Just when you thought it was safe to switch on your TV, RTE come up with another lie. I was quietly sitting watching TV the other night when an add came on that I assumed was for something like Centra or one of those franchise things. Imagine my surprise when, at the end of this annoying little film, the punchline was, “RTE; fuel your imagination.” Well you fucking first!
With less imagination than the contents of a can of beans, why do RTE’s marketing people think that we should fuel our imagination? Oh wait, maybe they’re asking us to imagine we live in a country with a decent TV station. Well, in that case I apologise. This must be the most imaginative piece of business ever. ‘Look, we have no intention of improving our service by, oh let’s say,...
Well it’s fucking shit. I got another bit of a grilling for not researching my posts so I put myself through an excruciating 15 minutes - which is curiously more than anyone connected with the show deserves - of it and I can honestly say I would prefer to sew my fucking sctotum to a horse’s fucking arse and yell GIDDY FUCKING UP!! The sad part is that these fuckers actually believe they’re celebrities. I’d prefer to spend 15 minutes listening to Ronan Keating and Nana Mous-fucking-skouri dueting on Sealion Dying’s, My Heart Will Go on than spend one more fucking nano-second watching this embarrassing piece of fucking shit.
We’re used to RTE failing us but this is fucking ridiculous. They will say, ‘Ah but it’s for charity’, well fuck...
Ok, that is fucking it. The gloves are, like, so fucking totally off. It’s like I never had a fucking glove. My hands are as naked as Heather Mills’ whorish greed.
It’s my own fault. I should have known better. I have recently been accused of slagging Ronan Keating too often. Apparently he’s a nice guy and I should leave the talentless piece of fucking annoying shit alone. Well fine. I promise to leave the fucking mincing, clichéd and contrived, smiley fucker alone from now on. The point that was well made to me involved my lack of research into all things Ronan. As I am certainly not a masochist, I have decided not to research him and, instead, simply stop talking about the fucking annoying prick.
Ok. The piece of miserable fucking puss to whom the title of this...
For those of you living outside of Ireland, I will take a moment to explain that Chorus is the name of the company who supply digital TV to the Thirsty Kipper. They started out as a crap company called Westward Cables, then changed to something else and continued their crap service before the last name change that gave us Chorus and something much more than crap. We’ve all had shit service from one company or another and that is basically what every pre-cursor to Chorus brought us. With the advent of Chorus, the service remained just a shitty as it always had been but with the added bonus of some imbecilic nonsense thrown in for good measure.
Right, got all that? Good. So why have I persevered with such a shoddy and thoroughly shitty service all this time? Y’see I’m one...
Yes, it’s that time again. A load of former kinda well known people are being forced to eat shit so that they can have a go at a second fifteen minutes of fame. I find, yet again, that I’m unable to ignore it because people are talking about the fucking thing. WHY!!!!!! I’ll tell you why. People are watching this because there’s nothing of substance on. I was privy to a conversation about this show today and, as I couldn’t contribute to the conversation, I commented on how unbelievably disgraceful the situation in Serbia is at the moment. Mentally and physically handicapped children are put in an institution and tied to a bed for the rest of their lives. BBC news broadcast pictures of emaciated children and adults living in appalling conditions. These pictures...
The lovely Fergal Crehan of Tuppenceworth has just outed himself as a (relatively) proud non-watcher of television. His stirring words have roused me from my blogging slumber and reminded me that there are more things in heaven and on earth worth writing about than quirky extraterrestrial visitors.
It has been almost two years since I outed myself (and my lovely wife) in similar fashion:
Though I have a television (the object) I never watch TV (the medium). In other words, though the box sits (as is customary) in the corner of our sitting room, it is not hooked up to anything other than a DVD player, a VCR, and a smattering of games consoles.
Not much has changed since then. We replaced our hefty black square box with a hefty grey widescreen rectangular affair (so I might satisfy...
Ok, TV is now an out of control, runaway train heading straight down the tubes. Apart from the Sopranos and a couple of other shows, it is complete and utter shite. Just look at the crap their coming up with in the form of new ideas. First of all you have Deal or No Deal with the incomparably nauseating Noel Edmunds. The game consists of asking people to open fucking boxes! Now we have the king of shite himself, Donny Osmond, hosting a show called Identity. The object of this pointless show is for the contestant to guess what some random idiots do for a living. “No 12! Banana Straightener: IS THAT YOUR IDENTITY?”
“No Donny, you fucking twat, I’m a fucking an arse sculptor.”
For fuck’s sake. Here’s an idea. How about a show where you ask the host...
