This Peter Kay Thing (Part Two of a Three Part Series)

We promised an update studying the contents of Peter Kay's "Special Kay" DVD. You didn't necessarily want to read an update studying the contents of Peter Kay's "Special Kay" DVD, but here we are anyway. For any non-regulars stumbling into this post, there's a preamble here. On we go:

0:00:00 Title sequence. Short clips of Kay-based business, each one bookended by lots of cereal being poured in front of the camera. Will Peter Kay actually have recorded a special introduction to this DVD, or is it going to be like the Kamp Krusty episode of The Simpsons, with a slight possibility of a recorded message about how Peter Kay endorses this event or product?

0:00:26 No such luck, we're straight into the middle of an episode of underrated 1997 Channel Four show Gas, and a Peter Kay set about the acts in working mens clubs. Gas was hosted by the excellent Lee Mack, and really, really should get repeated on More4.

0:02:18 It looks like we're not going to get the full Gas set after all, as we're straight onto one of the John Smiths adverts. The diving one. In case you don't remember it, it's not really very good, although it does reveal the character Kay plays in the adverts is called "John Smith", and not "Peter Kay". A revelation not quite up there with seeing Del Boy and Rodney's Dad for the first time.

0:02:58 An appearance on Parkinson. Parky mentions how Peter Kay used be a warm-up man for his show. A pity they didn't have the cameras running for any of that, it would have much more worthwhile. The walk-on music is "Amarillo", so we know it's not going to be imperial phase Kay. If we're really lucky, they'll include the episode of Parkinson that was Lord Bob Monkhouse's final proper TV appearance. Oh, and there are flash-cuts cropping out bits of the interview, as we suspect there will be with lots of segments on this disc.

0:05:00 One of Kay's Children in Need guest spots. Making profit from a charity appearance, there. A nice little bit using clippage from the BBC archives, though.

0:06:02 But we're not sticking with it. They really are going to split all these clips over the entire DVD, aren't they? So the actual performances take up more room. Gah. We're onto the advert for the paperback edition of Peter Kay's The Sound Of Laughter, which of course doesn't even feature any input from Kay himself, but rather Jim Bowen. A lot of DVDs include trailers before the main feature plugging other works by the same artist. This DVD has such trailers as the actual main feature. Right now, someone is taking screenshots of that bit of the DVD to use in a Powerpoint presentation on marketing.

He couldn't even be bothered appearing in his own advert for his own product. What does he do all day? The lazy git. (Now is a good time for someone to post a comment stating how he now spends all his time caring for the terminally ill, making us look like utter bastards.)

0:06:23 Peter Kay's guest appearance on The Sodding Catherine Tate Show. It's her Politically Incorrect Old Woman character, and is about as funny you would personally expect a Catherine Tate sketch to be. Not funny at all, if you're us. Peter Kay plays Politically Incorrect Old Man. The thing that always bugs us about Catherine Tate is that she's clearly great at doing characters, but the actual writing always lets down the sketches, and Peter Kay gives an only-slightly-less decent performance here. It's the sort of sketch where two of the big final punchlines are: a fart gag, and repeated use of the word "fuck".

0:11:53 One of the "Not Seen Before On National Television" pieces, with Peter Kay on Granada Reports. The Granada Reports bit includes Lucy Meacock linking to a clip of another early Granadaland appearance by Kay, on The Last Laugh Show.

0:12:28 The clip of Kay's appearance on The Last Laugh Show, which we're giving a separate entry to, because we're totting up these timings. Yes, we're that tragic. But anyway, growing up in Granadaland was great for anyone who likes comedy. While most of the ITV network got a repeat of The Equalizer (sic), we got fare like The Dead Good Show, a one-off sketch show by Steve Coogan, Caroline Aherne and John Thompson, and a stand-up show we think was called "Stand Up", which regularly had Coogan, Aherne, and a pre-Whitehouse Experience Rob Newman on it, when he was mainly an impressionist. Interestingly, we've just imdb'ed up Rob Newman to try and check the title of the show, and while that isn't there, it does mention that he did make an appearance in an episode of Cannon and Ball's Casino, around the same time The Mary Whitehouse Experience was on Radio One. Lumme.

0:13:49 Another appearance on the local news, this from when it was rubbishly dubbed "Granada Tonight", which is all wrong. More banter with the female anchor, but as it isn't Lucy Meacock this time, we're less interested. He reads out some of his publicity blurb whilst giggling.

