BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 4

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed we failed to update the rundown yesterday. As punishment, we’ve compiled a double update, taking in numbers eighty to sixty-one. Additionally, we’ve just given ourselves a Chinese burn. Ow.

Going out live after ITV’s matches from Euro 2000, the first series of this show made for very interesting viewing. No plan, just Frank and Dave being witty on a couch? Count us in. As the series progressed, especially once it had become pre-recorded, it became a bit less essential, but for ITV to take the risk of showing it in the first place it deserves to be here.

Notable moment: During the live Comic Relief mini-episode of the show in 2005, Frank pointed out “now we’re going to see a film about some of the work Comic Relief does. Aw, I always hate those, they always ruin the mood”, thereby making a point everyone had been thinking for years but had been too polite to say out loud.
 

    Moffat-penned Saturday night horror. How could it fail? Well, it did try at times, most notably when Hyde (played by Jimmy Nesbitt wearing slightly scary contact lenses and slightly mad hair) turned back into Jekyll (played by Jimmy Nesbitt without the slightly scary contact lenses and with slighly less mad hair), causing any witnesses to wonder aloud “hey, who are you? And where did that scary maniac disappear to?”

Maybe we’re being a little harsh. Jekyll was a great little show. It’s available at a laughably cheap price on DVD, too. Check it out. (If nothing else, you doing so would make us feel a bit better about skimming over this entry somewhat.)

Yeah, we know. It’s full of self-obsessed idiots, only idiots watch it, we don’t watch it in our house, et-bloody-cetera. Despite all of the received opinion on the show – and we’d love to know what percentage of people who love to complain about the show have actually watched it – there has been a lot to like about Big Brother over the last decade. While people would generally concentrate on the more disagreeable participants – Nasty Nick, Jade, Charley, Ziggy, or bigot-tits herself Danielle Lloyd – they tend to skip over the people who were in the majority (at least until the slightly more desperate later series when the ratings began to slip), the ones you’d probably taken an instant dislike to at the start, and ended up liking once they were able to be themselves.

It’s as if in this short attention span era, the most disagreeable thing about Big Brother is the way we’d need to watch it for at least eight hours each week to decide whether we should be hating these people or not. After all, who’s got the time for that? Luckily of course, we’ve got the tabloids to tell us who to hate. “PAGE ONE EXCLUSIVE: BB MEL IN EVIL RACIST OUTBURST, BURN HER! BURN THE WITCH! Page six: Muslims are evil and are taking over Britain.” You know the drill.

While we’ll admit we stopped watching Deal Or No Deal a long, long time ago, we still admire DOND(UK) for sticking with its rather lo-fi approach, especially when compared to the bombastic American and Australian versions. We could go into it in more depth, but instead we’ll point you towards this superb Bothers Bar review of the show from 2005.

 

One of the most underrated sitcoms of the decade, we’d say. World Of Pub was a great programme with a wonderful premise. Each episode would start and end in much the same way. Pub landlord Barry (Phil Cornwell), working alongside his idiot brother Garry (Peter Serafinowicz), would bemoan the lack of customers in his boozer. Regular barfly Dodgy Phil (Kevin Eldon) would come up with a plan to improve the fortunes of the pub. The plan would be hatched, carried out, events would ensue, and the pub would be destroyed in the final scene. Every week. It’s hard not to love a sitcom with that premise, frankly.

 

Yes, yes. It might have merely been a clip show, the new material the duo performed wasn’t very good, and a few of the chosen archive sketches turned out to be a little disappointing and all that, but it was brilliant to see them back together one last time, wasn’t it? Additionally, it was nice to see Ronnie B and Ronnie C modestly offer the lion’s share of credit for their favourite skits to the writers.

See also: The Smith & Jones Sketchbook, suggesting this might have been a become a new strand for bygone double acts (and hopefully not just a repeat of the revolving door approach to the hosts of Commercial Breakdown). That turned out not to be the case, cruelly depriving the nation of The Lee & Herring Sketchbook.

While we might not be big fans of David Letterman, we’ve got to admit his production company Worldwide Pants sure knows how to find gold. Case in point – The Knights Of Prosperity, a sadly short-lived ABC comedy following a bunch of misfits who come up with a plan to rob Mick Jagger, and other celebrities once Plan A inevitably goes awry.

It’s often said that the best formula for comedy is to base it on “the idiot who knows nothing, and the idiot who knows everything”. ‘Knights…‘ took things a step further, being based on one idiot who knows everything, and five other idiots of varying intelligence. For a programme where the premise is based entirely on stupidity, the writing was remarkably tight, with the episodes being expertly plotted and deftly scripted. Sadly, it wasn’t enough of a hit with viewers. and after being messed around with by the network (it was cancelled after nine episodes, rescued, then cancelled again two episodes later), ended up with just thirteen episodes in the can.

The first animated show on the list, Frisky Dingo was something we’d describe as – if you threatened to kill our family - Superman meets Seinfeld. The central plot (at least for the first season) revolved around megalomaniacal supervillain Killface and his super-heroic nemesis Awesome X, but the main humour came from the demented turns each episode could – but wouldn’t always - take. The entire first episode revolves around Killface meeting with the marketing team he’d just kidnapped, exploring how best to publicise his plan of crashing the Earth into the Sun.  The entire second episode saw Xander Crews (narcissistic alter ego of Awesome X) pondering how he can avoid hanging up his cape, in order to avoid running the corporation he’d inherited.

As the series progresses, the plot flits between the mundane and the ridiculous. One episode sees Killface finally activating his Annihilatrix - it malfunctions, merely moving the earth three feet further away from the sun, thereby ending global warming. As a result, he becomes a national hero and decides to run for President. Meanwhile, Xander Crews finds himself destitute, resorting to boiling used hypodermic needles and selling them back to the homeless.

Coming from the minds of Adam Reed and Matt Thompson – creators of Sealab 2021 – the jokes flow thick and fast throughout each episode (“Put some glitter on this and fax it out.” “You can’t fax glitter!” “Well, not with that attitude…”), and make the region one DVD boxsets well worth investigating.

 

Another fond studio-audience based glance at a show everyone used to love, and probably still would if anyone ever bothered repeating it. Excellent to see this on the air, but aside from a single repeat showing of the ‘Winter Olympics’ episode about a week and a half later, the Beeb still don’t seem to show us any of The Goodies.

 

For our money, videoGaiden was – and still is – the best videogaming programme ever broadcast in the UK, taking in the assumed knowledge of its audience, quickfire humour and cheery in-jocularity of magazines like Your Sinclair, Zero and Amiga Power at their best. And it was all aimed at grown-ups, too. Despite it receiving hugely favourable feedback from its viewership, it exists no longer, never making it out of the BBC Two Scotland region. Maybe if Rab and Ryan had put on Charlie Brooker masks throughout each episode, it’d probably be running on BBC Four even now.

See also: Thumb Candy (E4, 2001). Iain Lee looks at the history of videogames, and is surprisingly non-thumpable for the entire duration of this one-off documentary.

Also see also: Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe (BBC Four, 2009). But then we’ll guess you already know all about that.

 

And not, of course, “Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights”, no matter what the DVD cover says. What with Kay’s subsequent actions (taking sole credit for Phoenix Nights despite Neil Fitzmaurice and Dave Spikey being co-creators and co-writers of it, releasing a DVD of the same stand-up set every year, using the plot of a Max & Paddy episode to mean-spiritedly flick V-signs at Dave Spikey, etc, etc), it almost comes as a surprise how good the first series of Phoenix Nights really was. Give it another go. Go on, here’s one of the episodes on YouTube, right here.

