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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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The Media did not notice that the Russian bombing campaign of Ukrainian cities ended for the period of their evacuation of Kherson.

It is good to talk.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I don't know what you're hinting at but I would like to hint at some kind of wider arrangement viz
1. Kherson was mysteriously evacuated by the Russians and without loss.
2. The Ukrainians equally mysteriously were ultra-slow in re-occupying it.
3. Both sides have been blowing bridges with gay abandon but leaving the dam intact.

Are they tacitly (or even actually) preparing for a future in which
1. The Crimea is formally ceded to Russia
2. Ukraine formally agrees to supply it with water but
3. Subject to Russian good behaviour (for example, cheap energy as unacknowledged reparations)?

It's good to talk, but better to agree.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:


Are they tacitly (or even actually) preparing for a future in which
1. The Crimea is formally ceded to Russia
2. Ukraine formally agrees to supply it with water but
3. Subject to Russian good behaviour (for example, cheap energy as unacknowledged reparations)?

It's good to talk, but better to agree.


It is still possible for Russia to hit Ukrainian infrastructure if they want to. If they still don't, then more talks are possible. Actions speak louder.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Outer Range (Amazon)

"The world is really wild at heart and weird on top."


That's about it, it is a modern Western about Westerns, a ranch owner is playing poker against a hippie chick by the name of Autumn Rivers, he asks her to take off her shoes just to check she is not Satan. They are watched through a door by a massive wounded bison. The rancher bets his pastures, aha it is he who has actually cheated, turns out he had hidden an additional card up his sleeve. His prize is a lump of stone on a hippie necklace that can make mountains disappear....(megalithic folklore)

It's either a simple tale of a death and folks feuding over land, or it is Gifford and Lynch mixed with the Coen brothers, there is a time portal element in it as the Bison keeps appearing meaningfully.

Darker than coal. But there is gold.
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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Most of us are too young to remember but during the Covid era almost no new telly programmes got made and people had to get used to watching repeats and sub-ordinarily rubbish imports. But TV execs have realised, post-Covid, how profitable this policy is and we are now too old to care.
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Mick Harper
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The Christopher Marlowe Mysteries (BBC R4X) The Latest Secrets of the Hieroglyphs (BBC4)

Two more examples of BBC sound silliness. The first one is a radio period-piece heavily dependent on background tavern revelry and foreground flageolets to establish atmosphere. So heavily that what Kitt & Co are saying is difficult to discern. Tip: put your Dolby surroundsound setting on 'News' and the principals will come out loud and almost clear.

The second, a serious telly doc, is so anxious to be a serious telly doc that the French excavator has to be heard in all his French glory with subtitles in English. This is a dubious practice in itself when only the words are important but triply so when the viewer is being urged to examine the details of wall carvings but can't because of the need to read the rapid-fire words of a Frog in full flight. Tip: give up and listen to the radio instead. That Christopher Marlowe Mysteries from the archives looks interesting. Will it be Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum?
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Mick Harper
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Believe It! (BBC R4X)

In this intermittently amusing radio series, Richard Wilson seeks to re-energise his coffers now his One Foot in the Grave royalties are a thing of the past. He does this by rounding up showbiz pals to plan more and more elaborate money-spinning media exercises. Last night he and Ian McKellen were discussing the launch of Radio Ga-Ga aimed at the wrinklies. And much merriment was had by all.

This was something I advocated (for real) when I had a ringside seat at the plight of care home inmates who can do no more -- and want no more -- than to watch endless repeats of Dad's Army and similar popular programmes of their relative youth. I pointed out that modern radio & TV is so segmented that this is an entirely viable audience. And even if it isn't, the BBC should provide such a service as part of its national remit.

I also pointed out why media bigwigs will never do it. They are obsessed with 'the young' or at any rate segments of the population with which they have some personal acquaintance. They will rue this policy when the time comes.
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Mick Harper
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The Horne Section (Channel 4)

I was a latecomer to the radio -- who needs telly without pictures? -- but I've lately found that all I can do after a hard day at the workstation is to lie with a cold compress over my face listening to it. (The radio, not the cold compress.) Not knowing anything about this new medium, my strategy has been to mark on the daily schedules every likely-looking programme on Radio 4X (classics from the archive) then, come cold compress time:

1. Delete it forthwith if there is a studio audience
2. Listen to it for five minutes and, if rubbish, delete it
3. If it passes both tests, press the 'record entire series' button.

