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This was a fun one. In 2008 we went to Beverley in East Yorkshire for the British Criterium Champs and the East Yorkshire Classic. Chips were eaten. Hull accents were heard.
And we got in trouble for driving the commissaire car too dangerously.
We recorded the audio on an extraordinarily long microphone that cost £1. You can tell. We also didn’t have a script. You can tell that too.
We gave the documentary the tagline “UN FILM SANS MERDE” which in retrospect was a little bit presumptuous.
A Sunday in Hull
August 2008
We’ve got a fairly bandwidth intensive edition this month, what with all the photos and that documentary thing.
The documentary. We just about managed to resist using the Dean Downing hand washing scene as an homage to the meticulous bike cleaning at the start of A Sunday in Hell. We wanted it to be its own thing, and it is, just about.
It doesn’t quite match with what we envisioned when we got on a train to East Yorkshire armed with two handycams, but it still kicks the shit out of most “real” cycling coverage. Grab a camera and make your own.
A Sunday in Hull
Un film sans merde
2022 revision: We absolutely didn’t have the rights to the Primal Scream song we originally used at the start. We’ve muted the video for the first nine seconds and added a disclaimer.
There you have it. We made a thing. Now nobody can ever criticise us for not making a thing.
HOW THE UCI CAN BEAT RACE ORGANISERS
HOLD THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS DURING THE TOUR DE FRANCE
Most of the world still won’t give a shit about any other race than the Tour, but at least making it clash with the Worlds might mean that Tom Boonen and Paolo Bettini don’t turn up. Not that that actually made any difference to anybody’s enjoyment of the race this year, mind.
THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2008
THE MEDIA COMPLETELY IGNORING THE VUELTA IN FAVOUR OF THE MORE INTERESTING TOURS OF IRELAND AND BRITAIN, THEN TRYING TO GET EVERYBODY EXCITED ABOUT THE FINAL TEN DAYS
The Angrilu stage is the day before the finish of the Tour of Britain, so look for the “Best Vuelta in recent history” rhetoric some time around then.
TEN ANNOYING THINGS DRIVERS DO
NUMBER TEN
LISTEN TO THEIR MUSIC REALLY LOUD
So loud that it shakes the windows, stock, and customers of your local shop. So loud that it couldn’t possibly be bearable to be sat in the car unless you’re an overweight, braindead thug who’s desperate for any kind of outside validation, even if it only comes from equally braindead thugs.
THE MAKING OF A SUNDAY IN HULL
We know what you’re thinking: How did you make such an incredibly professional looking and well-crafted film with no budget whatsoever? Well, there are a few tips and tricks used in the industry that are completely unknown to the chunky-legged, sofa-bound public. For instance:
CAMERA LENSES
There’s no need for expensive, high-quality cameras. You can achieve the exact same effect by taping a £6 fisheye lens from Hong Kong onto the end of a camcorder.
It might look obvious now we’ve explained it, but nobody can tell the difference in the real world and they’ll probably think you’re Stanley Kubrick or some other dead person. For your second camera, just grab the smallest thing you can possibly find.
EDITING
Editing can be cheap and easy when you use a cracked version of Premiere given to you by somebody you hardly know. It also installs a trojan that asks for your bank account number and you get midnight phone calls from Russian men, which is the kind of quality service that serious auteurs like us demand.
Real film-makers don’t use expensive, powerful computers to edit. If you have a hard drive that’s too small to hold the entire film, you get the simple task of editting down two hours of footage in ten minute chunks.
DVD BURNER
Authoring a DVD to send to very important publications such as Cycling Weekly and Tractor Farmer is an excellent way of gaining publicity for your film. If you try to do it with a version of StarForce that was included in an old version of Pro Cycling Manager and causes your computer to locks down and become completely unusable before, during, or after it does anything to do with DVD drives, that builds character. Executive producers look for that in a director.