By the time series two rolled around, some of the magic had gone, especially in the case of the final few episodes, which practically served as pilots for underwhelming spin-off Max & Paddy’s Road To Nowhere. However, that doesn’t diminish the majesty of the first series, which we think didn’t even have anyone using the words “garlic” and “bread” together in the same sentence.

 

More from PlayUK, this was a prime example in Doing Things Properly. Aside from just mentioning the Sex Pistols quite often, implying that all music in 1976 was Prog Rock, and showing that archive footage of thousands of full bin liners in a London park because the all bin men had been on strike, this ten part series (ten part!) covered everything from the Pistols to Crass, Sniffin’ Glue to Oi!, Billy Bragg to Sonic Youth, and all points in between. It also played host to lots of interesting pieces from the archive, such as a young Gary Bushell on Newsnight flailing under questioning as to why his record label had put out an Oi compilation clearly inspired by Nazi party sloganeering, or highlighting just how bloody rubbish Limp Bizkit were.

The full series can be viewed from here.

 

Any series which opens with Kevin Eldon, clad in a red Lycra outfit with a huge question mark on his front, running around a field screaming “What am I?” over and over again, must be good. It’s one of the principle laws of television comedy. Simon Munnery’s alter-ego The League Against Tedium fronted this magnificently bewildering programme, atop a transit van slash battleship in a series of car parks and a big hat. The title sequence of each episode consisted of a voice over informing the viewers how they are shaven monkeys, arse-mouths, army surplus and such before a series of surreal vignettes (such as Kombat Opera, or 24 Hour News Read By A Man Who’s Been Up For 24 Hours – an early TV outing for Johnny Vegas). For the most part the show would comprise cracking dialogue from the baroque mouth of League.

“It is said that at the age of fifty-five, each man becomes that which he most despised at the age of twenty-five. I live in constant fear, lest I should become a badly organised coach trip to Cleethorpes.”

Sadly, Attention Scum fell foul of that most annoying of curses – being commissioned by someone’s predecessor. By the time the show had been made and ready for broadcast, there was a new Mayor Of BBC Two (or whoever gets to decide these things), who didn’t much like the idea of the show, and it was dropped haphazardly onto the schedule so as to be out of the way before anyone would notice. Annoying, but there you go.

Here is episode one. Of it.

“If a million monkeys were given a million typewriters… why, that would be the inter-net!”

Based on the diaries of Kenneth Williams, Fantabulosa! saw Michael Sheen play the role of Williams quite magnificently. As far as we can remember, this was the first of several impressive BBC Four dramas looking at the lives of well-regarded British comedians of yesteryear, but was easily the best.

Pop Fact! Michael Sheen is actually undertaking a massive project where he is due to take on the role of every single notable public figure from the British Isles between the years of 1958 and 1998. We can’t wait until 2037, when he’s pencilled in for “Thought Of A Number: The Johnny Ball Story”.

More archive clippery, but this took things a little further than asking Radio 1 daytime jocks just how much they liked it when David Brent did that dance. Comedy Map Of Britain went on the road around the UK, checking on locales important to the back stories of artists as varied as (deep breath*) Angus Deayton, Anton Rodgers, Arthur Smith, Hale and Pace, Bill Bailey, Chris Moyles, the Chuckle Brothers, Dudley Moore, Eric Idle, Graham Fellows, Hugh Grant, Ian Hislop, Ian Lavender, Jim Davidson, Jon Culshaw, Mark Thomas, Maureen Lipman, Michael Palin,  Terry Jones, Paul Merton, Richard Whiteley, Ricky Gervais, Ronni Ancona, Rowan Atkinson, Roy Chubby Brown, Steve Coogan, Syd Little and Eddie Large. Even the stories on the comedians we haven’t got much time for proved to be interesting – we even found ourselves enjoying the part where Leigh Francis visited the house he’d lived in as a teenager, finding some of his early cardboard masks still in the attic.

(*’Deep breath as we copy and paste all those names in from Wikipedia’, admittedly.)

 

If there’s a ever a place for “programme suffering the worst scheduling slot ever” in the Guinness Book Of Records, we imagine Biffovision would be in with a shout for it. The first showing of this BBC Three pilot first went out at 3.15am on a Tuesday morning. And was listed in the EPG as being a repeat showing of Two Pints of Lager. Surprisingly then, it didn’t attract that many viewers, and wasn’t picked up for a full series.

That’s a massive, massive shame, as we thought it was one of the most promising comedy shows of the last decade. Coming from the minds of Paul Rose and Tim Moore, the men behind seminal Teletext magazine Digitiser, Biffovision took the form of a surreal 1980s kids show where literally anything could happen. Yes, literally anything. The show also spiralled off into what seemed to be more traditional sketches, but which often ended in a less-than-traditional way (“these aren’t even my real hands!”), and while there were a number of cracks in the show you’d hope would have been Polyfilla’ed up before reaching a full series, it all works really well.

The pilot did finally get a repeat in a slightly more reasonable slot (at midnight), and watching it again on YouTube, even now we can’t help but be impressed by the relentless energy and sheer verve of the thing. It could have been a worthy companion to The Smell Of Reeves & Mortimer, but it seems what with the show not being instantly applicable to that all-important key BBC Three demographic, maybe it never, ever stood a chance.

If you’ve never seen Biffovision, we urge you to remedy this now. There’s probably a 60-70% chance you’ll hate it, but that’ll be all your fault for being wrong.

See also: Adam Buxton’s MeeBOX. Another BBC Three pilot not picked up because it contains at least one joke people under 25 might not get. Though, oddly, it’s fine when Family Guy spends half of each episode referring to 1980s pop culture.

A two-parter looking at the history of swearing on television, along with the now standard explanation of why there isn’t any surviving footage of Kenneth Tynan saying Britain’s first televised ‘fuck’ over a montage of furious tabloid headlines. Key moment: Felix Dennis refusing to be proud of being the first person to say ‘cunt’ on TV.

See also: The C-Word: How We Came To Swear By It. Will “Thick Of It” Smith takes a look at the history of fuck’s more offensive brother. The programme quite nicely made the point that certain sections of society are still happy to get on their high horse over its use. by highlighting the Daily Mail’s pre-emptive outrage over the programme itself.

 

The kind of show we always love to see on our screens, this eight part series looked at different aspects of L.E. over the years. Each episode of The Story Of Light Entertainment concentrated on individual Light Ent genres, such as double acts and impressionists, even spending an entire show on stars of the radio – a laudable thing for a modern day TV show, we’re saying.

Happily, the talking heads on offer tended to be more on the ‘know what the hell they’re on about’ side of the fence (Beadle, Yarwood, Large), even if we did have to put up with Avid bloody Merrion adding absolutely nothing to proceedings.

From the same corner of BBC Scotland that brought us Comedy Connections, That Was The Week We Watched sneaks in ahead of that show due to its broader (but paradoxically, narrower) appeal of concentrating on a specific weeks viewing from the past, with scheduling info and clips aplenty. And yes, we were utterly spellbound by the beautifully rendered CGI recreation of pages from the Radio and TV Times.

 

Beating the similarly themed Swap Shop retrospective in our list because Tiswas was much better than Swap Shop. Is there a “Best Of Swap Shop” on DVD? No, there isn’t. This is precisely the thing ITV should be putting out on Saturday nights more often, no matter than the eighteen million X Factor viewers think.

 

Blimey, all that was hard work. Expect 60-51 on Monday!

