Sad day on the cobbles

If you have read this blog before you know that I have been a fan of Coronation street for a while – even before we moved here.  There is something about the fact it is so not ‘Wysteria Lane’ -  everyone isn’t perfect with botox, implants and a picket fence.  They wear normal clothes have yellow teeth and more often than not have bad hair days – now that is something I can enjoy watching.

I was sad to hear today however that one of the main characters has died.  She has been on the show for over 25 years and was responsible for delivering some of the best wittiest, sarcastic remarks the show had to offer – and we all know how I love wit and sarcasm.

From what I understand, in real life Maggie Jones (who played Blanche Hunt) was every bit as funny and witty as she was on the show which you have to believe as it would be hard to ‘act’ witty as well as she did.  The highlight of the show for me most recently was when she dressed up as a fortune teller for one of their street parties – and at 75 I think she rocked the outfit pretty well.

For those who didnt watch the show you probably stopped reading a while back but below are some of her remarks which made her character, Blanche, so fantastic.  She was like a British version of Estelle Getty – a true British Golden Girl – and she will be sadly missed.

Blanche Quotes (stolen from various places on the interweb so thanks)

Blanche (to Fred about his marriage to Bev): Still, you’re getting on now, if you’re miserable you won’t have that long to endure it.

Deirdre: If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.
Blanche: I think I’ll go home then.

Blanche: “You’re going to have to start taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, Kenneth, or you’re going to have a long and unhappy old age”.

Blanche Hunt (to Steve MacDonald): That’s the second fiance to chuck that ring away. You’d be better off buying a boomerang!

Norris: “Speed bumps? Oh no, they are so ugly and unattractive.”
Blanche: “So are you, but at least they have some use.”

On Peter: “He’s about as much cut out for fatherhood as I am for rugby league.”

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I’ll be watching and taking notes

I am a sucker when it comes to trickery or illusions as a kid I remember sitting in front of the TV watching David Copperfield (the American illusionist not the Dickens novel) make a train disappear in front of my eyes.  When I moved to the UK I stumbled across a show featuring the English illusionist Derren Brown.  After watching him select a random audience member ask her four questions including the name of a newspaper, a page number and a word then producing a newspaper in a sealed box with the word she said circled on the page number she picked, I was hooked.

Dont even start to tell me she was seeded in the audience because I BELIEVE….Anyhoo my Britlusionist has a new show starting this week and he will start by predicting the lottery numbers live on TV on Wednesday.  Don’t be surprised if you find me cross-legged with my nose too close to the TV just like I did when ol’ Copperfield worked his magic….and if you don’t hear from me after next week’s draw, I am on some island counting my winnings.

PS  I don’t want to hear any comments like ‘if he can predict the lottery why doesn’t he just make his money predicting the lottery’.  I don’t know, maybe he has enough money and wants to share his talents with the world….or he’s crazy, or it’s a big ploy by the National lottery, or….I don’t know. Just watch it.

Daytime telly at it’s best

I know I can’t stay unemployed for long as if I do I will inevitably throw our big ol’ television over the big ol’ balcony as daytime TV is so terrible I can’t stand it. I am beginning to think it is a government conspiracy to get people back to work.

It starts mid morning with Jeremy Kyle (when I hear his voice I know its time to get my a** off the couch) where he invites the trashiest of trash to his show to yell at each other and accuse them of cheating/beating/lying which he fixes in 60 minutes after subjecting guests to a lie detector, paternity test and counselling.  That show is followed by a female version called Tricia Goodard then reruns of American versions of said sh1t programming like Maury Povich and Judge Judy…so you can see why the TV is off most of the day.

There is one game show however that I have seen a few times in the afternoon called Divided….ignoring the annoying host and strategically placed commercial breaks, the concept of this show is great as it is a televised social experiment.

The premise is that three people work as a team and are presented quiz questions which they all must agree on an answer to.  The cash value of the answer is based on how long it takes for the team to agree the answer – ie the faster they agree, the more money.  After a few rounds they build up a sizeable cash prize fund…the kicker is that at the end, the prize fund is split into 3 uneven sums – one large, one medium and one small.

Obviously everyone wants the big one but they must all agree on whom gets each sum but as they argue their time and money ticks down all the way to zero.  Its amazing there is always some b*tchy person who ‘won’t back down’ and insists they earned the highest value…for some reason no one will take the lowest value because I guess it makes sense to go home with nothing versus something??

