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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Airplane Repo (Discovery Channel)

We're running auditions at the moment and because of excessive demand, you'll first have to pass a written test. There are three Cessna's on a private airstrip currently being used by British paratroops for training. The owner hasn't been keeping up his payments on the planes and you have a court order to re-possess them. Do you:

A. Drive up to the lieut-colonel, British Parachute Regiment, show him the court order and fly off with the planes or

B. Have one of the team unobtrusively sky-dive on to the airstrip, armed with flares, wait till dark, light up the runway with the flares, fly in a plane with two spare pilots, and unobtrusively let the plane fly off again, then start manoeuvring the three Cessna's out of the hangar after having fixed the faults you find on a mechanic's overnight urgent to-do list, then when the paras start taking a belated interest, use the person with the flares to start letting off more flares so they all go off chasing her (yes, a pretty young thing with attitude) so you can take off with two of the planes, leaving one behind for the lady-of-the-flares to circle back, climb in and take off narrowly missing the paras trying to block her takeoff by parking a jeep across the runway?

Mark your paper "Yes, I want to be in a TV series" or "No, I want to be in the British paras."
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Mick Harper
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Raiders of the Lost Past BBC-4
Goth historian Janina Ramirez returns

One would have to agree the most interesting thing about this historian is her eye make-up.
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Meow.
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Mick Harper
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Special Branch (Thames TV)

Yes, a blast from the past (1969-74) brought to my attention by the invaluable Talking Pictures Channel. Some four dozen hour-length episodes for me to look forward to (the second half being the first efforts of the famous Euston Films of Sweeney, Minder etc fame). Why am I bringing this to your attention, apart from recommending it for its own sake? Because I had no idea it existed which I at least find amazing. Of course these were the years of my gadabout youth when you never watched telly but was actually out there living life for real. How short those years were. Thank Christ. Also, I meant to expand this into a consideration of how brief one's window is when it comes to pop music but that proved too big a subject.

PS If you do decide to join the Special Branch club it is advisable to watch the first episode on Youtube since for some reason Talking Pictures starts with the second one which is mildly disconcerting. Derren Nesbitt is the hero which is even more disconcerting.
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Mick Harper
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How little I knew!

Darren Nesbitt also appeared in memorable roles in a number of movies, such as a predatory blackmailer of gay men in Victim (1961), a murderous pimp in The Informers (1963), a slimy assassin in Nobody Runs Forever, and the suspicious Gestapo officer in Where Eagles Dare (1968). Nesbitt was keen to be as authentic as possible with his character in Where Eagles Dare. Whilst on location, he requested to meet a former member of the Gestapo to better understand how to play the character and to get the military regalia correct.

In 1971 Nesbitt was fined £250 when he pleaded guilty to thrashing his wife with a leather strap after she told him she was having an affair with another man.
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Mick Harper
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The Spy (Netflix)

You wait years for an Israeli espionage thriller and then two come along at once. As I reported in the case of False Flag (Fox Channel) one soon gets over any difficulties about rooting for the 'wrong' side -- I'm a Corbynisterian Palestine groupie -- because baddies are baddies in any thriller. But this is a 'docu-drama', based on real events, and is presenting problems.

You will all remember Das Boot when you soon stopped hoping that our depth charges would put a swift end to the blighter but in that case art was triumphing over patriotism even though the art was making it painfully docu-drama-ish. The Spy is good but not that good. It is set in 1965 so not only will I have to worry along with Mossad that "Syria isn't like Egypt, we've got no assets in the Golan" but I will have to forget there was no need to worry about it in the first place.
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Mick Harper
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Elsewhere in the Netflix empire there is a French-made series on tanks. It was interesting to hear that Leclerc's French armoured division which had disobeyed Eisenhower's and Patton's orders and made a beeline to liberate Paris in August 1944 ran into a problem as they drove through the cheering crowds. They had to keep shouting "Nous sommes françaises" because of course they looked for all the world like an American armoured division. Doubtless the Parisiens concluded they were Americans intent on getting a bit of free nookie.

