One-Round Gombatz The Boxer

The awe and mystery of Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel.

Pursuit of Happiness

Civilisation Part Six

Grandeur & Obedience

Civilisation Part 5

Man–The Measure of All Things

Civilisation Part 4

Romance and Reality

Part 3 of Civilisation

The Great Thaw

Part II of Sir Kenneth Clarkes classic documentary series and a reminder of what it is we are in danger of losing if we aren't careful.

Have I Got News For You

The Damien Green affair as filtered through the "satire" programme "Have I Got News For You", according to Samizdata:

Ian Hislop: It is amazing, isn't it, that they were were able to get 20 or so policemen to raid Mr Green's offices and search his house. Where are all these guys when you need to catch a burglar or something?

Compere: Ah, yes, that sounds like the sort of drivel you read in the Daily Mail.

Hislop: So let me get this right - are you saying that is perfectly okay for a bunch of anti-terror policemen to arrest, search and hold an MP for asking annoying questions in the House of Commons?

Compere: I am in all in favour of putting Tory MPs in jail.

Good Lord.

The Skin of Our Teeth

The first installment of a documentary series that reminds us of what we are trying to preserve and how truly fragile it is.

The Eternal Question

Some say that his favourite food is curried duck eggs and that his nose is on loan to the British Museum.

All we know is, he's called The Stig.

Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids is being remade for the BBC.

Given how badly Survivors has fared, I'm not holding my breath over this one.

Deep Thought, Call Your Service

BBC headline:

Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

The brain hurting doubtless comes from trying to figure out how Mr. Bain got a lectureship at the University of Glasgow when he cranks out such facile material loaded with buried assumptions and calls it philosophy.

Don't Mention the War

"My arm's come off!"

Survivors

I see that the BBC is reviving the 1970's sci fi series Survivors. From the trailer, I'm not getting my hopes up. It looks all very, very PC with lots of pretty people and strumming guitars, so I'm not getting my hopes up. In fact, since the cast includes the ghastly lead from Bonekickers and one-note actress Freema Agyeman, I shall regard my hopes lightly squashed.



If you want some idea of the standard the remake faces, have a look at the original credits, which I suspect contains more drama than we can expect from the entire first series of the new version.

The Man with the Flower in his Mouth

Television–Very early television.

You may have to squint a bit.

No Pleasing Some People

Oil prices drop below $109 dollars a barrel, which is surely news of crisis on the wane and better times ahead–unless you're the BBC, in which case it's a portent of economic gloom and misery.

Heads, you win...

Ghosts

Another installment in our ongoing effort to provide our readers with the latest from the world of science.

Hug a Jihadist

The BBC's Lyse Doucet criticises news coverage of the Afghanistan campaign, saying that it overlooks "the humanity of the Taliban".

"The humanity of the Taliban"? I had to read that at least three times to make sure I hadn't misunderstood. No doubt that is true in the same way that Khmer Rouge's good points were misunderstood as well, but being totalitarian murderers bent on conquest, enslavement, and genocide will do that for you.

How this remarkably silly woman manages to navigate through life without the smallest fraction of common sense or moral judgment is beyond me.

Electric Nightmare

The Dream

Panorama looks at the G-Wiz and hails it as the "electric dream" of the "green revolution."

The reality

To be fair, it does point out that it doesn't meet safety standards, but that's like saying that crashing into a mountainside in an egg crate is less than optimal.

Bias? What Bias?

BBC headline:
UK troops kill Afghan civilians
Translation:
Suspects shot trying to run checkpoint

Ghostwatch

Orson Welles was unavailable for comment.

After I watched this for today's posting I had a couple of bad nights when it came to shadows.

Bonekickers

Bonekickers is a new BBC series that, judging from the previews, is the sort that as a writer I'd run down a side street to avoid. Maybe it has something to do with its self-consciously ethnic and gender balanced cast, painfully cliched "feisty" female lead and publicity stills that uses the dreaded Pose™ that says "We think we're tough and edgy with that indefinable rock-star vibe, though nobody over the age of 15 who doesn't live in their mother's cellar will agree." It looks predictably awful in that hideous trendy way that fills in for creativity these days and I'd probably put it with Torchwood, Robin Hood, and Hex in the Do Not Watch Unless Threatened By Lord Olivier With A Pair Of Dental Pliers file if it weren't for the fact that it is about a load of archaeologists.