0:14:32 The same episode of Granada Tonight, and a serious bit about dentistry in Liverpool. Excellently, Peter Kay walks into shot while putting on his coat and saying goodbye to everyone. We genuinely love it when comedians do that, stock gag or not.

0:14:59 Another edition of Granada Reports, and it's Peter Kay in drag! He's promoting his part in the stage version of The Producers, and is only in drag (long red hair and everything) for a laugh. See, this is the sort of thing proper oddball comedians would do. You could imagine Russ Abbott or Les Dawson doing this on Breakfast Time in 1984. This is what we want! Peter Kay even bursts in on the post-interview action, performing the autocue link to the Granada Sport section, then grabbing hold of the Granada sports guy and messing around with him. A good bit of fun, all round.

He even sticks around for the rest of the Granada Sport segment, restricting himself to making shapes with his gloved hand from the corner of the screen. Great stuff, and it reminds of when the brilliant Charlie Wolf used to present the afternoon show in the early days of Atlantic 252. The station would go close down at 6pm, but Charlie would hang around, leave his microphone on, and appear after a couple of minute's silence to make silly noises, hum pieces of classical music, or continue with running jokes from earlier in the show. Wonderful stuff from one of the best disc jockeys we've ever heard (but whom no-one else can remember, it seems). Oh yeah, Peter Kay. He then sticks around to help read out Valentines Day emails from viewers whilst poking gentle fun.

0:19:39 From enjoyable local-news based fun to THE COLD HARD HAND OF MARKETING, and another John Smiths advert. The Indian restaurant one, which wasn't very funny either. The Jack Dee ones were better.

0:20:20 "Leonard", a VHS-sourced sketch where Kay plays a loner talking to an unimpressed (and silent) woman at a bus stop. No laugh track, and presumably from another Granada-only Monday night after News At Ten comedy show. A nice little monologue, showing what Peter Kay used to be capable of. Well, he probably still is, to be fair. There's just not the money in it. No opportunity for a spin-off single at Christmas, you see.

0:23:38 The video for "Sleep" by Texas, with Kay on pan pipes, and recreating famous bits of other pop videos and movies with Sharleen Spiteri. We cannot frigging stand Texas. And we've now watched the whole thing, just for you. Let no-one say we do not suffer for our art.

0:27:42 The John Smiths "Football" advert. He really could do any old crap by this point, and the adverts would still be hailed as genius. Stomping over baroque sandcastles, wiping his nose on the Bayeux Tapestry and cheerily tossing rotten apple cores to starving tramps are all things that could have been included in these adverts, to similar levels of public acclaim.

0:28:11 Kay on the first series of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. How do we know it's the first series? It was the only series where his radio producer Andy played a Hank Kingsley-issue sidekick role. Kay soon picks up on this, asking him what he's actually there for, before saying he can scoot up the sofa a bit to get more involved. Sidekick Andy's only real contribution is a pretty poor "it's Peter Gay!" ad-lib, before he tactfully moves back out of shot. He wasn't there for the second series, although it's only fair to say he remains a worthwhile foil to Ross on his radio programmes, and surely will remain to do so after Ross ends his suspension.

Kay goes on to start an entertaining anecdote about working in a cinema, but it soon cuts away for...

0:30:50 Yet another John Smiths advert. We're suspecting they've paid for this DVD to be made, frankly. They're trying to make the most of their last memorable advertising campaign, given that the follow-up to the Kay campaign was the unsuccessful "sarcastic Northern pub landlord" character. We can't even remember there being any John Smiths adverts for the last couple of years. Maybe they're now like Rolls Royce, and are now so very prestigious they don't even need to advertise. Or not.

0:31:16 Parky again, and Kay is going on about working in a cinema again, this time while sitting next to Lulu. The Scottish singer, not the shitting Blue Peter elephant, but you'll have already guessed that.

0:33:00 Back to the bitter-plugging. Another one of the wedding-DJ adverts.

0:33:17 Peter Kay's appearance on Corrie. This has of course already appeared on one of Peter Kay's DVDs, taking up the majority of space on the Driven to Distraction DVD you'll see going for a couple of quid in Tesco, or less in Cash Converters.

