The Televizni Noviny Drinking Game

Start drinking!

Surprisingly for a country where (trade secret) nothing much happens, Nova’s Televizni noviny (TN) evening news programme is routinely the Czech Republic’s highest-rating TV show.

Shown nightly at 7:30pm, TN is a 50-minute-long mishmash of horror, outrage, sentimentality, and the kind of “news” that, in a larger country, would only just qualify as village gossip. PraguePig.com loves it.

In the absence of too many earth-shattering events, Nova sticks to a tried-and-tested formula so predictable that PraguePig.com thought it would be ideal fodder for a drinking game.

THE RULES
Yell “drink!” every time you see or hear the following. Whoever shouts first, gets to sit out the round.

(But please stick to beer or wine if you do actually play. This stuff shows up with such regularity that you’ll probably end up in the hospital if you drink anything stronger.)

TN’s first-choice presenters, Reynolds “Rey” Koranteng & Lucie Boryhova: one sip
• Bonus: one extra sip if Rey is wearing a shirt without a tie

Reporter standing outside for no apparent reason, doing a piece to camera: one sip
• Bonus: one extra sip if it’s raining
• Bonus: two extra sips if it’s snowing
• Bonus: one extra sip if the reporter is standing on a balcony in the outskirts of Prague covering a story in a foreign country
• Bonus: three extra sips if the reporter is the painfully nervous Jitka Farova, looking like a deer caught in headlights

Death on the roads: one sip
(Car accidents are an obsession for Nova, even though death rates here aren’t dramatically different from those in Central Europe’s other former Communist countries.)

News report with musical soundtrack: one sip
(Sad music for sad stories, dramatic music for dramatic stories, zany “comedy” music for funny stories, etc.)

Cute zoo story: one sip
(PraguePig.com can’t remember seeing an edition of TN that didn’t feature a trip to a zoo or safari park.)

Cruelty to animals: one sip
(Guaranteed to feature the sad music mentioned above.)

Shameless plug for another TV Nova show: one sip
(Popular favourites include the reality show Vymena manzelek (Wife Swap), crime dramas Policie Modrava and Kriminalka Andel, medical soaps Ordinace v ruzove zahrade and Doktori z Pocatku, talent shows SuperStar and Hlas CeskoSlovenska, and magazine programmes Vikend and Volejte Novu.)

Shameless plug for a new film Nova is co-financing: one sip

Shoddy goods on sale at a Vietnamese market: one sip

An interview with one of the following media-friendly politicians – Miroslav Kalousek, Andrej Babis, Tomio Okamura, Milan Chovanec, Karla Slechtova, Marian Jurecka, Dan Tok: one sip

An interview with security expert Andor Sandor, just because he has a cool name: one sip