This would have been worth a laugh because as a retired archaeologist I've very low expectations about how my field is portrayed in popular culture as a glamorous sort of licensed tomb-robbing and treasure hunting rather than the meticulous, often boring enterprise that it really is. I'm even willing to forgive that the average archaeologist is never shown in truth as a chronically skint bastard forever on the lookout for a decent job. True, according to the reviews, one character is shown as a hard drinker, but the fantasy lies in it being one character.

But I'll let that pass. Let them forever be Indiana Jones chasing after the Holy Grail or the True Cross or the Lost Bus Ticket and more power to them. There are worse ways for a profession to be portrayed (*cough* Casualty *cough*).

Even the BBC is willing to admit this by running an article that points out the... "heightened" nature of the programme. Except they leave one tiny detail out.

You'll notice that I said that it "would have been" worth a laugh. That was before I noticed the buzz on the Internet about the premiere episode that tried to be "contemporary" by having as the villains a load of crazed, white Christian fundamentalists who want to drive all other religions out of Britain and start off their reign of terror by decapitating a peace-loving Muslim.

Marvelous. One moment I'm anticipating a nice MST3K giggle and the next I'm confronted by the BBC using the licence fee to produce something out of an Al Qaeda recruiting video. Suddenly my sense of irony is lacking and I don't feel much like laughing.

"Lounge Concept"

I've been on road trips like this–though, thankfully, not in a Smart Car.

Top Gear G&T

The BBC Trust has wagged a bony finger at Top Gear's polar special for allegedly "glamourising" drink driving by showing a scene of Jeremy Clarkson sipping a gin and tonic while motoring across the arctic wastes to the North Pole. Leaving aside the bizarre notion that Mr. Clarkson could glamourise anything, the producers quite rightly put forward the defence that the North Pole is outside of British jurisdiction and therefore no offence was committed.

Now if they'd had the presence to also point out that since the programme aired there have been remarkably few incidents of drunken British young people tearing around the Pole in SUVs, its impact may be emperically regarded as minimal.

I can't, however, say the same for the scene in another episode where they showed of James May driving an Aston Martin in Italy stark naked because his car was a racer and therefore didn't have air conditioning and couldn't open the windows. It's of such things that eye bleach is made for.

Update: James May responds– and not to the nude Aston Martin bit.

NHS & BBC

The BBC marks the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the NHS with a story that sets the benchmark for objectivity:

Three generations grateful for NHS

This headline that would do credit to the North Korean news agency was balanced in the story itself by lines like this:

Anthony was born with blue asphyxia. Today he is convinced the NHS saved his life - and that of his mother.

And from there It gets downright sycophantic. Overcrowded hospitals? Endless waiting lists? Mixed sex wards? Treatment rationing? A haemorrhaging budget with an army of bureaucrats to a squad of doctors? Sorry, no mention of that here.

All we need now is a pronouncement from Minitruth that all diseases have been eradicated and we'll have the set.

James May & Meccano

We're doomed

Top Gear USA

Top Gear, the only car show in history that got me to watch a car show, is to be transmitted on NBC television in the States. Sorry, not the BBC original with Clarkson, Hammond and May, but an American version that somehow is going to catch lightning in a bottle twice running.

The creative ineptness and poor judgment of American network television never ceases to amaze me–particularly when it comes to buying successful foreign shows.

Any other broadcaster for anything other than game shows would simply have bought the broadcast rights for the original programmes and left it at that, but the major American networks operate by their own bizarre rules due to a little episode in the 1960s when Britain's ATV started making heavy inroads into the syndication market, followed by The Avengers becoming a smash hit on ABC television. The Hollywood production companies had a collective infarct when they saw the possibility of competing with British programmes that they threw down the gauntlet to the networks and told them that if they ever bought another foreign product the producers would boycott the lot of them.

Since then, not a single British series has aired on a network unless it was essentially an American production filmed in Britain and so certifiable hits like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Spaced are relegated to cable while the networks indulge in the strange practice of buying formats, but leaving everything else behind. Sometimes this worked, as in the case of All in the Family and Three's Company, or The Office, though all were pale imitations of their parents. More often it ended up with painful abortions visited upon such classics as Fawlty Towers and Couplings that vanished in a mercifully short time.

