AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Reconstruction: America After the Civil War (PBS)

Now this is what public broadcasting is for: three programmes, hour-and-a-half each, on a slice of history that I need to know about but not enough to read a book about, and which no commercial telly channel would ever commission. And it's unwatchable. Why? Because the whole thing is told in terms of how badly the blacks did out of it. Now that's important, even vital, but it's not what makes the Reconstruction period important.

Ah well, that's what the fast forward button is for, so I'll get the gist, but why does public broadcasting always fall into the hands of such a tiny slice of the public? Why can't they be like the Jews of Hollywood and concentrate on their audience? No, wait, I forgot, only the liberal elite watch PBS. Not blacks though. I may have to think this through properly.

[Mick Harper]

Wicked Tuna: North vs South (National Geographic)

I came to this late so paused on the table at the beginning showing which team of fisher-heroes was ahead so I could root for either them or the underdog. I find either equally satisfying. One team had made $10,808 all the way down to some duffers with a big fat zero to their name. I was wondering whether they deserved my support when my eye happened to alight on how many tuna each boat had caught thus far in the series: the top team had caught one, as had all the other teams down to the duffers who had caught none.

Now I'm quite pleased in one way -- I was dreading seeing these fine animals being hauled in with hooks through their mouths and then left flapping around in mortal asphyxic agony waiting for someone to causally club them to death, but dramatic prospects for the series overall seem limited. "Over there!" "Nope, gone." Still, better than Whale Wars where nothing at all happens. I still have to tune in though because one day the Japs are gonna say, "Fuck it" and trust the camera and footage go down with the ship. But like I say, I support both winners and losers. The Japanese and the whales.

[Grant]

My best ever troll was when I read a Guardian article extolling whales and criticising Japanese whalers. I wrote "Whales are the rats of the sea."

[Grant]

So what do we think? Is Christian B the abductor of Madeleine McCann?
I'm suspicious because an itinerant German living in a van in the area for years prior to the abduction must have been fully investigated. Or are the Portuguese police as crap as our media said thirteen years ago?
My prediction - and I've not been doing too well lately - is that the German police are on a glory hunt.

[Mick Harper]

Unlikely since he's already in custody and therefore the situation reflects, if anything, badly rather than well on the German police.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

But remember the AE dictum: never judge by results. Whenever a big case remains unsolved, the police get slagged off whether they've done well or ill. It is always correct to make the parents a line of enquiry. It is not so much Portuguese ideas about familial inclusivity as the Portuguese tourist industry's nervousness about the chances of one's children being kidnapped by strangers if you choose Portugal for this year's family funfest.

Reading between the lines, will this turn out to be a case of one cellmate bragging to another about who deserves the top bunk? It's easily done in the gloomings of the night with not much else to talk about.

[Mick Harper]

The Woods (Netflix)

This would have been a good dark police procedural except for two perplexing happ'orths of tar that have not been applied to what is obviously an otherwise no-expenses-spared Polish production. I mention them because they are both now general faults, i.e. AE-tistical.

The less important one is the fact that party-scenes are always filmed the same way. Everyone present is patently an actor, all the party-goers are good-looking in an identikit sort of way. They are only extras, and directors normally go to some lengths to make extras look the part. Not only is this irritatingly unrealistic in itself (I'm often the only good-looking chap at parties I attend) but it has plot-implications since you are never sure whether they are meant to be like that, i.e. it's short hand for gilded people, or they have just whistled up bods from the local acting academy. In this case, since it is set in a non-American 'summer camp' (does anyone know what they are?) we never really become any the wiser even though the initial murder (I'm guessing the first of many) concerns an oik-crashes-party scenario.

And then there's the dubbing...

[Mick Harper]

I hate subtitles. If God had meant us to read subtitles he wouldn't have invented the talkies. But I can put up with them if Walter has made the right call. Now Netflix has come along and offers us English dubbing as routine. It would be perverse not to take them up on it except Netflix doesn't know shit about dubbing. It does not use English (or American) actors to speak the dialogue but insists on English-perfect 'dubbers'. Honest, Netflix, it's not the same thing at all. Native English-speakers have an ear for these things. We order whole societies on the basis of accent.

But watching The Woods is like listening to a computer programmed to speak English words. It's entirely functional, you're kept entirely up to speed on what's going on, but you wouldn't want to spend six one-hour stints listening to it however interesting the words may be. I actually had to go back to the original (Brazilian Portuguese, I think) and read the subtitles but my sense of sullen dissatisfaction means I may not go on.

Again, all this is so soppy because while in the old days when close-ups were so prevalent and film economics meant the whole world was watching the English-dubbed version, you needed professional all-purpose dubbers. But I'm paying £7.99 and I want to hear my ain folk being offed in some forest that will be forever Poland, or Brazil or wherever it's all meant to be kicking off. I'll pay £8.99 if necessary.

