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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Plastic Surgery Undressed BBC1

Presenters Mobeen Azhar and Vogue Williams put a group of young people looking to have plastic surgery under the harsh studio spotlight in this series. There is plenty of gruesome surgery footage and the realisation from the participants that maybe it isn't the answer. (Guardian)

Trivial perhaps but this is what Applied Epistemology is all about. Not least in that this blurb would pass you by every time. What's wrong with it? In itself nothing much, but ask yourself why it passes you by. Would this, for example, pass you by?

Plastic Surgery Undressed BBC1
Presenters Mobeen Azhar and Vogue Williams put to a group of young people looking to change their lives the idea they should consider plastic surgery. There is footage of how easy and routine the medical procedures are and interviews with young people who have been delighted with their own experiences. The participants come to the realisation that maybe plastic surgery might well be the answer.

Of course the second is just not possible, even though it is far more accurate. The BBC (and the Guardian) is simply not allowed to advocate -- no, not castigate, not even put neutrally -- something which millions of people for many decades have done, with all the evidence showing they tend to benefit from it. But here's the thing. We don't even know why we (and it is 'we') are obliged to take this position. It's something to do with puritanism and class and ... er .. and ... er ... even I can't fathom it. But being aware of it is the first step.
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Mick Harper
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A thousand hours on my digibox, a thousand hours on my Netflix, and I'm reduced to watching forty-year-old episodes of Elizabeth R. Is Glenda Jackson standing at this election? Has Vanessa Redgrave joined Momentum? Whither the luvvie vote? Come to think of it I'm a luvvie myself after my recent barnstormer as a stand-up comic. Ooh, I'm coming over all New New Labour. But they're going to tax high-earners, aren't they? Maybe just Lib Dems for the moment. Sam Giacometti it will have to be.
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Hatty
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This week's Storyville (BBC4) follows a couple of ageing Scandinavian reporters on their six-year investigation into the unsolved death of Dag Hammarskjöld, former General Secretary of the UN, who died in a plane crash in 1961 near Ndola Airport, Zambia.

The story revolves around a paramilitary organisation calling itself the South African Institute of Maritime Research, apparently funded by foreign intelligence services including M16, whose commander liked to dress up in eighteenth-century British naval uniform and wrote a fictionalised memoir entitled 'The Story of My Life'. I'd just finished reading Mick's latest chapter on Casanova's 'The Story of My Life' and marked "It is never the crime, it is always the cover-up" in red. Was it a premonition?
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Mick Harper
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No. It is entirely irrelevant to this case. "It's the cover-up" is only applicable when the original crime is a small one and was coined for Watergate when the original crime -- a break in -- is so trivial it barely gets into the Metro section of the Washington Post. Next to "Woman hurts knee opening trunk in Arlington shopping mall" (a trunk is what we call a boot). The original case, in this case, is the murder of the Secretary-General of the UN which is quite important.

In any case, in any case, you have missed the true significance. The only other Swede anyone has ever heard of, Olaf Palme, the Swedish prime minister, was also murdered under mysterious circumstances. But before you start a one-woman conspiracy theory I should point out there is no mystery about the disappearance in 1945 of the only other Swede anyone has ever heard of, Raoul Wallenberg. Everyone knows the Russians did it but, and I suppose this is significant, it is the only Stalinist-era crime they still haven't copped to. I wonder how many others there are.

PS I wish you hadn't told the world I'm writing about the Casanova cover-up. They'll be coming after me now.
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Mick Harper
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Interesting about the MI6 angle. Some background. The British and American governments were trying to keep their distance from the ancien South African regime for sound domestic and foreign policy reasons. However both countries were dependent on the Simonstown naval base and the South Africans were able to parley this into covert support from both countries. So far, so routine.

But, rather out of the blue, southern Africa became a cockpit in the Cold War because the Commies started piling in. The Cubans were in Angola, the Russians were backing Nkomo in Rhodesia, the Chinese were backing Mugabe in the same campaign, and everyone was lobbing support for the ANC in (or rather out of) South Africa itself. This increased the covert support into ... er ... increased covert support. First I've heard of the South African Institute of Maritime Research though it certainly sounds authentic, the Afrikaners liked these kinds of fancy English circumlocutions for their undercover units. And the MI6 support as well of course. We must open a file. But for Chrissake don't tell the world about it.
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Mick Harper
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Netflix is worth the subscription this week with The Irishman, three and a half hours of mafia mayhem plus the solution (though I haven't got there yet) to the Jimmy Hoffa mystery. Robert de Niro playing himself as a young hood is a triumph of CGI. Netflix always get the mob stuff exactly right.

Perhaps they'll do a documentary on where mafia money goes nowadays. Into streaming services is a strong possibility because they've got a steady, international income base, are expanding exponentially but never declare any profits. Amazon Prime would be my bet.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I have been watching Thames TV "Callan The Colour Years." Callan, played by Edward Woodward is a English agent famed for his killings.