Its hard to explain…just watch the experiment in all it’s glory – the excitement begins at 1:57

Talking rats and shopping hamsters

You know those memories you have as a kid and you aren’t sure if they were real or if you made them up? Well I was talking at work about a TV show I used to watch as a kid that had talking hamsters, rats and turtles.  After the strange looks I got from colleagues, I wondered if I had made this up and that I really hadn’t seen such a show.

Thanks to the internet and some savvy Googling I was able to find it…it was called Tales of the Riverbank and was a fine example of Canadian television (which was eventually sold to the BBC)….ages before Babe the talking pig, Canadians made rodents and other strange small animals tell stories, write notes and ride cars. See below for a steller example….although I am a wee bit disappointed as I remembered their mouths moved with the words.  No wonder I always wanted a hamster

Contains strong….

I mentioned this before but it surprises me here, in this prim and proper country,  is the amount of swearing and nudity on TV. You can hardly go a day without hearing swearing on TV (the late show hosts drop the f-bomb like its nothing) and at least every other day there will be some programme (educational or otherwise) featuring nudity of some kind (this includes naked male and female cadavers on the real live autopsy show).

Bearing that in mind I have been amused with the way they rate movies. They give movies a rating similar to that at home (PG, 12, 15 and 18) but then substantiate it with a line afterwards explaining what contributed to the rating.  Some examples of movies in the cinema:

Marley and Me – Contains one scene of mild violence, mild sex references and language (mild violence?…poor Marley)
The Reader – Contains strong sex (strong sex? sex with strong people?)
Seven Pounds – Contains emotionally intense scenes (do you really have to warn people they might cry?)
The Wrestler – Contains strong bloody wrestling violence, strong language, sex and drug use (sounds like a party to me)

Other examples of their extremely insightful comments included:
Contains strong bloody violence
Contains images of sexualised nudity (as opposed to educational, like the autopsy show)
Contains mild violence, threat and scary moments (hehe scary ‘moments’)
Contains mildly scary moments, mild language and slapstick violence,
Contains strong language and attempted suicide scenes (does the fact they said ‘attempted give away a bit of the plot?)
Contains strong language, gore, sex and drug use

I think some of the movies will actually benefit from those descritpoins. They should ditch the ‘best movie this year’ , ‘two thumbs up’ voiceovers  and replace them with …”Contains bloody violence, strong launguage and sexualised nudity”… that, would make people want go to the movies!

Little Britain. Big Laughs?

There have been a fair few of UK shows that have been adapted to the US market…Who’s line is it Anyway, Pop Idol, Deal or no Deal, Who do you think you are, I’m a Celebrity get me out of here, The Office, Strictly Come Dancing, Weakest Link, Who wants to be a millionaire (to name a few)…the latest UK import is Little Britain which aired I think sometime this week in the US (as Little Britain US…catchy title).

Anyway I just finished watching it and actually had a good chuckle – mostly because it was soooo pushing the boundaries of what is typically deemed funny in the US and I could see some people being absolutely appalled by the ‘vulgarity’ of the show. There was swearing, nudity and Rosie O’Donnell..it is because of 2 of those 3 things that I am pretty sure this wont have mass appeal but may develop a cult following (possibly The Office watchers) and could make it past a few episodes.

The basic premise of the episode was to compare the US to UK in a cheeky stereotypical way insinuating in a few skits that Americans were overweight gun loving people with an obsession with their space programme. It will be interesting to see how it does as Brits do have a fairly different brand of humour than the Americans and it seems that that invisible line between funny and offensive is much farther away in Britain than it is in the US…I am thinking that most American family rooms were filled with the sound of disapproving tisk tisks vs belly laughs after tonight’s episode but we will have to see (not sure how long the clip below will stay up on Youtube but its the Rosie O’Donnell cameo).

I did find the concluding line to the episode a bit funny (mainly cause I am Canadian) ….America is a funny little country with delusions of grandeur.

Can’t wait for Little Britain Canada comes out when they all dress up like weed smoking lumberjacks playing hockey, drinking coffee, doing shots of maple syrup in a snow storm…comedy gold.

Advertising works – especially for crap TV

I am fairly observant when it comes to marketing and am always intrigued by things that are advertised that I can’t immediately figure out what they are advertising.  When we first moved here, I was trying to figure out why there were huge eye shaped icons on billboards, clips on TV and in newspapers but no other copy, logos or decipherable images with the eye. I finally asked a colleague and they rolled their eyes saying oh that’s just an advertisement for Big Brother, it starts in a week. I hadn’t watched the American version but did know the gist but wasn’t too interested…that was until it started.

