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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Barrymore: The Body in the Pool (Channel 4)

There are two real life Silent Witnesses going through their TV paces at the moment, White House Farm and this one. They have common features. Both are tediously drawn out -- Barrymore's first half hour, from an hour and fifty, is pretty tough going, but both repay sticking with.

They both feature fairly terrifying police incompetence, largely stemming from initial assumptions and then running on rails despite (or exacerbated by) intense public scrutiny. In the Barrymore case the police assumed a simple case of drowning and made little attempt to treat Barrymore's house (and swimming pool and jacuzzi) as crime scenes, nor the ten people present as suspects rather than witnesses. Especially not Barrymore himself who had departed the scene even before the ambulance and.police arrived. As he said, "To avoid publicity." To which end, presumably, he contacted his publicity assistant who arrived shortly thereafter and (it is alleged and denied) removed certain items. The police acknowledge that this should not have been allowed and that certain items have indeed gone missing from that day to this.

There was no chance of recovering from any of this when the following day their pathologist declared it to be a 'simple drowning' with no 'third party intervention' and no evidence of injuries apart from those occasioned by pulling a body out of a pool, performing twenty minutes of resuscitation and being subject to repeated post-mortem measurements by a 'rectal thermometer'. This last became apposite when three subsequent pathologists pointed out that the severe bruising and tears to the anal passage 'could not be missed'.

Not the least fascinating aspect is that the police have announced a new investigation (I think, the fourth) into the case, nineteen years on.
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Mick Harper
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One AE aspect (careful ignoral and multiple PC considerations) was the question of the sexual orientation of the victim. The programme relentlessly pushed the 'he was straight' angle and, to this end, repeatedly showed clips from his wedding celebrations. Sharp-eyed AE-ists will have had no difficulty in noting two things

1. The bride was considerably less attractive than the groom and
2. The groom looked thoroughly miserable throughout.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Mick Harper wrote:
These are shown knowingly to be a constant reiteration of the basic technique of sit coms -- a laborious set-up followed by a punchline all delivered by people acting in character except they are all marionettes in the hands of scriptwriters coming up with punchlines etc etc.


Have you ever seen Curb Your Enthusiasm?
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Mick Harper
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I have tried, repeatedly, over the years because a) it always comes highly recommended and b) it is clearly significant in its own right. But can never manage it. I was beguiled though by a programme about the making of an HBO special called Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. He was, as it were, in character.

Might I, in return, ask your opinion of Entourage (Sky Comedy) which is currently (it won't last) tickling my funny bone?
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Grant



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TV news is leading on the subject of Philip Schofield declaring that he's gay. (For foreign reader, Schofield is a ubiquitous TV presenter). I have no problem with his gayness, but it's hilarious that liberals are telling us ad nauseum how very brave he is. If he was a movie star in 1920 or a music hall artiste in 1820 I'd concede the point. But this is 2020.
Liberals have developed a demented victim based world view which is totally divorced from reality.

Only a few weeks ago some of the female MPs trying to replace Corbyn were telling us how difficult it is to be a female MP, when we had a female prime minister 41 years ago!
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Mick Harper
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I had a complete double take. In so far as I knew who he was I had assumed he was some kind of standard gay icon, a Russel Harty figure. Of course I didn't know this, just as I didn't know he had a wife and kids, I just assumed it from multiple brief exposures to his looks, voice and general demeanour. If asked, I would have identified him as one half of a breakfast TV presenting duo, and the male half is either aggressively masculine (say Eamon Holmes... is it? or even the husband of the malfunctioning wardrobe woman) or the female presenter's gay chum chirruping on about 'light' subjects. He, I had assumed, was the latter.

So, like you Grant, I was mildly pole-axed to hear about his courage in coming out. Wholly the reverse I would have thought. Perhaps his career was on the slide and he needed a boost and isn't even gay! Now that would get my admiration.
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Grant



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Straights pretending to be gay (or bi) has already happened -- see David Bowie 1976.

Sadly it looks like the Schofield thing is the classic PR driven exercise to pre-empt bad news. But it doesn't appear to be working. Notice how his webuyanycar adverts have disappeared. He's toast
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Mick Harper
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To add to all the other thousands of hours of programming jamming my digibox, it is now election year in the United States and I have to spend most of my time watching the vote going from 43% to 59% in Murchison County as the urban precincts on the Massachusetts border, theoretically favourable to Elizabeth Warren, start reporting.

