Attention Canadians! News Posted by John Hoare on 15th October 2005, 02:47 Times have changed, our kids are getting worse.. They won’t obey their parents, they just want to fart and curse Should we blame the Government? Or Blame Society? Or should we blame the images on TV? No, Blame Canada! Blame Canada! With all their beady little eyes, their flapping head so full of lies Blame Canada! Blame Canada! We need to form a full assault, It’s Canada’s Fault Don’t blame me, for my son Stan He saw the darn cartoon, and now he’s off to join the clan And my boy Eric once had my picture on his shelf But now when he sees me, he tells me to fuck myself Well? Blame Canada! Blame Canada! It seems that everything’s gone wrong since Canada came along Blame Canada! Blame Canada! They’re not even a real country anyway My son could’ve been a doctor or a lawyer, rich and true Instead he burned up like a piggy on a barbecue Should we blame the matches? Should we blame the fire? Or the Doctors who allowed him to expire? Heck no, Blame Canada! Blame Canada! With their hockey hullabaloo, and that bitch Anne Murray, too! Blame Canada! Shame on Canada.. The smut we must stop. The trash we must smash The laugher and fun must all be undone We must blame them and cause a fuss Before somebody thinks of blaming us! I BET CANADIANS NEVER GET SICK OF THAT BEING QUOTED TO THEM. Anyway, TOS have just added a Canadian Dwarf Tracker, so you can keep up to date with all the shows on, erm, BBC Kids. Well, personally I think kids ought to be brought up on a diet of “twat”, “shit” and vibrator jokes. It’s easy to forget about Dwarf Tracker, actually – the UK edition reminds us that the series is starting yet another re-run from The End tonight @ 9:00pm on UKG2 (followed by Future Echoes and Balance of Power). Actually, this is the perfect chance to get a complete list of edits to the UK Gold showings, so I’ll be watching – but fuck knows why anyone else would be. Come on, show some Rutland Weekend Television repeats, or something – or anything that isn’t released on DVD yet…
The really annoying thing about red dwarf showing on BBC Kids is that they cut out a significant portion of each episode due to the commercial breaks in every half hour time slot. A couple of the most painful examples in recent memory was the loss of the entire scene of Rimmer first coming aboard the enlightenment and meeting Nirvana Crane and the cut backs between Lister with the lows and the Kryten / Cat party (almost all of which was lost) on Demons & Angels.
I think the problem here is that North American TV is absolutely rooted in the half hour/hour time slot mentality, possibly due to sponsors demands, possibly also because of the perceived shorter attention span of North Americans in general. As a result, a show that would take 26-27 minutes like red dwarf is cut back by at least 4-5 minutes to allow 8 minutes or so for commercials. The only exception to this over here is PBS, which runs without commercials. In fact it was on PBS that I first saw series IV-VI…
