Ireland's Highest Pub and Trolley Garages

For anyone as captivated by new and potentially interesting TV experiences as BrokenTV, every trip overseas usually contains a frisson of excitement when being in a bar that has a television set in it, and some commercials come on. This initial sense of wonder soon disappears just as soon as realise that (a) there is seemingly an upper limit of six different television commercials in circulation in many countries at any different time, (b) around 60% of them are just the same as the ones over here, except the can of Lynx shown at the end of it is a can of Axe, and (c) the remainder are shit adverts for mobile phones or digital cameras. And yet, each time we find ourselves in an alien land and the ads appear, or if we're merely in a pub showing an illicit stream of ESPN Hong Kong, the faint sense of wonder returns. This may be why we feel compelled to drink so much. Hic.

With that in mind, earlier on today we were trawling our EPG, looking for any gems offered by our shiny new subscription to Setanta, and slightly hoping against hope it was them and not Sky Sports who were showing live coverage of the Liverpool versus Portsmouth Asia Trophy final. NASN were showing a mens lacrosse match between New Jersey and Philadelphia, which was moderately interesting for about three minutes, but once you've got over the fact it's simultaneously one of the most effeminate and yet violent sports you're likely to encounter, it's a bit dull. We finally settled on Setanta Ireland, showing a repeat of the Peace Cup final between Bolton and Lyon. If we'd known what a crashingly dull match it had turned out to be, we mightn't have bothered, but there was one saving grace.

You see, and we might be wrong here, we're pretty sure Setanta Ireland is blocked for Setanta subscribers who live outside the emerald isle, but this wasn't blocked at all. Possibly the controller of Setanta Ireland had decided residents of Ireland shouldn't be the only ones to suffer. Either way, it meant we got to see the adverts offered up to viewers in the Republic of Ireland. "So?", you may be wondering at this point, "You don't update for nearly a month, then it's something as meaningless as this? No wonder all those readers who found the site after the DVD piracy poster update didn't stick around". Oh hush, you sweet fool. It's interesting. Yes, it is.

Unless you're reading this and you live in Ireland, in which case you might like to pop next door and see if BrokenFM are up to anything, because you'll pretty much know what's coming up.

ADVERT ONE: CARLSBERG

There are a few things over the past few years that have made us question our loyalty to Liverpool FC, and consider supporting someone else instead. We would have ditched them before you could say Istvan Kozma if they'd signed Lee Bowyer, but luckily the rat-faced bigot wanted too much money. If cuddly violator of human rights Thaksin Shinawatra had managed to take control of the club, then Rick Parry would have made it onto our enemies list (somewhere between Richard Bacon and the evil clown who our parents). The actions of the hundreds of boneheaded scallies who'd thought a perfect way to compliment their Justice For The 96 wristbands would be to barge their way into the Olympic Stadium and potentially cause another disaster brought us perilously close to the edge of disowning the club.

It says a lot about our total inability to maintain a sense of perspective when we state that another reason we feel slightly ashamed to follow Liverpool is the fact they're sponsored by the company responsible for one of the shittest advertising campaigns on British television. "Carlsberg don't do nightclubs, but if we did, we'd use it as an excuse to cram lots of bland anonymous big-titted FHM photoshoot types into a crowded space because our advertising agency isn't very imaginative".

Happily, the Irish campaign is much better. It features a bloke chatting up a pretty girl at a bar, yes, but it's an Irish bloke in an American bar, which is a vast improvement on the UK adverts which are clearly made to be interchangable with as many other dialects as possible (which is why there's the bare minimum of speech in them and a lack of nation-centric landmarks, you see). Pretty Girls' boyfriend comes along, leading Pretty Girl to offer Irish Bloke two options; run away, or get kicked in. Luckily, Irish Bloke saves the day with a bit of blarney instead. Slogan: It's never just A or B, there's always C - Carlsberg.

Granted, it's hardly Citzen Kane, but it's amiable enough, and a welcome change from the UK's Carlsberg advertising, which still seems to think that every alcohol-quaffing male amongst the population is a thick Nuts reader. Still, tits eh? Tits! Phwoar!

ADVERT TWO: JOHNNIE FOX'S PUB

The next advert is more representative of Setanta Ireland's daytime ad-space. A cartoon fox is having a nice sleep. As Shakepeare once wrote, "to sleep perchance to dream about a little cartoon fox donning a little green waistcoat and joining in a riverdance in Ireland's highest pub", although the last part of that was largely implicit. Yes, that's right, somewhat delightedly a large proportion of the adverts on Setanta Ireland are for specific establishments. It’s like being in a cinema sometime in the early 1980s and getting to see lots of local adverts, but with improved promotion budgets.