0:37:09 Parky once more, this time sitting next to Sandra Bullock. She seems to find him funny enough. After a bit he gets up to sing a song with the band, a self-penned ditty about and for his nan. It's easy to scoff, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of old-school light entertainment, we're saying. It's certainly preferable to Jimmy Carr going on about paedophiles again. Kay even wanders around the set while singing, which is always fun.

0:40:14 Probably the main draw of the DVD now, with camcorder footage of Kay's first ever stand-up set from 1995. It's in a small comedy club, and he seems a bit nervous but still engages in banter with the audience (about water infections, if you're wondering). The set is interrupted by an interview with the owner of the establishment, and while the interview is on VHS, we pretty sure this is taken straight from the BBC's Comedy Map Of Britain, only with an extended cut of his routine. There's even a quick post-mortem interview with 1995-Kay at the end, which certainly wasn't part of the Comedy Map of Britain show. We think.

0:43:40 Hurrah, it includes Kay's stuff from The Sunday Show, the BBC Two Sunday early-afternoon show that wasn't quite as good as This Morning With Richard Not Judy, so we didn't watch it very often. The series was best known for playing host to Dennis Pennis. Hey, that's another person called P. Kay(e), what are the odds? Additionally, we'd wager Phil Kay probably made the odd appearance on there too, thereby making the full set. of comedy Kay(e)s. Well, apart from Gordon. Have we got time to ruminate on the accuracy of rumours suggesting that Paul Kaye was only picked to front Woolworth's 2002 Christmas advertising campaign because they'd thought they were booking family favourite Peter Kay? And by the time they realised they've booked the controversial gobshite and star of BBC Two's 'Perfect World' (of which there isn't even a Wikipedia entry), it was too late to find a replacement?

Not really, no. The first of the Sunday Show sketches sees Kay taking part in Junior Masterchef, with the real Loyd "No, just the one 'L'" Grossman, and coming up with meal ideas such as Cup-a-Soup and Netto Beans. It's his performance that makes it funnier than we're making it sound here. Good stuff.



And so, with the clock sitting on 0:44:33, and another bit of the interview with Jonathan Ross ("Eye-level is buy-level"), we'll blow the half-time whistle on this comprehensive breakdown. Tune in again tomorrow for the rest of this anally-retentive listing, providing our family don't have us sent to a therapist first. Also: some charts, and what you should think about this DVD.

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Christmas Advertising: A Spotter's Guide, Part One

CrediCrunch™ or not, this is the biggest advertising spell of the year, (unless it's a World Cup year and England have sneaked through), with the clamouring creatives desperate to tell us what we need to buy for everyone this festive period. Well, as long as it's from their clients. This leads to increased advertising spend, leading to extra-especially exciting programming on the commercial channels at this time of y... oh. Our point stands. A lot of the adverts can be very expensive, and need to do something wonderfully creative in order to stand out from the crowd, whilst simultaneously enthralling the viewing millions and enfostering a feeling of warmth toward the faceless corporations that fund each commercial.

At least in theory. In actuality, they can broadly be rounded up into several categories, and here are some of them.

THE CELEBGASM APPROACH: "Have a cracking Christmas... at Wool-worths"

The preferred choice of the big hitters, the plan is to cram in as many stars as possible into their allotted minute of airtime, as if to say "look how much we can afford to spend on an advert! We don't even need your custom!"

Then: 67% of the Goodies at Woolies. Fucking brilliant, frankly. If they'd stuck with this sort of thing instead of putting all their cash on a couple of mammals constructed from felt and fake fur, just maybe things would be going better for them now. What wouldn't be to love about "Mitchell And Webb's Festive Cavalcade"?



Now: The current M&S adverts are currently all over the place, making the assumption that seeing Twiggy, Gary Barlow and Myleene Klass looking really pleased with themselves is going to make us want to buy a bland pullover for Uncle Alan. Now, if it were Harry Hill's Hamper Of Hilarity, with Stuffer the Cat pointing at iPod Nanos, we'd be sold.

Merry Christmas from..
Watch the ad...

We can't let M&S off that lightly, either. They once tried to exploit the 'celebrity' of Piers Morgan in order to shift their food. Seriously, how have they not gone into receivership after that?

THE SPECIFICS APPROACH: "Liquorsave at Kwik Save!"

Some companies prefer to just fling a load of present ideas in your face, preferably with their corporate logo flashing up between each brand-blip, in the hope that one of them will stick. "Mum, I neeeeeeed one of them!" "Tsk. But where on earth could I buy one of those? Ah, yes. Dixons."

