I was just thinking the other night, while watching TV on UBC satellite, we really have the ODDEST stuff here! I get programs from all over the world (Australia, India, Korea, Japan, United Kingdom, USA, Taiwan, Spain
etc.) but some of them, you can only say “Huh”.
For instance, has anyone seen the show “Travelling on the Euro Train”? It’s an hour show, where the commentator takes you on a trip on a train somewhere in Europe. The other night it was in Spain. Sounds cool, right? Right.
Weird thing is, the commentator speaks for about 10 minutes during an entire hour show. The rest of the time it’s earily quiet, with music playing in the background and the cameraman just filming out of the train window. So all you see are fields, houses, shops, factories, powerlines, boats etc. zipping by. For an hour. At first it’s a bit mesmerizing and then you think “er….why?” and switch to another channel!
The next one, which I love, is “Passport to the Sun”. It’s a 2003 BBC tv series (actually shown here on an obscure channel that no-one ever watches). It’s a docu-drama following the lives of tons of different British expats living in Spain and holidaymakers who come for a quick trip. The people on there range from the typical Brit boozer who just wants to get rip-roaring drunk for his entire holiday, to the retired folks in their villas and on their boats, and the Brits who like good old American line-dancing (in Spain 🙂
A couple of weeks ago, one of the guys on was Leapy Lee. He’s the singer from the 60s, that had a huge hit with his song “Little Arrows”. Apparently, he now lives in Mallorca where, every week, he does a “Curry Night” at a local restaurant. He usually has about 150 people show up for a night of dinner, drinking and dancing and he makes the Indian curry. Looked like fun! The show is addictive, and it also shows you quite a bit about the British psyche. Honestly, I’m not that proud to be British after I’ve finished watching it!
Then there’s a Japanese show called “Fashionable Living” hosted by 3 of the stupidest Japanese women you’ve ever seen. They ooh and aaww and cooh over jewelry designs and hand-painted plant pots and then, one of them shows you how to make one. They are so stupid and mindless to watch that it really is addictive. Especially when you can only think “How do grown women actually act like that?”
My Japanese friends tell me it’s very indicative of how Japanese women act, although, now they are living out side of Japan, they think it’s as weird as I do.
There’s also a Korean show, which is something about ‘Love’, but as I don’t read Korean it’s difficult to figure out what. It’s like a game show, with two teams – men and women. From the audience reaction and film clips, they all seem to be famous people in Korea. I only recognize one of them though from a Korean soap opera I own. It looks like they do some kind of ‘dare game’ where one team dares the other team to participate in a game. They do, they look like fools and everyone laughs.
Then one of the guys presents a flower to one of the women. Very weird and bizarre but I have sat through several of these 45 minutes shows, in Korean, simply because I can’t tear my eyes away.