ADVERT THREE: TAILORING ALTERATIONS CENTRE

Taking it to the next level, another cartoon advert, this is a barely animated Flash effort about altering suits to measure. “For all your alteration needs”. And that’s about it. Excellent stuff.

ADVERT FOUR: MCDONALDS

A schoolboy is getting ready for school. In order to fit in with his male-grooming-fixated peer group, he has borrowed and applied some of his mothers moisturiser. But: Oh no! It’s tinted moisturiser! Alack! His face is as orange as the bastard offspring of an Oompa Loompa and Gavin Henson. What to do?

Clearly, the only thing that can now happen is for the pantry door to open in a shaft of beaming white light, revealing twice Eurovision winner Johnny Logan, belting out the song which took him to triumph in 1987 , “Hold Me Now”. With Ireland’s Mr Eurovision in the room, the schoolboy has finally found the father figure he had been seeking for so long, and as his mother collapses in shock, the boy seeks solace by burying his face in the arms of The Loge. A-ha-ha-and thereby rubbing a large orange smear onto Logan’s white jacket. Gleefully ignoring the cost of having to dry clean his outfit, Logan merely chuckles and offers the boy a McDonalds hamburger. So you see, what with McDonalds selling a nice hamburger that costs just one Euro, everything will be okay.

ADVERT FIVE: STREETCARE SERVICES LTD

Almost taking the form of a Powerpoint presentation more than a proper television advert, this adverts tells the viewing public how adept Streetcare services are at the art of contemporary street furniture. Need a bus shelter? A shopping trolley garage? A Park bench? A bin? A bike shelter? Or even a pitch dugout? You do? Then they’re your men and/or women!

Rubbish sarcasm aside (they’re running successful businesses, while we’re anonymous twats sneering at them on the internet. My, aren’t WE big?), adverts like this are worth approximately eighteen million identikit adverts for debt consolidation or personal injury claims that make up the vast majority of afternoon ad breaks on other digital channels, so more power to them. Of the two commercial breaks we’ve now watched on Irish telly, only one advert contained any stereotypical fiddle-dee-diddly-dee Oirishness, and that had a small cartoon fox in it, so we can probably forgive even that. BrokenTV doesn’t have a lot of truck with lazy regional stereotyping, you see. We’re Welsh, and we’ve hardly ever worn a stovepipe hat or molested a ewe.

In summary then: Irish adverts – more of them please.

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An Update About Big Brother That Isn't Really About Big Brother So Most Of Our Readers Might Want To Read It Anyway

This year it seems that the Sunday Mirror (and possibly the Daily Mirror, only we haven't looked at that for months because it's an especially poor read at the moment) have taken the decision that they "don't" like Big Brother. What this actually means is that they're still going to spend at least four pages of every edition going on about it, but delivering all copy in whatever the literary equivalent of a sarcastic voice is. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, of course - all tabloids like to do this sort of thing where celebrities are concerned (not that the bungalowmates really qualify as celebrities), and it's true to say that BrokenTV is massively guilty of the same thing from time to time.

However, the absolute nadir of this approach can be found on page 27 of this week's copy. Kevin "He's The Real TV Mr Nasty" O'Sullivan (erm, no he isn't?) is charged with keeping tabs on each one of the residents of the Big Brother Bungalow, and writing a little 'summing-up' of every one of them, every week. In order to cement his "The Real TV Mr Nasty" credentials, he really socks it to each one of the shameless BB wannabes. Except, as most people who've watched the current series will probably have noticed, the majority of tenants for this year aren't especially disagreeable. In some cases they might be flawed, self-conscious, emotionally fragile or a bit shallow, but in the main they're fundamentally decent enough people. But "The Real TV Mr Nasty" has a job to do!

So, Liam? He's tewwibly working class! The twins, Brian and Gerry? Stupid, "sensationally stupid" and a "greek tragedy"! Chantelle? "Coconut Head"! Laura? "Spends most of her time lying in bed being fat"! And, as you can probably imagine, so on. The last of these is an especially low blow, which almost tempts us into saying something along the lines of "Kevin O'Sullivan is the very worst kind of smug cunt; he's a fucking smug cunt". Luckily, as we're not about to start billing ourselves at The Real Internet's Mr Nasties and because our mum might read this, we're not about to descend to that level.

Personally, we'd happily go out and get drunk with any of the BB07 contestants, apart from Charley (because she'd start a fight) and Carole (because she'd start nagging us about ordering the drinks wrongly or tell us off for going on the fruit machine). Liam would pay for the drinks from his winnings, natch.