But, fools and their money, as they say.

Doctors' Daughter

Science has decreed that marrying first cousins in now hunky dory, but what about an actor dating his television daughter who is also the real-life daughter of another actor who played the first actor's television character previously.

My brain hurts.

Does Plastic Count?

The BBC asks the hard-hitting question:

So is it possible to survive the day without spending any cash?

Checks drinks cupboard.

Yes.

Panorama Predicts

Looking back at looking forward to the 1960s.

And I'm getting dizzy.

Update: And over at Paleo-Future, it's France 2000AD as seen from 1900.

Mystery of the Ages

From the BBC:

Every day British people throw away more than a million pots of unopened yoghurt. Why?

Having tasted "cheesecake" yoghurt by mistake, I offer this possibility:

Maybe because it's nasty?

Organ Recital

BBC headline:

Ireland appoint Kidney as coach

Apparently the spleen wasn't up to scratch.

It's All In The Database

I love this nasty little bit of tyranny courtesy of the BBC. It even has the infamous knock on the door.

Just goes to show what they think of Outer Party members down Broadcasting House.

Hitting The Nail

"A soap-opera with laser-gun fights"; the best description of the consistently disappointing new version of Doctor Who that I've seen.

Could There Be a Connection?

Justin Webb looks at the "paradox" of the United States as a nation with 200 million guns and yet has a certain "tranquility and civility".

Mr. Webb's inability to see what is right before his face is taken to even greater heights by invoking the apparent contradiction of the Virginia Tech massacre (which occurred at a widely-publicised "gun-free zone") plus a resident of Washington DC who opposes the draconian firearms ban on the city being lifted by showing off nine gunshot wounds and claiming that lifting the ban would turn the capital into the "wild west". Mr. Webb does not ask him, "as opposed to what?"

Next up: Why the United States believes in military force despite defeating Communism and Fascism, has a record prison population despite a low crime rate, and grows vast amounts of food despite not suffering from famine.

Comedy of Fear

Can Mohammed go to the mountain?

Not if you're the BBC.

Car Shooting

Top Gear-Car Shooting - Click here for another funny movie.
Now that is what I call sport.

White Season

Ron Liddle over at The Spectator sums up BBC's "White Season":

When those programmes were commissioned and the BBC executives sat around discussing the content, they undoubtedly caught the whiff of the zeitgeist — that, come on chaps, we really ought to do something about those dreadful people in the north who somehow feel estranged and alienated. But they were singularly incapable of commissioning anything which said, actually, they might have a legitimate grievance.

That would have been a step too far. Instead they commissioned a bunch of programmes that said: white working-class people, we feel your pain, but unfortunately, you’re wrong. In other words, they demonstrated precisely the same mindset which infects every single news bulletin, documentary and drama we have witnessed for the last 20 years on the BBC. Can you imagine them commissioning a film about a Muslim girl who converts to Christianity, converts her mum — and by the denouement is proven right to have done so? It will never happen.

White Wash Girl

I haven't had a chance to see White Girl, part of the BBC's "White Season", except in brief previews on the Web, but if the reviews in The Telegraph and Beaman's World are anything to go by, it is a drama that shows that in the eyes of the Beeb the white working class of Britain are a load of drunken, foul-mouthed, wife-beating, child-beating racists whose only salvation lies in embracing religion.

Provided, that is, the religion is Islam.

This is no reflection on Muslims qua Muslims, but from what I've been able to glean, the BBC's storyline of knuckle-dragging chavs being redeemed by blemish-less mosque-goers is as deserving of a double take as a 1943 Rank film showing how English dock workers would be so much more pleasant if they were more like those nice Germans.

E-Day Update

E-Day, an "independent operation" (even though started and backed to the hilt by the BBC) , has proven a complete bust. Designed to sell people on the idea of returning to mud huts and peasantry, the end result was that electricity consumption actually went up on the day.

The BBC has relegated the embarassment to the back pages of its web site and is now faced with trying to wrap its collective mind around the fact that the British people aren't a load of dupes after all. Meanwhile, Dr. Matt Prescott, the alleged brains behind E-Day said,

I will do my best to learn the relevant lessons for next time.

The relevant lesson being that there shouldn't be a next time.

Update: This just keeps getting better: