"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!)
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)
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)
"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.)
Yes, we've finally got around to updating BrokenTV TV. And what have we added? Some of the best old comedy we've found, dating from the late 1940s. Viewers of Victor Lewis-Smith's output may well have noticed clips of old Public Information Films with a rubbery-faced old man being bollocked by an off-screen announcer who throws pepper in his face, but the full version of this, and other films from the era seem to have been missing from YouTube. UNTIL NOW.
"Don't drink it, man!"
Watching them all now, we can't help but hail the star of these short films, one Richard Massingham, as a comic talent to rival Hancock, before Anthony Aloysius Hancock had got anywhere near a TV screen. Born in 1898, Massingham worked in medicine, at one point being appointed Senior Medical Officer at the London Fever Hospital, but also made occasional short films. Noting that there was nobody making specialist informational films for the public, he set up Public Relationship Films Ltd in 1938, and set about making a troubled Britain a slightly safer place. Especially once the Nazis stopped dropping bombs on it, of course.
The clips we've got here date from 1945 to 1948, and are just a few of the ninety or so short films he turned out over his short career. Massingham went on to co-direct (with Jacques Brunius) an award-winning short film for children, To The Rescue, and had begun work on The Blakes Slept Here, excitingly quoted at Screenonline as "a lavish and curious Technicolor amalgam of gas advertisement and historical cavalcade", when he sadly passed away in 1953.
Just imagine how great he could have been given the Bill Kerr role in the TV version of Hancock's Half Hour.
Here are a few shorts of Massingham magic, in full.
Coughs and Sneezes (1945)
Or, the one that was on TV Offal (or was it Ads Infinitum? Or neither?). All great fun, but quite how people who go about kicking other people into rivers can be classified as 'pretty harmless', we're not sure.
Don't Spread Germs (Jet Propelled Germs) (1948)
Semi-sequel to the above snot-aversion campaign, includes a wonderful bit of announcer intervention.
Pedestrian Crossing (1948)
Pay heed, citizenry. How to cross the road in post-war Britain. "It's no good thinking you can have a sleep!"
A Warning to Travellers (Five Pounds in Notes) (1949)
Richard Massingham being told ONLY TO TAKE FIVE POUNDS IN NOTES WHEN HE GOES ABROAD, otherwise the balance of payments will get all messed up. Less excellent than his other PIFs (his character speaks for one thing, instead of just pulling faces), but any Richard Massingham is fine by us.
There is one Massingham clip already up at YouTube, Watch Your Meters, which is nice, because the version we've got has messed up sound, and you can get hold of the super What A Life! (a tongue in cheek look at postwar austerity) from archive.org (we'd put that on YouTube, but we're not directors so can't put twelve-minute epics up there).
ScreenOnline has more details on the great man, including more clips of his short films (but only if you're a school, college or uni, which we're not. Bah). It even includes a transcript of an article written by Massingham for Sight And Sound in 1939, Richard Massingham on Continuity.
Now, if you'll excuse us, we're off to spend the new year fretting about the balance of payments and drinking. Look out for the BrokenTV Awards 2006 tomorrow, if we're sober enough. Until then, here's a bonus bit of VLS-approved retro clippage, this time from 1950, telling foreigners how to use our buses.
Here's something we were thinking of doing for a while. Remember The Chart Show? The pop video showcase that used to be on Channel Four in the 1980s (and then on ITV, where it wasn't anywhere near as good)? Repeats of old episodes are now running on Sky Digital channel The Vault on Saturday mornings and Thursday afternoons. It'd be handy to capture one of those, and bung it up onto YouTube so everyone can see it, we reckon.
Well, what with us being as endemically lazy as ever, it's quite fortunate that someone else has done just that. Except, even more excellently, they've uploaded an original Channel Four broadcast of it. So, with thanks to the enigmatic (well, we presume so) JamesTV2001, here it is in full colour. Now we can all sit back, watch that cutting edge Amiga 500 graphicry, and hope that the specialist chart rewinds to one of the songs in it that we want to see, even although it hardly ever bloody did:
Part one. "Everything Good is Bad" by Westworld, "Burn It Up" by The Beatmasters with PP Arnold and "Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now" by Wedding Present.
Part two. "The Garden Of Eden" by The Garden of Eden and "Copperhead Road" by Steve Earle.
Part three. "Please Help the Cause against Lonliness" by Sandie Shaw, "Valerie", "Don't You Know What The Night Can Do", & "Roll With It" by Steve Winwood. Before somebody stuck a drum machine behind the latter and then claimed it was their own song.
Part four. "Harvest For The World" by The Christians, "Don't Cry" by Boy George and bloody "Orinoco Flow" by bloody Enya.