Then: Currys, replete with an exploding Christmas bauble with the Currys logo on it between each product shot. The number of teens frozen with delight at receiving a tenner's worth of Matsui personal stereo as a result of this clip sadly have not been recorded.



Now: Currys again, this time leaving the branding until the end of the advert, and using an even more modest backdrop in order to highlight the product by an extra 7%. The principle is still the same, with the only differences being each gift getting slammed into a CGI parcel at the end of each money shot, and Voiceover Man mentioning Currys every ten seconds to make up for the lack of branded tree decoration.

The Right iPods at C..
Watch the ad...

Of course, Woolies cleverly incorporated this approach as well in their old commercials, splendidly encouraging the bussed-in talent to indulge in bits of business around each product. Seriously, Philip Glenister, in character as Gene Hunt, looking perplexed as his vinyl copy of Lee Hazlewood's "Love and Other Crimes" won't fit into a Blu-ray player? Do we have to do everything for you, The Entire Advertising Industry?

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Not The Most Auspicious of Starts

But then nine hours of work, four hours of college and three hours of traffic before getting home tend to do that to us. Anyway. With the current faux-outrage over ITV beaming the cock of a naked Blue Square Premier footballer into the nations living rooms and minds*, the tabloids' current obsession with pretending television is shoving society into a bubbling cesspool of, erm, cess continues unabated. But which newspaper likes to get the most frothy, and over which broadcaster does it get the most frothy about?

(*Aside from that, we could help but quite liking ITV Sport's utterly shambolic coverage of the Histon-Leeds match. Commentators falling silent once they realised the song the fans were singing about ITV wasn't very complimentary, meaning the nation could get a better earful of that familiar sea shanty "ITV Are Fucking Shit." The lenses of cameras behind the goals being covered in raindrops. The lense of the camera used for the main action being covered in a barely perceptable sheen of condensation. The camera used for the post-match interviews having a problem with it's horizontal hold. And all simulcast on ITV HD. Brilliant.)

WE HAVE DONE A CHART.

And it tells us absolutely naff all, because stories with the words "sky", "one" and "disgusting" were flagged up as hits for the search on Sky One, a similar thing happening with Channel Four. We were so hoping that would turn out to be more interesting.

Still, it's very late, and we've charted that data now. And, looking on the positive side, it's day one of our update-a-day-a-thon, and we've already got our festive nadir out of the way. So, erm, yay?

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The Advent of Advent

As the thick layers of frost on everyone's car this morning have signified, it's December. And once you've buggered up your credit card by using it to get rid of all that frost, that can only mean one of several things: it's time for BrokenTV's Second Advent Calendar, with at least one update per day until the 24th, and possibly beyond. And some of them might not be lazily linked-to YouTube videos, too.

Now, this doesn't count as today's update (that would be cheating), but we've just thought of an excruciatingly weak satirical comment. We may as well say this now, before Andy Parsons or someone comes out with it on a topically wry Radio Four panel game.

"Now that VAT has been cut to 15%, does this mean pound shops are going to become 97.5p shops?"

Yeah, we know. Terrible. And not even accurate, because of course, prices set by the pound shops will be 85.106p, which rounds up to a full pound when 17.5% VAT is added to it, meaning the mathematically correct comedy price would now be 97.872p, but then using that figure would require this lengthy and tedious explanation as a postscript, which doesn't make for a very good punchline.

We really need to raise our game over the coming month, don't we?

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Kashing In On Kristmas

That's it. It is now officially Almost Christmas. How can we tell? Why, the annual Peter Kay DVD Featuring Absolutely No New Content Whatsoever is in the shops, that's why. If you hold the DVD case up to your ear really, really closely, you can almost hear the sound of distant sleighbells and people in bad knitwear clinking together glasses of QC sherry.

This year's offering is "Special Kay", a compilation of what the back cover describes as "a golden cluster of the finest and funniest comedy moments that have made Peter Kay one of the UK's favourite comedians". Further down the blurb, this is revealed to actually mean "from early appearances on Granada's The Last Laugh Show to cameos in Coronation Street; uproarious banter with Parkinson and Jonathan Ross; scintillating stand-up on Children In Need and Comic Relief, the hugely popular and award-winning John Smiths ads and so much more!"