However, a mission has gone wrong. Callan has been captured in East Germany, transported to Moscow drugged and tortured. Still, the Brits have also picked up a russkie spy. A mysterious civil servant type approaches Callan's boss "Hunter" and suggests saving Callan with an exchange.

"Oh. No, the Russian is worth much more"

Hunter is a man that truly understands the importance of "Exchange Value"

A lesson to us all.
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Mick Harper
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Yes, I have been watching Callan along with Special Branch and Public Eye, all post-Carré and Deighton i.e. antidotes to James Bond, emphasising the grubbiness of it all. You have to get used to the seventies-slowness of everything (and the production values) and the trick, I have found, is to be ruthless about deleting episodes after five minutes if the subject matter doesn't make up for this in excitement. Or in Marker's case, quirkiness since he doesn't do excitement. Goddamnit, until the third series, he didn't even have a car. "Follow that man," he snarls at the conductress.

For instance, what you describe re East Germany would qualify but Eddie snooping around a hotel room in London outing an East German spy wouldn't. Though you can flick forward to the scene with his odiferous informant and then to the office where he deals satisfyingly with his toffee-nosed superiors. Again. Why can't they see his worth? I blame the thwarted social ambitions of British scriptwriters. They are to be found with Mozart, below the salt.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Mick Harper wrote:
Yes, I have been watching Callan along with Special Branch and Public Eye, all post-Carré and Deighton i.e. antidotes to James Bond, emphasising the grubbiness of it all.


My favourite was Anthony Valentine as Toby Meres, an SIS agent, working alongside Callan. Toby is such a beast. Deep down, we are all wannabe posh psychopaths.

Whoops. Is that just me?
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Mick Harper
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I'm afraid so. However you raise an important point. How to signal goodies and baddies. In America where all actors (like all politicians) have to conform to what was considered to be handsome in the previous generation, you go by haircut. Over here, it's the mouth. So poor old Anthony V, whose mouth is a permanent sneer, is always a villain. I told him at RADA to get some plastic surgery but he said he preferred steady work rather than top billing. Being brought up in poverty does that to you. The Valentine, by the way, was because of a then popular crooner, Dickie Valentine, who Ants greatly admired. Indeed I believe they were later caught... but there I go, running off in all directions down memory lane.
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Grant



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Watched the Trial of Christine Keeper but couldn't get past the first half hour of typically badly written BBC tosh. What did it for me was when she went into a caff and asked for a full English. No-one said that in 1960, not even in 1980.
Why do so many writers have tin ears for dialogue?
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Mick Harper
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Because we, I mean they, lead sedentary and isolated lives and are obliged to use argot dimly remembered from their youth. Say, c. 2000 AD. Of course the BBC is supposed to employ script editors to take care of this i.e. ex-script writers ten years older than the script writers they are supervising, but that only takes us back to c. 1990. What the hell, who watches BBC1? It's not as if it's a subscription service.
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Mick Harper
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It's early days in the Christine Keeler serial -- I'm only half an hour in; it is, I agree, hard going -- but already the BBC has made a stupendous departure from orthodoxy. Which is that Keeler first met Profumo at the swimming pool at Clivedon, as shown on screen right at the beginning. Now half an hour later, they are suggesting that Profumo knew Keeler at Murray's Soho club at least a year before.

'So what,' you ask eagerly but with a languid upper class air. It makes all the difference. The case as presented by the Denning Report is that it was all highly accidental and unfortunate but definitely not sinister. Profumo meets Keeler at Cliveden on the Saturday, Captain Ivanov meets Keeler at Cliveden on the Sunday. Neither knows the other is interested in Keeler. If not, it's a set up and the only question is who is doing the setting up, the leading candidates being MI5, MI6, FBI, CIA, GRU and KGB. As you all know by now, secret services always fight their own domestic rivals more vigorously than they fight other people's secret services.

Of course only a complete doltard like Denning would omit to ask the AE question: "Never mind the bollocks, what is the overall probability of a British Secretary of State for War and a senior Russian intelligence agent meeting the same prostitute during the same weekend at the same stately home under any circumstances whatsoever?" And, having arrived at the answer 'vanishingly small', would have worked back from there.

But instead His Learned Lordship wrote the official report which said, and as far the British state is concerned is still the final word, "Oh well, these things happen. He's a very naughty boy. Next case!" Let us hope the BBC is reopening it. If so, Hatty and me might return to our own book on the subject which we had to set aside because though we found several guns, none of them were smoking.
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Mick Harper
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The next time I turned on my computer (this morning) after revealing the truth behind the Profumo Affair (above) I was asked to confirm my identity, something I've never been asked to do ever, ever. Coincidence? Yes.
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Mick Harper
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Having worried about it for a bit, I realised it was the first time I'd logged on in 2020. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Some variant of the 2000 bug maybe. Software people out there might care to enlighten me. 'Software' and 'people'! Not words that go naturally together.
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