I have spoken at length about the Mass Murderers, Jessica Fletcher and Dr Sloane from Diagnosis Murder and I have proof now that Sloane is a killer. Before I get to that, however, I must point out my Nostradamusesque moment when I predicted that Hollywood would soon make a Nancy Drew movie. Well, I was wrong about the star but I was on the money about the concept. Sarah Michelle Gellar will not play the eponymous heroine. No, that is left to a little nepitism. Yes, if you didn’t think there could be anyone more annoying than Julia Roberts, check out her niece. The clips are long but they were the only ones I could find.
And now, to Mr Sloane, the tap-dancing mass murderer. In this cliff hanger, he is finally accused....
Ok, I don’t watch much TV but I do recognise lack of quality when I see it. I’ve just had a discussion with Barnacle Joe about what passes for televisual entertainment these days. I won’t even go into the whole Big Brother thing because, if you derive any entertainment from that, you’re way past saving. One of the programmes discussed was C.S.I. Apparently it stands for Crime Scene Investigation. Now there are many C.S.Is and none of them are any good. I have to admit to only watching fifteen minutes of one episode but it was enough.
You then have the soaps. Eastenders is probably the greatest load of fucking tripe ever committed to film but people seem to be obsessed with it. For a start, someone dies every Christmas. I mean, people have enough to worry about...
I’m not happy with Ireland. I’m not happy with the way we have swapped our culture for a mid-atlantic amalgam of coloquialist bollox. I’m not happy with our government. I’m not happy with the fucking Dublin foor idiots who seem to be allowed to speak in public far too often. I’m not happy that our power company - the ESB - have said that they only hiked the price of electricity to encourage competition but now will reduce prices to compete with that competition. Here’s a sales pitch; GIVE US BACK OUR FUCKING MONEY, YOU ROBBING FUCKING BASTARDS!! I’m not fucking happy but I’m Irish. I’m happy to come from the same country as J.P Dunleavey. I’m happy to come from the same county as Richard Harris. I’m happy to be loosely...
In a month or so, we Irish residents will be asked to pay the princely sum of one hundred and fifty six Euro for the privilege of being permitted to watch Irish television. To put it another way; €156.00. Or WHAT THE FUCK?????
One hundred and fifty fucking six Euro for the pleasure of watching Sean Ban prance around a stage like a fucking idiot!! One fucking hundred and fifty six fucking Euro so that we can watch a pompous and self-involved Gerry Ryan interviewing nobodies on his fucking awful chat show? One fucking hundred and fifty fucking six fucking Euro for the treat of watching Plank Kenny host the Shite Shite Show! One fucking Hun - fucking - dred and fucking fifty fucking six fucking Euro so that they can continue to make that fucking awful Dublin soap!!
When in the name of...
Ok, I’ve gone on and on and on about how crap TV is these days. Yes, there are some exceptions like the Sopranos and the show from which the clip below is taken but these exceptions merely prove the rule. First of all we have reality TV. Is there a more vapid and pointless medium of entertainment? I mean what’s the point in watching a shower of morons being morons in a house on TV? Is there a point or are you being brainwashed by penny-pinching TV execs? If you are someone who has bought into this collective dumbing down of our crumbling society, you’re probably not going to like this post very much. No, you don’t receive mail on this site you ju… No, a post is another word for an article on a blog si… look, here’s a banana. Go sit in a corner...
Was complaining recently to my wife, brother-in-law, the milkman (etc) about the new Doctor Who's unimaginative use of time travel. The formula of the show is (basically) this: Our daring duo arrive in the past/future, encounter dangers and dilemmas, solve the problem/vanquish the foe(s), and hop into the TARDIS to do more of the same the following week.
In other words, the TARDIS is rarely used as anything other than a device to change scenes and hop to new and exotic locations. In that regard, dare I say it, it differs little from The Time Tunnel.
This, of course, is not to say that Who at its best isn’t far superior to Irwin Allen's piece of fluff - it clearly is (the swirly, psychedelic tunnel was TTT's main, if not only, attraction). Still…the chief pleasures of the time...
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Back in our conker-playing, football sticker-collecting days, my primary schoolmates and I were in clear and enthusiastic agreement as to the funniest thing ever dreamed up by humankind: The campfire farting scene in Blazing Saddles. It had no serious competition (although a joke involving a passenger having a poo out a train window did, at one time, run it reasonably close).
Though farts and poos remain, of course, potent comic muses, the sad reality is that they just don’t occasion as much hilarity as they once did. When last I saw Blazing Saddles, for example, I sat stone-faced and disappointed throughout much of it. Even the copious wind-breaking left me cold.
The reason why childhood/childish humour is on my mind is as follows. Last weekend, for some reason, "The Sailor’s...
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And so it ends. After 18 days of squinting at shifting, swirling, pixellated blobs of colour and light on the lousy bbc.co.uk feed, the World Snooker Championship packs away its balls and white gloves for another year. My eyes may never fully recover.