Of course, given that Kevin "He's The Real TV Mr Nasty" O'Sullivan is making a healthy living from giving controversial and insightful insights into television (Gillian McKeith is quite annoying, apparently. Who knew!?), while we're embittered loners swigging Somerfield Value gin whilst hammering away on a tawdry TV blog only read by other supermarket-own-brand-gin addled reprobates. Maybe we need to introduce more of an 'edge' by making needlessly controversial remarks about those that probably don't deserve it? Then the offers from Her Majesty's Press will start flooding in!

Fingers crossed!

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BrokenBrother: MicroUpdate

With Seany - who'd we'd jokingly stated would be next to leave the house because we'd just put a fiver on him to win - having been the next person to leave the house, it's quite clear that we'd never pass ourselves off as Big Brother experts. Each of the two people we've now backed as winners have left the house in disgrace at the very next opportunity, and we're flirting dangerously with relegation from Brig Bother's Fantasy Big Brother League (the bottom three quite possibly having to enter a fantasy league based on Castaway 2008). With that in mind, we're simply going to post up the figures, and restrict ourselves to five observations based on the last two weeks of Big Brother.

1. Our current favourites are now the twins. Yes, who'd have thought that after the launch show, eh? Despite initial revelations, along with Laura they seem to be the most genuine people in the bungalow this year. Coupled with the fact we've just realised that they both look quite a bit like Lauren Laverne When She Was Still In Kenickie, we've decided they must win.
   
   
2. Amanda is the current Betfair favourite to win. Somehow, Sam is languishing on 13, while Amanda is on just 5.8. We've no idea how, because we can't really tell them apart. Of course, in our imagination both of them are [the rest of this paragraph has been confiscated by The Taste Police]
   
   
3. Brian seems quite incapable of understanding that women need to go for a poo as well as men. We're not even making this up. That's almost as funny as him believing Laura and Seany telling him that there's no electricity or inside toilets in both Wales and Ireland ("Can't you ask Tony Blair to do summink abaht it?"). The fool - we've had indoor lavvies since 1997, although we do both still get our electric from a really long extension cable plugged into Blackpool Illuminations.
   
   
4. Unless every single Big Brother viewer PayPals one British pound to BrokenIndustries account in the next 36 hours, we're going to lay odds on Charlie winning, thereby ensuring she'll be in the house for the duration of the series.
   
   
5. We don't know who Russell Kay is (or whether that's the right way to spell his name), but we'd sure like to punch his face in.

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RUPERT SMASH

How TV Changed Football Forever (Sky One)

We’d heard that Rupert Murdoch was interviewed as part of this, so it was hardly ever going to be completely subjective, but we’ve taken comfort in the fact that it’s made by Victor Lewis-Smith’s production company. As such, it’s exec produced by the dreadlocked scourge of rubbish television, so it should be worth watching, yeah? Yeah?

By way of answering this question, here’s a little picture we’ve Photoshopped during the ad breaks, which we feel sums up the programme quite comprehensively.

So, it’s the majestic, heroic and inspiring story of how Rupert Murdoch SAVED the sport of football. As you may well have forgotten, up until 1992, football was a sport only ever played by competing villages, with teams of 300 or more kicking a policeman from one village to another in order to win a league championship sponsored by a newspaper that wasn’t The Sun. Luckily, GLORIOUS BENEFACTOR AND FRIEND OF PUPPIES Rupert Murdoch donated £304m to the FA, so that football could be rescued for the people. As long as they’re willing to subscribe to Sky.

Using ‘How TV Changed Football Forever’ as our sole source, here’s a quick list of the ways in which football was inarguably worse before Sky made it, and by extension our lives, better:

Why football was worse before Sky:

Footballers were almost like normal people in the 1970s and 1980s, even having unfashionable hair and moustaches. This, clearly, would never do.

People were able to throw pint glasses filled with urine at Piers Morgan's head. Against all possible logic, this is somehow wrong.

It was much cheaper, but not covered in comfy seats, so was really bad. Luckily, Sky helped cover stadiums in shiny seats that cost a lot of money to sit in. As opposed to accommodating both options within the same massive stadium.

Sky stopped hooliganism. Not the European ban, not improved policing methods, not the Taylor report, not an overall social change. It was Sky.

Even the BBC's coverage of the Heysel disaster was shambolic, for heaven's sake! Where were the slow-motion replays?

The suits charged with running football were a bunch of incompetent yahoos back in the 1980s, operating in a small house which isn't even in London, it was in ‘the north’. As opposed to now, when the incompetent yahoos can afford plush offices in Soho.

