The Internet's Funniest Streamed Movies

Last night I watched one of the poorest shows ever screened on South African television, and I'm including Madam and Eve and Vetkoekpaleis in that list.

The show in question was "Clipz" screened at prime time on M-Net last night. It consists of short clips downloaded from the internet and presented by a host in much the same way as "America's Funniest Hove Videos". Except that instead of Bob Saget, who could sometimes pull off an amusing one-liner, you get a local comedian blandly telling you what's up next, and instead of a live studio audience (in an actual studio) you get a blue-screen virtual studio with crappy graphics.

Advertised as this weeks funniest clips from cyberspace, I'd seen at least a quarter of the clips before and some of them as long as five years ago. And funniest? Admittedly at least half the clips were really amusing and I understand that not everyone has the same sense of humour, but I defy anybody to pronounce that a montage of giggling babies is the height of human hilarity! Seriously, wtf?

The quality of the clips was understandably crap, there was even a warning from the host to this effect. There was also at least five minutes of shameless plugging for M-Net's own "web portal" where you can get short films and funny bloopers from local shows. They showed half of a ultra-short film and one of the aforementioned bloopers. The blooper was of some actor unable to deliver his lines due to fits of suppressed giggles, if that was an example of the funniest blooper on the site I'm glad I took no notice of the URL.

Is this what it has come down to? I mean I totally understand that with the costs of bandwidth in this country most people don't have access to these clips but this is just the height of laziness in television production. This is the kind of programming I expect from e-tv, in fact if this were an e-tv production I'd think it was a great idea for the free-to-air broadcaster. But getting it from M-Net is actually insulting. People from around the country are paying a substantial sum in subscription fees and M-Net is offering this in return?

In general I do enjoy the service provided by my multichoice subscription, otherwise I'd just cancel it, but until there is some serious competition this is unfortunately the kind of bullshit I'm just going to have to put up with.