Okay, I finally did it -- I finally figured out how to get the BBC iPlayer to work on my American computer. For those who don't know, this is basically the British Broadcasting Company's version of the streaming sites you see among all the American television networks here, where hundreds upon hundreds of hours of BBC content (both TV and radio) are available for instant watching/listening at the touch of a button; but since the BBC is paid for by British taxes (and since their American rebroadcasts are done on cable, which you have to pay for as well), the entire site is disabled to all internet connections that don't originate from a UK server address. Ah, but it turns out that there's a fairly simple workaround for this, which is to install a way to use a fake proxy server on your system, to literally trick the BBC website into thinking that you're based out of a British country; for example, I used Lifehacker.com's guide to installing the "FoxyProxy" extension on my Firefox browser, then just Googled the term "British proxy server lists" and used the very first fake IP address I found, which has worked perfectly the three or four times I've now booted up the BBC iPlayer here at home. (And just so there's no misunderstanding, let's plainly admit that what I'm talking about is against the law in Great Britain; but more on the ethical considerations of all this a little later.)

I've wanted to try this for a long time, to tell you the truth, because just in general I find the pop detritus of a foreign culture to be infinitely fascinating; this is one of the big things I learned during my trips to Germany in 2003 and '04, for example, that among the items I found most exotic and interesting while there were such lowbrow things as bathroom graffiti, local tabloids, highway billboards, daytime television programs and the like. And let's face it, I'm already a fairly heavy Anglophile to begin with, which I absolutely do not deny, and have already established a habit over the years of watching an unusually large amount of British television when given the chance -- in fact, many of my favorite shows of all time are originally from the UK, such as The Prisoner, Monty Python, Doctor Who, The IT Crowd, Monarch of the Glen, Ballykissangel, Absolutely Fabulous, The Young Ones, Rising Damp, Coupling, Fawlty Towers, and a lot more.

But those are all major, traditional shows we're talking about, easy to export to other countries and with a fairly surefire way to generate revenue; what gets lost in this overseas transfer instead are the local versions of the more transient stuff, talk shows and soap operas and local news, the stuff that makes up the bulk of any television station's daily programming, no matter where on the planet that station is located. And that's the most fascinating stuff, I think, because it's like a window into daily life in that other country, and just as big a peek into another national culture as viewing locals' photostreams at Flickr or reading their blogs, which as I've discussed at length here before is something I find one of the biggest singular pleasures about the entire internet as a communications platform, this opportunity to literally transfer your consciousness to another location (if you do it right), and to feel for at least a few hours like you have literally somehow magically transported your physical self to a location halfway around the world.

And so like I said, I've ended up booting up FoxyProxy about three or four times this week, and have now watched or at least sampled somewhere around 15 or so shows; and I have to confess, it's been so far just as riveting and interesting an experience as I thought it was going to be. Because the thing to know about the BBC if you don't already is that their big, splashy, well-known expensive dramas and comedies represent only a small fraction of what's on the air there each day; much more common there is just a whole endless series of inexpensive talk shows and game shows, news shows and soap operas, almost none of which we ever even get glances of here in the US. And so for example I've now watched episodes of Have I Got News For You (one of the oldest of these game shows), and Never Mind the Buzzcocks (a music version of these game shows), and QI: Quite Interesting (a popular and unusual game show hosted by Stephen Frye, and the inspiration behind NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!), where I've discovered that they all essentially work the same way; that in reality the "game" part of these game shows are basically excuses to bring a panel full of British comedians together to riff on various current events from the news that week, and with each and every one of them starting with monologues that basically pair up current headlines with outrageously silly photos and videos. And then for another example, I've also now watched the talk shows Frank Skinner's Opinionated, The Graham Norton Show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Russell Howard's Good News, and the teen-oriented The 5:19 Show (and had already gotten hooked a year before over at YouTube on The Sunday Night Project, one of the first British talk shows to get me interested in throwaway programming to begin with), and they all tend to share a lot of the same traits too, including this penchant for wacky-photo opening monologues, as well as the BBC's habit of making all their show sets primarily revolve around bright purple color schemes. (And why do all the sound stages at the BBC seem to share this purple color scheme? Well, I guess that's a question for someone else to answer.)

