Watching sport in Foreign

Apologies for a lack of postings but Mad Dog has been pursuing his other passions - skiing, eating cheese and drinking heavily... in the Alps.

So, no TV, except for BBC Prime (the cream of British TV for expats - Red Dwarf, Tittybangbang, you get the picture...); German late-night shows that appear to be nothing but adverts for dirty phone lines ("Oooh, ich bin geil, ruhf an nul nul acht drei drei drei funf. Geil!" - what? It's research. I had to watch for half an hour to write the words down); and today Formula 1 in French.

I can highly recommend Sport in Foreign. You can still pretty much follow everything but you learn new words like "le box" for the pits and "pneus" (think that's tyres, but the commentator may have had a sneezing fit). It works best for football - watched the Chelsea v Juve game in Bar Italia a while back. The Italian commentators were just like Andy Gray; they refused to pronounce foreign names correctly. They were OK with Bosingwa (unlike Gray) but they wouldn't accept that not everyone has a sounded vowel at the end of their surname. Thus Lamparda and Ashli Cola.

I'll make this a mission: I want to watch cricket in Punjabi, skiing in Swedish (where everything sounds like a dirty word); and rugby in the language of its champions: Gaelic.