Because some people liked snooker, as proved by a clip of Bill Bailey mentioning the sport in his act, everyone by association must have hated football. This is because of a little-known statute passed by the Heath administration in 1972 which dictated that every UK citizen was only allowed to like one sport each. Luckily, OUR MAJESTIC LEADER Rupert Murdoch campaigned to repeal it, and nowadays we are also allowed to enjoy America’s Cup Sailing and WWE Heat as well.

The Football League was crap. Look, here's an old photo of some Edwardians holding the trophy in the 19th Century! Haw haw haw! How shit they all are with their side partings and dignity!

All the camerawork from the 1980s was terrible ("as if it were being shot from France"), and there were never, ever any action replays! (Erm, no it wasn't, and yes there were).

Every single foreigner who had arrived in the Premiership since 1992 has been FANTASTIC (at this point you might like to mentally compose a clip of Albert Luque missing the ball and kicking himself up the wazoo, followed by a clip of Frank Worthington taking on six defenders a back-heeling it into the top corner from 35 yards).

Since Sky came along, footballers don't drink alcohol and more. No, they don't. Pre-1992, each and every footballer was a raging alcoholic, even the ones that weren’t Scottish.

Sky had finally rid the game of the working class scourge which had blighted it for so very long. Rah rah rah, we’ve gone and smashed the oiks!

Clubs falling out of the Premiership, thanks to Sky’s money, may very well find themselves in financial meltdown. Hurrah for Sky, for expunging mediocrity from the sport of the people!

Okay, okay. Sky’s coverage might have been a tiny bit rubbish at times, in the very early days, but it’s perfect now. PERFECT.

While Sky helped the Premiership cure cancer and solve world hunger, it has nothing to do with them that England still haven’t won anything, despite expending almost as much energy on endlessly promoting upcoming coverage of England’s must-win friendlies against Azerbaijan or Latvia . This is mainly because Sky aren’t allowed to show the World Cup finals, obviously. As soon as they’re allowed to show it, England will win it every four years without fail.

It wasn’t all bad. There were a few sort of good bits. Namely:

A clip of KYTV.

Talking heads included James Richardson, Steve Claridge, The Stelling and Barry Davies. Some of whom even dared to speak sense.

Erm.

Oh yes, a vidiprinter effect at the bottom of the screen telling us who was talking.

However, there were also a lot of really especially bad bits:

The programme using the old (pre-1985) blue and white globe used to represent BBC-1 (with hyphen) in the early 1990s. If we knew Ofcom’s phone number and we weren’t endemically lazy, we’d be complaining about that right now.

Piers Morgan, Kelvin McKenzie, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Bacon, Keith Allen. If anyone reading this has a theory about it being possible to drop a bomb on a television programme and destroy the inhabitants of it, this could be a good place to start. And what’s with VLS’s obsession with employing Richard Bacon, anyway?

A claim that kids in schools in the 1980s were ashamed to play football. No they bloody weren’t! Well, unless you went to a really posh school, maybe.

Referring to but refusing to name "a right-wing tabloid newspaper not owned by Mister Murdoch". Oh, grow up for fuck's sake.

Mohammed El Fayed complaining about the wages footballers get. Erm, stop bloody paying it to them, then.

A gobshite from Five Live, who quite clearly wants to be the new Miff Daniels. We know, it’s a ghastly thought. “In the 1980s, if you admitted you were a football fan in polite company, it was as bad as saying you’re a racist.” Oh, get to fuck.

As an example of how footballers spend their stupidly large salaries on garish tat, Robbie Savage owning a second-hand fruit machine (a Monopoly one, if you’re taking notes). We know a few people who’ve bought a fruit machine to use in their house; we’ve even been tempted with the idea ourselves. It must be a Wrexham thing. We’re wondering if the one Robbie owns is the exact same one that used to be in Stevie’s Kebab House on Victoria Road.

Yet another person claiming that football videogames might possibly replace ‘proper’ football on television. Because football-based videogames have only just been invented. Oh, hang on.

The very idea that football only became popular since it all went to Sky is clearly an imagined one. Sky's largest audience for a football match is around the two million mark. The last big live league game on ITV - Liverpool 0 Arsenal 2 in 1989 - attracted an audience upwards of 10 million. Do the math. s.

We remember the late 1980s, when Granada used to show a football programme at 3pm on Saturdays where Elton Welsby kept the region updated with the latest scores from the top division. Sound familiar so far? As each goal was scored, however, instead of cutting to a former professional telling us what he’s looking at on a television screen we can almost-but-not-quite see, they would actually show us the goal being scored. Minutes after it was scored. For each match in the top division. It was excellent, and we were very much anticipating this new and genuinely useful advance in the coverage of our favourite sport. Even better, we didn’t have to pay an extra £192 per year for the privilege, either. And then Sky came along.