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BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 3

 

Cracking on with this, we’re going to go with ten entries a day from hereon in. Mainly because it’ll free up more time for us to bore everyone with hugely esoteric fare about “BrokenTV’s Top Ten Discontinued Snack Foods 2000-2009” and the like, but we suppose it’ll also make each daily visit a bit more worthwhile for you lot, our several readers. That’s also a good thing, in a way, we guess.

 

Pre-empting Peep Show by several years, ‘The Mitchell and Webb Situation’ went out relatively unnoticed on much-missed digital channel Play UK, before finally being sneaked out on middle-of-the-night BBC Two in 2008. Especially when compared to some of the sketch comedies that have hit the main channels since this first went to air, that’s a bit of a shame (speaking of which, don’t hold your breath for The Kevin Bishop Show, Revolver or Velvet Soup on this rundown, 'kay?). What you’ve got here is pretty much That Mitchell And Webb Look on a reduced budget, so while several of the filler sketches fall a little flat, for the main part the standard of writing wins the day. Look, here’s a clip of a running sketch from the first episode.

See also: Play UK (nee UK Play) in general. Foolishly launched as a digital-only channel in 1998, back when only a few hundred thousand TV geeks had digital TV, it pumped a load of money into all-new programming (almost entirely made by channel part-owners The BBC). Helped by the channel’s other main bad decision – being placed in the '”music” section of Sky’s EPG due to its daytime output being mostly music-based, but depriving it of a prime slot in the “entertainment” section – many of the shows on offer didn’t get the audience they deserved, what with the channel being shoved on the far end of channels like ‘The Box’. By the time Play UK made the move to the “entertainment” section in 2001, it was at the arse-end of that section – not very conductive to ‘passing trade’ (as it were), and the channel closed a year later. It was probably relaunched as UK Repeats Of Changing Rooms, we imagine.

One of the main reasons we’d fight to the death to protect the licence fee is because BBC Four are always likely to commission documentary series like this one. Well, not ‘fight to the death’ as such, but we’d probably take a minor scar on a part of our bodies that’s usually covered by clothing. Comic Britannia was a lovely Iannucci-voiced three-part series, with each episode looking at a different ‘type’ of comic book borne of Old Blimey. Episode one (“The Fun Factory”) was of the greatest interest to us, what with it centring on the likes of The Beano, Whizzer & Chips et al, but the other parts, looking at the comics aimed squarely at each gender, followed by a look at more ‘grown-up’ comics such as Watchmen were both just as entertaining. Admittedly, it’s the simple thought of giving a good few minutes airtime to people saying how ace Leo Baxendale was that helped cement this show’s place in the top hundred.

Twitter’s funniest man wasn’t always restricted to being witty in sub-140 character bursts, of course. Peter “Quick, Copy-Paste His Surname From Somewhere” Serafinowicz’s sketch show wasn’t pure gold by any means – sketches such as the lamentable “You’re A C**t” X-Factor spoof, Gay Holmes or the Clone Brother sketch (which admittedly did have the “argument-bargument” line) fell utterly flat in our living room – but overall, it’s hard to watch this and not be a little mystified why Serafinowicz hadn’t been given his own show earlier. Also, he’d help cement our theory that the entertainers who are the very best at doing impressions seldom restrict themselves to just being ‘impressionists’. See also: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Rob Newman. Yeah, flip you, Culshaw.

For fairly understandable reasons, Chris Langham won’t be picking up too many cheques for repeat fees these days. Sadly, that means this one-off BBC Two docudrama isn’t likely to get much of a re-airing any time soon, and that’s a huge shame.

Despite being one of the most lauded authors of the 20th century, and despite him actually working for the BBC at one point, there isn’t a single surviving  frame of George Orwell in any film or TV archive in the world. When it came to trying to put all this into a television film, Chris Durlacher came up with the approach of ‘inventing’ a series of scenes featuring Orwell, but making sure that every word uttered by his depiction of Orwell had originally been written by the man himself. As a result, Orwell (played by Chris Langham) appears in scenes such as a never-actually-happened episode of Face To Face, or documentary films on his chosen subjects – such as serving in Burma, the Spanish Civil War, or highlighting poverty in Paris and London.

In short, it’s a remarkable piece of television, and you do kind of suspect that were it not for the identity of the lead actor being used as a stick for the Mail and Express to beat the BBC with, it would crop up more frequently in repeat form on BBC Four.

 

The Real Hustle pretty much created itself a new genre when it hit the digital spectrum in 2006: “factual TV you should be terrified of not watching”. After all, if you didn’t watch each episode, would you have known about the popular scams therein? Each episode ended up revealing at the very least one moment of “Buh! Of course! I’d better bloody look out for that in future”, often more. Admittedly, some of the scams pulled weren’t much of a threat – the one about people wandering into PC World and downloading the software from demo PCs to USB drives was a bit daft – but the vast majority of them were frighteningly plausible. After all, we’re probably not the only ones to be visiting elderly relatives when they’ve received a cold call from from someone claiming to be be The Red Cross, and can they have your debit card details….? Hey, hang on….*

As time went on, the central scamsmiths fell pray to their own popularity, meaning their undercover identities could be too easily rumbled (in much the same way Donal MacIntyre’s had in 1999’s MacIntyre Undercover). This meant the programme relocated overseas for the most recent series, to Las Vegas and beyond, but sadly (at least for us) this has meant the original appeal has become slightly diluted.

Personally, we’d only tuned into it because we’d thought it’d be an animated spin-off from ‘Hustle’, in the same way ‘Ghostbusters’ led to ‘The Real Ghostbusters’. (nb. Not really. We couldn’t stand ‘Hustle’.)

(*And yes, admittedly, said cold callers could well be The actual Red Cross, but… really: flip right off! If you’re an actual charity phoning people (who, in the case of The Actual Elderly Relatives We’re Talking About, already voluntarily give to The Red Cross), don’t. Give people the free will to contribute if they wish to, don’t badger them into it. If you do, you’re a bunch of shitbags. Yes, you are. Yes, even if you are a charity. This is the thing we think, if you do the thing we’ve just said.. You heard.)

In the pre-show publicity (at least the parts of it where Lee hadn’t penned articles under a false name saying how his show was going to be rubbish and people should just watch Michael McIntyre instead), Stewart Lee expressed his hope that his Comedy Vehicle would be a return to the days of Dave Allen on a stool being brilliant. As it turned out, he wasn’t quite right (if nothing else, Lee’s show didn’t include jokes with rape as a punchline, unlike Dave Allen*), but Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle was a very good show nonetheless.

We might be pissing in the face of received comedy wisdom here, but when he’s doing a live gig, Stewart Lee does have an unhappy habit of making forty minutes material last for two hours, doesn’t he? In his 41st Best Stand-Up Ever set, his Tom O’Connor ‘Sardine’ bit seemed to take up about 40% of the show. It was probably a lot less - we didn’t time it or compile a graph or anything - but it seemed to be about that much. But when given a number (that number being ‘six’. Not sure why we’ve said ‘a number’. Maybe we’re merely trying to increase the word count) of half-hour slots to fill, he was able to be a little tighter. Okay, maybe the stand-up on our screen was a little bit too tight, what with the programme including cutaway scenes merely reaffirming the point he’d just made without even bothering to include an extra gag, but the fact each episode seemed to whizz by so quickly was testament to the quality of Lee’s stand-up.

