Reprise Podcast 18 (and 17 as a bonus)

I think I’m going to have to get it. Was very tempted already when I heard that DJ Shadow was involved. However I’m a sucker for Daft Punk. Ideally I’d spend several hours a day wearing one of their robot helmets, dispensing short advice on my face screen. Maybe in a bank. I digress. This looks very good.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with it either. It’s all done right, but I just want that X-Factor (X-Forza?) to push me over the edge, make me love playing it.

It makes me angry beyond words. Well okay it doesn’t do half of that. However it is terrible. What exactly are they doing at the end there? I don’t understand. Maybe I refuse to understand or comprehend. In fact I do.

Done that? Good. Right, where were we?

Okay, early on he sums up nicely one thing that really annoys me about television at the moment. Sometimes there is a need to explain who a person is, what makes them tick. However most of the time, if you’re on a game show say, it really doesn’t matter. So don’t bother telling me.

I. DON’T. CARE. ABOUT. YOUR. FUCKING. JOURNEY. The journey is you auditioned for a telly show, you had some degree of knowledge about said show. You then did your thing. You’re probably not an expert in the field the show deals with, as if you were, you’d be doing it for a living. So sometimes you may find doing said thing a bit tricky. Most of the time though you do the thing to the best of your ability. Then you either win, or you get so far in the show, and go home. Even if you win, you’ll probably make little impact on that area you chose afterwards. Life goes on. It’s not really a journey.

The worst example of this is Total Wipeout on BBC1. If you’re going to run across some big balls and probably fall off, get on with it, don’t give me your life story. The infinitely better Viking (Japanese telly shown on Eurosport 2) doesn’t bother with this, their contestants shout, then get on with something far harder and more impressive. For a bit of fun, they sometimes have them do the same thing with their kids in tow. No lifestory needed.

The other upside of this is that you either get more or less telly, rather than pointless filler about lives I don’t care about. And that is a good thing.

Then tonight Shelley-Ann Fraser took the women’s 100m in 10.73 seconds, boringly (I jest) only the third fastest time in history. A different race, much harder to call beforehand, but ultimately won in style.

This is just the start of the gold medals for Jamaica here, at least the 200m and sprint relays to come, but in a perfect world, Bolt would have a go at the 400m, give us all a treat. I suspect he won’t, but I can hope.

The session itself finished with Alonso on pole, and massed confusion when the timing failed. Drivers had to swap times when they got out of their cars, which resulted in Jensen Button asking Alonso what his time was on live tv, and exclaiming “Fucking Hell” when he realised how quick he’d been. Will be interesting to see if Alonso can hold on, but he has been fueled very light.

Now we’re nearly at the end, it seems clear that they really have written a decent sequel to the League of Gentlemen. It’s got a similar feel, but perhaps with a tighter plot to it all. Both are elaborate mechanisms to wrap around a sketch show, but this is no bad thing when they are so gruesomely funny. I’m sure we will have some death, destruction and resolution in the final episode, but I get the feeling this won’t be the last we see of it. I hope not too.

Note that I haven’t seen the final episode yet. At the end of the sixth episode, we were promised that we didn’t have to wait, we could watch it NOW on the red button. Like an excited puppy I waited patiently for the Virgin Media box to load slowly, only to find nothing. No final episode. They hadn’t put it up. People were sad. Maybe a final cruel joke. Or most likely a fuck up. Gah.