Tuesday 26 October 2010

Do Keep Up London

I was glad to hear that there is going to be a Radio 4 series, written by Ian Hislop, having a stab at making a few jokes at the expense of the coming UK Olympic Games. It's about time. After all the British are supposed to be the ones with the sense of humour, but so far very little opportunity has been taken to make fun of the coming event.

Before our Olympics, many people here thought the whole thing was going to be an utter embarrassment. Reflecting that mood, we had a wonderful series called The Games, involving John Clarke, Brian Dawe and Gina Riley:












Of course, during the actual proceedings, we had Roy and HG's superlative commentary, served up in The Dream:













And huge thanks to Brit, who, despite disapproving of Australian humour, provided invaluable technical expertise.

10 comments:

  1. Seems to me there's little else but cynicism of the Mock the Week variety. Can't say I'm desperate to hear the smug git Hislop making smugly gittish remarks about the Olympics. I think they'll be fine. Christ, what are we living for anyway?

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  2. Our approach (speaking for the Australian nation here, of course) was that we made fun of it and thought it was great at the same time. It wasn't an either/or. Actually, I think that is what we often do about things. Hislop's more on the side of the angels than not, surely?

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  3. Well Private Eye is much better than Guido, but I'm a Merton man.

    Btw - you know you can embed vids - just copy the youtube code and post it into your HTML tab.

    And you can do those magic links in comments by harnessing the power of basic HTML.

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  4. Ugh, that was a horrible mind scrambling link - please no more of that ever again. I shall probably have to shut down the computer for a week now so my brain cells can reassemble.

    I like Merton very much indeed, as long as he doesn't do travel documentaries where, in the ones I've seen, he seems to think he has to be some kind of lame father christmas sort of figure and not a bit mad and faintly bitter.

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  5. What a great compilation! hours of entertainment. Thanks.

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  6. I wholly approve of Australians having a sense of humour.

    God knows you'd need one.

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  7. Oh, thanks for this zmkc. I'll have to come back tomorrow to watch more. These reminded me of what a fun time we had with the games. The Games was great and then Roy and HG were just wonderful - I got so little sleep that fortnight waiting up for them! Who can forget the "battered sav" and "hello boys" in the gymnastics... As for the Greco-Roman wrestling!

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  8. Ah, us mere provincials ran this well dry a couple of years ago...

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  9. I'm just sour faced on the bloody games. But, looking at the po faced aerosols who are running the London games, they're beyond satire, especially when they try to convince the rest of us that sucking all the lotto money into London is good for us because what benefits London benefits us all.

    The best laughter will come when they actually start and the commentators give us their all. Classics like 'Juantarina of Cuba opens his legs and shows what he's got' or in a swiming heat, 'she's responding to the water the water's responding to her'. Me I'm off to wherever won't be showing them

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  10. Richard - I don't think you can get away from the Olympics; they will always be showing them wherever you are, although only from their perspective (eg in the seventies I was in Ulan Bator when the Olympics was on and, from there, it looked as if there was no sport on offer at all except wrestling, which was the only thing the Mongolians had a chance in.)

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