TEAM IMAGE OF THE MONTH #1
AMERICAN BEEVES
Excellent work disguising that Saunier Duval kit. Could maybe try using a Sharpie instead of just a Bic next time though
EMAIL OF THE MONTH
From: Jakub Seydak
To: DerailedUK
Subject: Stephen Colbert For President, Enters Race
Victorious
Interrupted:
Anger.
Gloves
Repeated.
Anger.
victorious
scandal
Captured
Interrupted:
Anger.
Lofty
Interrupted:
Scandal
TOUR DE FRANCE: CENTENARY EDITION (PS2)
We know we’ve already reviewed the Xbox version of the amazing official Tour de France game, but there’s been some massive improvements in its sequel, Tour de France: Centenary Edition. Here are just some of them:
- The addition of a tuck move, performed by tilting the analogue stick forwards, adds a third fantastic speed that sits somewhere in between the other two options of “Rider Glass Cranks It At Whatever Speed He Feels Like” and “Sprint Until You Pass Out”. It’s definitely not at all a poor substitute for actually having any semblance of control over your character.
- Removal of the Ventoux-lite (not to mention snappily titled) “Peak 2” stage, to be replaced by an identikit rolling stage. This makes specialising in any particular area even more futile than in the previous version.
- Riders no longer fall through the floor at random.
- Introduction of team tactics. By pressing the left trigger you can request a team mate bring you water, and by pressing the right trigger you can request a team mate pace you. In either instance, a rider will appear from behind and crash sideways in to you, usually sending you into the barriers.
- Bikes and equipment are now affordable. They’re also fully customisable with unrealistic and physically impossible designs. They do, however, continue to have woefully misleading names, titles and information: Bikes for mountain stages are heavier, and “sprint” bikes appear to have tri-bars attached.
- Many new officially licensed teams complete with their star rider. This includes the US Postal team, who had won four consecutive Tours de France and were heading for a fifth, and their world-famous, inspirational leader, Roberto Heras.
- The race continues to not feature a peloton, instead featuring hundreds of processor-friendly groups of seven riders scattered across the course. It’s a gap bridging simulator.
- Your character no longer handles like a tank. But you still have to spend an entire year just training your cornering to ensure you don’t crash out of every single race you enter (you still will).
- Training has been tweaked to be more intuitive, in that you can actually see what effect your training will have before you do it. It also has even less of a bearing on the outcome of the race — if you specialise in climbing, you’ll still be starting mountain stages in 131st place; if you specialise in sprinting, you’ll be starting flat stages in 131st place. All you have to do to ever see the front of the race is to become the best rider in history — easy.
- Difficulty has been ramped up to counter the affordable bikes and slightly less illogical training system. You now don’t have a hope in Hell of ever winning a stage of the Tour de France. Hard games always have the greatest credibility!
- The game awards you sprint and points jerseys based on seemingly random factors. General Classification is only slightly less perplexing: Finish the first stage in seventh place and chances are you’ll be in twelfth place overall, even though that just doesn’t make sense.
- Removal of the fun, goal-based practice mode, making way for a “practice mode” that just appears to be a race.
- Still nothing like cycle sport at all.
Overall rating: Something out of ten
COMMENTATORS VERSUS
MTN ENERGADE
We’re not 100% sure on this, but we presumed that the word “Energade” came from “energy” and the suffix “-ade”. So “Enner-jade” would be our way of saying it. Apparently we’re WRONG though, since a certain Tour of Britain announcer has been referring to it as “Enner-gayed”.
DANILO DI LUCA & ALESSANDRO PETACCHI
The Tour of Britain did well to attract high-profile shamed stars on a downward trajectory such as Danilo Di Luca and Alessandro Petacchi. It’s just a shame nobody told a different Tour of Britain announcer what their first names actually are. “Daniel Di Luca” is just weird, and not going the whole hog and calling him “Daniel Luke” is just wasteful. And “Alejandro Petacchi” just doesn’t make a lick of sense…
TEAM IMAGE OF THE MONTH #2
Look! He’s pretending to be a chicken! We bet his team mates just love him.