Big Brother isn’t just a TV show on over here, its almost a religion and like it or not, by the end pretty much everyone knows which contestants have hooked up, which person has said or done something controversial and which one is expected to win….the reason for this is that Big Brother somehow infects your brain. Probably because it is on TV every SINGLE night of the week for an hour and on one channel 24 hours a day for the entire 4 week season (although on a side note on the 24 hour channel you can’t always hear what they are saying as  whenever the contestants are talking about their family or a company brand name, the producers annoyingly play a tape of birds chirping and airplanes noises so you can’t hear what they are saying…took me ages to figure out that this was intentional and not that they had super crap microphones that kept picking up the noises around them). On top of the TV coverage, all the trashy papers and free papers seem to dedicate full sections to interview friends, ex lovers and parents of the contestants so you can get a true picture of these goons who choose to live their lives in front of the entire UK population.
Anyway it is quite an institution but I have to hand it to the marking dudes for the show as after seeing the image below flash on the tv screen for less than one second during a commercial break I am now aware that a new season is starting and have blogged about it, whether or not I watch it is yet to be seen but I can safely say I won’t be able to avoid it (who am I kidding, I’ll probably be watching the 24 hour channel trying desperately to lip read whilst they broadcast bird and airplane noises).

Gin’s got talent!

This is just too cute not to post.  This clip is from this season’s Britain’s got talent which I think might actually be broadcast in Canada as some point.  For those of you not familiar with the show, it’s a reality TV show looking for someone to perform in front of the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance which is an annual gala evening which showcases a variety of performers (mainly if not all British) and raises money for the Entertainment Artistes Benevolent Fund. 

The reason why I like this show is that there is a fairly specific criteria they are looking to fill at the end of the show i.e. playing in front of the Queen which teds to mean the acts that make it through are pretty spectacular and focus on some amazing jaw dropping talent (ie last year they found Paul Potts the opera singer whom eventually won it and Connie Talbot the 6 year old runner up to Paul Potts who could melt your heart with her rendition of Somewhere over the Rainbow).

Anyway not surprisingly after seeing a few entrants from this year’s first episode I am sure I will be glued to my TV to see what other great acts are on their way.  So far though it looks like it will be a good year for the Queen!

 

 

Documentary spoof

Further to my previous post about odd documentary type shows on British TV, one of the BBC comedy sketch shows has come up with this hilarious ‘mockumentary’ titled The boy with an arse for a face. 

Warning, contains nudity…kind of

For your TV viewing pleasure…

To say television is different here is a bit of an understatement. Not only are their standards different in terms of censorship i.e. swearing seems allowed just about any time of day as is topless-ness and naked bums but the content is also different.  Most programmes are based much more around a reality/documentary style (which isn’t surprising as the US has based the majority of reality show formats from the UK  – Apprentice, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars etc).  But there are also a series of ones that don’t require audience input but are based on ‘real’ life which the titles alone cause me to laugh out loud or scratch my head, for example;

Baby Borrowers – a show focused around ‘lending’ teens a baby for a set amount of time to see if they can really cope with parenting.  The description from the BBC website is perfect, I won’t even try to paraphrase it…..Britain’s teenagers are breeding like rabbits – can they be convinced to wait? 

Can fat teens hunt? - a show following overweight teens who have been sent to Borneo to adopt a hunter/gatherer lifestyle to break their unhealthy relationship with food. A bit extreme but I guess sending them to Weight Watchers wouldn’t make for good TV.

Spa of Embarrassing Illnesses- pretty much as the title says, allegedly 75% of Britons have an embarrassing illness that they won’t discuss with their doctor….right, so its much easier and more therapeutic to discuss it with the entire UK viewing audience, got it.

Autopsy- yes, they literally perform an autopsy on TV!  I was flicking through the channels and did a double take when I saw a guy in a white lab coat pulling organs out of a dead body in front of a studio audience who looked thoroughly intrigued versus grossed out.

Kill it, cook it, eat it - I found this one on Tuesday night and watched while they hung a lamb carcass up and sliced it apart to explain what bits you actually eat.  This concept isn’t actually that new over here as for the past few years Gordon Ramsey has reared an animal on his show only to kill it and eat it in the final episode to support the believe that if we eat it, we should know how it actually gets to our table.

This is just a sample I could go on and on.  To be honest, I do find some of these documentary style shows (okay maybe not the ones listed above, there are some less outrageous ones) are quite interesting and are a nice break from the perfect-ness of Wysteria lane.