les emissions...

the thing i love the most about french tv is the commercials...for one thing, there are far fewer and the commercial breaks are every 30 minutes (or more, if you're watching a movie)...and secondly, they're just more interesting...my favorite commercial is for cegetel dsl ("la vitesse vous manque?" - "are you lacking speed?")...

the one thing that really bothers me, however, is the fact that nothing starts at a normal time...maybe i'm just used to american programming where everything starts on the half-hour...here, the 9 pm movie, actually starts a 8:50...the morning news ends at 9:07 instead of 9 on the dot...part of it is the problem of making foreign television, which they have a lot of, fit this commercial schedule...to fill these weird programming gaps, they created these funny little programs that they stick randomly throughout the schedule...the most famous, "camera cafe" shows corporate life from a hidden camera in the employee coffee machine...they've now turned it into a film (espace détente)...there's "un gars une fille" (a guy a girl), about a couple, chou-chou and lou-lou, absolutely hilarious...but my favorite is samantha...nothing beats french men dressed as women, making stupid jokes and puns...