You remember at the start of this update we sarcastically mentioned how the programme was inspiring? Well, we have to admit that is in fact: true. Well, it’s inspired us to go with Setanta instead of Sky Sports for the start of next season, anyway. Ho.

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What To Think About Television (For Busy People)

And not just because we're too incompetent to formulate proper reviews of television programmes. Cough.

Jekyll

Surprisingly good. Despite giving Jimmy Nesbitt an excuse to do his ‘wacky’ acting, and despite the infuriating zoomy-bit-slow-motion-bit direction, it seems pretty good. And the performance of Zoe Slay-taaah Off Of EastEnders is good enough to make us want to see The Bionic Women when it gets made too.

Golden Balls

A disappointing return to our screens for The Carrott. Just because Deal Or No Deal is huge, it doesn’t mean every new game show needs to have a winner pretty much at random. Whatever happened to skill? No, lying about the number written inside a little ball doesn’t count as skill, and nor is it really anything like Poker But With Balls Instead Of Cards. No-one plays poker saying “woo, I’ve flopped trip tens, you may as well fold” every other hand without getting punched up the bracket. Also, the entire Share Or Shaft bit at the end just leaves a bad taste in the mouth – did they learn nothing from racism’s Robert Kilroy Silk’s downfall? We demand ITV put repeats of Shark Infested Custard on every day in place of this.

Would I Lie To You?

The BBC’s latest panel show that will get cancelled after one series due to poor ratings is actually pretty good. It’s helped of course by having just about the best two captains you could hope for in such a situation – David Mitchell and Lee Mack, but slightly hamstrung by having three members per team. One of the reasons HIGNFY has survived for so long is by having just one guest per team, if they aren’t very good Paul Merton or Ian Hislop can carry the show that bit more. If the guest is a good one, such as Danny Baker or Sean Lock, they get more time to themselves with which to entertain the nation. With two guests per team, inevitably one comedian and one non-comedian, more time is lost to giving everyone a say, whether they’ve got anything interesting to offer or not. That’s why Have I Got News For You and QI are better than 29 Minutes of Fame, Bognor or Bust, It's Only TV... But I Like It, Mock The Week, The Best Show In The World Ever... Probably and The Best of the Worst.

There is the option of filming a seemingly entertaining panel show with entertaining guests like David Mitchell, Richard Herring, Alexei Sayle or Griff Rhys Jones, but only actually broadcasting a few minutes of it every week, with the remainder of the running time devoted to a disappointingly weak facsimile of The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Or, if you’d rather, Bob Mills’ The Show, which was a much better example of the format, and the only Bob Mills thing we’ve ever really liked.

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New Landmark in UK Stupid Levels

In an episode of her not-bad-by-BBC-Three-sketch-show-standards skit outlet Karen Taylor pokes fun at contestants dim enough to plough their child benefit into premium rate quiz channels (this quite possibly happens in every episode, we’ve only seen one of them). All very well and good, but new shocking evidence uncovered by BrokenTV (well, we’ve watched a few episodes of South Park on MTV where we didn’t skip the adverts) shows the truth to be far worse than anyone could possibly have imagined.

“Grab your mobile and take our baby name test now. Text ‘baby’ to [number] and we’ll send you the perfect name for your baby, whether you’re expecting, or just planning ahead. Simply text ‘baby’ to {number]. Want to find out your future husband’s initial? Text ‘hub’ to [number] and we’ll send you the initial of your future husband. Perhaps you’ll be able to figure out who the lucky man is. Simply text ‘hub’ to [number]. Subscribe to our texts now, and for just £1.50 you’ll receive your latest results each week.”

That’s right. For just £1.50 per week until the end of time, an automated computer system will send you a random child’s name that you could possibly use for your very own baby, were you to spawn one. And better yet, for just an additional £1.50 per week, you can have a single letter of the alphabet sent direct to your phone. That you could pretend is the first letter of the name of someone you’ll get to marry years from now. Which changes every week. If you keep subscribed to the service for six months, you’ll have the entire alphabet covered, which means the system will definitely work.

The second most depressing part of all this, as far as we can see, is that this ‘service’ is proving so popular the company behind it is able to afford Crazy Frog levels of ad break saturation, and still make a massive profit. We strongly suspect this is due to the sort of people monumentally idiotic enough to unwittingly subscribe to the service are completely incapable of being able to follow the simple instructions for unsubscribing. Hell, we’re astonished they can manage to use their phone in the first place without losing an eye somehow.

The most depressing aspect of all this is much worse, however. We’re almost frightened by the fact that the company behind the entire scam are actively encouraging their target market to reproduce, presumably once they’ve found a potent idiot with a name matching the letter of the alphabet they’ve been sent this week. And while that might be bad news for the theory of evolution, it’s good news for Sunny Delight shareholders and people who sell baseball caps.