PRODIR’S LATEST INNOVATION
They’ve designed a special way of hiding things inside hollowed out books. Cylindrical things. Full of liquid substances. But definitely ink, no drugs. Syringes won’t fit there, only pens. The riders on Saunier Duval were already told that, honest.
We’d advocate banning books in the peloton because of this, but most cyclists are so illiterate that they wouldn’t even be able to recognise a book if it walked into their house and slammed its thrilling exposition right into their balls. We should be alright.
TEN ANNOYING THINGS DRIVERS DO
NUMBER NINE
WASH THEIR WINDOWS
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with cars having windows drivers can actually see out of. In fact, they’re quite likely to be one of the things that prevents cars from killing people all the fucking time, and instead makes it so cars only kill people most of the fucking time.
What we’re not so fond of, however, it the act of a driver washing their windows as they drive, using their water squirters. Maybe if cars had nozzles that weren’t shaped like corkscrews they’d actually be able to get some liquid on their windscreen, but at the moment any cyclist or pedestrian within a three metre vicinity is likely to get an unexpected shower of toxic window deshitting chemicals that smell awful and taste like something you’re not supposed to swallow.
And the worst thing is that the driver is always so completely oblivious of how they’ve been an ignorant sack of shit. Perhaps it’s time to teach people that one of the consequences of spraying poisonous liquid all over the place is that anybody nearby is likely to get some of the poisonous liquid on them.
ANIMALS ON BIKES
It’s a dinosaur. A metal dinosaur.
This is so far removed from that brilliant dalmatian riding the tricycle that we’re finally, finally thinking that we might’ve exhausted this obsession. We’ll probably only keep doing these for another two or three years or so now.
DERAILEDUK STICKER GIVEAWAY!
We’ve got a load of stickers with a design that’ll have Gustav Klimt turning in his grave!
Get in touch and we’ll throw a handful of them in to an envelope for you.
Stick them EVERYWHERE.
MAKE YOUR OWN TOUR DE FRANCE MOUNTAIN STAGE FOR TV
THINGS YOU’LL NEED:
- An inability to refer to the word “cycling” as anything other than “The Sport Of Professional Cycling” and the word “race” as “Professional Bike Race”
- A mountain (not essential, since they don’t actually show up on TV anyway)
- All the usual suspects
WHAT YOU DO
- Open with a shot of the peloton hitting the bottom of the mountain. Cut directly to Damiano Cunego going out of the back. Refer to that as a surprise.
- Completely ignore the majority of people in the main group, instead focusing on riders from Anglophone countries. The specific hierarchy is American, British, South African, Australian. If there’s none of them, just say how strong the lead riders are and carry on talking about how unfortunate the riders from Anglophone countries have been.
- Talk incessantly about Chris Froome even though he’s only on the screen because Denis Menchov has overtaken him in an attempt to rejoin the yellow jersey group.
- When it gets to the end, say that the winner reminds you of “A Certain Lance Armstrong”.
PROMO IMAGE OF THE MONTH
IVAN BASSO FOR LIQUIGAS
Shot on a camera phone. Too much headroom. Blurry. No effort whatsoever. A poor performance from a seasoned player in the promo image business. 🙁
TOUR OF BRITAIN OFFICIAL RACE PROGRAMME CONTROVERSY
This is the last time we pay for a Tour de France official guide and a Tour of Britain programme in the same year. They’ve got the exact same features in, almost word for word.
| “TOUR LEXICON” | “PELOTON LEXICON” |
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The images in the feature are all also eerily familiar…
| “TOUR LEXICON” | “PELOTON LEXICON” |
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So there you have it. Categorical proof of something. The Tour of Britain programme is probably still worth buying just for an excuse to talk to the girls who sell them, mind.
WE’RE GOING TO INTERBIKE THIS MONTH, SO THE NEXT ONE WILL BE UP WHENEVER
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