Incidentally, my better half's suggested technique for rendering clarity to the dizzying vortex was to "unfocus my eyes", thus (presumably) unlocking the wonders of Magic Eye snooker. It didn't work…
It wasn't until mid-way through last night's captivating (and gruelling) final session that I discovered a feed of the crystal-clearest resolution over at eurosport.de. No need to unfocus here. The eyes could do their standard, everyday focusing job, and mighty relieved they were to do it.
The only downside was commentary delivered in...
I recently installed an LCD TV in the Thirsty Kipper. I thought it would be a good way to while away the time when things were quiet. I gotta tell ya, it’s fantastic. I love it but there’s a problem. I’ve gotten so into what it can do, I’ve started watching shite movies in order to hear the glorious surround sound and sample the visuals that I’ve always thought of as dross. For instance, I recently watched a movie called xXx merely for its aesthetic value. As a movie, it is the worst kind of shite. This is the stuff that Hollywood spits out when it wants to fucking annoy everyone. There is no plot, the performances of all involved - including Samuel L - are abject fucking rubbish and it makes me sick to think that there are people out there who actually...
As a young lad, I was carefree and full of youthful optimism. I spent most of my play time as a child, outdoors. Climbing trees, playing soccer, getting into the normal trouble that kids get into and, surprising as it may seem, I was rarely sick. At Halloween, we used to build a bonfire and cook sausages and stuff by sticking twigs through them and holding them up to the bonfire. We’d go camping and cook fish that we caught over a small camp fire. The fish would be cleaned on a rock. I’m not trying to say that I was a Grizzly Adams type child but that’s what we did back then before fear drove our children indoors and property development all but wiped out the rolling fields. I got cut, bruised and sick from experimenting with alcohol but I was never struck down by...
I may have told you that, some years ago, the Thirsty Kipper was put in a dry dock for a while and yer ould Cap’n had to depend on the pittance that the state gave out for a while. It wasn’t long but it was long enough to notice two things. Firstly; if you weren’t demoralised by being out of work, you will be by the attitude of the staff in the dole office. In their eyes, you are guilty of trying claim off the government while working until they prove otherwise. The second thing I noticed is how abysmally awful daytime TV is.
For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t watch daytime TV without going into a blind rage. You had fucking awful chat shows like Vanessa - who gave advice on everything from obesity to failed marriages… WWHHHAAATTTTT???? So, Vanessa...
Whilst grimmacing at the ineptitude of the Irish team last Saturday, tearing the arm off the couch in blind rage, I thought of the genius that was Alan Latchley. In doing this I thought of my blogging colleague, Bock The Robber. Alan was manager of Scunthorpe, Bock’s favourite soccer team and I believe that the interview below will serve as a lesson for Steve Staunton. This is for you, Bock.
I give you Alan Latchley - aka, Peter Cooke....
As many of you know, I’ve been vociferously critical of RTE in the past and I still think that they’re a load of shite but I must take my hat off to them for their honesty lately.
As you know, my televisual self-sacrifice knows no bounds. I am prepared to plant my attention where nobody should ever be expected to, simply to report back to you so as you may be spared the pain. I was at a loose end the other night and so I thought I’d check on RTE again. I was surprised to see that they were openly admitting their shallowness and lack of creativity with a show called How Low Can You Go? Seemingly, even RTE were admitting the abysmal nature of their programming. I watched a bit of this show and I can tell you that abysmal is not an adequate description of it. It consists...
Though John Waters' spectacularly clunky and hokey lyrics for Ireland's 2007 Eurovision entry ("They Can’t Stop The Spring") were understandably greeted with howls of derision, it's hard to deny that he's simply following in an ignoble tradition.
Here, for your 'enjoyment', is a particularly hilarious verse from Waters' opus:
The curtain has been raised
And Europe's all one stage
And the archipelagic icicles
Have melted like the cage
"Archipelagic icicles"? I didn't even write shit that bad back in my leather-trousers-wearin', Jim-Morrison-lovin' days.
Cast our mind's back 26 years to Sheeba's "Horoscopes", however, and we encounter lyrics strained/bonkers enough to (perhaps) make even Mr. Waters blush:
Don't let the planets take control of our lives
Believe in the truth and...
3G, dublin, O2, sky, tv3 vodafone I love, as you know, to fool around with new types of technology. Mobile TV is something that interests me, I love TV and to have it on the go is pretty cool, probably more advantageous to those people who commute and regularly miss their TV shows.
I was less than impressed by Vodafones mobile TV service, as there was nothing interesting on there. It seems however, as the Irish Independent has it, that O2 Mobile is launching a pilot Mobile TV scheme, with the following Channels RTEI, TV3, Sky Sports, Sky News, Setanta Sports and the Discovery Channel, sounds good! 350 people will take part in the trial in Dublin and will be able to watch selected TV channels on the go!
