Seeing as after five years I seem to have completely run out of things to say on this journal, I might as well mention something else that I found mildly entertaining. Yesterday I would probably have told you that I thought Mitchell and Webb were rather unfunny (not irredeemably, though - Catherine Tate's always going to be difficult to beat in that respect) but that was before I saw Nümberwang, which I have been laughing about for roughly the last 16 hours.

It helps that apart from the absurd exaggerated details like the umlauts over the numbers, this is pretty much what I remember German television as being like - bright, loud, fast and very difficult to work out what's going on. Even the spoken German is much more competent than you'd expect (barring the obvious problems with the title itself) even though you'd think it would need to be severely codded up to make it funny.

However, I didn't realize that this was in fact just an alternative spin on one of their recurring sketches (normally in English) that seems to make fun of chance-based or overly complex daytime TV quiz programmes - like a numerical Mornington Crescent. And I didn't realize that it had become quite such a cultural phenomenon in my absence, with even this usually rather sober site having a page detailing it, a fake board game and a real online game (in which I was rather frustrated that I could never get past round 2 despite it obviously being an exercise in futility).

I suppose to sum up, Britain has gone a bit strange since I left, but has not yet grown out of making fun of other countries. (America in general seems to be much more sensitive about things like this - Banzai didn't even get going before it was taken off.) So that's something familiar to come back to.