(*This is true, sadly. As the BBC Two repeat run of Dave Allen At Large in 2005 showed, there was once an Allen sketch where a young woman is drowning in a swimming pool, repeatedly shouting “help!” to notify people of her plight. The lifeguard (played by Allen) duly dives in to save her, and pulls her to the side of the pool. The lifeguard then carries her to a changing room (off camera) and begins molesting her, causing her to shout “help! help!” all over again. And that was the punchline. Really. Frigging hell. All credit to BBC Two for showing the episode uncut meaning we’re able to make up our own minds on the matter, of course, but bloody hell. Still, at least he didn’t say something rude about the Queen, eh?)

See also: The lovely Red Button extras for the programme, where Lee would improvise banter with Armando Iannucci about the subject of each night’s episode, intercut with out-takes from the studio recording. For the last two episodes, Lee also quite generously broadcast highlights of the warm-up acts used for some of the shows. That’s certainly the first time we’ve seen that done (mainly because no-one had bothered switching on the cameras for the warm-up acts before now, we presume), but something we wish more comedy shows would do. Oh? What’s that? We’re stuck with forced joyless discussions between a Phill Jupitus and Noel Fielding who’d rather be in the pub on our Red Button channel? Ah.

Don’t also see: Time Trumpet. Despite the involvement of Armando Iannucci, Stewart Lee and Adam Buxton, and despite it following on from the brilliant (but somehow not on this list) ‘2004: The Stupid Version’, it was a bit crap.

More BBC Four fantasticness. If you were going to put together an hour-long documentary on a videogame for BBC Four, what would you choose? Half-Life? Ico? The Grand Theft Auto series could probably stretch to a whole hour? Mario? No, try that one where the shapes drop onto each other.

Yes, Tetris. One of the lynchpins of the channel’s Hard Drive Heaven series (despite – GEEK HAT ON! – no version of Tetris we know needing to be installed to a hard drive to run), Tetris: From Russia With Love looked at the slightly surprising history behind the puzzle game. If nothing else, the fact the programme highlighted a huge legal tussle between Robert Maxwell and Nintendo makes it worth watching. Oh, and it’s also worth us mentioning that Tetris topped the list of (long-forgotten videogaming website) Xbollox’s Top 100 Videogames Of All-Time. That might just seem like we’re trying to force everyone to read something we wrote back when we were any good, but we’d like to state that Stu Campbell once called that article “the best list of Top 100 Games not done by me” (on the old Edge forum, we think, though we can’t be clear on the actual syntax he’d used at the time. What’s that? No-one cares? Oh).

Representing precisely the kind of 9pm-10pm Saturday night documentary-on-a-slightly-lightweight-topic pioneered by ‘I Love 19[decade][year]’ at the turn of the century, The Smash Hits Story looked at arguably the most brilliantly 1980s publication there ever was (yes, it ran from 1978 to 2006, we know). Inspiring everything from lame copyists ‘No1’ and ‘Fast Forward’ to the mighty Your Sinclair, The Smash Hits Story looked at the peak years of this publishing phenomenon, and commendably treated the last ten years or so of it’s publication with commendable short shrift. Just as when we’re allowed to to do a documentary on the NME, we’ll only bother covering up to 1998. It’ll happen, just you wait.

Special ironic post-script: the plug was pulled on Smash Hits just in time to miss the reigns of La Roux, Ladyhawke, Annie, Lady GaGa, Florence, Saturdays and Hot Chip. But there was a mini-comeback for Michael Jackson once he was dead, so well done there.

Possibly the bravest scheduling of the decade. Come December 2001, merely a few months after 9/11, the whole topic of “New York” was still very much off-limits for TV comedy. Remember how brave it’d seemed when Frank Skinner had shown his brilliant “You’ve Bin Laden” video out-take sketch only a few weeks earlier? Well, with hindsight, Skinner’s sketch was at about the same level as The Dandy publishing “Addie and Hermy” strips circa 1940, while – if you were an idiot, admittedly – this show could be seen as making gags about the holocaust in 1939.

In actual fact, this show had been recorded well before the events of September 11th 2001 – a fact the Channel Five continuity announcer went to great pains to point out before each episode – but even this hadn’t been the case, Sadowitz (who, to their eternal credit, the nascent C5 seemed to have chosen as their flagship comic, what with The Jerry Atrick Show, The People Versus and all that) surely wouldn’t have shirked from telling it like it was. The first episode ended with Sadowitz berating man-mountain WWF manager Johnny Valiant over the fakery of wresting, with furious condequences, and the remainder of the series pretty much went on from there.

 

In a decade where more people than ever have access to the non-traditional channels, the amount of interesting repeats seems to be lower than ever before. While UK Gold launched on the back of The Innes Book Of Records, Morning Sarge and KYTV, where are we now? Only Fools And Horses, Porridge and The Vicar Of Dibley on a constant loop. For shame.

Luckily, ITV4 felt fit to buck this trend – even if it were only on the daytime and early evening schedules, with verbatim repeats of not just The Big Match, but also occasional offerings from the other 1970s ITV regions, mainly Granada’s Barry Davies/Elton Welsby-helmed “The Kick-Off Match” (Wrexham vs Sunderland? Yay! We suspect Wrexham’s Racecourse Ground was the only one still readily identifiable from these repeat broadcasts). All this was brilliant to see, not least for the most minor of factors, like the way Big Match host Brian Moore always kept a big beige telephone on his desk, in case the gallery needed to contact him, or the way Moore would always read out the full names and addresses of competition winners: “Congratulations to Mrs Edna Smith of 27 St George Road, Leicester! You’re the winner of two tickets to the European Cup Final in Munich next May.” Quite how Mrs Edna Smith reacted on getting home from Munich two days after the European Cup Final only to find she’d been burgled, TV history hasn’t deemed fit to record.

Pertinent postscript: Kudos to Twitter’s @Custard_Socks for noticing this - repeats of The Big Match Revisited are currently running on Men And Motors on Wednesday nights. Y’know, at the exact same time either Champions League highlights are being shown on ITV1, or League Cup highlights are being shown on BBC One. Remind us, why did we forget that Men And Motors still exists again?

 

Tomorrow (or: “later today”, given how late it is), 80-71.

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BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 2

While we’d like to spend a little time musing on the way BBC North-West and Granada* have failed to heed our advice and simply fallen off-air at the end of their analogue tenure, we’re instead going to crack on with:

(*Though, really… Granada? You used to give a flying crap about things! You just collapsed off-air in the middle of a film no-one cares about. If you still had an ounce of decorum, you’d have summoned up a roll-call of continuity announcers, like Colin Weston, Richard, Judy, Bob Greaves, Lucy Meacock, and the rest… for shame.)

 

There have been quite a lot of “wry looks at unusual people” from just beneath Louis Theroux’s faux-concerned brow over the last decade, but it’s this which has stayed in our memory. Louis And The Nazis saw Theroux visit California, specifically the home of the man dubbed “the most dangerous racist in America”, Tom Metzger, in order to see just what makes him tick. Tick with bilious bigoted fury.

While Metzher spent most of the programme trying to be polite and well-mannered (as racists tend to do when appearing in documentaries), one pivotal scene of the documentary saw him, alongside his family, angrily excommunicate Theroux from him home, after Louis courageously refused to reveal whether he was Jewish or not.

See also: Nazi Pop Twins. A 2007 Channel Four documentary where James Quinn travelled to meet Prussian Blue (who were also shown in “Louis And The Nazis”), pretty much the white supremacist answer to Tegan & Sara.

TV’s Believe It Or Not was (what seemed to be) a curious yet enjoyable pair of pilots for Sean Lock. Both programmes dipped into the less remarkable depths of TV history, be they UK-based (such as popping in and out of The Sky At Night’s ill-judged dalliance with cloud-strewn live astronomy) and US-based (Shatner. Rocket Man. That is all). On first transmission, episode one ran from 8pm-9pm, and was a family-friendly flip through the more mockable parts of the television archives. Episode two ran from 9pm-10pm of the same night’s BBC Four schedule, and was an expletive-packed glance at similarly kickable televisual offcuts. With the perpetually quick-witted Lock at the helm, both programmes were as hugely entertaining as you could reasonably expect such a thing to be – maybe Victor Lewis-Smith about fifteen years ago could have handled the show slightly more entertainingly, but only just so.

“Liiiiiiiive astronomyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

Sadly, this hasn’t yet mutated into an actual series. And sadly, it hasn’t stopped people on the internet calling Sean Lock “Sean Locke”.

You know all the things the infuriating Extras decided to pretend was wrong with studio-audience sitcoms? And you know Ash Italia’s ill-considered theory in a Word Magazine article about how British stand-up comedians are incapable of penning half-decent sitcoms? Well, this quite comprehensively slaps the latter around the chops, and kicks the former quite forcedly in the balls. And was it Not Going Out that felt the need to include a teeth-clenching cameo from the star’s top showbiz chum Chris Martin? No, it wasn’t.

So, Not Going Out happily debunked many of the misconceptions about the British sitcom. It had a live studio audience (of course, so did Father Ted and I’m Alan Partridge, but columnists tend to forget that when they’re getting in a lather over The Sodding Office). It was primarily written by a stand-up comedian (of course, so were many prime US sitcoms, but columnists tend to etc). It went out on BBC One (of course, so did Men Behaving Badly, but people seem to have forgotten how good that was when when making lists).

Anyway, to detract from us just finding excuses to attack perceived prejudices, we’ll just note that each episode of Not Going Out contained enough piss-funny lines to win us over, no matter how weak the plot tended to be, or how underused Miranda Hart was once she was written in as a proper character. If nothing else, in this age of “relentless promotion before the first episode of each series, fingers crossed most viewers stick around for episode two”, Not Going Out saw its audience grow episode by episode, despite never really being promoted by the BBC. So, naturally, it was axed before series three had finished. Hey, that’s marketing for you. Expect the final, Christmas themed episode on your screen over the end of this month, unless the BBC One schedulers are even more clueless than even we’d fear think.

He looks and sounds a bit like Andrew Collings. He writes and thinks a bit like us, if you were to believe a reply to one of our posts on the NotBBC comedy forum a couple of years ago (we post there under the less-than-wacky pseudonym ‘Mark’, which presumably led to the confusion). Clearly, the latter isn’t at all appropriate (if nothing else, you’d have to take everything we say, but then replace the words “Shaun Micallef” with “Neil Kinnock” or something), as we’d never be capable of making biographies of Lord Byron, Karl Marx, Thomas Paine or Harriet Tubman accessible to, well, berks like us.

The Mark Steel Lectures was able to take such lofty subjects and make them accessible to the YouTube-video-sized attention spans of Generation X, putting them in the contexts of Room 101 (the Merton-fronted TV show, as opposed Orwell’s original) or the Match Of The Day studio. This led to modern-day dullards like us learning things by deceptive proxy. This is a good thing.

One of our favourite things about BBC Two over the last decade has been their propensity to broadcast programmes like this. It would have been just as easy to run a clip show fronted by a former kids TV presenter wandering around a hamfisted mockup of the Live & Kicking set, but they didn’t do that. Instead, they invited Noel Edmonds to front a retrospective of BBC One’s Saturday morning kids output – in front of a huge studio audience, and alongside his original co-stars – to great effect.

While you could quite justifiably claim such a programme was just a cynical exercise in memory-gland tugging, we’d counter that even the cold mechanical heart of a cyborg Norman Tebbit would have found the phone call from a stricken Tony Hart to be genuinely moving.

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BrokenTV’s Top 100 Television Shows Of The 00s: Part 1

It’s December, and that means it’s time for AN UPDATE A DAY from your super soaraway BrokenTV, all the way up to Christmas Day. No matter how busy, drunk or lying unconscious in a ditch we are, there’ll be something new on this blog every day. And if you’re going to start something like that, why not start big? Time for:

BrokenTV has called in all of its staff, including all of the staff members who never seem to post any updates to the blog, a cherry picked team of top media players, alongside several major figures from the television industry. Together, they embarked on a week’s stay at a top secret Travelodge and spent a sixty-hour week locked in vitriolic negotiations about just what abbreviation we should be using for the decade that is about to splutter out. “The noughties” has never sounded quite right (indeed, it’s December 2009, and our spell checker still doesn’t recognise it), “the zeroes” sounds too American, and we can’t use “the 2000s” because that’ll leave us nothing to use when we pen our roundup of the century’s television in December 2099. Stay tuned for that, by the way, just ninety years from now. It’ll be a blast.

In the end, the panel settled for “The Oh-Ohs”. Of course, it’s the only decade this century to end with two zeroes, it’s quite catchy, and the panel felt that when uttered, the phrase successfully encapsulated the events of the preceding nine years and eleven months, what with the war, the terrorism and the economic strife and everything. So there you go. “The Oh-Ohs”.

Then we got the work experience kid to cobble together a list of the best hundred telly shows from the decade. We would have asked the panel for their input, but they wouldn’t stop going on about when they’d be allowed to see their families again. That was apart from Mark Lawson, who was desperate keen to stay and help. Of course, we’re not that desperate.

* A quick note on how we’re doing this: to keep things interesting, we’re only including television programmes which have started in the last decade. For example, don’t expect to see The Sopranos (HBO, 1999-2007) in there. On we go!

Ah, high concept television. While it could easily be annoying - imagine an edgy sketch show where the last line of every skit was "I see you've bought a new ladder" - it can often become second nature. For example, when Peep Show started, surely we weren't alone in thinking the entire first-person-view schtick would get timesome by about the third episode. And how wrong we all were, eh?

But this isn't about Peep Show, it’s about (to give the show its full title) ‘Frank Sidebottom’s Proper Telly Show in B/W, With Repeats In Colour’. As you might expect from the title, the first time each programme was broadcast, it was in monochrome, giving the (already pretty lo-fi) programme the feel of being captured on CCTV. When the same-week repeats rolled around, they were in full colour. An utterly pointless conceit, and as such one that we enjoyed seeing quite a lot.

Anyway, the programme itself. Anyone who stayed up too late too frequently in the early 1990s might remember Frank’s Fantastic Shed Show, a decidedly cheap yet cheerful affair going out on the wrong side of midnight on ITV. This is largely the same, but with about a fifth of the budget, meaning your enjoyment of the whole thing will hinge on whether you find Frank Sidebottom entertaining or not. We happen to think he’s endlessly entertaining, more so when the studio guests on ‘Proper Telly Show’ (yes, there were studio guests) didn’t know anything about him. David Soul, for example, clearly didn’t have the foggiest what was going on, and presumably spent most of his off-camera time pondering how long the sixth circle of hell had been in Manchester.

Notable mention: Frank Sidebottom, alongside Little Frank, also starred in Channel M’s overnight test card until the handover to Euronews. This meant the test card would appear as usual, only the centre was taken up by recordings of Frank improvising banter with his puppet alter ego. And best yet, no scary cloth clown in sight. (Second notable mention: We were delighted to notice that Frank appears in the US television commercial for FIFA 10, just the same as he does in the UK version.)

