A very heavy burtation at The Grammy Awards

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Have you ever had one of those anxiety dreams where you show up for a school play (etc) only you've never read the script, and just have to fluff your way through opening night?

Or where you have to run a radio show only the microphones are broken and you have only one, highly inappropriate CD to play and then there's like 20 minutes of dead air while you try desperately to get this show on the road?

Perhaps they're just my own personal brand of subconscious hell, but for one local American news reporter, Sunday night's Grammy Awards telecast became a living nightmare.

Let's go live to the Staples Centre with CBS2's Serene Branson, shall we?



Just in case you were wondering what she said, it was:

"Well a very very heavay - uh - heaveh burtation tonight. We had a very darist-darison, by, lets go hit teret taysan those to the bet who had the pet."

Or, visually represented by the power of meme:


(Before you start wringing your hands and raining on the LOL parade, she didn't have a stroke - as was widely rumoured - and is fine, having chalked it down to a simple case of nerve-induced brain addling.)

I'm not sure exactly what a heavy burtation is, but I'm guessing that if it ends up in the Macquarie Dictionary, there'll be a link to Branson's to-camera monologue under the definition.

Strange things happen when people try to ad lib straight to camera; one particularly brilliant example was VH1's Jessica St. Clair, who - live - decided to test out a new sign-off at the end of Best Night Ever, a new pop culture clip show.

Sadly, the video has been disappeared from the web (perhaps to prevent St. Clair from performing professional-embarrassment-related hara kiri), but  fortunately I watched it so many times, I can still repeat it verbatim:


Full of confidence, St. Clair announced: "And 'cause this is a new show, I'm going to try out a new sign-off!"

As her eyes slowly registered that her sign-off train was going off the rails, she bleated: "So sit back and really see you guys, see ya."

Around the "really", her voice broke and squeaked, the dreadful realisation sinking in but unable to send the signal to her mouth to stop in time.

Her kicky new sign-off went down the televisual toilet faster than a lead turd.

Right before the camera cut away, her eyes darted to the side, as if to say, I think I can see my career escaping out the window. It was awful. It was amazing. It was amazingly awful and awfully amazing.

I couldn't stop thinking of St. Clair when I watched (numerous times) Branson's herp-a-derp Grammys report this morning.

I can laugh because I've been there - on live radio, or live TV, quite often you just start riffing, and quickly your mouth gets away from your brain. It's not unusual to find yourself in the middle of a sentence that you have no idea how to finish.

If we are to believe Branson, that's precisely what happened to her at the Grammys.

The camera probably cut to her when she was in the middle of thinking what to say, then someone probably barked in her ear-piece, and by the look of her anguished glance off camera, maybe someone caught her attention and scrambled her signals, which gave us the exquisitely painful final product you see above.

I believe it's what's known in the biz as a very heavy burtation.