Just in case you use this system to find out the initial of your future husband and it doesn’t work, you can contact the people responsible at help@txtuk.tv – but don’t just bombard them with complaints or use the address on download websites like realplayer that require an email address for them to send spam to, because that would be wrong.

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BrokenBrother: "He Looks Like A Clown!"

According to Wikipedia, a petard was a medieval small bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications. In medieval and Renaissance siege warfare, a common tactic was to dig a shallow trench close to the enemy gate, and then erect a small hoisting engine that would lift the lit petard out of the trench, swing it up, out, and over to the gate, where it would detonate and (hopefully) breach the gate. It was not impossible, however, that this procedure would go awry, and the engineer lighting the bomb could be snagged in the ropes and lifted out with the petard and consequently blown up. Thus to be 'hoist with his own petar' is to be caught up (and destroyed) by his own plot.

The phrase was coined by a Mr W Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who first used it in his play Hamlet. Two schoolfellows of the titular Dane, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, concoct a plan to see Hamlet executed. However, the Prince is too wily for them, and amends the death warrant to contain their names instead of his. Hence, "for 'tis the sport to have the enginer. Hoist with his own petar; and 't shall go hard"

That's quite handy for us to know, as right now modern day Rosencrantz-in-blog's-clothing BrokenTV finds itself dangling from its very own electronic petard. We go and get ourselves quoted in an online magazine, stating how that Emily off of that Big Brother think she all dead clever and that but she ain't, only to find they've used a section of text where we begin two consecutive sentences with the words "of course". Of course, we're suitably chastened by this, and have to face the fact that Victoria Coren will never want to join us down the Lamb and Thesaurus for a drink now. But then, we did only get a 'B' in GCSE English, so what can you expect, eh?

But anyway, there are new people in the bungalow. Seany seems quite interesting, and sure to raise the overall entertainment level in the house. Gerry hasn’t really done enough yet for us to think that much of him, and hopefully he’ll seem a bit less one-dimensional as time goes on. And Lesley has gone – a bit of a shame, but if you treat everyone else as if you’re some sort of public school headmistress, you can’t be too shocked if some light-hearted St Trinians type behaviour goes on.

As for the others, the number of dislikeable people seems to have been whittled right down. The twins, who’d initially given the impression they’d do little but squeal for the duration of their time in the house, seem to do little more than wander around in an innocent world of their own, electing to keep their mouths closed and just run around on the furniture if something important is going on. And more power to them for that. If there’s ever a British live-action version of Cutie Honey, the twins would be perfect.

As everyone seems to have pointed out, Shabnam looked a lot nicer without make-up, but if she prefers to wear it, then that’s fair enough. We’d guess her willingness to agree with whoever is speaking to her is more to do with an innate desperation to be liked by others (notice her frantic comment about make-up and clothing to Gerry, 0.5 seconds after he walked in the door), rather than any calculated cattishness. We should admit that as the fake PhD certificate in psychology we’ve ordered from eBay is still in the post, it’s not exactly a professional opinion. Meanwhile, Ziggy’s reaction to his ‘competition’ was quite funny. It’s the same reaction we had once we realised that Big Brother’s Black Eye is doing much better coverage of the show than we are.

It did seem a bit suspicious that Charley swiftly moved from not being too bothered about the whole Emilygate situation, to suddenly acting as if it affected her hugely. This could be because it’ll improve her chance of winning (“I’m going to be on the front of all the papers”), but it could well be because she’s had more time to think about it. Although there wasn’t any malice on Emily’s part when she said it, so: hmm. Of course, she won’t win because of this – it wasn’t just coincidence that Shilpa won CBB whilst being the nicest person in the house, you know.

Anyway, new graphs. We’ve added another clause in the calculation process, so that anyone not left in the house automatically takes a 15% hit to their total score. This should translate to a 15% boost for whoever wins at the end of BB’07, and for now it should help the people still in the house (and who don’t get the benefit of some extra Wikipedia text explaining why they’re not there any more). Finally, we’ve taken out the keywords clause, because it was a pain in the bum to calculate.

Emily storms into the lead despite not being in the house any more. Infamy and, erm, famy just being two sides of the same coin, of course. Gerry is helped to a decent score by having a very long full name. Somehow, and maybe we’ve missed something here, Laura has collapsed in the betting race, with Tracey now a somewhat unlikely favourite. Gerry has leaped into second, and Chanelle third.

Seany, who’d we’d say has a decent chance of winning, sits at a surprising 39/1. Expect him to get hounded out of the house very soon, as we’ve just buggered all that up, by putting a fiver on him to win.