If any O2 Hoffs are reading this feel free to send me a TV phone and ill gladly do a...
Being at a loose end of a Sunday evening and suffering, as I am, from a really fucking annoying dose of the flu, I have just switched on “Graham Norton – Uncut”. I have never paid much attention to Graham and any of his shows because I saw his stand up show once and it was frankly… well… uhm… fucking crap. His show is crap but was saved by the fact that Samantha Morton was a guest. She kept me entertained. In his opening monologue, Graham spoke about the Oscars. During his typically unfunny diatribe, he showed a picture of Helen Mirren biting down on a burger. After he had tittered annoyingly at his own observations, he said “Our queen wouldn’t be seen like that.” Now, unless I missed my guess – and please correct me if I’m wrong – Graham Norton is Irish. We...
Yes, it’s true; this is my 100th rant on this site. Since last July I have been waxing lyrical on all manner of shite and now I find myself at this worrying milestone. There have been many highlights in my life this year outside of my duties on the Thirsty Kipper but the highlight of my ranting is the disposal of one Mr. Richard Shepherd and his writing web-shite. Due to the dedication of Debs and Rochelle and a few others we have now ensured that his website - worldsgreatestnovel.com - is now a dumping site for every fucking reprobate on the net with a link to dump. I recently posted as “Mematey” in his forum and he didn’t even ban me. Was it good enough for him to simply neglect the site? No. There are still twenty-one authors, whose work is still associated...
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channel 6, Digital Terrestrial Television, RTE, sky tv3It looks like Digital terrestrial television is begun, lets hope is as good as the UK version, to date, it looks promising, and has an interesting channel line up (see below).
This second phase of the pilot will involve a trial with an initial panel of 500 public participants, who have been drawn from the Dublin and Louth areas. This will rise to 1,000 participants over the lifetime of the trial.
TV Channels include RTÉ 1, RTÉ2, TV3, TG4, Channel 6, BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC News 24, Sky News, Sky Sports 1, Extreme Sports and UKTV History and radio channels RTÉ Radio 1, RTÉ 2 FM, RTÉ Lyric FM, RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta and Today FM. Source
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RTE The Irish Indo is reporting today that the new RTE website is a massive hit. And I have to admit, that yes, I do like it, I now find myself checking it daily for News and Business News, as well as the new TV Guide, and of course the Entertainment section (goes without saying). Impressively their list of online videos, including RTE News broadcasts, is becoming more extensive. I reported (well had a screen shot) of the site shortly after its launch here. Some people mailed me to say that they still don’t like it, but if the below figures are anything to go by, RTE are going something right.
THE redesign of RTE’s website has contributed to a massive 78pc increase in traffic, the station claimed yesterday. vFigures show 29 million page impressions registered for the month of...
Abrams Confirmed To Direct ‘Star Trek XI’
After months of rumours and speculation, J.J. Abrams has committed to directing Star Trek XI.
I wish I cared – I really do – but Star Trek finished with Voyager for me
More equality?
A gay couple who were covered with a blanket by an airline stewardess because they were hugging have received an apology.
Virgin is shaking things up a bit for SKY – about time they had some real competition, be nice to see the same in Ireland?
Sky and Virgin remained defiant today as the dispute over the carriage of the former’s channels on cable rumbled on.
Apple TV to be ‘a few weeks’ late
Initially the company said the £199 ($299) device would ship in February, but now expects it to go in mid-March.
Move on Jade!
Big Brother...
I would like to start this by saying that I enjoyed Enemy at the Gates but thought it would have been a lot better with a different lead actor. It needed someone gritty and raw - Gary Oldman, perhaps. Having said that, I did enjoy it but I do believe that it is time to consign Jude Law to the celebrity scrap-heap. Firstly; he takes himself way too seriously for someone of limited talent and secondly; he’s a tosspot. In fact, more than being a tosspot, he’s a twat, a twat, a twat and a fucking major fucking, pain in the hole twat!!!
“So, Jude, what attracted you to this role?”
“Well it was written with such integrity and soul that I couldn’t turn it down.”
“So it wasn’t the big bag of money you got for doing it then?”
“No....
I was pottering around the ol’ Thirsty Kipper today, y’know, tending to the more boring aspects of pirate life – filing maps, cataloguing my ill gotten gains and such – when I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation between two crew members about the flagship of RTE’s drama department, Fair City. I was going to make these two intellectually challenged miscreants walk the plank for uttering the name of such horse shit on my vessel but, having been castigated by all and sundry about my treatment of some of our more irksome Irish “celebrities”, I decided that, in order to mete out an appropriate punishment, I should really ascertain whether the RTE executives had finally hauled their heads out of their arses and hired actual writers instead of the Dublin 4, latte swilling...