And apropos my last post it was also fascinating to observe how Russian T-55's in Syrian hands stood up against British Centurions in Israeli hands. I had reluctantly to conclude, just as in 1940, that it was the quality of the crews not the quality of the tanks that counted.
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Mick Harper
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I thought I was an expert but I never knew Warsaw Pact tanks could as a matter of routine cross rivers underwater. "Germany is full of north-south rivers and the bridges would all be blown," a Soviet expert told us. Just after, "Hungary in '56 was the first time the West tried to invade us" and just before he said (re 1968) "Czechoslovakia has a land border with the west and we knew Nato were concentrating tanks there."

A third of all tank recruits failed the underwater test which wasn't surprising because nobody ever knew whether a tank would be waterproof until they tried it. Them crazy Ivans. Actually, making tanks waterproof is not such a big deal -- they had to be radiation proof after all -- the bit I couldn't figure is how you get out of the river given that German rivers, unlike Russian ones, tend to be embanked and you couldn't see where you would come out on the other side. You just drove and hoped you hit a nice little gradient, I guess. Give me a swimming tank like we used on D-Day every time. Maybe we would have won World War III after all.
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Mick Harper
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Did I say the Israelis had British Centurions?

It was designed in World War Two and considered obsolete in the 1960's. Israeli engineers upgraded it with a better cannon, new armour and a reliable diesel engine.

But they kept the sprockets. You can't beat a British sprocket.
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Mick Harper
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You can't beat British early warning systems either

Anyway, these fighter aircraft flew overhead which was unusual for Yom Kippur, and then there were sirens, so I tuned into the BBC to find out what was happening because there's no Israeli radio during Yom Kippur. [army reservist on Netflix tank doc]
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Mick Harper
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How Trains Changed The World (Discovery Channel)

This fabulous new series (not railway-based travelogues fronted by the likes of Vic and Bob) tells me things I didn't know on a regular basis. (Which to be fair is true of Vic and Bob as well.) I'll pass them along. The facts, I mean; to you, I mean. Consider, for example, this exercise in selective genotyping.

The Brits are trying to build a railway from Cairo to the Cape so who do they turn to for the east African section? Twenty-eight thousand Indians obviously. I don't know how they were selected. When the railway is finished 22,000 go home, six thousand decide to stay on. Again, I don't know on what basis. They rapidly take over the economies of East Africa. Idi Amin comes to power, chucks the whole lot out and most but not all -- I don't know on what basis -- arrive penniless in Britain. Whereupon they all rapidly become multi-millionaires (o.n.o.).

As they said to one another, "This Britain, it could be a new Uganda!"
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Mick Harper
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A woman called Nesrine Malik turned up on Newsnight. I wasn't impressed but let us say I wasn't unimpressed. And that is as much as I can hope for given my transcendence over the present intellectual landscape. I spelled transcendence wrong until corrected by my spellchecker. What joy that would have given my critics.
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Mick Harper
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If you thought Newsnight presenters get in the way of a good story with their incessantly premature interjections (to show how tough they are) you should watch Cuomo Prime Time (CNN) to see how the professionals do it. We've got Chris Cuomo, we've got Mayor Giuliani, we've got Trump with his fingers in the Ukrainian cookie jar, we've got Joe Biden offering bribes to get his son off a corruption charge, we've got Chris and Jules speaking over each other so much I had to switch off.
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Hatty
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A Scottish farmer interviewed on Britain At Low Tide (Sunday, 8 pm, Ch. 4) said that long-distance drovers travelling 'hundreds of miles' only covered about ten miles a day, otherwise the animals would lose weight before reaching markets south of the Firth of Forth (where the programme was taking place).

It fits the pattern of hillforts, or hospitality industry we might say, that are roughly 10-12 miles apart as TME points out. The interviewee was talking about droving a couple of centuries rather than millennia ago but the system seems to have worked well over time, leastways as he commented there were 'no roads in Scotland' until the late eighteenth/ early nineteenth century, and it's an unlikely source since the series is about intertidal archaeology. The presenter, palaeobiologist Tori Herridge, is much superior to the likes of Neil Oliver and Alice Roberts though probably neither she nor they know it.
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Hatty
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Newsnight seems to have gone downhill though it may just be my personal opinion. But Channel 4 News still cuts the mustard and I doubt it's simply coincidence that Ian Katz, who used to be the Newsnight editor, is now Channel 4's Director of Programmes
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