Telly

Something stupid's going on with our telly. Because we live in frenchy-Switz we have the stoopid french version of pay TV, and so, unlike the german-livers, who gained something ridiculous like 9 extra english channels the other day, we seem to have lost Film 4. Actually, we might not really have lost it, but it does seem to have vanished from our TV guide thing. Not that I should be encouraged to watch more telly, but if we were going to lose a channel, why couldn't it be one of the ones that just seems to she Antiques Roadshow all day every day?

In other TV news, I've just found Buffy on a french channel! It's like homework and fun all at once!

Wheel Of Fortune

I've just been watching the French of Wheel Of Fortune on telly, and what a cultural experience it was! It was like going to KFC in another country and finding that they offer a different type of sauce or something when you order the nuggets. Not that I go to KFC in Australia, and not that they have KFC here (as far as I'm aware) but once long ago I went to KFC in England and I'm sure they had a surprising Indian twist to their menu there.

Anyway, I've learnt that French people are apparently cheats, either that or the French wheel (of fortune) is ridiculously heavy. One of the competitors, an old lady, apparently had some terrible arm disorder that prevented her from spinning the wheel much, but the other two (able-bodied youngsters) didn't really spin it much further than she did. Most of the time they just gave it a gentle nudge so as to stay as far away as possible from bankruptcy. Boring.

The Lovely Assistant was sort of a departure from what I'm used to, and sort of the same. She was tall and blonde and flashy (normal), but she also looked sort of plastic (in a plastic surgery way. When I say "sort of" I'm being extremely generous. She looked extremely plastic) and she was at least a head taller than the host (who was small and featureless but not at all charmingly Tony Barber-ish). And her dress looked more like a nightie than a dress. At the end of the show, she danced with the winner (who, strangely, looked a bit like the Lovely Assistant, but shorter and less flashy. Just as blonde though)

The French version has a dog. He doesn't do anything, but he's always there watching.

And, most unexpected of all, the French version of Wheel of Fortune is educational. I now know that there's an expression "entre la poire et le fromage". I don't actully know what it means, but I like to imagine that it's the French equivalent of "between a rock and a hard place", except the French think that being caught between two soft places (like a poached pear and a camembert, perhaps) is the worst possible scenario. Or maybe it's like being caught between a beurre bosc and some parmesan. Which could well be delicious.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Urm .... am I really watching some crappy German quiz show about Australia that seems to be implying that couples therapy involves drinking beer (helps with letting the emotions out, it seems), that Australians eat tinned cheeseburgers, that dehydrated wine is normal (you can take it camping!) and that thongs have bottle openers in the soles? They seem to be serious .. although happily they did just admit that the beer therapy thing was a lie, and DJ Bobo is one of the contestants (and surely no one can possibly take him seriously?).

It's a Raabout!

Remember It's a Knockout? That ridiculous gameshow from the 80s or so which seemed (in my memory at least) to involve people dressing up in ridiculous (often heavily padded) outfits and hitting each other with inflatable hammers and so on*? There's something on on telly here (well, in Germany, but close enough) that seems to be It's a Knockout's new-century relative. Possibly it's been going on for ages, actually, so it might not actually be a new-century relative, but that's not important.

It's called Schlag den Raab, and it's a gameshow that's on every now and then, and it involves a contestant playing assorted games against this dude Stefan Raab (who may possibly be the Eddie McGuire of German telly. Or maybe the Eddie McGuire back in the days when he was on every TV show in sight, before he turned into a semi-absentee Serious Businessman Type). Anyway, there is a member-of-the-public type contestant and Stefan Raab, and they play 15 different games of varying ludicrousness (such as answering general knowledge type questions, identifying celebrities, balancing on the end of a 10m pole, memory and reaction time type tests, this weird game involving hitting a nail with a hammer, playing soccer only while driving cars and using a ginormous ball, and playing pingpong on a tiny tiny table) and it goes on and on and on and on for hours (apparently it is show kinda live on TV and it always starts late and it's not unusual for it to finish at 1am or something) and if Stefan Raab wins he doesn't get anything, and if the other person wins, they get some relatively vast amount of money.

It's kind of crap, but it's good to see that people's silly talents from the olden days (by which I mean the It's a Knockout-type years) are still appreciated. It's like seeing people breakdancing, which I approve of enormously.






* Did you know that the Australian version of It's a Knockout was axed because people living near the oval in which it was filmed complained so much? Huh.