Part five. "Ordinary Angel" by Hue & Cry, "True Love" by Glenn Frey and "Riding on a Train" by The Pasadenas.
The final bit, with "Desire" by eighties band U2.
There's a heap more Chart Show goodness from the same Tuber here. It includes the last ever episode from 1998 (which includes a superb montage of all the Chart Show graphics over the years) and a special from 1986 (which is great, because Fuzzbox are on it). Both of which we probably would have been better off posting here, but what can you do, eh?
We're currently sitting at home waiting for Johnny Parcelforce to deliver the Nintendo Wii we should be getting today. We'd be really excited, if it weren't for two things:
(a) The parcel tracking page for the delivery in Amazon claims that it was actually delivered yesterday morning. No it bloody wasn't. Nobody was in, and no stupid little card was left. And you'd said Tuesday on your confirmation email. If J. Parcelforce has nicked it, then we'll have to go on some sort of MASSIVE DAMAGE spree at their depot.
(b) SWEET MOTHER OF MERCY DAYTIME TELEVISION IS BAD. Why do the BBC assume people who have nothing better to do than watch TV at 10am are the kind of audience thinking "how I can buy lots of houses, have them renovated, and sell them on for profit?" It's more likely they're thinking "how long have I had that bread in? Wonder if there are any green bits on it yet?" Or, in our case, thinking of ways to cause MASSIVE DAMAGE to the local Parcelforce depot.
A far better thing to broadcast at this time of the morning is a static screen of a scary clown, and some jaunty music. They did it all the time in the 1970s and early 1980s, when there were lots more people with nothing better to do than watch TV at 10am, and we're betting with that cheery little lift to their collective spirit, the peoples of Britain set about inventing the ZX Spectrum and DNA fingerprinting and stuff.
By way of testing this theory, we've put the YouTube video below on a loop for the last half hour, and we've already come up with a number of new exciting ideas. Mainly ideas for inflicting MASSIVE DAMAGE on the local Parcelforce depot if our Wii doesn't arrive in the next few hours, but it's a start.
[Midnight update]Luckily, our Wii arrived not long after we'd noticed that someone we've never heard of had signed for it via ParcelForce's online tracking. They lived down the road, and delivered earlier this evening. Which was lucky for us, because Johnny Parcelforce couldn't be bothered putting a card through our letterbox telling us who he'd given it to, so they could just as well have kept it, and we would never know.
Here's our in-depth review of the Wii so far: It is excellent. Wii Sports is wonderful, but Wii Play is slightly disappointing so far (apart from the 9-ball pool game, which is tops). In fact, Wii Sports is so ace, we haven't even got around to trying Zelda or Call Of Duty 3 yet. Our Mii code is 6585 9853 0847 1206, in case anyone wants to kick our online arses at, well, whatever online games might appear.
My Name Is Earl. American Dad. Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Daily Show. Arrested Development. Studio 60 On Sunset Strip. Lost. 24. The Colbert Report. American television is in a very healthy state at the moment, possibly the healthiest it's ever been. OR IS IT?
Thanks to modern technology, namely the newest version of TVUPlayer, we can finally see what it's really like without it stopping for rebuffering every five seconds. And guess what? Well, predictibly, it's mostly rubbish, which much of the day outside primetime being taken up with teleshopping or tedious local micro-news. Of course, what with the channels being taken from the west-coast feeds, they're all about seven hours behind us, meaning you need to be up at around 4am to see anything in primetime, but even then it's mostly repeats or dull reality TV that even Bravo 2 will turn their nose up at over here.
The screenshots we've tried to take don't work, so have an out of date one.
The listing of available channels is constantly updated in the new beta version (which works much better for us than the last 'stable' release), meaning a few appear and disappear at random (BBC World popped up on the list for us the other day, only it wouldn't work. If a working version of BBC Prime pops up, we'll be really pleased). It does contain Comedy Central, so night owls will be able to see live editions of The Daily Show and Colbert, but be warned - the same channel seems to show endless episodes of MadTV, surely the worst sketch comedy ever broadcast. Although we haven' t seen Blunder yet.
Oh, and you can use it for seeing live 3pm Saturday Premiership football, which was the real reason we'd used it in the first place. Yesterday we watched the Wigan-Liverpool match, which was quite odd, as it featured no commentators at all, just the crowd noise and occasional caption.
Special bonus selection of YouTube clips sorted of linked to the two above things: Classic clips from the NASL! You've gots to love that Being There-ish TV coverage.
"ITV is set to air a 90-minute special version of 1970s children's show Tiswas. Presenter Chris Tarrant and other members of the original cast are due to be reunited for the one-off, according to The Sun. The return of the cult show will feature clips of the original, plus new sketches. However, co-producer Tarrant is said to be searching his own collection of tapes for Tiswas footage after it emerged that 350 master tapes were thrown away."