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Now Available At Short Notice

It's okay, it looks like she won't go hungry. Skills include: Good public speaker.

Of course, it wasn't as bad as the transcript made it look, but really. Ironically pretending to be 'urban' in those circumstances, while not the cleverest thing anyone has done in the Big Brother house, didn't leave as bad a taste in the mouth as the whole Shilpa business, which was an actual personal attack, and much worse.

The highlight of the whole affair? One of the audience on ...Big Mouth berating Chris Moyles for doing much the same about gay people on Radio One, and garnering nowhere near as much negative press. Just a pity it didn't happen while Moyles was presenting Big Mouth, really. We're wondering how Channel Four would have handled it if this was the week Leigh Francis was hosting Big Mouth (19th to 21st June. Get ready to cancel that Series Link, folks!).

Maybe he could have done his Michael Jackson impression throughout.

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BrokenBrother: "The upholstery is smouldering gently"

"Emily Parr is a Tory voter and considers herself right-wing."

From Monty Python's Flying Circus episode 28:

(Sound of an explosion out of vision. Cut to reveal Mrs Nigger-Baiter's chair charred and smoking. Mrs Nigger-Baiter is no longer there. The upholstery is smouldering gently.)

Mrs Shazam: Oh, Mrs Nigger-Baiter's exploded.

Son: Good thing, too.

Mrs Shazam: She was my best friend.

Son: Oh, mother, don't be so Sentimental. Things explode every day.

Mrs Shazam: Yes, I suppose so. Anyway, I didn't really like her that much.

Hey boys and girls, can you count all of the stupid mistakes we made in the last update?

"We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism."

"Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her"

"We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL."

Pof. As well as everything else, we'd like to state we hadn't seem them doing the 'rank themselves in order of' task before placing that bet. And we'd wondered why the odds were so good. "I'm definitely in the top four of attractiveness", indeed. Of course, it's quite obvious that Emily isn't a massive racist, but really quite staggeringly thick. Of course, anyone who feels the need to introduce themselves to the nation by stating how intelligent they are before they say anything else, very probably isn't.

Of course, today's events have had quite an effect on our slightly tweaked Fame-o-meter. Slightly tweaked because having 'citation needed' as a bonus multiplier wasn't really worthwhile, so we've adapted it to account for the number of times each person has been Googled and found BrokenTV. A bonus of 2% added to their score for each search, limited to a maximum of 20%. That's good news for Charley, because of what we're inadvertently top-Google-ranked for (can't think why), along with Shabnam and the twins (we've given 50% of the bonus points for joint searches to each twin, who now merit their very own bar on the chart).

We're a day behind the highlights shows at the moment, because of a power cut last night, so our current favourite is Laura for displaying a little bit of quiet dignity, with Charley still in the relegation places. It's quite possible Emily would be bottom, but The Big BrokenTV Big Brother Rulebook states that only current bungalowmates are eligible for those positions. This gives us the following scores.

Name	Total
Amanda Merchant	39.90
Carole Vincent	78.00
Chanelle Hayes	36.00
Charley Uchea	100.80
Emily Parr	136.08
Laura Williams	43.20
Lesley Brain	58.00
Nicky Maxwell	57.00
Sam Merchant	39.90
Shabnam Paryani	62.40
Tracey Barnard	40.00
Zac "Ziggy" Lichman	115.00

But what does that look like in barchart form? In super 3D? This:

Woo, eh?

THE BROKENTV NON-BIG BROTHER THING CORNER

It's the DVD boxset we really, really want.

All 692 episodes. 174 discs. Plus, a signed photo of Val "Bea Smith" Lehman. Yours for just £702.68 (not including shipping from Australia). Cripes.

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Broken Brother: Part Three

We've finally got around to watching the highlight shows. All of them. In one evening. Including Friday's live show. For you. Because we care. And because we thought we'd better have something proper to say about it, given we've tried to squeeze a week's worth of updates out of the Wikipedia page for it, the Betfair odds and the Word Count extension for FireFox. Here are a few thoughts that thousands of people have already said on other blogs by now, so we'll keep it mercifully short.

As ever, there seem to be three distinct camps in the preliminary rounds of Big Brother. One contains the people who seem quite annoying at first, but after a while aren't that bad, such as Emily, quite rightly top of our Fame-o-meter, or Carole, who seems quite staggeringly different from her pre-bungalow montage so far. Another contains the people who'd seemed quite nice, but soon display themselves to be The Worst Person In Britain As Far As The Tabloids Are Concerned, namely the aggressively vacuous Charley (who doesn't seem to realise that being the first one to leave the bungalow rarely even garners a Conference South level of celebrity). The other, larger group contains the supporting cast who kind of blend into the background; the others, even including Sam and Amanda, who put the twee in twins (erm, does that work? Has anyone else said that yet? Oh).

