AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Mrs Miniver (BBC R4)

We've all seen the film. We all enjoyed the film in a guilty sort of way. Such stiff upper-lippery under trying conditions. But who knew it was a book by Jan Struther written in 1939? Well, I didn't and how could it be since the film is all about Dunkirk which, I could have sworn, occurred in 1940. But anyway I started listening to it in fifteen-minute chunks.

My mouth was fully agape for the first quarter hour. I don't think I've ever heard a smugger, more nauseous rendering of pre-war English upper middle class life in all my born days. Only for the second one, which I'm listening to as I write, to reveal the whole thing is a comic spoof. I am sore confused.

[Mick Harper]

Have you noticed that when you watch TV and you have to lie in an incredibly uncomfortable position because otherwise your bifocals will distort the picture but when you switch over to a radio programme you stay in the exact same position?

[Mick Harper]

In Our Time (BBC R4)

Melvyn was on about the Hanseatic League this week. No, Wiley, not the Human League. The talking heads admitted that nobody had a clue where it sprang from or when. "The earliest historical records are from the twelfth century... etc." I immediately thought of the Megalithics but the only connections I could make were

1. It was centred on the salt-free Baltic
2. It had no centralised organisation or obvious muscle
3. Despite which it flourished indefinitely until the joint-stock era
4. The English Hanse HQ was at the Steelyard, All Hallows Street
5. But the English were seen more as rivals than members.

Anything else greatly welcomed.

[Mick Harper]

A Cold War of Spies (PBS)

This is a surprisingly good four-part treatment of a usually hackneyed subject. The talking heads are new and worth a listen. Although 'victim culture' has clearly reached this normally traditional sector, viz "The Americans wanted to try out their new weapon on a live population to observe the effects."

There was one completely new bit of information. Dealing with Soviet 'sleepers' the programme claimed they would be given birth certificates in the name of infants who had died at the appropriate time (so far so Day of the Jackal) but "churches would be bribed to destroy the death notices". I'd like to have been a fly on the vestry wall when that conversation took place.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Witness History (BBC R4)

They were recounting the seminal 1972 fashion season when American haute couture designers were invited to Paris for the first time. One of the movers and shakers, a Brooklyn schmutter merchant of the old school, was on hand to set the scene. He started well

[Mick Harper]

To Catch a Copper (Channel 4)

An odd series. Although the remit of the programme makers was clearly to produce a Oh-how-awful collage of police malpractices -- it is all the rage at the moment -- I couldn't help having constant reservations. Mainly it was all to do with the modern malaise that the police are no longer police but an arm of the social services. For which they are neither trained, selected or naturally suited. And it showed.

As it happens I have some personal experience of restraining loonies from my time as a head night porter in a teaching hospital and I can tell you it's not easy. It's especially not easy if you are expected to be psychiatric nurses rather than night porters or policemen. It is complete nonsense to talk about sensitive policing. You haven't got time for doing anything much more than hanging on like grim death.

What people don't appreciate it is that it is scary. We are all kinda experienced in dealing with unco-operative people, angry people, maybe even criminal people, but mad people are something else. They are immensely strong, they are immensely unpredictable and they are immensely cunning. From what I saw, I would have been more inclined to give the fuzz and fuzzesses medals rather than handing out condign punishments.

Though I'd give Bristol & Avon's Chief Constable the bullet straightaway. What an appalling West Country version of our own dear Cressida she was. I'm not in the least surprised that she gave the go-ahead to a project that showed her in her true lights. She loves herself to bits, that one. The absolute pits was when she gave a 'financial settlement' and a letter of apology to the woman with the baby on the bus.

I'd have given her six months in whatever passes for Holloway down there in yokel-land. I mean the woman on the bus though I wouldn't object if they shared a cell.

[Mick Harper]

Colvill & Soames: Bad Apples (BBC Radio 4X)

These are rather good if workaday spy thrillers from the nineteen-nineties. The reason I'm bringing this one to your attention is because of a remarkably prescient piece of dialogue about corruption in high places. Our two intrepid investigators are on the trail of a bent Home Secretary and have reached the hallowed grounds of the Sussex county cricket club in Brighton (Hove actually) because their quarry was on Any Questions in Brighton Town Hall (Brighton, actually) the night before

[Mick Harper]

Reindeer Mafia (Walter Presents to Channel 4)

The first episode certainly bodes well. You have to get used to an ambience that puts Vera in the shade and also to lines like "Why did you have him killed?" "He was threatening to take over the herd" but other than that it is exactly the sort of organised crime drama we all know and love. We will finally discover what part of the reindeer cannoli comes from.

[Mick Harper]

Did you see Howard Jacobson on Newsinght? Blimey, what's got into him. It was like Enoch Powell's River of Blood with extra foaming. Comic novelists aren't supposed to have a sense of proportion but nor should they be invited onto the Newsnight couch in these sensitive times. Taking of which I posted this up on Medium today
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Anti-Semitism is Alive and Kicking

[Mick Harper]

Corrupt Cops: What the Police Knew (Dispatches, Channel 4)

A bit scissors and paste but that is in itself significant because all the cases featured were extremely old hat-- Kenneth Noye, the Sydenham carpark axe murder, Stephen Lawrence. This means either
(a) there's not much corruption in the Met or
(b) there's not much appetite for police corruption-hunting.

I really cannot say which it is. My own investigation of the Croydon Playboy murder notwithstanding.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wolf like me (Peacock currently showing on Prime for free)

You settle down with your "significant other" for a Rom Com, or a is it a fantasy? It feels superior, well acted but clunky, yet you both are suddenly laughing out loud.

What is going on? She does a lot of running away, she is actually quicker than Danny chasing crims in Blue Bloods, he does a lot of hang dog.

Worth sticking with for the very dark humour.

One of a kind. Character piece. Jeckyll and Hyde.

[Mick Harper]

Spot the Non-Deliberate Mistake

[Mick Harper]

Just One Thing (BBC R4)