Now, just before any Peter Kay fans reading this rush off to Amazon to write a review of the disc including the word "dissapointment" (sic), just hold on a moment. While it may seem that repackaging your performances in charity shows and selling them on for your own personal profit may *seem* wrong, it... erm, we can't think of a proper ending for this sentence. Put it this way: if The Flaming Lips or The White Stripes or a similar band put out a rareties compilation disc, including live appearances on their local TV news show "KBBXLTV37 Action Eye Live At 6 News", not many of their fans would be registering their displeasure via the medium of smiley-strewn missives on the Digitial Spy forum, would they? Well, why should Peter Kay be any different?

And it's not as if - chuckle - the people behind this compilation will be scraping the barrel so hard they'll be dredging up Peter Kay dying on his arse at Live 8, is it? Eh? Of course not! The thing is, were someone to put out a compilation like this, compiling guest appearances, chat show outings and adverts featuring Morecambe and Wise, Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, Kenneth Williams, or Mayall and Edmondson, it'd be a genuinely essential purchase. Just because it's Peter "Three Hour Prime Time Advert For Cash-in Single On Channel Four" Kay, does that really make it any different? Plus, much of the material on offer is from when Peter Kay was still funny - surely that has to count for a lot?

It really does appear that he is repackaging his performances for charity shows and selling them on for his own personal profit, though.

Well, we're conflicted. There's only one way to sort this out. Stopwatches and spreadsheets will show us the way in our special Peter Kay's Special Kay Obsessive Compulsive Breakdown Special! Erm, which we would have done here, but it took so long to put together the fake DVD covers, we really can't face it right now.

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One Hit Wonderland*

*Apols to Tony Hawks, and to anyone annoyed by overuse of the word 'concept'. You'll see.

As you may very well not be aware, aside from being an increasingly irregular contributor to BrokenTV (which is a bit of a shame, because he's the only one), BrokenTV's Mark X is also the conceptual mastermind behind an entirely new concept that has taken (at least twenty-nine people on) the internet by storm (legal notice: internet may not have been taken by storm. Conceptual concept may not entirely be 'new', although all reasonable evidence suggests that it is). This concept being The Song Wars, the central tenet of which is that the free market should decide who the best person on the internet at liking music is, and that from that point on it is they, and they alone, who can dictate what everyone else should like. It's a shamelessly Keynesian approach to music criticism admittedly, but we're sure Mrs Thatch would agree with it, if only she were still in full possession of her marbles.

The contents of the conceptual nutshell are as follows: Twenty-nine people are taking part, grouped into groups of seven or eight. For any given week, apart from the first few and the last one, one person from each group will choose a musical 'theme', such as "Songs with numbers in the title" or "Songs that are appropriate for our economy taking a nose dive", and each group member is expected to put forward a song fitting in with the chosen weekly theme. At a given time, a streaming link to each thematic track is put up on the Be Excellent To Each Other forum, and members of the public vote for the three songs they like the best. At the end of the week, the scores are totted up, and points allocated accordingly.

After ten weeks it becomes a knockout between the top two players from each group, and then some other stuff happens. It's still a bit vague, because we're only up to week eight of the group stage, but all of this doesn't really matter right now. Suffice to say, it's a brilliant and groundbreaking concept, and while you may argue that it's stealing elements of both Adam & Joe's Song Wars from 6Music and Mark & Lard's Cheesily Cheerful Chart Challenge from Radio One When It Was Good, it isn't, so there.

BUT ANYWAY, this isn't about that. Well, not completely. Recently, a topic of "One Hit Wonders" was chosen (for Group A, if you're really that interested), leading BrokenTV's Mark X to wish he'd submitted the fantastic "Hobo Humpin' Slobo Babe" by maligned Swedish genre-straddlers Whale instead of the track that he did submit, which in turn posed a further, a very pertinent question. What exactly does constitute a One Hit Wonder? BrokenTV's Mark X claims that anything reaching the UK Top Twenty can justifiably be classified as "a hit", while other quite staggeringly wrong people are willing to claim that the 'hit' in question should chart more highly. But... who is right? There's only one way to find out!

A STATISTICAL BREAKDOWN OF FIGURES RELATING TO BANDS GENERALLY REGARDED AS BEING ONE HIT WONDERS, WHICH MIGHT EVEN RESULT IN A CHART OR TWO!

