The Most Depressing Thing Ever
We have digital cable. We’ve had it for quite some time and it’s really nice. The music channels are good, and there are channels we couldn’t get otherwise, and some of them are ones we love.
One of the channels we get as part of our digital package is BBCAmerica. For some reason, though, it was out for about six months. It started out as an intermittent thing. We’d call the cable company and do the “reset via phone” thing and it’d be okay for a while.
Then it would work during the day, but we’d lose it around 7pm.
Then it was never there, and we started losing channels through 109 to about 118.
Kitti finally called the cable company (again) and said this was really getting silly, and we’d already had the cable box replaced once and it was really just a mass of failure and so the tech this time was actually helpful.
Long story short (too late), we have BBCAmerica back.
So. The depressing thing. To celebrate the fact that it’s back, we were watching Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.
And then it happened.
Between shows… between the end credits of one and the start of the next… there was a public service announcement that said (paraphrasing) “These shows contain people with funny accents. If you can’t understand them, turn on closed captioning!” in this cheerful, happy, helpful moderately Cockney accent (possibly recorded by the same guy who does the Geico Gecko).
I thought it was a joke. And then, between shows, there it was again.
Dot… dot… dot. That’s right up there with the time I found out that “Trainspotting” was re-recorded for the US market, with the accents toned down (both of which rank slightly below the time I saw a version of “Mad Max” that was dubbed into American English).
It’s the friggin BBC! It’s British television! I think anyone making the decision to watch the channel will already know the people have “funny” accents.
Once and ONLY once have I had to resort to turning on the captioning. We were watching “The Acid House” and the Scottish slang was so thick and the lines in one of the stories were spoken so rapidly that we honestly couldn’t follow it. Reading it at least gave us better context, so we could figure out the slang.
Sigh. Just sigh. I suppose they’ll start putting that same warning on SciFi, before Doctor Who, because… y’know. Accents.
Though they really ought to include it before Stargate, because dude, who says things like “zed pee em” instead of “zee pee em”? Crazy Canadians with their wacky, hard to understand accents.
Tags: Television
August 6th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Hah! My stepmother, who is Canadian, recently had us over to watch a British WWII movie (The Cruel Sea). She kept asking me, the stoopid American, if I needed her to turn on closed captioning. Finally I asked her “why, are they about to start speaking German? Because then I’d need a translator. I really am OK with the English language.” Gah! And she’s the one who says “oot and aboot”!
August 6th, 2007 at 9:02 am
Hey, I had more~ where’d it go?
There was supposed to be another couple of lines on there that said that I’d heard that PSA also, and thought it an idea to be right up there with stupid.
Sigh.