Calum's Wee GNOME Blog » television

Progress…?

calum — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:19:49 +0000

Said farewell to an old friend today: the 14″ Sony KVM1400U TV that my parents bought for me when I left home in June 1993. (I well remember double-checking with the man in the shop that it had a SCART input, as I was desperate to get a better picture from my Commodore Amiga 500+ than the RF input I’d been using up to then gave me… and eschewing the slightly more expensive variant that had teletext, as that seemed like something I’d never use.)

It’s been used almost daily since then and was still working perfectly, and I hate replacing stuff that does. But if nothing else, it had been dropped so many times that the case was in several bits and I couldn’t really guarantee it was still electrically safe. So off to the great recycling plant in the sky (well, Argos) it went. Somehow I doubt that the 19″ LED TV we bought to replace it, for almost exactly the same price in numerical terms, will last another couple of decades.

(We aren’t a completely CRT-free household yet, though—we have a larger and equally well-used Sony warhorse in the dining room that’s probably still got a year or two left in it!)

Après Match 2008

calum — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:59:29 +0000

If there’s one thing that always brightens up RTÉ‘s coverage of the big fitba’ tournaments, it’s the Après Match team’s piss-takes of the Irish TV pundits, which are usually shown at the end of the live coverage or highlights programmes. They remind me a lot of the early Only an Excuse? sketches from back home.

I’d missed most of AM’s Euro 2008 efforts so far, so I was happy to find out tonight that they’re online here[1]. I presume the site will be updated as they do more throughout the tournament.

Naturally they’re much funnier if you’re familiar with the Irish TV stations’ football coverage, although the targets include the likes of Graeme Souness, Liam Brady and Frank Stapleton who are familiar enough to viewers in the UK and elsewhere. That said, they actually started with a Sky Sports send-up this year—just a pity Gary Cooke‘s impression of Andy Gray is one of the poorest I’ve heard any of them do, especially as Risteárd’s Richard Keys is right on the money!

[1] RealPlayer plugin required, and doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, I’m afraid