That's right. Here's how we've rolled for the following analysis:

* A list of fifty acts regarded, both correctly and incorrectly, as One Hit Wonders has been compiled. Some taken from the BeEx Song Wars Group A Week Eight Poll, some culled from the brain of the BrokenTV collective, but the majority from Channel Four's "50 Greatest One Hit Wonders" poll.

* For each act, the performance of their "One Hit Wonder" hit has been measured against the popularity of their next most popular track.

* The data chosen reflects not on the respective chart positions of each artist, but rather on the number of plays they've accumulated on Last.fm in the last six months. This has the clear benefit of measuring the actual popularity of each record. After all, if you're going by chart positions, "Mr Blobby" by Mr Blobby (highest chart position: No 1, in peak-sales period December) gave better unit in the singles chart than Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (highest chart position: No7, in the less-peak month of November). Going by Last.fm six-month listen-numbers, the score is Nirvana: 152,615, Mr Blobby: 109. So, despite Mr Blobby selling more singles with his best-known hit, the Nirvana track is over 1,400 times more popular, thereby dispelling the hit parade as a worthwhile reflection of actual worth.

* With the Last.fm system meaning that only records people still listen to are worth including, tracks categorised as 'one-hit wonders' that no-one listens to any more have been dispelled from the survey. And really, even though some tracks have got to number one in the last thirty years, the fact less than twenty scrobblers have listened to Rene and Renato in the last six months means they genuinely aren't worthy of inclusion in our survey.

* It's worth noting that some records classified as being the "one hit" of certain artists aren't even the their most listened-to track. This goes some way to proving that Channel Four don't know shit about shit, but the fact Balls Of Steel still stinks up their weeknight schedule makes this something of a moot point.

* Numbers. We've taken the aggregate total of plays for Hit One (the "One Hit" attributed to each act) from Last.fm, including any wrongly-tagged plays in their listed "Top 15" on the "last six months" chart, and compared them to their second most listened-to track, which is recorded as "Hit Two". The plays for Hit Two, divided by plays for Hit One, and expressed as a percentage gives an overall OneHitWonderousness percentage. In each case, the lower the percentage, the greater the case for them being a true One Hit Wonder. After all, if your biggest hit scored one hundred times the number of listens for your next biggest hit, then well... perhaps that "Ultimate Collection" compilation isn't going to be a viable concern after all. Conversely, for well-regarded bands who almost accidentally spewed up a chart smash, they're more likely to attain a higher percentage figure, and leave with their artistic integrity very much intact.

"ENOUGH OF THIS, MAKE WITH THE NUMBERS, EXCEL-BOY."

Tsk. So terse. Here are our findings for the top fifty oft-wrongly-credited-as-one-trick ponies:

Admittedly, that really isn't wholly legible, and we blame our restrictive 460 pixel width template for that. We can only offer to make up for this by offering the same in an equally unhelpful barchart:

Not that much clearer, is it? In any case, the executive summaries for the above can be expressed with the following bullet points:

* If you're not concerned with what could justifiably by described as 'popular' acts, Denise LaSalle is has the most rounded career of all OHW artists.
* If you are, it's Alphaville.
* If you really are, and are taking the rest of their six-month chart into consideration, it's They Might Be Giants who have the best overall career plan out of the above acts. This is pretty demonstratively true, even without the benefit of maths.
* No, t.A.T.u. don't count for this. They've had three top ten hits, you berks. And we've just received the Russian edition of their new album - while it's a bit sketchy, once the English language version arrives, they will very much be 'back', don't you worry. With a bit of fleshing out, "Fly On The Wall" could be their next pop smash.
* Yes, we have accounted for tracks recorded under the names of both "The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band" and "The Bonzo Dog Band".
* Chesney "Turned On Wrexham's Christmas Lights In About 2002" Hawkes really is the UK's King Of One Hit Wonderdom, whereas The Weather Girls take the global crown.
* OR DO THEY? We're willing to accept evidence to prove us wrong with all the above. Register your own counter-claims in the comments section. Personally, we've had backed Skee-Lo to top the chart, and we were very wrong.

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The Irony Is Almost Sickening

So. There's this really big rugby match we'd bought tickets for. Quite good tickets, too. Only for events to materialise that mean we won't be able to go to it.