Clavdivs Quiz

Reto and I have been watching I, Claudius for the last few weeks. Last night we watched the last episode, and who should pop up in it but this chappy: Does anyone recognise the actor? This is a fairly bad picture of him, actually, in terms of looking like himself, but once you know who he is he's easy enough to recognise.

What's That, Skip? In Front Of Oncoming Traffic?

I've been in Regional Australia for a good half a day or so now and look! Here's the proof, grazing on my parents' front lawn:

About half a minute after this photo was taken a car drove past and one of the kangaroos jumped out in front of it (good instincts there, Skippy). The driver slammed on the brakes, the other 2 kangaroos bounced down onto the road to help with the "getting in the way" duties, and happily they all survived. Which no doubt saddened Sammy, my parents' cat, who has recently discovered that owing to a terrible shopping miscalculation his breakfasting needs for tomorrow morning (kangaroo meat) may well not be met.

Out And Proud(ish)

As it turns out, everyone likes the Gilmore Girls (well-known now-defunct TV show). It used to always be my favourite crap fallback show, one that was always lurking around on pay TV or real TV, waiting to be watched when there was really nothing else on, and I was always more than happy to watch it. I always kept this kind of quiet, though, because it really is a pretty stupid show, but I have recently found out that everyone likes the Gilmore Girls. Heaps of people who I have the utmost respect for have told me that they enjoy it.

It would be my favoured crap fallback show in Switzy too but it seems that it's only ever on there in weird foreign languages, and so instead my favoured crap fallback show there is Friends (which actually is crap).

Bad Timing

Arrested Development is on telly here every night! This must have started while we were in Berlin because they are only up to the 6th episode or so. It's such bad timing, though! Right when I am about to leave the country. Sigh. Not that it's such a disaster because I've seen it all anyway, but a refresher course is always nice.

In other bad news, apparently Twin Peaks is being shown on TV here as of next week. I never saw this at the time (because I lived in the country and we didn't get the TV station it was on), but I always thought it might be up my alley in spite of my general fatigue with all things David Lynch-related.

Don't Read This, Tina (not until monday, anyway)

Oh Serbia.

Yeah, sure, they were good (and those red sash things that the backing singers were wearing were excellent. Were they supposed to be reminiscent of beauty pageant entrants? Or did they have a faintly Princess Mary tinge about them?), but what does that matter at Eurovision? Exhibit A, last year's winners, a bunch of Finnish nutcases dressed as monsters, ludicrously over-the-top, so bad it's good crap entertainment. Exhibit B, that woman in the pink dress who was plucked from anonymity (allegedly) to fulfill her life's dream of hosting Eurovision. She was ridiculous. If Eurovision was at all concerned with talent and good taste, then she would not have been there. Therefore Serbia should not have won. France should have won, because they were hilarious and excellent and completely ludicrous. Especially the guy who ran around a lot and seemed to be wearing a cat (which is sadly absent from this video, as are their excellent pink costumes, but it seems there is no youtube version of the actual performance yet. Sigh). Or I would have been happy with Sweden (also ludicrous).

We Was Robbed

Everyone knows, I think, about the dubious pleasures of Eurovision. The reliably abysmal English entry, the heavily choreographed boy bands, the strange fondness lately for wearing white and gold, the bands who seem to have been transported to the stage directly from 10 years ago (without so much as an outfit change or a trip to the hairdressers in between), the girls with those excellent dresses where the skirt can be whisked off to create an entirely new (and Eurovision-appropriately skimpy) dress, only to be whisked away again to reveal an identical skimpy dress in another colour, the people singing about peace, love and HIV awareness while dressed in traditional national costume, the fake musicians on stage, the odd group of lunatics dressed as monsters/pirates and so on. Sadly this year, though, we the viewing public are going to miss out on the chance to hear Switzerland's own DJ Bobo spreading the message about the everpresent danger of being attacked by vampires, because in an abysmal travesty of musical justice, we the voting public failed to help him get past the semi finals. And by "we the voting public", I mean people in Europe but not in Switzerland (who could have voted for him but apparently didn't). By which I mean you, Annette, because you are the only person I can think of at the moment who actually reads my blog and lives in Europe but not Switzerland.

