On the one day of the year when people have something better to do than visit an unpopular blog that was quite good for a month in 2007, a rare update! It’s a complete (in several parts) Christmas episode of defunct Aussie panel show Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation. Because hey, if you understood the reference in the title of this blogpost, you’re all about relatively obscure comedy miscellanea.
Piggywiggywiggywiggywoo, everyone!
Inarguably so. Having spent every single minute of the last month listening to every single song recorded in 2012 (with no sleep, often listening to six or seven songs simultaneously in order to get through them all), we've whittled them down to the twenty greatest songs pumped out into the world since 1 January 2012. And here they are, presented to you in the form of a badly-edited video that hopefully won't be removed as soon as we upload it. Enjoy. And probably grumble about how there aren't enough guitars, but shush.
View in full YouTube-o-vision here. Hover over the oblongs on the bottom-right of the video window when each song is played to leap to full versions of each song.
And yes, we do know the intro to that video goes on for too long. We’ll try harder next year.
Yes! After what feels like 19 months, 713,000 hours of pointlessly televised rhetoric and 4.2 billion idiots on Twitter who don’t even live in America banging on about it as if it makes them somehow seem ‘interesting’ (hello!), the 2012 US Presidential Election Night Of Nights is here. And to mark it, the biggest ever prize giveaway that your super soaraway BrokenTV has ever seen. (Up to) FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS! And more realistically, at least one DVD boxset of the underrated US drama series The Riches (season one) starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver both being way better than you’d expect them to be could be YOURS. (Terms & conditions apply.)
That’s a BRAND NEW AND SEALED copy of the above DVD box set. And it could be yours. YOURS. “Why?” you may ask. It’s because we love you, dear reader. And because we’ve accidentally bought two of them from eBay because we’re a bit thick. Our stupidity equals BIG CASH PRIZES FOR YOU*.
(*Potentially.)
HOW TO WIN:
Simply take part in our super What Will Be The First Letter Of The First Word David Dimbleby Says During Tonight’s Live BBC One Coverage Of The US Election Results On BBC One At 11.35pm Tonight Sweepstake, exclusive to our Twitter followers.
Here’s the playgrid, containing the rules, current players and more information. All you need to do to enter is make sure you’re following @BrokenTV on Twitter, and have the ability to pick a letter from the alphabet. That’s it!
In addition to the lucky winner bagging the above prize, those picking certain letters CHOSEN ENTIRELY AT RANDOM BY THE BROKEN TV COMPUTER, HONEST could win up to £5000 in super top tax-free cash prizes. And if THAT weren’t simple enough, we’ve even told you what those letters are! It’s like we’re allergic to money!
So. Without any further ado, THE SWEEPSTAKE.
It really is as simple as that!
(Winner posted on Twitter and here at about 11.40pm. Or, this update removed quietly when no-one wants to take part. You MONSTERS.)
UPDATE 10.52pm
All letters now GONE, as above. The winner of our competition will be revealed LIVE ON BBC ONE AT 11.35PM.
UPDATE 11:47pm
And it’s over! With David Dimbleby opening ElectoFestUSATwoKayTwelve (which is the name that the US Senate recognises for the US Presidential Election, we believe) with the words “The White House…” (followed by some other words that we couldn’t hear over the sound of our tears and rage). This means that @alanjenson is the big winner, not only of the DVD boxset (which – BREAKING – he has just declined on Twitter, which means a rollover for 2016), but of an EXCLUSIVE BrooPeter badge, which permits the holder free access to all manner of National Trust attractions and museums. (Mainly because the EXCLUSIVE BrooPeter badge is actually just a really big gun with a safety pin stuck to it.)
Anyway, there you go. Bit of fun, wasn’t it? Apart from the bit where we realised we were recording the BBC1 Wales coverage of US Election Night 2012, which skips the first half hour due to Week In Week Out being on before it. Oh, BBC One Wales.
Anyway, we’re not bothering with a live blog this time round. Y’know, as a kind of ‘protest’ against everyone on the internet not bothering with this blog any more (hey, what do you want? Updates more than once a month?). Instead, we’ll be twattering on over on Twitter. BrokenTV are we. Will we post searing satire like “hey! Fox News aren’t that ‘Fair’ and ‘Balanced’ after all!”? It’s a slam dunk!
As reported on BoingBoing, underappreciated animation genius and illustrator Run Wrake has sadly passed away after losing a battle with cancer at the horrendously young age of 47.
By chance, we’d only recently stumbled over his YouTube channel, which seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Help remedy this by visiting it right now. If you need any special reason for doing so, because his work is so richly and wonderfully creative, the majority of it being from the 1990s, where opportunities for such weird and wonderful work to be seem by the public were – in comparison with nowadays – tremendously rare, cropping up in the likes of BBC/MTV’s Liquid Television or late night Channel 4. This also coming from the days before the ubiquity of programs such as Flash or After Effects made animation more accessible, Wrake became an inspiration for the new breed of offkilter animators, whose work now receives the audience such majestic oddness deserves. Think of Wrake’s work as being a midpoint between Terry Gilliam and Cyriak Harris, sadly without it ever really finding the audience it deserved.
A few examples:
PING BATTER PONG: In 1998, when MTV’s M2 channel launched on the new Sky Digital platform, it opened with an hour-long compilation of Run Wrake’s work. Those were (as we’ve said several times before) the days when M2 was quite simply the best music channel ever to grace television, happily playing host to acts you’d likely never see on the more mainstream MTV channels, as well as giving as much credit to directors of music videos as they would to the artists. Factor in that there were no adverts (hey, probably hardly any viewers) and it’d happily give up an hour of primetime to French hip-hop, and as we said, best music channel ever. And here are the first three minutes. Of it.