The tickets arrive, their arrival coinciding with our credit card bill reminding us just how much we'd paid for the damn things. We decide to put the tickets on eBay for someone else to buy. We look at some other listings to see what they generally go for, as well as some other websites to get a bit of inspiration for writing up a description. Our search takes us to one of many profiteering scumbucket ticket scalping websites. Sorry, websites specialising in "providing premium, hard-to-get or sold out International and Six Nations Rugby tickets". We're not sure the classification for "hard-to-get" means "able to go to Ticketmaster's website on a Friday morning a couple of months ago", but then we're not experts.

Some rugby men, yesterday.

Looking at the pricing on said scumbucket ticket scalping website, tickets in the same area of the ground as ours are going for £150, before VAT. That means anyone buying four tickets exactly the same as the four sitting just to the left of our keyboard right now will pay a total of £705. The face value of each ticket? £55. That means EvilTouts.com (not their real URL) has plonked a markup of almost £500 on four pieces of card with a shiny hologram in one corner. Of course, this does mean that, were we to be similarly evil, we could pocket ourselves a crafty £500 profit. That would be enough for 50,000 penny chews!

Unfortunately as far as our bank manager is concerned, we're not evil, and we decide to list the four tickets, including Special Delivery postage, at £300. After accounting for the tickets, booking fees, eBay and PayPal charges and interest on the BrokenTV credit card, that probably only leaves a fairly modest profit with which to buy enough stale bread and "Whoops!"-stickered own-brand pineappleade for the BrokenTV collective's dinner for a whole week. Plus, of course, it means that four fellow rugby-likers will get to watch the match at a reasonable enough price to prevent Jesus in His heaven from crying himself to sleep.

A few more rugby men, the day before that.

Us being us, we decide to idly fill out our product description with a dash of whimsy, and a smattering of faux-outrage. Viz:

Six Nations (and de facto European) Champions Wales take on the mighty All Blacks at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium. The All Blacks will be keen to regain their rugby credentials after their capitulation against France.After a thrilling (if ultimately futile) comeback against World Champions South Africa, Welsh confidence couldn't be higher, which makes this a tantalising match-up.

Ticket scalping websites are shifting the cheapest Cat 3 tickets for this match at around £90 each, with tickets along the side like these (block L33, as per the map below) going for £150 each. £150! Ruddy hell. That means these four tickets would be £600 in total before VAT and postage. After VAT and postage? You're looking at £176.25 per ticket. That's a princely £705 for the four. It's not as if a fresh-from-Las Vegas Tom Jones is playing on the wing and you get a complimentary half-time lapdance from TV's formerly hot Sian Lloyd! £705! "Good Time Entertainments"? "Buying Up Block Bookings Of Tickets With Which To Fleece Honest Rugby Fans Entertainments", more like. I would rhetorically ask how they all sleep at night, but the answer is clearly "on expensively bought mattresses funded with the hard-earned wages of honest sports fans".

Sorry, got carried away. Where was I? Oh, yeah. I'm selling my four tickets (to reiterate, all four seated together in block L33) for a total £300, including postage by Special Delivery. That's a much more reasonable £75 each, and will be sent out by Royal Mail Special Delivery as soon as the listing ends, to ensure they arrive in plenty of time.

Of course, if it turns out that a fresh-from-Las Vegas Tom Jones really is playing on the wing and you genuinely do get a complimentary half-time lapdance from TV's formerly hot Sian Lloyd, I'm going to be looking pretty darned stupid at around 17:16 on the 22nd of November.

Granted, the above invective hardly makes us the new Max Boyce, or even whatever the rugby equivalent of Tim Lovejoy is, but it filled a space in the listing, maybe gave someone a bit of a chuckle, and cleared out a bit of angst-steam from our valves. If one-tenth of the seventeen people likely to read that listing are amused by it, we've satisfied one person, and provided another with 0.7 of a good time. We set the BuyItNow listing to five days, click 'Submit', and relax at 8:36pm.

At 8:43pm, our tickets have been sold and paid for. To a ticket scalping eShop that, if a sample listing of theirs is any indication, will be selling our tickets for around £140 each. And our listing was up for a fraction of the time it took us to take photos of the tickets, watermark them with our username, upload them, type out the description, and all the other stuff. And no-one, other than us and the buyer of the tickets (who almost certainly didn't bother reading the listing) paid attention to our lazily-typed description.

Another picture of rugby men. (Reader's voice: "That's rugby league, you dolt") Look, we don't know that much about it. Leave us alone.

Ah, crap.

