People vs Humanity: Part #125374
Anyway, it’s half time between Argentina and Holland, and only someone with the benign patience of Sir David Attenborough would indulge the company of the ITV “pundits”. There are chimps who have fallen out of trees onto their heads who can offer more insight into world football than Messrs. Gullit, Allerdyce and whoever the other one was.
So, I have a bit of a channel hop while the ITV primates get it out of their system. ITV2 are showing ‘When Harry Met Sally‘. As serendipity would have it, I tune in just as Meg Ryan launches into the famous faked-orgasm-in-the-diner scene. As those who have seen the movie will know, the pay-off to the scene is when a waiter approaches an older woman on an adjacent table and she says…
Well, if you watched it on ITV2 tonight, what she said was, “I’ll have whatever she’s h-”, because halfway through the gag the station cut to the ad break, totally killing what was (fifteen years ago) a pretty good, wry joke.
A few years ago when I was living in Australia, there was a furore over the showing of Simpsons episodes. The channel with the rights to show them edited the episodes so that they could fit more adverts into the half hour slot. The Simpsons-to-advert ratio was dictated by the channel’s marketing department.
So call me naive, call me liberal panty-waister, but in whose interest was the movie shown on ITV2 tonight? Quite clearly the station has the same level of respect for its viewers as the Murdoch press has for humanity. That is, shut the intercourse up. The film was secondary to the extremely important messages the sponsors have to impart.
It’s a small point but symptomatic of how we all hate each other and are ultimately doomed. Oooh, second half kicking off…
Posted on June 21st, 2006 at 9:16 pm
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Filed under Miscellaneous misanthropy |
Pretty good for a half time spurt of words. I hate the fact I cannot write like that.
Good writers are like Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Italy etc. Words, like a football, play off one another and it becomes art.
It’s interesting that the GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL, from latin commentators (even longer when you hear it) is a feature of Latin countries……… when they actually play proper football.
Meanwhile enjoy England’s exit compliments of the referee at the “round of 16″ (hate that).
On a similar theme, I understand that when the USA played the Czech Republic last week, the US broadcaster ESPN cut to an ad break after the US anthem had been played and just as the Czech anthem began.
Even the most devoted flag-waving nationalist would surely find that an extraordinarily inappropriate thing to do.
It’s not just disrespect for the audience. ITV utterly hate films. Always have done.
That’s why they’re incapable of editing them sensitively when they want to fit a few ads in;
That’s why they pioneered the absolutely evil practice of splitting a 9pm film in half so that ITN could have their half hour of ‘news’ (followed by extra long ads)
And that’s why they implemented the most idiotic policy ever of swear-word censorship in the 90s with the aid of a lot of bought-in US tv-edited blockbusters - Mel Gibson: ‘let’s get those funsters‘, ‘this is a real firin’ gun’; Bruce Willis: ‘Yippee-ky-ay, Kemo Sabe!” Etc.
Ah well, it looks like ITV might be going down the swanny anyway.
If you don’t like the half time punditry (and no-one could be blamed in all fairness) you should try watching footy on Spanish TV. I saw the Spain Ukraine match in Spain and you get a whole 15 minutes of ads. Which is no bad thing.
I have a similar on-going beef with Classic FM. I’ve even emailed them about it - sad sod that I am - but to no avail. The length of individual pieces + the advertising schedule MUST BE ADHERED to at whatever cost. Nothing to do with football but just as maddening; it goes like this.
The 2nd movement of the Beethoven Emperor Concerto gets a regular airing - I hear it at least once every couple of weeks in the car where I tune intermittently to the station. Anyone who knows the work - I mean the WHOLE thing - also knows that the transition from the 2nd to 3rd movement ranks among the wonders of the entire classical piano repertoire. Just 3 or 4 notes with measured cadence duration and interval take the listener from as remote a key possible to the home key of E flat major and a resounding driving tempo change. It is pure magic.
I have heard the 2nd movement at least 20 times in the past 12 months on that station, and every single time thay have stopped it on the brink of that transition. They are pure bloody philistines.
Have any of the pundits anything interesting to say, apart from Alan Hindsight, Gary Vinegar, and Terry Geezer?
Well, Martin O’Neil has to be one of the smartest men on television. He knocks pseuds like Winston Schama and right out of the ring.
Hey Rochenko, you’re a melonfarmer (my personal favourite).
MysteryWelshBoy, do you remember the 1994 World Cup in America? There were those rumours doing the rounds (probably urban myths) that the US TV companies were lobbying for the matches to be divided into quarters rather than halves to fit in more ads.
Yeah, Andrew, but he looks like a serial killer.
Fun you, you fuzzy sock sucker.
More censorship fun.
Andrew: how right you are; I’d overlooked him.
The worst peice of swear dubbing that I ever heard was for ‘Aliens’. In the scene where the jumpship crashes stranding them on the planet with the aliens one of the marines starts swearing his head off, along the lines of; ‘we’re all gonna [funning] die!’ It wasn’t just the words that were dubbed in. It was that the voice actor used sounded nothing like the actor who he was censoring.
Hilariously bad.
Oh, and Gordon Strachan knows his football and is articulate with it.
Oh all right: Alan Hindsight, Gary Vinegar, Terry Geezer, Martin O’Leicester and Wee Gordy. But not Ruud Gullible or Ian Wrongy.
I’m surprised at your inclusion of Terry Geezer. I try to avoid ITV at half-time, remembering the last World Cup (or perhaps it was the last Euros) when it seemed that Geezer’s job was to interpret the incoherent ramblings Pitiable Gascoigne.
Andrew, perhaps I’m remembering how once he was. Like Sven and Beckham?