Personally I think we (by which I mean Switzerland) was robbed. The vampire song wasn't that bad. It was catchy. It was ludicrous (because they were all dressed as the undead. Maybe if they had been able to recruit Mark Selby they would have been more successful). People have at least heard of DJ Bobo (didn't he have some song that was famous in the early 90s? Possibly some idiotic joke type song, but that's better than nothing). The song was in english, which I think is always a good thing in Eurovision. There was an enormous scary blonde woman and a dude with a huge mohawk on stage. I think DJ Bobo might have worn fangs at some point, although apparently not actually during the semi-finals. There had even been scandal and drama about the song before Eurovision was on (some bunch of conservative types in Switz got a petition up to have the song banned because apparently vampires aren't really alive, and only satan would say that they are, or something like that. Plus the song was used on telly here to advertise dairy-based beverages, which was entertainingly ironic, a bunch of doofuses dressed as vampires singing about how they just "have to survive" while happily scoffing strawberry milk. It's better than the blood of virgins, people! Apparently DJ Bobo has some longstanding thing as an advertiser of dairy products). Surely all of these are good enough reasons to vote for him? Apparently not.

Reto kept me awake for some time after the semifinals ended as he muttered darkly about eastern European conspiracies not to vote for any non-eastern European countries and how no one likes Switzerland (he also said no one likes Norway either, which I thought was mean because I like Norway and I was hoping they would get into the finals too, even though their song was pretty atrocious (the singer had the excellent change-o dress thing going on though). Apparently Reto was right, though, because no one voted for them either). All of which I suspect may contain some grain of truth, because entertainment definitely wasn't the winner last night. The songs that were the funnest (which surely should be the sole criterion on which you base a vote for a Eurovision song?) were not, in my opinion, the ones that got into the finals.

Still, that doesn't mean I won't be watching the finals. It just means I'll be sure and have a nice glass of gin and tonic in my hand when I do. And possibly a mean-spirited determination not to vote for any of the countries that got to the finals by beating Switzerland (and Norway) in the semi-finals. He he.

I ♥ The Losing Team

Mark Selby lost. Although he did make a ludicrously valiant effort in winning 8 of the 12 frames played on the second day of the final. And he still gets his £110,000 in prize money. So it's not all doom and gloom.

Pool Party

A rainy weekend meant that I spent a lot of it sitting on the couch reading and watching Reto channel-surf. Personally my televisual preferences in this country run mainly to stuff in english, which means that I spend an embarrassing amount of time watching abysmal shows on Mtv (although I have to say that Flavor of Love, where trashy morons compete for the heart of the formerly well-known singer or something, Flavor Flav, is not abysmal or embarrassing at all. In fact, it's the best tv show I have watched since I left Australia and stopped watching things that allowed me to retain some semblance of self respect).

Anwyay, Reto has an inexplicable fondness for sport, so there was a lot of ice hockey to be seen and ignored over the weekend, and a lot of snooker, which I ignored slightly less because the commentating was in english and because the competitors were wearing such unattractive waistcoats (horribly shiny and with these awful pink-themed tartanny patterns on the back). As it turns out, this snooker thing is a competition which has been going on for something like a week, the horrible-waistcoated people didn't seem to make it past the early rounds, and it's actually kind of interesting. Well, not actually interesting, in the sense that it's not that much fun to watch, but interesting in the sense that I have a favourite player now and I want him to win. He is Mark Selby, and he looks kind of like a vampire or a victim of consumption or something. He is quite the youngster, too (only 24) and apparently last time he was in this competition he was eliminated in the second round. And everyone likes an underdog, especially an undead* newcomer underdog.

I first got interested in him during the semi finals, which dragged on and on and on forever on Saturday evening. He was playing against Sean Murphy, who I don't like at all (and he sounds like a complete dork from his wikipedia profile. Apparently he and Mark are good friends though. There's no accounting for taste), and it was the best of 33 frames (and considering that a frame takes something like half an hour or so, you can imagine that 33 of them takes what seems like a lifetime) . Happily I didn't watch most of it, but in the end it came down to the last frame, they were totally even at 16 frames each, and then against all my expectations, Mark won. By the time it was over he looked like he was on the brink of death, all pale and sweaty and grim looking, which didn't leave me too optimistic for the finals, which started the next day (Sunday).

My pessimism was well founded, it seems. The finals are half over, and the other bloke, someone called Higgins, is giving poor Mark a bit of a trouncing. It's 9-3 or so at the moment, and the rest is apparently on tonight, but I think Mr. Selby is just going to have to make do with second prize (which is something like £110,000 . Poor thing).



* although according to DJ Bobo, vampires are in fact alive, and may well be responsible for Switzerland trouncing the competition at Eurovision next weekend. Assuming he gets into the finals, anyway,and assuming that the voting public is insane enough to want him to win. Which is quite an ask, frankly.