Spurious Awards

This week’s Spurious Awards include ultra-fast news gathering in V , a Romulan in Lost , worst idea for a game ever and more

Most Surprising Guest Star Of The Week

Hang on, do our eyes deceive us? Is that an aged Romulan in the old people’s home Jack visits in Lost ?

Performance Of The Week

In the otherwise disappointingly lame musical episode of Fringe , one moment of bizarre genius stood out when three corpses in Walter’s lab sit up and give us a jaunty rendition of “The Candyman” from Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory . Maybe they should audition for the Ex-Factor ?

Worst Idea For A Game Of The Week

Years ago, there was a popular schoolyard gag about Kirk, “boldly going where no man had gone before… the girls’ toilets.” Oh, those innocent days. Now, videogames are going where no game has gone before… up some girl’s muff. Channel 4 and Zombie Cow Studios are currently developing Privates , a platform shooter (which will be available to download to PC free from the C4 and E4 websites) in which a tiny gang of marines with condoms on their heads delve into vaginas and arses, blasting away oozy, shouty monsters. Zombie Cow has described the game as, “Technically pretty accurate if you don’t count the tiny people or the germs with teeth,” in a half-hearted attempt to make it seem like the game has some kind of educational value, and not just designed to appeal to potty-brained teenage boys who snigger at the word vagina. "We’re exploring some pretty unique gaming environments and themes,” adds Marshall. “I can honestly say I can't imagine you've ever played anything quite like it. There's a hell of a lot more to come soon.” We seriously don’t want to see their update of Jet Set Willy .

Fastest News Gathering Of The Week

TV cliché #457 decrees that whenever one character urges another to switch on the TV because there’s breaking news, nobody ever has to channel flick to find the news. They just switch on the telly and up pops the news report right away. No-one’s ever tuned into MTV, Bonanza Bingo or Hot, Sweaty and Naked. V , being V , manages to expand on cliché #457 in its own inimitable, nonsensical, laws-of-nature-defying way. Right. A V shuttle crashes. Father Jack is an on the spot witness. He immediately phones Erica to tell her. Anxiously, she immediately phones her son to check he wasn’t on the shuttle. He wasn’t, but he switches on the TV to find out what’s happening… and there’s the news report in full swing. That’s some reaction time by One News there. We suspect some kind of tip-off.

Most Desperate Attempt to Illustrate A Dull New Story Of The Week

How do you illustrate a news story about a public consultation on budget cuts to local amenities in the Highlands? If you’re the BBC website , with an Ood, of course. Why? Because residents of Inverness are going to see their alien slave grants slashed, maybe? Erm, no. Turns out (in the very,very last line of the story) that a number of museums are under threat of closure, and one of them currently has an exhibition of SF movie and TV props. You have to wonder what image they would have used if there had been a exhibition on the history of the flushable toilet running instead…

Fake Opening Titles Of The Week

It’s a shame this came our way just a couple of weeks after our feature about one-off opening title sequences, because it’s a beaut. But it’ll only really make any sense to anyone old enough to remember Hart To Hart (presumably in the US it gets repeated loads on cable…)

Missing Sequels Of The Week

There’s been quite a few reports on the news over the past week about some really naff attempts by Chinese fraudsters to get around copyright laws with their lame, rip-off superhero action figures. They’re all pretty hilarious – Spader-Man (the dyslexic webslinger), Silver Bat (on his bat-horse, indeed), etc. But the most mystifying case of suspect name-changery has to be Robert-Cop 3. Not just Robert-Cop, but Robert-Cop 3 , you’ll note. Which begs the question, what happened to Robert-Cop 1 and 2? Did they fall foul of Captain Custom? Will we ever find out how an ordinary copper became a Robert? Are they now Bobbies? We’ll leave it there…