More hi-concept hi-jinkery, this time from the pen (and whatever implement people primarily use to direct things) of Peter “Chicken Lollies!” Baynham. I Am Not An Animal was the Triffic Films-animated tale of a group of highly pseudo-intelligent animals rescued from the laboratory of a vivisectionist, being forced to fend for themselves.

A top-drawer collection of voice artistes lent their voices to the show, including Steve Coogan, Kevin Eldon, Amerlia Bullmore, Julia Davies, Simon Pegg and Arthur Matthews, the latter as a rabbit bred specifically to provide telephone IT support. The main humour to be derived from the show is the relentlessly optimistic yet slightly bewildered nature of the main characters. On first being set free, finding themselves in a field of cows, paternalistic horse Peter remarks how they must be in “[a] weird giant nightclub with an uneven green dancefloor, which the overweight, naked clientele insist on eating”. Similar confusions ensue as our suburban menagerie find their own house, and (unwittingly) avoid capture from their former owners Vivi-Sec UK.

Hardly the most EPG-friendly offering on our list, Penn & Teller: Bullshit! sees the punk illusionists calling, well, bullshit on a number of pseudoscientific notions, fads and misconceptions.

Many, if not all, of the topics should often have a default setting of “bullshit” in the minds of most reasonably thoughtful people, but that doesn’t stop it being an interesting, and useful programme. In an age where far too much television exploits people buying into the myths of “talking to the dead”, alternative medicine or crypto-zoology, it’s kind of comforting to see a programme roundly debunking such things – and showing their workings as they go. As well as swearing quite a lot.

As you might expect, it’s far from being a show for everyone. Penn and Teller’s libertarian viewpoints mean that left-wing prejudices are attacked as often as those from the right, so while Timmy Guardianreader might well lap up episodes focusing on creationism or so-called ‘family values’, he’d be spitting tofu with apoplectic rage at the episodes attacking environmental hysteria, recycling or PETA (well, not ‘apoplectic rage’ as such, but he might mutter something and scratch his beard angrily).

If we do have one problem with the show, it’s that the producers can occasionally be as prone to cherry-picking their ‘evidence’ as those they are attacking. An early episode looked at the ‘myth of secondhand smoke’, which Penn Gillette has since admitted had been misleading. And so would Teller if he hasn’t been in character, presumably.

Given it’s arguably the greatest revelation in communication since the invention of the printing press, it’s surprising there haven’t been many television documentaries taking a look at the history of the internet. Or possibly, given the way we’d said “the printing press” and not “television” in that sentence, not that surprising (because television allowed only a tiny proportion or people to put out their crackpot views to millions, whereas the printing press and internet allowed anyone with the necessary equipment to pump out their demented ideas without fear of censure, like what we’re doing now. If you were wondering).

It seems that for this decade, Download: The True Story Of The Internet is as comprehensive a retelling of the tale as we’re going to get. It’s not absolutely perfect – the slightly odd presentational style of host John Heileman can be a little offputting – but all credit to the producers for having the show helmed by a journalist who has been closely involved with the web from its early days, and he does know what he’s talking about. Just remember, if the show had been made in the UK, it’d probably be hosted by Iain Lee instead. So, think on.

The first episode of ‘Download…’ can be viewed in full on Google Video here.

Quite annoyingly, John Simm doesn’t seemed to have aged a single day over the last ten years. 2000’s Never Never was a two-part drama for Channel Four, written by Tony Marchant. It saw Simm playing John Parlour, a darkly charming loan shark, forever hovering around the residents of a sink estate with the promise of funding a Christmas their kids really deserve, and hey, something special for you as well. After a fashion, karma ends up taking its revenge on Parlour, putting him in a position where he needs to help of his former victims if he is to survive.

Very well written, and as good a performance as you’d expect from Simm, this is a nicely engrossing story that really ought to see an outing on More4.

 

Tune in tomorrow for shows 95-91! Or whatever the web equivalent of ‘tuning in’ is. Click in? Ah, you know what we mean.

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Shaun Micallef’s His Generation (As Proper A Review As We Are Capable.) (Of.)

Stealing an image directly from The Vine’s interview with Shaun Micallef to use at the start of this review probably wouldn’t be legal, would it? But what if we took a screenshot of part of The Vine’s website that happened to have a photo of Shaun Micallef on it? Surely that would just be classified as coincidental, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it? We’re pretty sure it would. (“Taxi!” – BrokenTV’s Legal Dept)

 

Well, we’ve been listening to My Generation, the debut album from one-man comedy renaissance Shaun Micallef, and guess what? It’s really good. As we’ve mentioned, it’s more of a traditional comedy album, taking in specially-written sketches and songs, as opposed to being Just Comedy Songs or Just Live Stand-Up, like other comedians would put out. Here’s a track by track breakdown, containing mild spoilers because copying out lines from the album is much easier than us coming up with ‘opinions’ and ‘being interesting’.

 

Track One/Two: A Welcome / I Remember You

An introduction to the album, followed by a rendition of the Frank Ifield classic. The cover begins as a fairly straight version of the song, before trailing off into silly voices while the backing singers (well, a multi-tracked Susie Ahern) continue stoically with the ‘proper’ version. Interestingly (well, or inconsequentially, depending on whether you’re us or not) it’s a completely different take of the song than that lip-synced by Shaun on the Rove clip we linked to yesterday.

It’s A Bit Like: Vic Reeves, circa Big Night Out

Track Three: Treading The Boards

An second-division English thesp looks back over the career of himself and his top showbiz chums. The first outing on the disc for some of the splendid wordplay we’ve come to associate with Mr Micallef, which is always more than welcome. Plus, any comedy album released in 2009 that uses Kenneth Tynan as a reference is a welcome thing in our book, and not just because already knowing who Kenneth Tynan is makes us feel a bit superior for about three seconds (although after that our feeling of superiority is outweighed by our default setting of ‘self-loathing’, meaning the equilibrium is restored, not least because we’ve just realised we’re the sort of twats who’d use a word like ‘equilibrium’. But hey, this isn’t about us).

“O! If his mouth could talk, the stories it could tell…”

It’s A Bit Like: Peter Cook

Track Four/Five: An Announcement/Christopher Walken Sings David Bowie

Shaun does Bowie’s ‘Fashion’, in the voice of Chris Walken. Brief enough to avoid outstaying its welcome. Previously used as a gag on Micallef Tonight, of course.

Track Six/Seven: Women/Things That You Can Do

A postmodernly faux-sexist ditty about female heads of state around the world (including, as you might expect, multiple references to Ukraine’s Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko), followed about a harpsichord-backed tune from the 1950s about “The Things An Australian Wife Can Do”, performed in the style of Noel Coward. More delightful wordplay on offer, which works much more impressively when listened to, than when merely transcribed on the internet by idiots like us. But still:

“Clever things that you can do-oo / Clever things that you can do-oo / Just keep the lino polished /  your cares will be abolished / you’ll wonder where the daylight hours flew.”

It’s A Bit Like: Spitting Image, then Noel Coward

Track Eight/Nine: An Interview/Accident Medley

In a piece that could have been written then deemed not quite suitable for Newstopia, Shaun meets Neil Brady (played by Shaun), a schoolteacher who has written a heartfelt medley about the Death Of Princess Diana, and other tragedies.

”Oh, they chased her down a tunnel, but she couldn’t get away / if only they had dared to stop and think / But they went snap! Snap! Snap! The crazy pap- / -arazzi were to blame, and her driver who’d had too much to drink.”

It’s A Bit Like: Newstopia, like we just said

Track Ten: Medicine Man

Splendid. Micallef performs a monologue in the guise of an old-fashioned doctor from a Yorkshire village, who holds no truck with the modern ways of that fancy coroner from the Big Town.

