not sure)

Ian "H from Steps" Watkins (H from Steps)

Cleo Rocos (From The Kenny Everett Television Show and, of course, Genghis Cabs)

Dirk Benedict (The Faceman)

"But most of them aren't even celebrities", you may well be pshaw-ing at this point. What a clever observational comedian you are. But, just in case they don't make them all stand in order from 'most' to 'least' famous on podiums again this year, who is the most famous? As ever, science has the answer.

As each celebrity was announced, BrokenTV's crack squad of internet ninjas were hammering away at keyboards, checking out the size of each celebrity's Wikipedia entry. Once they'd worked out how to spell their names. Alarmingly, in the ten seconds it had taken them to find the entry for most of the housemates, someone, somewhere in the country had already added details on that personality entering the Big Brother house. This section of data has been discounted, leading to the following fame-o-graph:

A surprise? Well, the main one for us is that Cleo Rocos hadn't got a Wikipedia entry at all, as she's been around on telly for twenty-odd years (she did about three minutes after she entered the house, of course), and cropped up in quite a few things. It's quite clear from the gap between fifth and sixth who the 'proper' celebrities are, but like a dog in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way. This is why Jo O'Meara (the one who'd taken our team of wikininjas the longest to find) is the current Betfair favourite, and the most famous person in the house, as proven by science, is stuttering along at 22/1. Still, we're backing science, by plonking ten of the Queen's finest British pounds on Shilpa, hoping that the UKs large Indian community will help steer her to victory (or at least let her price drop, so we can claw some money back).

THE BROKENTV/CBB BETTING EXCHANGE
(Further odds that should be on Betfair, along with what we'd give)

Odds on Ken Russell doing a Roger Cook, and being taken out of the Big Brother house on a stretcher at 1.30am on the second night: 4/1. We really hope not, of course, but, y'know.

Odds on Donny Tourette being voted out first, then claiming he was doing it all ironically anyway, so it doesn't matter that everyone in the UK thinks he's a cunt: 8/15.

More CBB gubbins soon! (Unless we get bored, because this doesn't look as promising as last year.)

Read More