[Mick Harper]

Murder in the Carpark (Channel 4)

I'm fairly au fait with Catford pub carparks and while bodies are fairly routine they don't normally lie there for two hours, as was the testimony of the first responders. Well, actually, the third responders since the first one wandered into the pub, spent a fair amount of time waving his fiver to get the barman's attention (I would have maybe been a bit more pressing in the circumstances) and then he and the barman wandered out to have a look to decide what to do next. Call the police was their eventual decision.

Anyway when plod did arrive, though the Lion is the local police hang-out, one of the more eagle-eyed of them spotted the body had "his car keys in one hand and a packet of crisps in the other". Now call me old-fashioned but even us Old Catfordians don't carry around a packet of crisps as a talisman so that could only mean the dead man had just purchased the crisps in the pub. Maybe a clue there. Or maybe evidence that he wasn't killed in the carpark at all. We'll never know because having an axe in your head is fairly routine in Catford so there was no need for any kind of intensive forensic examination.

PS I have watched more CSI's than is good for one and so far I haven't come across a body still clutching car keys, packets of crisps etc post mortem. Unless it's some kind of reflexive Lewisham Grip. We shall need guidance on the point.

PPS Just opposite the scene of the crime is, or was, the Oxo factory which is where flavoured crisps were invented. 'Oxo crisps', a local delicacy in an era when a soggy bag of salt was all anyone else was being offered by way of variety. Oxo crisps for sure didn't need it.

[Mick Harper]

Catford police station, historians of the AE movement will be interested to hear, marked the birth of the AE movement. I was on the top of a 47 bus with my dad travelling from Catford to Bromley and my dad leaned over and said, "See that police station? Well, they built it the wrong way round. The architect, when he finally came to look at his handiwork, was so horrified that he blew his brains out."

It was only much later that I learned this is an urban myth and is said about any building that looks a bit weird and that the locals don't like for any reason. My dad believed it and so did I such is the power of authority. So not the birth of the AE movement after all. The search goes on!

[Mick Harper]

I'm a huge fan of Al-Jazeera News which I watch every night for an hour because it is the best -- only -- English language station that treats the whole world as its oyster. Last night there was a long report about street demonstrations against the president in Mali, West Africa. Especially by lawyers, in full regalia, protesting about the president suspending the Chief Justice just before elections.

I was struck by the fact that a francophone country like Mali would have lawyers in eighteenth century British wigs (not to mention a still operating Chief Justice in charge of elections). More surprising was that Mali's capital, according to the byline, was called Blantyre, also the name of a small Scottish town associated with Dr Livingstone, I presume, and later the name of the capital of Malawi. OK, a serious error on the part of someone, but it happens, so I waited until the end of the bulletin to see if there would be a correction. Nothing. I tuned into the next bulletin two hours later to see whether anyone had noticed.

Not only had no-one noticed but now there was a live report from an Al-Jazeera reporter 'on the spot', or at least next door to Mali in Dakar, breathlessly telling us how the demonstrations were progressing 'in Bamako' (which is the capital of Mali) and how prominent the lawyers were in proceedings. Meanwhile the real demonstrations, with the real lawyers, were continuing several thousand miles away in Blantyre, the capital of Malawi, in south-east Africa. My faith has been severely shaken but I will await developments.

[Mick Harper]

That Deborah Cohen off Newsnight. How can you be a Cohen and be blonde and have a northern accent? I think she married in.

[Mick Harper]

The Man Who Tried To Feed The World (PBS)

It's a melancholy fact that modern famines are caused by modern ideologies and I'm in the middle of an application of this at the moment. I'm very partial to proper stoneground wholemeal bread but it's very difficult to get hold of. My local healthfood shop used to stock it but no longer -- "There's no demand". But they'll order it for you, and I do so, six loaves at a time. But it's a struggle to eat. Why? Because it comes already sliced and they cut it too thick.

Now you're probably not aware of this but bread slice thickness is critical to human enjoyment. That's why they have thick-sliced loaves but call it 'a toasting loaf', because cooking it makes it palatable. But thick untoasted wholemeal bread is why there's no demand for it. Now I know this but the question becomes 'How do I persuade the baker of this?' He'll just say, 'Nobody else has ever complained.' That's true, I never have in a dozen years, but that's not the real reason. 'Thick cut', 'chunky cut', 'rough cut' are all signals of homeliness and goodliness, the very essence of the healthfood industry. Or hair shirt socialism as I always call it.

[Ishmael]

These posts are so often thought-provoking. Truly enjoy reading these.