Classic TV

There was a pretty cool game show on tv last night. Predictably centred around food with a World Cup twist, it involved two teams (a Korean boy band and a hotchpotch of Japanese comedians dressed as famous people) and a giant 3x3 board with pictures of ridiculously expensive sushi on the squares. Taking it in turns, the players kicked a football towards the board, and the square they knocked out denoted the sushi that their team would eat. The great twist though was that once a square was knocked out, it was replaced with a chilli pepper square...

... and if one of the players put the ball through it, they would have to eat a fiendishly hot chilli pepper. The players were remarkably accuarate, and were able to pick their spots pretty well, as demonstrated by one of the Koreans below.

Bang! Right on the money... this lead to a handful of flaccid beige sushi being wheeled out, at the astronomical cost of 2000 yen each (and that's just one piece, not the usual two).. naturally, there were wide-eyed calls of "amai!" and "oishii!", though for that price I would have expected Konishi Manami to serve it on a gold platter, dressed in a nurse's uniform... next up in the shootout was the Japanese version of Ronaldinho, who had been incredibly smug throughout and trying - in vain - to emulate his namesake's tricks and skills...

It was inevitable that he would tap the ball through one of the chilli pepper squares, and he did. Cue the dramatic entrance of a bright red pepper on a square of rice, a tentative nibble and then a lot of huffing and puffing and drinking of water. Classic.

And finally, with this being wednesday, there was an appearance by Gorie, aka huge man in a pink dress. He/She was sat at a picnic table having lunch, inexplicably with a painted green face, whilst a naked man with a lizard tail writhed about in the background...

It's testament to the fact that I have been in Japan for a long time that the previous paragraph seems completely normal to me now...