Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Je dois partir maintenant, parce-que ma grand-mère est flambée
FRANÇAIS! Excuse My French, BBC2, 9.00pm
It's entirely possible that we're alienating every single last one of our readers by recommending a show that doesn't involve anybody's breasts catching fire or covering a baby in fake tan, but we're going to take a chance and mention this one because we watched it last week and loved it. Perhaps we're getting an inflated sense of superiority after making it to the end of Spiral on BBC4 (even if we did have several "WTF?" moments during the final episode that we still haven't managed to figure out yet), but things involving French seem to appeal to us at the moment.
Innyway, this is being billed as a language-tutorial version of Big Brother, which seems a little far from the point because not even Big Ron Atkinson is as vile as Jayne or Richard. But the aforementioned Big Ron, Esther Rantzen and Marcus Brigstocke have all been sent to France to improve their linguistic skills, and to make it doubleplus-hardcore, they're not allowed to speak any English during the daytime. They all have varying degrees of experience with the language (Big Ron is a beginner, Marcus is a post-beginner, and Esther has an A-level from way back), and each week they're given various tasks they have to do with their limited skills, such as plan and complete a long journey, or run a restaurant.
It doesn't sound fascinating, we know, but there's a lot of fun to be had from this - especially as the subtitles translate what they're saying literally, mistakes and all. So there's a lot of fun to be had from giggling at Big Ron saying something like "please escort my chicken to the toilet". And you never know, you might even learn something. Failing that, you can laugh at people you consider to be beneath you - and if that isn't the quintessence of LOWCULTURE, we don't know what is.
By Steve :: Post link
:: 
::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
