Chanel 9

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This article is about the fictional TV channel. For real-life TV channels called Channel 9, see Channel 9.

Chanel 9 was a recurring sketch in the British sketch comedy TV show The Fast Show.

Chanel 9 is a fictional television channel parodying foreign television. It drew references from conintental Europe and South America. The sketch stars Paul Whitehouse, Paul Shearer and Caroline Aherne as TV presenters in a fictional Mediterranean country. The idea is that it parodies the kind of strange and unfamiliar (to them) television shows that British people end up watching whilst on vacation in countries around the Mediterranean, in particular Spain and Greece. One of the sketch's most important, and funny, aspects is that it is completely presented in a nonsensical fictional language, which is mostly based on Spanish and Italian, but also contains words from other languages, and some words are completely made up.

The hosts dress in garish 1970s-style suits and dresses and also appear otherwise glitzy. The channel mostly focuses on various kinds of game shows and other light entertainment. It also has a news program, where meteorologist Poula Fisch (played by Aherne) presents the weather forecast, the weather map is of Iberia covering Spain and Portugal suggesting this is where the show is from. The weather is nearly always entirely scorchio (meaning scorching sunny hot) for the whole country. Once a coastal region had cloudy weather, and this was so surprising that the channel immediately made a special on-site news report: Sensacio! Nimbocumulus a costa!

The channel regularly shows advertisements for various mysterious-looking devices with no obvious purpose, which are all called Gizmo with a varying prefix (such as Auto Gizmo or Garden Gizmo) and are all exactly the same. These are presented by attractive women wearing skimpy outfits, but nothing they say makes any sense. The sketch would often begin by appearing from untuned signal snow interference effect from what looked like the middle of a different sketch and itself appearing to be halfway through, giving the impresion you were accidentally receiving a different programme on a foreign channel for a short while. It would then untune and faze out again into the what looked like the middle of another sketch.

The Christmas Special edition of The Fast Show saw Chanel 9 presenting their interpretation of the Nativity Story. From the third series, Chanel 9's output branched out into versions of television light-entertainment staple shows, including a lottery draw, variety show, and sports quiz.