It’s A Bit Like: Alan Bennett, or Stephen Fry

Track Eleven: They Whisper His Name

Sotto Voce!

It’s A Bit Like: The title theme to series three of Alexei Sayle’s Stuff, but taken in a different direction

Track Twelve: Charlton Heston Reads The Bible

One of our favourite things. Shaun gets another chance to do his brilliant Charlton Heston impersonation, previously heard in the reports by “Pilger Heston” on Newstopia. Charlton Heston is in a recording studio, trying to record a speaking book of The Bible, with amusingly splendid consequences.

”This God-damn Bible is taking forever!”

It’s A Bit Like: Newstopia, or Smith & Jones when they were at their peak

Track Thirteen: Love Theme From Roger Explosion

Performed by Susie Ahern, it’s a theme for the Roger Explosion sketches from Full Frontal (the 1990s Australian sketch show that we’re always mixing up with the similarly alliterative Fast Forward, even though Fast Forward was rubbish and Full Frontal was great and had Eric Bana as a cast member and everything).

It’s A Bit Like: They Might Be Giants’ theme for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Track Fourteen: Slap On The Terrorist

Another sketch we presume was originally penned for Newstopia, Shaun interviews Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the terrorist behind the failed 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Yousef clearly has long-held issues with the 9/11 bombers, who had clearly plagiarised his idea, and to compound matters, had carried it out with none of the panache and flair that he’d had. A great sketch, with Shaun putting in good performances in both roles.

It’s A Bit Like: Newstopia again

Track Fifteen: Jesus Was A Good Man

A country-tinged melody about how Jesus was really good, and how the devil is rubbish.

It’s A Bit Like: A satire on Toby Keith, or someone, we imagine

Track Sixteen: A Visit

An uncaring son visits his bewildered elderly father at an old people’s home. A brilliant sketch that works best when you hear it for yourself, so less said the better. It’s basically a fleshing out of a certain sketch from Micallef P(r)ogram(me), and the post-credits scene at the end of an episode Micallef-devised sitcom Welcher & Welcher, if you’ve seen those.

It’s A Bit Like: The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), or heck, Monty Python. Probably Cleese as the son, Jones as the father. Maybe even Cook & Moore.

Track Seventeen: Hell Of A Time

Just dandy. A short song from the perspective of a dead man reaching heaven, and being delighted about all the things he can do now he’s there. Oh, if only there were a way you could hear what it was like.

It’s A Bit Like: Eric Idle in full pomp

Track Eighteen/Nineteen: An Explanation/Modern Day Folk Heroes

Shaun muses on how Ned Kelly is Australia’s sole folk hero and how there should be more of them. He duly introduces a song about some more contemporary equivalents to Kelly in the hope they they could subsequently be held in similar regard to old bucketbonce. Said song is then performed in the style of Bob Dylan.

It’s A Bit Like: The Bit In Newstopia Where Shaun Sang A Song As Bob Dylan

Track Twenty/Twenty-One: A Briefing/Dalgetty’s Fruit Wholesalers

Mr Dalgetty, owner of a fruit wholesale firm visits a slick American advertising agency, and tells them all about the background of the family-owned firm, and what they’re looking for. The agency then performs their radio advert for the company. A bit one-note, but hey.

It’s A Little Bit Like: The Songs Victor Lewis Smith Did Between The Prank Calls On Nuisance Calls

Track Twenty-Two/Twenty-Three: A Synopsis/Cahiers Du Cinema

A French actor introduces his song in a near indecipherable accent, followed by his song, performed in something which may not necessarily be in actual French. We’re not sure, as like Girls Aloud, we can’t speak French.

It’s A Bit Like: Don’t know, but the backing music was also used for the menus in at least one of the Micallef P(r)ogram(me) DVDs.

Track Twenty-Four/Twenty-Five: An Early Morning/Tipworks Market

An eager father wakes up his children, because they are all going to… Tipworks Market. A short song about said market is then performed, in the same breathless style as Victor Lewis Smith circa Inside Victor Lewis Smith.

It’s A Bit Like: Victor Lewis Smith, moreso than the Dalgetty sketch

Track Twenty-Six: Poetica Zirconia

Just super. More top wordplay from Shaun, via a look at the work of poet Sir I.P. Whittingslow. Great stuff that we’re not going to spoil by transcribing here, so you’ll just have to buy the album. As the sketch contains several funny poems that work very nicely in isolation, this could be cherry-picked for an episode of The Smith Lectures, if Radio Two still do that. We wouldn’t know, as they’ve stopped putting their comedy shows on Saturday afternoons, because they’re idiots.

Track Twenty-Seven/Twenty Eight: A Tribute/My Generation

Shaun introduces and performs an electro cover version of the The Who classic, before waxing philosophical on matters historical.

“If history teaches us anything, it’s that we learn nothing from it. It’s a valuable lesson that’s worth remembering, and unless we do, we’re doomed to repeat it, or at least sit a supplementary exam during the holidays.”

Track Twenty-Nine: Happy New Year

Shaun’s celebratory tune designed to create global togetherness just after 11.59pm on every December 31st, by way of impersonating residents of several trouble-stricken nations forgiving their tormentors. A nice end to the album, and one we’ll hope to see performed on Shaun Micallef’s New Year’s Eve show on Australia’s Channel Ten. Or more specifically, the following day, if we can find a (“wholly legal advertising-supported streaming video of it. Where’s that bloody taxi?” – BrokenTV’s Legal Dept).

It’s A Bit Like: Spitting Image, again

 

So there it is. Much more of a ‘lazily-compiled breakdown of the tracks alongside a bunch of facile comparisons’ than an actual ‘review’, admittedly, but that’s just how we roll. In summary though, it’s really good, save for a few duff tracks like “Cahiers Du Cinema” or “Dalgetty’s Fruit Wholesalers”, which we didn’t really rate that highly. In a nutshell: the good tracks more than outweigh the bad, and if you don’t buy it we don’t think you shouldn’t legally be allowed to vote.

 

To round things off, how about offering a sample track? After all, it’s what successful music blogs do, it would genuinely help promote the album as people can hear for themselves what the contents are like, and probably won’t end with a harshly worded cease-and-desist letter being fired off at Broken Industries Inc. Yes. That’s what we’re going to do. it’ll be a good thing to do. A nice thing. An honourable thing.

MP3: Shaun Micallef – Hell Of A Time

Buy a copy of His Generation from here if you’re in the UK, or from here if you’re in Australia. If you’re from neither, both links are probably equally applicable.

(“Thank God you’re here. Driver – the airport please. We want nothing to do with this.” – BrokenTV’s Legal Dept.)

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YouTube Thing And Album Of The Day

We've been listening to the new Shaun Micallef CD plugged in the above Rove interview. Except, Micallef being Micellef, he instead plugged a wholly fictional album, and brought with him a copy of The Best Of The Smiths to display.

The actual proper album is a really rather splendid "old-school" (if you will) comedy album like what Peter Sellers or Monty Python used to make, containing a few comedy songs ("Christopher Walken Sings David Bowie's Fashion") and a load of enjoyable sketches. Favourite so far: "Charlton Heston Reads The Bible". You can buy it here. Or elsewhere, probably. Like iTunes if you're in Australia, we shouldn't wonder.

(Yes, this is a bit of a placeholder update until we come up with something else. Still a great album, though.)

Update: It's also available from Amazon Marketplace for under a tenner. Thanks to Paul from Hot Cuss (which should be updated more frequently. Tsk) for the heads up.

