ITV serves up a right Lemon »

ITV serves up a right Lemon

March 19th, 2008

I watched the amazingly funny new Keith Lemon show, Keith Lemons Very Brilliant World Tour, last night on ITV2. The character is a creation of Leigh Francis of Bo Selecta fame and has popped up in a few small doses here and there. However, this is his first major series and i was in stitches. I don’t know whether it’s just the Leeds accent (being a Yorkshire fella myself) that cracks me up, the amazing way Leigh played the character or maybe i see a bit of myself in him? A bit of everything methinks. How he stopped himself from laughing i’ll never know.

Bang Tidy.

Now here’s the rub. With the success of TV broadcasters such as the BBC moving online with their iPlayer (which i Beta-tested and was very good BTW) all channels are following suit including ITV. You’ll see at the end of most of their new programmes now a web address for the show. Being as i wanted more Keith Lemon i went straight to the address they flashed on-screen, www.itv.com/keith. Awesome. ‘Page does not exist’ i was told. after checking it wasn’t my eyesight or chunky fingers still no joy. So ingeniously (ahem) i tried itv.com/keithlemon….. bingo. First sour lemon to ITV. But i was well excited when i saw they had outtake videos and extra content. Bang tidy is that.

After selecting ‘Learn Japanese with Keith’ the video player went in a constant loading loop and wouldn’t play. WTF was this a mac issue? Ah no. Amazingly ITV have chosen Microsoft Silverlight as their player of choice…. sweet jesus. So after installing the fabled Silverlight (and i was getting bored at this point) i tried again. No joy. Just a message saying they were using Silverlight to enhance the experience for mac and firefox users. And that was it! No Keith Lemon, no Japanese learnt. A couple of classic lemons from ITV. So i did the only sensible thing and went to youtube, where it worked…. so here’s learning Japanese with Keith Lemon