THE SHOWBIZ SET: In 2002, Channel 4 broadcast the wonderful documentary The Showbiz Set, looking from the formative years of television to its golden age. It was so wonderful in fact, that we named it 17th Best Television Programme Of The 00s. Chopping together a plethora of famous faces from the varying eras covered in the show, Wrake’s title sequence set the scene for it well.
NME GALLERY: We first came to recognise Wrake’s work from his artwork for the NME (when it was good, which was when we read it). Often taking a photo of the artist in question and transforming it into something otherworldly and fascinating, Wrake’s illustrations always seemed to leap out of the page and draw you in to a 700 diatribe from Johnny Cigarettes on the new Blaggers ITA album (or such).
JUST A MINUTE: More recently, Wrake produced this promotional piece for the BBC, highlighting (and we have to say, enhancing) sixty uninterrupted seconds on Sudoku from Paul Merton. Taking on the dual aims of being strange and inventive, but without being offputting to the Radio 4 audience it was aimed at, Wrake put together a piece that flows as expertly as Paul Merton’s yapping mouth does at its best.
FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON - WE HAVE EXPLOSIVE: Unsurprisingly, him having worked for the NME for so long, Wrake also lent his talents to a number of music videos. Many of which (such as his work for Howie B) are sadly unavailable to view in the UK (yeah, cheers BMG), but this example from Future Sound
of London shows just how well Wrake’s trademark style combined with similarly inventive sounds conjured by noise wizards FSOL.
MEAT STREET 2: Wrake’s most recent upload to YouTube, from just a couple of weeks ago, the second part of what was (at least intended to be) an ongoing narrative. While this may indeed have been part of an earlier work (the video doesn’t have a description), the abrupt ending to it comes across as a bit of a gutpunch, given the circumstances.
Run Wrake, 1965-2012
www.runwrake.com | vimeo.com/user10255055/videos | www.youtube.com/user/runwrake
Though luckily, BBC Northern Ireland were on hand to make sure it didn’t just fizzle out without a suitable salute. As you can see here:
They’ll have a job topping that when digital broadcasting is switched off in 2078 (to be replaced by all television being put out in edible pill form). Lovely stuff.
Wondering how the US media covered the bit of the Olympics closing ceremony where “Del Boy” and “Rodney” appeared? Here’s what the New York Times live blog said about them:
Sadly, they don’t seem to have picked up on the BIG news that Eric Idle was (presumably) the first person to say (sing) the word ‘shit’ during an Olympic closing ceremony.
Oh well. Can’t have it all. More of this kind of thing soon, perhaps.
Oh, one more thing. No-one retweeted the best joke we made all night on Twitter, so we’re going to post it here. Now, where out of context it makes even less sense than it did at the time.
Well, we say joke…
Our Twitter feed feels slightly tainted now. This is possibly payback for us trying to display a modicum of understanding for the subjects of BBC Two’s Young, Bright and On The Right when we previewed it in last Saturday’s Guardian Guide :(
In protest at Team GB spending a whole day not bothering to win any gold medals, we’re skipping today’s Olympic update. Oh, okay, we couldn’t be bothered. Instead, what might become a nice idea for a weekly update where we ‘curate’ (post a YouTube link to) a ‘fascinating movie curio’ (a film rare enough for its handlers not to have ordered its removal from YouTube).
Despite our linkbait blog title, this has absolutely nothing to do with Christopher Morris’ extravaganza of ambient stupid, but rather a collection of delightfully skewed short films from Japan. Co-funded by Sega (yes, that Sega),the Jam Films anthology series took works from a number of different directors and basically gave them free rein to do whatever they liked. Which, given these are Japanese film directors we’re talking about, is pretty much a licence to print bizarre money with the yelping face of King Alan Tractors IV on it.
Here, you’ll find the following tales:
THE MESSENGER: the fate set to befall a mobster holed up in his concrete lair is laid out by a mysterious woman.
KENDAMA: a ball and string toy gets mixed up with a bag of onions. Oddness ensues.
COLD SLEEP: A man awakes from suspended animation to find himself on a planet containing the wackiest high school in the world! (Of that particular planet.)
PANDORA: A woman with athlete’s foot consults a mysterious and slightly sinister old doctor, and ends up finding the cure in an unusual place.
HIJIKI: Translated as “edible seaweed”, a criminal takes a family hostage as a siege situation develops. But, who is actually the criminal(s) and who is truly the hostage(s)? Aaaah.
JUSTICE: A bored schoolboy counts the snapping of tight shorts worn by girls jumping hurdles viewed from the classroom window.
ARITA: A young woman has doodled a character called Arita throughout her life, but has no memory of ever doing so. It seems she is not alone. What IS going on?
Jam Films was followed up by “Jam Films 2” in 2003 and “Jam Films S” in 2005, both of which were similarly interesting. Quite frankly, we’re surprised Jonathan Ross hasn’t insisted they get an outing on BBC Four, so instead we’ll be thankful that at least one of them is available to view in full on Good Old YouTube.
Fingers crossed that the others will appear at some point, but for now, sit back and enjoy the glorious oddity that is Jam Films.
We have to admit, the fakery skills of the YouTube faux-continuity community are becoming increasingly realistic. You can’t even tell this was made using MS Paint and Windows Video Maker AT ALL.
After all, were it not for the fanciful notion of ITV bothering with actual Olympic coverage, we might even have been fooled. Oh RIGHT – as if they were going to pick one Olympics to cover, and then make it one taking place all the way over in South Korea? Chinny reck-ON.
Wait, what?