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out In The Middle Of BBC News 24 – It’s The Digital Switchover!

Not one, but two disappointing YouTube-based updates on the same day? We’re spoiling you, we really are.

So, the Big Digital Switch-Off is now underway, and given the number of posters featuring That Robot Formerly Voiced By Matt Lucas But Which Has Since Become Mute (possibly not the robot’s real name) hanging from lamp-posts in our vicinity, it’s a big deal. Certainly big enough for us to have to retune our Freeview box every few weeks if we want to avoid accidentally recording Five’s 8.30pm output with our series link for The Daily Show, and big enough for ‘our’ BBC region to become BBC Wales, but for our ITV region to remain Granada. Maybe the region thing is down to continental drift, who knows. But anyway, yeah, big.

How is this being marked? Pretty much every transmitter has been pumping out an analogue signal for at least fifty years – you’d hope they’d be given a last hurrah before having the plug kicked out. While it’d be a bit much to expect the sort of big showbiz farewell old ITV franchises used to put on once they’d lost their licence, it would be nice.

You could guess the drill here. A montage of some of the programming put out over the transmitter over the years, interviews with local ‘celebrities’ (possibly restricted to a reporter from the local news and the bloke from Safestyle Windows, but hey). A sombre chat with the engineers who’ll be carrying out the actual switch off. A jovial glance at some of the transmitter-based bloopers over the years – mostly where the picture would cut to static, but if we’re lucky there could be a misspelling of the word “Independent” on the transmitter-generated caption for the 1979 ITV strike.

Actually, having said all that, it’d be a rubbish idea. No wonder we’re not director general of the BBC. We didn’t even make it to the interview stage.

They could at the very least give the switch-off a cursory mention on the BBC News Channel just before the channel falls off air, in the manner of Philip Schofield saying “goodbye to Northern Ireland” when he was in The Broom Cupboard and they were about to cut to their regional news. That’d be quite good. Or maybe just put up a special caption, and a nice bit of music. Even a Ceefax page saying what’s going on, for the benefit of the elderly and/or bewildered. Or even, just for a bit of a giggle, let the nuclear attack emergency broadcast system kick in. Chortle!

After all, with such a rich history in broadcasting, surely the BBC wouldn’t let the UHF signal they’ve been sending us so lovingly for so many years end with a whimper? By just letting it die in the middle of the overnight BBC News simulcast? Surely not that. That’d just be shi- oh? They did just that? Ah.

“Bye Winter Hill! Don’t let 56 years of transmission hit you on the arse on the way out!”

“See you in hell, Moel-Y-Parc!“

So much for BBC Two in the UK, but what about the digital Checkpoint Charlie in other nations? Germany, for example. Back in the pre-digital Sky era, we used to love wandering through the high numbers on the Pace receiver checking out German telly, and it seemed to be very professionally put together. Some channels used to fill the wee small hours by broadcasting repeats of news bulletins from the 1970s (yes, really! How excellent is that, eh?), or rolling as-live thru-windscreen coverage of someone driving through Germany (again, yes really! How utterly uninteresting is that, eh?). Surely our stereotypically efficient Teutonic cousins would make the effort?

Sadly, and similarly, no. Going by this grainy couldn’t-even-be-bothered-running-an-aerial-lead-into-their-PVR footage, German station ARD (was that the one who ran repeats of Monty Python series four in the mid-90s?) simply fell off the air with a whimper in the middle of an entertainment show.

 

Meanwhile, the feed of ARD on the Grünten E2 transmitter at least had the good grace to go out after the end of a news bulletin, before crashing quite amusingly into the testcard and a piece of hugely inappropriate music. Five bonus points to them.

Leave it to Sweden to do things properly. The analogue farewell for viewers of TV4 saw a news bulletin interviewing the very engineers who’ll be shutting off the analogue signal, before falling off-air in the middle of a cooking programme. Admittedly, it should have been done with a special closedown concert featuring Whale, The Wannadies and The Knife, but it’s a marked improvement on what we’ve seen so far.

Hopping over the Atlantic, the home of Still Bothering To Do Regional TV Properly, it seems quite a bit more was made of the switchover.

A lot of – if not all - channels ran rolling captions over their analogue broadcasts detailing what was about to happen. If nothing else, it gives us an excuse to post a clip of the hugely underrated Drew Carey Show.

 

As for the actual turn-off itself, it was handled so well, we’re almost feeling guilty about about the haphazardly Photoshopped picture just up there. There are plenty of clips of these on YouTube, so we’ve had the BrokenTV researcher monkeys poring over as many as several of them to bring you

BROKENTV’S TOP 3 US ANALOG(UE) SWITCH-OFF CLIPS

Iiiiiiiiiin three! Illinois-based WGEM went about things very nicely, with the whole thing making up part of a news bulletin. No Swedish engineers in ill-considered knitwear here – the switch-off is handled by one of the station’s reporters, after a cheery explanation on what’ll happen next. Hurrah!

 

Iiiiiiiiin two! Unless Fox News have been lying to us, PBS affiliate WSRE is sure to sign off with a BBC World News bulletin, a plea to get everyone driving hybrids, and will end on an animation of Richard Dawkins jumping up and down on Old Glory as a sarcastic Europop remix of The Star-Spangled Banner plays out in the background. Well, it doesn’t. Instead, we get a lovely slideshow of transmission rooms, musings on the era of analog(ue) broadcasting, a tremendously overcomplicated mention of the frequency the channel has been broadcasting on (along with a somewhat overdesigned slide of the number “23”), information on the FCC’s stipulations on channel closedowns, a quick ‘compilation’ of test patterns (including the infamous ‘Indian’ one), shots of past WSRE programming (“Fish’n With Andy”), and a quick “thank you” to loyal viewers.

In short, just like how an IBA Engineering Announcement would look in 2009, if they still existed. Splendid.

 

And iiiiiiiiiiin one! WDEF-TV does things in as perfect a manner as humanely possible. Bonus points right from the start, for cutting off David Bloody Letterman in mid-sentence, cutting to a “DTV Update” as if it were a newsflash. Newsflashes are always exciting, as long as they don’t involve our impending deaths. There then follows a quick look back at the history of the analog(ue) coverage offered by the network over the years, and a rundown of just why digital is much better. The bulletin ends with a splendid montage of local WDEF output over the years, including glances at delightfully lo-fi weather reports, news teams and caption cards. After that, it’s quickly back to Letterman, with the signal quite nicely cutting out before Dave can open his gob. Textbook.

In summary, come on The BBC. You’ve still got several regions to close down – get the local news teams in to make something special of it. It’s no good looking at ITV – their regional output has long since been a joke, but the annual regional concerts for Children In Need show that the Beeb can still do this sort of thing properly. Come on, we want to see Gordon Burns on BBC North-West blowing out a candle at 00:29 on the 4th of December to mark the end of analogue, and we want it, erm, then.

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The Unsettling North American Television Ident Awards

What is it with pre-90s US television networks, eh? They’re not content with merely having channel identities that look like the corporate logo of a sinister megaglobal corporation pumping out robotic vigilantes that go wrong and kill everyone in early 1980s straight-to-VHS movies, no. They have to ramp up the chill factor my animating them badly and playing in music recorded by (we’re guessing) a hook-handed killer given a Bontempi organ for the first time. In short, they make the 1970s and 1980s Open University ident seem cosy by comparison. What do we mean? Here’s what we mean.

Aargh!

Aiee!

Urg!

Spuh!

Meh.

Fuh. Though admittedly this last one is from Australia.

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