german tv

let's talk about german tv. so far i've noticed a couple of things. german's love married with children, or so i gather from the amount of times i have seen it on the television. it's almost as if it's their simpsons. (speaking of which, i am so missing the simpsons. it's one of the things i miss the most. i know it sounds stupid, but after seeing it almost everyday for the last 17 years, i miss it so.) married with children (different youtube clip) is a cackle and a half on german tv. i have no idea what they are saying, as it's dubbed in not too bad german, but given the show is one of the lowest common denominator kind of things, you can easily guess what's going on. the laugh track i am assuming is left as is, but i'm not too sure. although i haven't heard many germans laugh unless drunk, so i can't tell if it's different or not.

what's interesting about german tv is that on satellite you have about 1000 channels. i'm not kidding. 1000 channels!!! although it suffers the same fate as australian tv, the more channels tends to mean the less there is to watch. half those channels are taken up by news (cnn, bbc, cnbc, spanish news, cuba vision, italian news and even the english version of al jezeera (which unfortunately doesn't have beheadings or that anti-western mickey mouse damnnit!!!)) and the rest is either quizmania-esque shows , tv shopping or porn. though that's one thing i knew about before coming here. after a certain timeslot it seems you can put anything on tv. the other night i was flicking through channels 247-389 and saw a woman looking like a russian car crash victim licking her lips at the camera in a bikini sitting on a not so sanitary couch, two women going at it in a park, a young guy with a hand down his y-fronts looking like he needs a hit (either physical or drug-related, i don't think he'd care), and about 5 women on different channels fingering themselves. seriously, who needs that on tv. it's what the internet is for, and as the broadband here is unbelievably fast, so why bother?

but that all brings me to my next point, why are there so many channels devoted to calling up and spending money? besides the quizmania channels, tv shopping and porn (which understandably has numbers underneath), there are so many ads for ringtones, phone games and god knows what else cause i can't understand what they're spruking. here, it's like at home, everyone has a moblie, but i'm yet to see or hear people going on about it or showing their new crazy-frog inspired phone crap. at home you'd always get a group of teenagers who are more than happy to show off their new ringtone or make everyone on the train/tram/bus hear their way cool new mp3, here no one has done it yet. maybe i'm just not getting on the right transport for it. or maybe germans just have a better understanding of public etiquette. MTV is the worst for it. i thought australian MTV was bad with programming that was all reality shows and no actual music, but here it's abysmal. between every song there's at least 3 ads for phone nonsense. although i was a little comforted by the fact that there seems to be just as much reality programming on that station as at home. i'd hate to see american MTV though, imagine the awful programming on that channel! but i will say that one show has made me laugh, it's a german version of so you think you can dance (wikipedia entry of the US show as i couldn't find and actual official website). i've only caught it once, but my god was it funny. imagine kraftwerk and the nazis got together to show off their new moves they learnt on an exchange to america, but put a euro spin on it that isn't quite right and you've got it. i don't know what the show is called and i can't remember what time i caught it, as i saw it during severe jet lag in frankfurt, but trust me, it was better than almost anything else i've seen here so far. i laughed and laughed and laughed til i cried tears of pure joy.

the other night i was lucky (or unlucky) enough to catch a really old show that had some guy in the seventies or sixties teach his audience how to paint. it was brilliant and i couldn't stop watching until he'd finished his landscape. to give you an idea of what i was watching, imagine a blank studio stage with an late 40s/early 50s guy sporting an afro standing in front of a blank canvas telling you in hushed whispers how to get certain effects while he painted a generic landscape of sunset over a shack in the woods. this alone was comedy gold, but when you consider he was talking like the gay guy tobi from family guy. it was pure genius and very creepy. he was saying things like, 'that's it... a little more. look at that happy shrub, he don't care. oooh, that's it. i think a little more, ahhh...' as if he was talking to his lover. i was waiting for him to start saying, 'a little faster now, i'm going in deeper. you like that, don't cha.'

there is one channel that is brilliant though, it's called arte. it's french and refuses to dub hardly anything from its original language. i love this channel for the pure fact that late on a thursday night i have seen day of the dead twice now, in its original language, uncut and with no ads! tre bien!

well that's my introduction to german tv. i'd love to show some clips from it, but as i don't have any of the names of shows it's kinda hard. just rest assured that if i did, you probably wouldn't understand them anyway. hell i don't!

tchuss