(Oh, and the match in question will be live on BBC One, so this is in keeping with the BrokenTV remit.)

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The Vidal versus The Dimblebum

Because the video in the version everyone seems to be linking to stutters badly on our computer.



We really should change the site header back, shouldn't we?

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The Day The Laughter Might Die

A bit late with this, but Digital Spy reports, in a piece claiming Harry Hill is under consideration to present this year's Comedy Awards, "Graham Norton, Dara O'Briain, Piers Morgan, Al Murray and Jimmy Carr are also apparently in the running for the job."

A quick note to Michael Grade: If this story turns out to be true, and Piers Morgan is ever chosen for such a role, we will NEVER watch ANY ITV channel ever again. No matter how enticing your programming might become, even if TV Burp is broadcast as frequently as Emmerdale, it would be a matter of principal. ITV would be dead to us.

A quick note to Piers Morgan: You're rubbish. No-one actually likes you. It's worth mentioning at this point that there are a lot of celebrities often lazily dubbed as "celebs we love to hate", but when they finally shuffle off this mortal coil, like Jeremy Beadle, everyone feels a genuine sense of loss that their talent really had gone unappreciated whilst they were still around. Celebrities such as Paul Daniels and Jimmy Hill are likely to fit into this category once they reach the great departure lounge. You however are going onto the other pile. The one with all the racist comedians and murderous dictators. Yes, Pol Pot does count as a celebrity. If Piers Morgan counts as a celebrity, Pol Pot counts too.

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The World Is Now, At Least A Bit, Better

And he's getting a new puppy for his kids! Trendy new-meeja cynicism aside, this is a pretty huge thing right here. Four and a half years ago, we watched the DNC National Convention coverage around the time of John Kerry's presidential nomination speech, and noted commentators stating how Barack Obama wouldn't be a likely prospect for 2008, but one to keep an eye on for the future. It seemed John Edwards would be the more likely candidate at the time. But here we are, in a situation quite probably aided by the shambolic Bush administration, but a hugely exciting situation nonetheless. And not just because it all means we all know it's really annoying Ann Coulter, who seems conspicuous by her absence on the Fox News tonight.

This is probably going to come back and quite roundly bite us in the arse (and thank heavens that this isn't a print medium), but from where we're sitting right now, America is doing a damned good job of redeeming itself right now. Barack Obama has just made reference to the moon landings and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The event happening right now is firmly up there with those two landmarks.

[update 5.23am: CNN and Fox News have both quite commendably broadcast the sound of audience cheering for around fifteen minutes after the end of Barack Obama's victory speech before chipping in with any actual commentary. And Fox News have an alert title of: "Pres-Elect Obama - This Is Your Victory" and are carrying on with coverage while CNN International have cut to adverts. The cynics amonst us might have expected them to go with an editorial line of "TEH SOCIALISMS! YOU WILL DESTROY US ALL!!!1". Now, should we stay in to see if Karl Rove will stay on to offer his personal congratulations, or nip out to buy some newspapers? Even though the newspapers know a lot less than we do right now? Hmm.]

[update 5.30am: Right now on Fox News, Brit Hume is hurriedly pissing the goodwill of seven minutes ago up the wall by trumpeting him aboard as a "new Clinton". Whatever your individual opinion on Bill Clinton is, the tone of his commentary makes quite clear his intent. Can you imagine David Dimbleby announcing the election of David Cameron in 2010 with the words "...and David Cameron is duly elected Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Shit. No, really. In the name of Jesus Cocking Christ! What were you all thinking? You STUPID ARSEHOLES!"

In the world according to Brit Hume, Barack Obama is only President because of the Credit Crunch, and for NO OTHER REASON. Oh, and because Sarah Palin is a "dumb-ass bitch". We'll grant you, that's not a verbatim quote.

A more accurate slogan for Fox News would be "Fox News: It's Like Picking At A Scab".]

[Update 5.50am: Karl Rove is still in the Fox News studio. Ultimately, it was all about funding. While it could be argued that if the Republicans were in the right all along, they wouldn't have been funded so badly by actual fundraisers, you, erm, shouldn't. In the interests of balance, we should probably state that we haven't heard Fox News pin the whole thing on The Liberal Media yet. Come to think of it, where is Bill O'Reilly anyway?]

[Update 6.11am: Bed? Yeah, that's probably a viable proposition right now. Night all. And to think, we didn't even need our 24-juice.]

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