Good news, of course, as Tiswas was wonderful and much better than boring old Swap Shop. And it's nice to see ITV paying tribute to one of it's classic programmes that isn't Spitting Image (which they inevitably go and mess up by letting John Fucking Culshaw anywhere near it).
Things that are going to happen in ITV's forthcoming Tiswas revival:
1) They won't mention any of the dodgy racist bits that were it, such as Chris Tarrant in a pretend 'Lenny Henry: This Is Your Life' segment saying that Len has been "seen everywhere, apart from in coal mines". Yes, really. It's on the VHS 'Best of' that we've got.
2) There will be an interview with the man who used to be the tiny child who used to dress up as a rabbit and sing Bright Eyes, which won't be very interesting because, really, how can it be, unless he has since turned into one of those odd 'FurryLover' people who populate 60% of Second Life and can only get an erection while dressed as a woodland creature, or something?
3) There'll be about twenty seconds about OTT, and that only saying how terrible it was, even though it actually quite enjoyable in a knockabout way. And clearly a billion times better than Bo! in the USA.
4) They'll pass on the opportunity to show an entire episode (taken from Chris Tarrant's shed) on one of their digital offshoot channels, because then there'd be slightly less room for people who've been on Big Brother trying to con people on low incomes into wasting £1.50 a call that doesn't even 'get through' on a fixed 'quiz'. Well, after spending ninety minutes showing us all the best bits and saying how ace it all was, why would viewers possibly want the chance to see an episode for themselves, eh?
5) Three million slightly pathetic men in their thirties will make a mental note of whether they still 'would' when the Sally James of 2006 appears on screen.
New, from the makers of BrokenTV: BrokenFM. Like BrokenTV, but about music, and home to at least two good ideas. Only one of which was stolen from elsewhere
Issue one comes with a super free gift for all boys and girls - a 99 track compilation that can magically fit onto a single CD (until the link gets removed).
You know, for ages now, we've been looking over the blog and wondering why no-one ever leaves comments any more. Over twenty people have been looking at the site every single week, and nary a "dude, where are the pictures of Beverly D'Angelo in the shower I'd Googled?". With typical stiff-upper-lipedness we'd continued to post, but always in the back of our minds were the sounds of children taunting us with cries of "you're a rubbish blog that no-one comments on" to the sound of Ring A Ring Of Roses (it didn't scan very well, but that's what they'd chant).
Just now, we've flipped over to the new Blogger software, and upon logging in to prepare for Secret Super Excellent New Project, we've just noticed a tab labelled "52 Unmoderated Comments". One click later, and in amongst all of the "Grate site! Please be visit my site full of teh scamware!" comments from scammers, were several proper comments from loyal readers. Oh, you guys! Here, have some lollipops!
They're yoghurt flavoured ones and everything.
Commenting should now be working properly, so you can all feel free to tell us what you think again. And with luck, the voices of the children in our head will soon go back to only taunting us about that tramp we killed when we were eleven.
(Coincidentally, all of the comments should now be in place, if anyone wants to read them.)
The deleted final scene from the Everybody Hurts video finally unearthed.
We're glad they stopped the shaky-close-up-on-faces-o-cam after the first few minutes. It looked awful.
Was is just us, or did quite a look of it seem overdubbed? The dialogue didn't quite fit the action in a few of the office scenes, and sounded as if it were recorded in a sound booth, not the set of an office. Quite distracting, really.
The Virginia Governor going all Sun reader "lock the lot of 'em up" crazy after one terror attack seemed a bit unrealistic, even for an American politico. If it had been referred to as the second or third similar attack in a few years, that would have made more sense. They could have just mentioned it, they wouldn't have needed to prepare another expensive CGI shot or anything.
Why do dramas like this and Death of a President always have such laughably fake looking pretend American news channels? Can't they get the people behind The Day Today's 10NN to knock something up? The fake news network didn't even have the Stars 'n' Stripes, or horrid over-CGI'd WAR ON AMERICA FROM THE SKIES logo on screen or anything. We could be grateful they didn't just rope in some News 24 presenters like they normally do, or do what Doctor Who did, and have a pretend American news network operating in what is clearly the Wales Today studio ("Look, there's where Bob Humphrys usually sits!").
The young muslim couple INADEQUATE SPOILER SPACE in the car who got killed should have been introducing into the story near the start, getting concerned about the attack, started to get annoyed by the press treatment, and just when you think they're going to become main characters, the accident happens. If you're going to be a conspiracy drama with lots of twists, this is the sort of thing you should be doing, not faux-controversial OMG THAT EVIL EMBASSY BLOKE IS A GAY111! stuff.
So, who will the baddies be? The fictional country that the writers have made up a name for especially for the show? Could be!