For the most part, as ever, the contestants aren't in full-on Ooh, Look At Meeeeee, Davina mode and tend to relax into their everyday personalities, meaning they're generally quite difficult to dislike. Unless they're trying especially hard to be disagreeable like Charley. Even Tracey has stop saying "'ave it" every four seconds, thankfully. After watching the first highlight show, we'd prepared a comment along the lines of "how can someone who seems so determined to point out that she's more unique than everyone else be such a horrendous stereotype? Catherine Tate is very probably kicking herself for missing out on Middle Aged Clubber Woman Who Always Does The Same Thing", but that now seems callous and nasty. Bah.

We've noticed that there doesn't even seem to be an Official Big Brother I-Thought-Scousers-Come-From-Newcastle standard Thicko this time, almost definitely so there's less risk of overt racism. Despite initial appearances, the twins wouldn't scrape a Level 2 NVQ in Dimwittery, and Charley's more self-centred than anything else. Once The Blokes storm into the house this may well change, but for now it's reasonably well mannered. Which is a polite way of saying "pretty dull". Unless one of the next three bungalowmates to enter is a baboon with toothache, we might well get rather bored of all this.

So: graphs. It's not really worth updating the Fame-O-Meter right now, hardly anything has changed and it might well need a massive reimagining over the next few days. Luckily, galloping to the rescue on a numerical steed comes Ollie from Betfair, who has been good enough to supply us with spreadsheets of Betfair's daily prices since day one of the Big Brother Bungalow. So now, here in glorious Office-2007-o-vision (because we put them together at work) are some nice hot graphs. Hey, they're probably slightly less dull than watching Chris Moyles host Big Brother's Big Mouth.

Firstly, because having everyone on the same graph was like a car crash, the outsiders. Lovely Emily is hopping along in at 30, so we've plonked a fiver on her. We can always lay the bet once her odds drop AS THEY SURELY WILL. Charley is struggling in last place on about the same odds as Kieran Richardson signing for Inter Milan.

There's the middle bunch, squabbling for the middle ground like eejits.

And there are the favourites. Fairly surprisingly as far as we're concerned, Ziggy's odds have lengthened, despite him seeming more agreeable as the days have progressed. Carole at second favourite seems a bit of a shock, given that we're sure she'll get bored of it all by the end of the first month and walk, especially if most of the others devote most of their energy to cooing over any new male co-inhabitants. Chanelle seems quite desperate to become this years' Chantelle, and Laura seems like a nice person, but we're sure she's only in the house to give Justin Lee Collins someone to do a piss-poor impression of during The Friday Night Project.

Our prediction: Someone who isn't even in the bungalow yet to win it. But hopefully not before Emily's odds have dropped to single figures and we've made a killing.

Someone who knows what they're talking about's prediction: We've got permission to post the following bit of proper knowledge from Steve, the Betfair Betting Expert.

Keep stakes low. Don't be fooled into the 60% book on Betfair (the winner may not even be in the house yet). With 3 months of Big Brother anything can happen. It won't be as simple as picking the winner Pete from last year. I have managed to lock in (no loss) green book on the winner's market through some trading. Nothing big or worth shouting about but a green book of £45 always makes me smile. Backed Chanelle at 32 as soon as she entered the house and then layed her at 27 the next day. Then laying Ziggy at 7.4 when he entered the house and backing him at 7.8 the next morning.

I think this year's show will be one of the most interesting yet. Big Brother wants a love relationship to blossom and I think we will see it. Will it be Chanelle and Ziggy? Odds are shortening every day. I'd give odds of 1.1 they will kiss sometime in the show.

The two prices that have been affected most over the last 24 hours are those of Chanelle and Emily. Chanelle's price got significantly shorter throughout yesterday and she became second favourite at one point however this soon changed after a late night row with Emily over a pair of hair straighteners. Chanelle is back to being third favourite while Emily's price has drifted from 25 to 30.

Tracey and both the twin's prices have all shortened meaning Emily is now the fourth least favoured housemate.

The Big Bouncy Betfair BB Betting Blog is in full here, for anyone who wants to read it. And that's enough plugging Betfair for now. Other betting websites are also available, folks.

More BB07 fun next time, where BrokenTV shamelessly tries to sneak back onto the artistic roll-call, and we try to think about something to write about that isn't Big Brother or a graph.

Pop Fact: We were going to visit the Hay Festival this week. We've ended up doing this. Best laid plans, eh?

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