Foreign TV shenanigans!

The Summer Olympics have come and gone for another season, but the Paralympics are in full swing, if you're still hankering for some athletic competition! I didn't know much about the Paralympics, so I did a little googling, and found this wiki page, which would never lie to me. According to it, the Summer Paralympics have been held immediately following the Olympics since 1988, and the Games started as a small competition between British WWII veterans in the late 1940s.

The Paralympics don't enjoy the same level of widespread awareness that the Olympics do, but let's hope that's only because it's still working its way on to the world stage, and not for any other uglier reason. As the Games are held in the same city as the Olympics, there's still quite a lot of business going on in London surrounding them, and the Royal family has been out taking part and supporting the athletes. It's tough to find a Paralympics broadcast here in the States, but you'd think it'd be much easier in the UK. Alas, no.

Photo by CE

This is what my friend CE encountered when she tried to tune in to the Paralympics early on. Hopefully, they've gotten that sorted out by now. Also, hopefully, they learned to spell PLEASE at some point.

If this were in the US, this would totally be some sort of joke about British spellings. "This is how they spelled please in Medieval times!" And then they'd play Monty Python and the Holy Grail, so you'd forgive the bad joke.

It's somewhat comforting to know that British broadcasters are no better at spelling than their American counterparts, no? We may have done well with that Revolution thingy, but we haven't entirely risen above our roots yet. I also like how different this is from an American apology. I feel like you'd almost always get a phone number now, so you can call a specific place to complain, even though, because the sign is up, the broadcaster clearly knows it's not working. The Brits are just like "Eh, it's not working now. You can try again later. Maybe it'll be working. Maybe not. GOOD DAY."

Because if you finish with manners, you win.

(Thanks, CE!)