Anyone who doesn't live in England and have digital TV is missing out on some brilliantly strange TV lately. Anyone who DOES, may I point you towards the joy that is BBC4 and Ideal World. The former is showing gloriously odd programmes lately and the latter is a low-budget shopping channel with crazed presenters, a bizarre schedule and some interesting methods of approach in respect to selling items.

BBC4, on the other hand, has been showing lots of 60's programmes everyone never got to see but wish they did and documentaries verging into the highest realms of weirdness. Lately, I've been watching 60's cult sci-fi classic The Prisoner (completely mad but BRILLIANT) and the interestingly titled "Adam Adamant Lives!" in which the main character is a guy from 1800-and-something who's frozen in time until the 1960's.

I encourage EVERYONE to see The Prisoner: it's set in The Village, a seaside town that is in fact a prison for its inhabitants who are subjected to multiple psycological tests and are referred to only as numbers. The maintenance staff of the prison drive round in Mini Mokes and the guards are huge, translucent floating rubber balls that can suffocate a man to death. Watch it enough and it even begins to make sense.

BBC4 also had a documentary on the BBC Radiophonics Workshop (the guys who did the Doctor Who (I LOVE Dr Who) theme tune and assorted sci-fi special effects noises) in which - during interviews with ex members - a balding guy with a beard, glasses and a blue shirt kept appearing in the background, partially lit and glaring manically into the camera with a fixed smile. Occasionally, he was upside down and I swear at one point he was rearranging his hair. This had NOTHING to do with the program as a whole, the guy isn't even MENTIONED, and I had to rub my eyes and ask others if they could see him too before concluding he was definetly NOT a figment of my imagination.

Watching digital late at night is like sitting through a dream: once you turn it off, you're not quite sure it actually happened. I would like to emphasis I am *not* on crack but the guys who made these gems of television probably are. I have hereby reached the conclusion that televisual lunacy is GREAT. Much better than bloody soap operas. Hooray for madness!

What's the weirdest thing everyone here has seen on TV lately?

Quote:Originally posted by Alex

I am not a number, I am a free man!

Er, yes. Have you got freeview, or one of those sky/cable thingys? I'm probably going to do the freeview thing as I'm sufficiently fed up of seeing trailers for interesting shows, thinking "yeah, that looks cool, I'll watch that!", only to hear the dreaded phrase "at 9 o'clock, on BBC3". ITV2 looks quite good sometimes too, even though it's all rather lowest-common-denominator stuff.

The weirdest thing I've seen on TV lately? That refereeing decision against Portugal, although I suppose that's not TV's fault.

Freeview. Currently, with "Kingdom Hospital" getting shown on BBC2, a show isn't good enough unless I yell "This is fucked up!" at least twice.

Hahaha! I was on holiday and the information channel there was a powerpoint presentation. I turned it on one moring and it was showing someone's windows desktop.