The only problem is that CNN can only use blue shades for Democratic candidates and there still being half a dozen in the race means it is difficult to distinguish, for example, between the parts of New Hampshire that voted twice for Obama but switched to Trump in 2016 and have Sanders in the lead thus showing he's the man to beat Trump in 2020 (dark turquoise) from those where Buttigieg is in front (light turquoise) from those still too close to call (turquoise). It's a good thing I don't care.
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Mick Harper
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White House Farm ITV-1

Although the programme makers made it clear whose side they were on, not Jeremy's, they were pretty fair. I would think I speak for all if I drew the following slightly contradictory conclusions

1. He probably did it
2. There's no way in the world that he did it beyond reasonable doubt.

This highlights something unavoidable in the criminal justice system. We all have to pretend that the reasonable doubt doctrine is applied because we find the idea of innocent people languishing in gaol intolerable but, if it were, too many of the guilty would be getting away with it to make civil society tolerable. So juries convict on gut instinct. 'He probably did it.' And appeal courts almost never reverse jury verdicts just because they ignored the reasonable doubt doctrine. It has to be positively perverse.

It may be the trial judge was reflecting his own unease by handing out a very skimpy twenty-five years -- meaning Bamber would have been out years ago and walking amongst us. But the Home Secretary understood that this is simply not permissible and converted the sentence to the very rare 'whole life' tariff.
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Grant



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I would have agreed totally but after watching the TV series I think there is a chance that this is genuinely a miscarriage of justice. What struck me is that the girlfriend didn't produce a single piece of info she wouldn't have got from the papers. What's the chance of that? If he had confided in her for months beforehand she would surely have been able to help the police in some way?
I must read up on the subject. It happened an hour's drive away from me. I might go and do some lurking at the weekend.
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Mick Harper
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What struck me is that the girlfriend didn't produce a single piece of info she wouldn't have got from the papers

Me too and it was a new detail. I've kept vague tabs on this case since the off and have never heard of this extremely important point. The other bit of new news was her cheque-kiting. The impression given by the programme was that her criminality re the mobile home park was strictly as an adjunct to him (which does him no favours either). But what if, as this suggests, she was a crim before she met him?

There is little chance of someone in Jeremy Bamber's circle hooking up with a young woman with criminal convictions so either he sought her out or she sought him out. This puts quite a different complexion on proceedings (either way, for guilt or innocence). But it seems to have been treated with careful ignoral by all and sundry. But not by DCI ("Lurker") Grant. Send Hatty a chit for your petrol money.
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Mick Harper
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Hidden (BBC-4)

Which of these is the wettest, gloomiest, dankest, most nutter-infested Godawful place you've ever come across: 1) Hidden's Wales or 2) Vera's Geordieland?

Tomorrow's semi-final: Lapland vs Belgium
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Mick Harper
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The other thing they have in common is that quite often the victim is not a young woman who has been mysteriously left with legs slightly akimbo and her skirt drawn up, a pose that can only be properly framed by a camera shot looking up the body. What I find infuriating though is that I'm always mildly disappointed when it isn't. I thought I was better than that.

But what I'm really waiting for is, after two hours, for the DCI to turn to his DS and say, "Fucked if I know." Run end credits.
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Mick Harper
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Storyville (BBC-4)

Tonight. About a community in Denmark where more than nine hundred fishermen are married to Thai women. The world keeps on eluding me.
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Wile E. Coyote


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I have a cracking idea for a prog, it's a stylish reworking of a cult classic, The Wicker Man, wrapped within a bog standard Agatha Christie whodunit. It gives a passing nod to Mulholland Drive. Rufus Sewell plays Edward Woodward and sets off to investigate a rash of connected deaths occurring around the pagan village of Much Deeping. The twist is that super suave Mark Easterbrook, who uncovers the solution to the Christie whodunit (stuff you Marple), is also a killer himself, albeit by the rather boring method of tipping the radio into the wife's bath. I have been pulling my hair out writing this, so it is only fair that most of the characters should pull out theirs. It's not going to end well for Rufus but there again it didn't for Edward.

What do you think?
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