Category: Humour

Comedian and former BBC 6 Music presenter Adam Buxton’s live music video show, Bug, is to be adapted for a new television series for Sky Atlantic.

The eight-part series will be a music video extravaganza that celebrates the most brilliant, compelling, thought-proving and weird music videos in the world today.

Building on the enormous success of five years of the live Bug shows, Adam Buxton will present these famous and not so famous videos, and examine the various comments they prompt and provoke among the esteemed members of the online community.

The series will celebrate innovative and ground-breaking videos, include special guests from the world of music videos and highlight the funniest comments on the web.

Each episode will also feature an original music video made by Adam and a host of the finest directors working in the industry today.

Adam Buxton commented: “I tell people that Bug is like going round to a friend’s house and having them open up their laptop and show you interesting and amusing things they’ve found or made, except not as tedious and shit as that sounds.”

Sounds great and as a fan of Adam Buxton since the good old Channel 4 days when he and Joe Cornish presented a late Friday night comedy on the weird and wonderful, not to mention their ultra-successful BBC radio show, I am looking forward to this new Bug show on Sky.

This video on Buxton reading YouTube comments still make me laugh.

So here we are at an unbelievable milestone for the most famous family on TV. After first airing on December 17th 1989 they have reached 500 shows! Now, whatever you think of the show, the family or Fox Television, this is quite an achievement.

While Family Guy may have taken the “most dysfunctional family” crown in many peoples opinion, that show has also been cancelled, twice! So to go this distance and by the sound of it the end is still not in sight, this is something you have got to give them credit for.

This is the longest running American sitcom, animated and prime-time show, with a multi hundred million dollar movie and awards galore. They are simply are HUGE… or should that be were.
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Last night on Sky1 was the final episode of Day 8 and after nine years in the life of CTU agent Jack Bauer, the hit real-time drama has come to an end.

It has been an emotional ride with thrills and spills over the course of 192 episodes/hours. From losing his wife Teri in season one plus the constant kidnapping of daughter Kim, not forgetting losing his colleagues one-by-one in the following seasons, it’s been a tough life for Kiefer Sutherland’s character in 24.

Guardian writer Charlie Brooker has posted his view on the show and what the creators can do with a plausible idea of a spin-off!

Jack Bauer is no more

So. Farewell then, Jack Bauer. CTU agent and terrorist-botherer extraordinaire. You thwarted countless unspeakable plots. Apart from the ones perpetrated by your own writers. In those you were sadly complicit. Now your time has finally ended. But even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. Unless it’s using the 24-hour format. Which yours, ironically, didn’t.

Apologies to EJ Thribb. Anyway, that’s enough poetry for one column. By the time you read this Bauer will be dead. Well, not dead exactly, but gone from our screens. The former hit series 24 has ground to a halt due to public indifference; the final episode, broadcast on Sky One this evening, culminated in surprisingly low-key fashion. Jack said goodbye to Chloe and shuffled off into the sunset, limping a bit because he was moderately wounded (“moderately wounded” by his standards, at any rate: anything less than a full lung dangling out of his chest cavity is a minor inconvenience to Bauer). He now exists only in the minds of fans and the creative team planning his first spinoff movie, which presumably will last precisely 240 minutes if there’s to be any notional continuity at all.

It’s a fairly inauspicious end to a series that, let’s not forget, was groundbreaking when it first appeared, back in 2001 when season-long story arcs were still a rarity rather than the norm, and the “real time” concept was an arresting gimmick. Furthermore, its sheer brutality was shocking. Not many hit series end their inaugural season with the hero cradling the corpse of his pregnant wife. It certainly didn’t work for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The audience choked on its Ribena. But 24 pulled it off. Which made it all the more disappointing that, having established an exciting new form, the show proceeded to repeat itself ad nauseum, until it all became so predictable that Jack was visibly yawning during some of the later torture scenes, and sometimes had to splash himself in the face with cold blood just to stay awake.