So, for instance, the Horne Section got the chop (on both tests) whereas I was enraptured by After Henry. The strategy falls down when a radio series gets promoted to a TV series. Hence I discovered After Henry turned-out to be exactly the sort of twee formulaic sitcom that makes one physically ill when watched on the telly, whereas The Horne Section was unexpectedly good.
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Mick Harper
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There are things you read you just can't get your head round. I have been reading about Richard Harris. What do we know about him? Not much. He first came to my (and I imagine the public's) attention as a rugby league player in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life. Then he disappeared off to Hollywood and he would pop up from time to time in films. I can recall a musical in which he was somewhat risible and latterly Harry Potter. He had a reputation as a hell-raiser and we all assumed (didn't we?) that he was a second-rank star who rather misused his talents and his life. Then I read this from a Guardian piece about a Sky Arts doc on the great man:

The hardest aspect, he says, was the opening scene of the documentary in which he returns to the suite at London’s Savoy Hotel that his father kept for 28 years

Now a suite at the Savoy is stupendously expensive. You're talking tens of thousands of pounds a week in today's money. I can understand Richard Harris might be given one when filming in London. I can understand, though barely, he might have kept one in his British pomp. To maintain one for twenty-eight years when you live in America, you'd have to be... I dunno, but not Richard Harris.

The only tenable explanation is that it was like one of those caravan park mobile homes a friend of mine had. It was yours, bought and paid for, but other people could use it when you weren't there. It sort of made the economics work. But for the Savoy to be entering into such an arrangement is not something I can get my head round.
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Mick Harper
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Mick Harper wrote:
Delete it forthwith if there is a studio audience

This is something else I can't get my head round. I can understand, though barely, that people might trot along to Shepherd's Bush to watch, say, a half-hour sitcom being filmed. I might even do it myself once to take in the technical complexities of it all. But to watch four people standing at microphones recording the script of a sitcom is surely not something anybody would do. Yet there are always, apparently, waiting lists. But why does the BBC do it anyway?

It all started, as these things tend to do, in America where it was found that radio listeners (then television-viewers) wanted to know when something was funny. And I see that, laughter is infectious. Soon, the Americans being the technological go-ahead people they are, dispensed with the live audience and just ran a laughter tape. The British, being the fuddy-duddy let's-be-honest twats they are, banned taped laughter and insisted on live audiences.

So why do I 'ban' programmes with live audiences? Because of my meta-mind. I am too busy imagining the scriptwriters hammering out what will work for people who make a night of it in Shepherd's Bush listening to the script being read aloud. Of which (did I mention it?) I am not one.
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Mick Harper
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This Week's Whodunnit Answers

Where did Agatha Christie become Agatha Christie according to Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen (BBC-2)?
Answer: Ugbrooke House in Devon

Where was England's greatest scam artists headquartered according to Revisionist Historiography (Amazon)?
Answer: Ugbrooke House in Devon

This Week's Great Minds Think Alike Question
(choose two from four)

A Christie
L Worsley
M Harper
H Vered
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Mick Harper
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Wednesday (Netflix)

This is far too derivative of Harry Potter considering it's directed by Tim Burton, but quite diverting. (It's directed by Tim Burton.) Aimed at the under-12, over-60 market.
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Mick Harper
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From episode three I learned a fab new way of signifying enthusiastic consent:

"Don't you agree?"
"One hundo!"

I'm dying to use it but, being a recluse, I don't get much chance and besides the phrase may have come and gone and I will be exposed as a been-and-goner. My family, while not at all reclusive, are far more out of touch than I am so I can get Hatty to feed me the line a couple of times at our next Zoom conference. The rest of you can practise saying it amongst yourselves.
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Mick Harper
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Secrets of Playboy (Channel 4)

I don't know how the series ends but I do know how Playboy ended because I had a tiny window on it. By the mid-sixties the whole Playboy empire had come to depend on the profits of the Playboy Casino in London's Park Lane where I worked as a roulette inspector. The casino profits in turn depended on an endless supply of oil-money millionaires from London's Arab quarter in nearby Edgware Road.

They had a wonderful 'system' which consisted of covering the entire table haphazardly with chips ensuring that with each spin of the wheel they would be passed a stupendous pile of chips as their winnings, accompanied by a winning smile from a bunny-croupier and whoops of delight from white-robed hangers-on, while an assistant bunny-croupier started collecting up all the losing chips into twenty-stacks. On every spin stupendously wealthy punters were guaranteed to lose slightly more than they had won.

Muggins meanwhile had to sit there adding up in his head what six times thirty-five plus nine times seventeen plus twelve times eight amounted to and say 'yes' when the lead-bunny had added it up rather more quickly, announced what it was and started pushing twenty-stacks out, collected up by the assistant-bunny from the previous spin. More on this when I've sent out a twenty-stack of emails to university libraries informing them of the availability of Revisionist Historiography.

How the mighty are fallen. But a nice piece of product-placement.
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Grant



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I used to go to the Golden Nugget in Shaftesbury Avenue and watch Chinese people do the same, covering most of the table with each play. I was a trainee card counter until I realised it was very hard and the margins were so low I would be better off getting a second job
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