AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Every time I get settled with a new channel they take it away. It's just happened with Vice, an American trendy-lefty-youffy channel that I thought rather good and watched at least its news bulletin every day plus assorted docs. Unlike my fellow trendy-lefty-youffy compatriots apparently

[Mick Harper]

Bognor (Talking Pictures)

I thought I knew my eighties police procedurals but this was a new one on me. Bognor (curious name but it gets one's attention) is an undercover agent for the Board of Trade investigating how the Russians are getting our food secrets. "I thought we told them anyway as part of our cultural exchanges." "Yes, but only in our own good time."

Anyway, this time it's a mysterious order of monks (aren't they all) with a new type of honey produced by a special strain of bees. The BoT have already sent in one undercover man disguised as a monk, but he's just been murdered. "Nice chap but he didn't seem to have much of a vocation." So now it is to be Bognor going in disguised as a police detective investigating the murder. This surprises the actual police detectives investigating what appears to them to be the murder of a monk, but Bognor resourcefully tells them he's Special Branch.

Let us hope the real Special Branch don't turn up when the real police ring up the real Special Branch and ask what the dickens they are doing sending in one of theirs without clearing it with them first and anyway what's the security angle in monks offing each other? Meanwhile Dr Who, in the shape of Patrick Troughton, has turned up and having taken Bognor (whose Land Rover has overturned thanks to someone draining the brake fluid) to the pub whose landlord seems to be in on it, but we don't know what it is, indicates that the first undercover man was murdered because of homosexual jealousy on the part of various monks. Who aren't really monks "except half a dozen of them, they're really good chaps and don't know what's actually going on." Nothing yet about bees but I'll keep you posted.

Did I mention the abbot likes to play squash in very tight shorts but hastily dons a cowl if he sees anybody coming?

[Chad]

The BBC have long been the propaganda department of the LBGTQ movement, but it wasn’t until I sleepily stumbled into last night’s episode of Casualty, that I realised just how extreme the credo had become.

Patient 1: Orthodox homosexual male, in orthodox homosexual marriage, having baby via surrogate female (sexuality not specified).

Patient 2: Estranged sibling of patient 1.

They meet up at father’s funeral, both end up in hospital after argument leading to collapse of light fitting.

Patient 2 tries to apologise to patient 1 for past homophobic bullying and reveals that she/he is now transitioning from female to male. But (and this is the good bit) she/he is not sexually attracted to women, and is actually a homosexual male in a woman’s body.

Meanwhile, a bisexual, married, Eastern European, paramedic (whose son is dying of cancer) sods off for a bit of, emotionally therapeutic, back seat buggery in his boyfriend’s banger.

Can’t wait for the next instalment.

[Mick Harper]

Don't be such a misery-guts. You can always settle down with a good book. Here are the themes of this year's Booker Prize long list

Thomas Cromwell gets executed
friendship between Palestinian and Israeli who have just lost their daughters in the conflict
a tale of redemption
two immigrant orphans in the wild west
black experience in America (two entries)
a nanny deals with her employers' white fragility
gay graduate reckons with grief and the aftermath of abuse
dystopian future as a mother and daughter escape a dying metropolis
life amid London gangs
boy's love for his alcoholic mother
female soldiers resisting Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia
returns to Nervous Conditions in This Mournable Body
toxic mother daughter dynamic
hard hitting accounts of poverty and social deprivation (remaining entries)

[Mick Harper]

Soviet Storm (Sky History One}

A must for war buffs. A twenty-hour (or so) account of the Great Patriotic War made, as the title suggests, by the Russians. Valuable on that account alone (no worse bias than ours, less than the Americans') but how else are you even going to hear about, never mind get an hour long account of, say, the Rhezv Meatgrinder?

The usual infuriating ha'penny-tar criticisms. This is a mega 2012 production, no expense spared, except for the maps which are the worst since the Hereford mappa mundi. Doesn't anyone in Russia know that you have to colour in land, sea, German territory, Russian territory, axes of advance and pockets of resistance in a way that the eye can distinguish which is which? And swift camera angle shifts to show different perspectives are super-modern but only if you knew where you were in the first place.

Sky, I appreciate you don't have the funds to recolour the maps but surely you could change the Cyrillic lettering into some more familiar alphabet? I can make out Moscow and Berlin from first principles but nothing in between. Not even Rhezv when it was at the centre of the action for a full hour.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Having finished my twenty hours of Soviet warmongering, I am now halfway through my six hours of Watergate. What did we do before we had too much cornucopia? Thank God I did my Line of Duty duty many months ago and won't have to do it again for at least a year. Which reminds me, or rather the Guardian Review reminds me, it may be time for a Sopranos cycle again.

[Mick Harper]

Do not think, for one moment, I don't spend every evening moaning about having nothing to watch. Why don't they start a Watching Paint Dry Channel. In colour!

[Mick Harper]

Ten Ways (Discovery History)

[Mick Harper]

War Factories: Fiat (UKTV)

This terrific series has finally got round to Fiat. But what was even more terrific was that all the talking heads, being obliged to talk narrowly about Italian interwar industrial policy, were obliged to admit that Mussolini was a damn good leader, just what Italy needed at the time. They even had kind words for his foreign policy at the end of the thirties, practically blurting out they would have done exactly the same as him in his shoes. Let's hear it for Fascism!

Oh, God, I hope Levi Roach isn't reading this.

[Mick Harper]

Friday Night Dinner (Netflix)

[Mick Harper]

Connected (Netflix)

So I get this phone call, "You're on speaker phone!" and it's a roomful of jeering people telling me to go watch Episode Four of Connected on Netflix. After fifty minutes or so of the usual half-witted pseudo-savant cavorting around getting half-witted pseudo-savants to explain Benford's Law to him (and us) which says that random numbers do not begin with a random digit but with, most often, one then two then three...we get to the pay-off. It's this bloke in a balloon sailing over a volcano in Catalonia (no, I didn't know either) and the volcano-ologist bloke with him saying, "Everything coming out of it obeys Benford's Law," or something, I was slightly slack-brained by this point.

We are now shown a classic map of the Pacific Ring of Fire and the cavorter-in-chief is assuring us that everything real in the universe, 'from your tax returns to plate tectonics', obeys Benford's Law. So the roomful of jeering people were right, plate tectonic theory is right and Mick Harper is wrong. These are the sort of people I have to put up with in my life.

[Ishmael]

Do I follow correctly? These people were seriously excited to call you and tell you to watch a TV program because they believed it proved your theories wrong?

[Mick Harper]

Yes. It tells us quite a lot about how paradigm theories work their way into the popular consciousness (including of course people who will be studying the Earth Sciences at university -- and then teaching it). Every time a volcano blows up (or any spectacular seismic event occurs), the news media rush to the site and explain, in awed tones, how plate tectonics has struck again. Volcanoes (and all spectacular seismic events) therefore get gradually accepted as living proof that the plates are tearing the earth apart. Cause and effect. What's your problem, Mick? Don't you believe the evidence of your own eyes?

You think us wittering on about symptoms not being the same as diseases is going to make much headway?

[Hatty]

Can someone explain how La Garrotxa (Catalunya's volcanic field) has anything to do with plates shifting around? It was active 11,500 years ago, in line with Mick's theory. Apart from an earthquake in 1428, and some 'shaking' in 1901 and 1902 that according to Wiki hurt no-one, it's hardly evidence of a plate is it? Quarrying for volcanic gravel has been going on there until the 1990's.