The real-time format was partly to blame, of course: it eventually turned the series into little more than a string of preposterous deadlines. Sometimes it felt like watching an adaptation of a paperback spy thriller as recounted by a six-year-old boy, who’s regurgitated a rough storyline from memory in one breathless sentence: “And then Jack stops the bomb but the man runs away so Jack chases him in a car but the car crashes into the sea and then a shark comes to eat Jack but Jack kills the shark with a sword and then Jack builds a helicopter out of some reeds and a coathanger and then Jack flies the helicopter into the terrorist’s head THE END.”

Come to think of it, rather than cancelling the series, Fox should be incredibly bold and recommission it using that system for next year: get a six-year-old boy to recount the plot of season one from memory, and then force everyone involved to shoot a word-for-word re-enactment of whatever he says, no matter how absurd. Don’t know about you, but I’d definitely tune in to watch Jack on the trail of a man with funny arms who stole his Lego. In episode four he rides a horse up the side of a building. In episode nine he climbs inside a robot and blows up everyone in the war. In episode 12 he eats some spaghetti and hides from a giant with a purple beard. It is, without question, the finest television series ever made.

Failing that, the “ticking clock” format is too good to leave alone. If CSI and NCIS can spin themselves off into independent mutations, why shouldn’t 24? How about a Sex and the City/24 hybrid in which Samantha has 24 hours to conceive? With anyone – man or beast? Potentially pornographic. OK, more sensibly: what about a version of 24 set during the second world war? Or in the middle of a Towering Inferno-style disaster? Or by a wall somewhere in or near Plymouth? Admittedly, that last concept needs work.

Best of all, they could create the ultimate mind-mangling edition by setting the whole thing 20 years in the future. Halfway through the series, a group of futuristic terrorists (white hair, silver bodysuits) set off a time-reversing pulse-bomb that makes events unfold in reverse. Fiendishly, they detonate it on the last Sunday in October, at the precise moment when the clocks go forward an hour. In the immediate aftermath, 10 members of Jack Bauer Jr’s team die of confusion trying to synchronise watches. It’s down to Jack Jr himself to save the day, but since the detonation of the timebomb moves further away with each passing second, his task gets harder and harder, and the series carries on way beyond its allotted 24 episodes, all the way back through the passage of time until it reaches the big bang, at which point it is revealed that the universe itself was created by a similar explosion – an explosion Jack’s great great great great great great great great forefather somehow manages to thwart, thereby cancelling the formation of time and space itself.

“The following takes place between now and never o’ clock.” Come on. It’s got a ring to it.

Source: The Guardian

The longest-running animated television show, The Simpsons, celebrated their 399th episode by creating a stylish and amusing parody of hit ‘real-time’ drama 24.

The episode entitled ’24 Minutes’ features guest appearances from none other than Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) as the hard-ass CTU agent who never sleeps or goes to take a break in the comfort area, and his CTU assistant, the know-it-all computer wizard Chloe O’Brien (Mary Lynn Rajkskub).

Sample these two video clips below with Kiefer providing the familiar intro to the show plus edited highlights of 24 references!

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It’s quite amusing to see the famous ticking clock and the split-screens.

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Probably the most amusing news story on Kiefer – the star of ‘real-time’ drama 24.

Kiefer Sutherland has only himself to blame for the delay of his Jack Bauer action figure. The Emmy Award-winning actor set fire to the prototype model during a drunken night out…

The action figure had been developed by McFarlane Toys and would have hit the retail stores sooner, but the ‘real’ Jack Bauer decided to destroy it.

Sutherland explains, “They tried to come out with one a couple of years ago and they had sent me the doll for my approval… We took the doll out for a night to have some fun and we’d had some drinks. We sat it on the corner of the table. We started torturing him around 11 o’clock at night, and, by two o’clock in the morning, we had set him on fire in the parking lot.

“We got up the next day and there was just this puddle of wax. His clothes didn’t burn, which I thought was pretty cool… and then I got a call the next day saying, ‘Did you like the doll?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it was great.’ And they said, ‘Well, OK, good, you gotta send it back to us because that was the prototype… It took that guy a year to make it.’ I said, ‘Well, let me look for it, I think I left it in the trailer.’ This went on for about a week and then I had to just kinda come clean.”

To be fair, the model of the all-American action hero doesn’t even look like him. So did Kiefer do the right thing?

Source: andPOP