The reason I find these so fascinating is precisely that they discuss the things that don't usually transfer well to an international audience; they are chock full of references to local events, feature a whole series of only minor celebrities who will never ever be known to American audiences, rely on jokes that many times go straight over my head. But so too is it fascinating to see the different style of humor and patter that used for these shows, a much more biting and dark-edged style of comedy than seen in most similar-type shows here in the US; and speaking of that, by the way, I've also learned this week that the cliche really is true, that these shows sometimes seem to be nothing but an excuse to create an entire self-sustaining industry for an endless series of genial, tired-looking, leather-skinned middle-aged gay comedians, in that you tend to see the same dozen or so of them pop up on show after show after show, sometimes as the host and sometimes as a guest. I don't know why I find all this so fascinating, but I do; perhaps it's the sense of getting a glimpse at another society, or perhaps the sorta taboo aspect of it all, albeit a type of taboo that has its roots in the banal.

And to tell you the truth, this isn't all the types of shows I've been checking out this week: I also sampled Question Time, their version of Meet The Press but where random audience members get to directly ask politicians questions (which, by the way, is yet another aspect of these shows I find fascinating, that politicians also regularly appear on these jokey current-events quiz shows, and are expected to be just as funny and sarcastic as the comedians they've been paired up with, something you would never see on American television in a million years); and I also checked out one of the Prime Minister debates that have been in the news so much this month, as well as a few of the public-opinion shows that appeared before and after them (where it becomes clear that the British public finds the whole thing a lot sillier and pointless than how American news sources have portrayed it, a sort-of reality-show popularity contest that to many Brits represents the worst of dumbed-down surface-level American influence on UK culture, not the "historic game-changer" it's been portrayed as by CNN, the New York Times and others); and I even caught the latest episode of Britain's most popular soap opera, EastEnders.

That might've been the most surprisingly fascinating experience of all, to tell you the truth; because despite it being not much more than exactly what you would expect from a low-budget daily soap opera, this look at a fictional working-class neighborhood in the troubled east side of London features what's easily the most racially diverse cast of all the BBC shows I've now watched. And that says a lot, I think, and goes a long way towards explaining why Europe is having such a bigger problem than the US is as far as educated, supposedly assimilated Muslim youths turning to extremism and terrorism in their twenties; because in a country whose media only even allows such people to appear on the air at all while in the guise of a trashy melodrama about low-class problems, while all "prestige" shows feature almost exclusively rosters of pale white males in their fifties and sixties, that's a society that obviously has deep and profound problems concerning the idea of permanent class divides, one of the few issues that nearly everyone can unanimously agree that America deals with in a better way, which is why you see so profoundly many more young people of color in the US successfully transition into quiet middle-class adulthood, instead of becoming angry poor suicide bombers like what plagues such cities as London and Paris these days.

Now, to be honest, I doubt I'll be doing too terribly much more illegal BBC-watching in the future, after I get all this cultural experimenting out of my system, because frankly there's not much of a reason for me as an American to do so; out of all the shows I've now sampled, for example, the only one I liked enough to want to watch the entire run of is the truly hilarious, half-improvised, creative-class family comedy Outnumbered, and that's one of these traditional prime-time high-budget shows I was talking about before, which makes it much easier to simply rent out on DVD through Netflix, instead of going to all the trouble of setting up this fake proxy server and dealing with the hiccups of streaming videos online. (And to be clear, there are still shows on my list that I haven't gotten around yet to watching, such as Waterloo Road and Skins and Mock The Week; and for all its coolness, I should mention that there are some BBC shows still simply not available through their iPlayer service, such as the half-century-old astronomy show The Sky At Night, the venerable University Challenge, and such other "legacy" shows kept on the air mostly for tradition, but whose actual ratings are in the basement.) That's the ultimate thing about an activity like this, which is why I don't feel bad about it technically being illegal, just like I don't feel bad about watching the occasional TV show illegally through BitTorrent when I miss its original airing, in that I never use these options as a way of doing a permanent runaround; that when it comes to the projects I truly enjoy and wish to support, the Doctor Whos and Losts of the world, I'm more than happy to consume these shows through the proper revenue-generating channels, like renting the official DVDs or watching them on ad-supported television. Everything else is basically fun experimenting; but like all experiments, they're meant to be both short-term and temporary, not a means of literally taking money out of the pockets of the shows' creators.

So anyway, that's what's mostly been eating up my time around here this week, which I thought you'd enjoy hearing about. I'll talk with you again soon, I'm sure.