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AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Coastal Defenders, Royal Albert Dock (BBC-2)

How times change. When I were a nipper and you fell in the Thames you were immediately sent off to hospital 'for a tetanus injection against locked jaw'. This anyway was how my brother used to put it when returning from a day rowing at Greenwich. Even though he's always been a bit of a drama queen, this was a fair summation of the state of the river at the time.

Now the denizens of Coastal Defenders treat the Thames as a sort of outsized venue for wild swimming.
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Mick Harper
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Blunt: The Fourth Man (London Live)

This is an 1986 offering i.e. just after Blunt's unmasking in the Commons by the Iron Lady. The film itself is briskly efficient -- and highly recommended -- with the added bonus of watching the youthful Ian Richardson (Blunt) and Anthony Hopkins (Guy Burgess) in action when they were just Central Casting toffs rather than the screen giants they subsequently became.

Not surprisingly Blunt is the central character and portrayed in the film as the Mr Big of the Cambridge Spies. A theory which has been allowed to decay in the forty years since, doubtless under the quiet ministrations of MI5 and the Palace. (Philby is mentioned but only as a spectre.) More surprising is the centrality of Goronwy Rees, a forgotten figure now but, according to the film, not to be forgotten. I have a small personal interest here as I once met his daughter who, I was pleased to see, is actually in the film. Guy Liddle is treated with unusual, shall we say, circumspection.

Blunt: the Fourth Man? I think we now know he would be more like the seventh. And when Moscow's files become available, probably the eleventh or twelfth. That is if he wasn't the First.
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Grant



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What did Blunt know which meant that MI5 had to protect him?

That Harold Wilson was a spy?
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Mick Harper
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There is a maximal case -- which I have a lot of time for -- which argues that much of British politics in the second half of the twentieth century was, let us say, 'guided' by the Soviet secret apparat. Once you have your own men in their secret apparat it is really quite simple maneuvering them to the top. Then it is a question of how easy it is to cross over into politics proper. Not that great in my opinion -- too many checks and balances in pluralistic societies.

That is a key difference between western and eastern secret apparats. It is impossible to picture western agents wandering about Russian universities recruiting adherents of western ideology and instructing them to make a beeline for the NKVD and GRU. They had to rely on recruiting malcontents already inside the Russian secret apparat. Not so Cambridge (and the ones they haven't told us about). But how much overall harm they did to the general thrust of east v west is pretty questionable.
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Mick Harper
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Blowing The Bloody Doors Off Radio 4X

"Teddy boys were called that because their hairstyles made them look like teddy bears." Michael Caine.

I hope you didn't say that to their faces, Michael. Dahn the Elephant. It was because their clothes harked back to the 'Edwardian' era.
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Wile E. Coyote


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MH370: THE PLANE THAT DISAPPEARED Netflix

It's either according to this mini series

1) The pilot (this gets dicounted as he was a nice personable dude)

2) The Russians (this is really bonkers, three Russian passengers remotely flew it to Kazakhstan by jumping down a hatch at the front of the first class that contains some of the airplane's electronics, jammed it from communicating to the outside world, and somehow took away control from the pilot )

3) The Americans (this is also bonkers, a couple of American AWACs jammed the electronics as it was carrying bits of drones to China, it's then hinted that the Americans took it out before reaching its destination)

Either way we are told that somebody out there knows.

Possibly, but it was not the makers of this documentary mini series.

Anyway the guy (it's actually folks) who claims to find washed up bits of Boeing is apparently planting them, in the wrong places, to throw investigators off the real crash scene.

Anyway, advocates of theories (2) and (3) talk us through them.
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Mick Harper
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Coincidentally I am listening to Passenger List on Radio 4X (very exciting, highly recommended) about a plane that disappears (over the Atlantic). After a few months of total mystery, some wreckage is found washed up on Greenland. But this was the bit that got to me. An expert from the Dooby-Dooby-Doo said, "I wouldn't bank my career on it because a surprisingly large amount of plane wreckage is found on beaches, but it looks as though it is the plane."

It's fictional of course but I don't think the writer would have said this if it wasn't true. Why it's true is trickier. Bits don't fall off planes, do they? Not structural parts anyway. And every plane is, as it were, accounted for -- take-off to landing. All a bit odd.

As, let's face it, is the MH370. A one-off unless someone can come up with anything more recent than Amy Johnson. 'A world record' as AE always puts it.
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Mick Harper
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A Murder in the Pacific (BBC2)

This terrific three-parter about the Rainbow Warrior ended for me in two unusual dénouements. First, I had actual tears in my eyes when the ship was finally sunk (to make an undersea reef) off northern New Zealand. This from someone who stands second to none in his contempt for these kinds of environmental activists.

Second, I had actual rage in my heart. Not because of the French action -- a dubious but ultimately acceptable bit of realpolitik skullduggery -- but because of French re-action after getting caught. To get their two secret service people out of gaol (they had been sentenced to ten years for manslaughter) the French threatened to stop New Zealand lamb and dairy exports to France if they weren't set free!

It was, let's face it, all New Zealand's fault for harbouring Greenpeace terrorists in the first place.
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Mick Harper
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The Listening Post (Al-Jazeera)

This is a weekly roundup of media issues and this week -- after a long and tendentiously left-wing account of the Lineker Affair -- it was the effect of AI on journalism. Broadly that it will soon be possible to dispense with journalists. A kind of parallel problem has been taxing me for a very long time. In the 24-hour news cycle, there are zillions of talking heads, paid to talk about something they know about, but who always say things I already know.

Now, true, I'm a polymath but even so you would think there are limits even to my sagacious neural networks. But it seems not. Over and over again, subject after subject, country after country, they say things that I could have said. It's as if AI had already taken over.

Though maybe when it does, it will say something I don't know. If so, here's to you, AI.
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
There is a maximal case -- which I have a lot of time for -- which argues that much of British politics in the second half of the twentieth century was, let us say, 'guided' by the Soviet secret apparat. Once you have your own men in their secret apparat it is really quite simple maneuvering them to the top. Then it is a question of how easy it is to cross over into politics proper. Not that great in my opinion -- too many checks and balances in pluralistic societies.


I developed this same theory regarding the USA. That cabal is still in control. They've controlled the Presidency since Nixon. Reagan wasn't their boy but Bush Sr. was.
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Mick Harper
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One may be true, the other false. They both may be true. They both may be false. The big difference is that there is compelling evidence for one, and no evidence (that I'm aware of) for the other. It is one of the chief differences between a conspiracy theory and a theory about a conspiracy.

Of course here at the AEL we have a firm policy of welcoming all new theories so, please, Ishmael, fire away.
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Mick Harper
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The Gold (BBC1)

How strange. As I remembered it, Kenneth Noye was acquitted so I got a shock when he was sent down for fourteen years at the end of this (great) series. Then, by a satisfying irony, he killed someone he was having a road rage argument with and got life (which I assume he is still serving). What actually happened, I now realise, was that he got off the murder charge re the policeman in the balaclava during the raid on his house, later served fourteen years for Brinks Mat, then got life for the road rage offing. They say crime never pays.

But, on this viewing, Noye's greatest regret must be that he is not viewed as a cool criminal mastermind but as someone who popped someone just because he got cut up on an M25 sliproad. You don't even get extra privileges for that.
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Mick Harper
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The Gold: The Inside Story (BBC1)

Crime-Busting 80's Style

"Were you working in Brinks Mat on the night of the robbery?"
"Yes."
"Is your brother in law nicknamed 'The Colonel' because of his skill in organising complex armed robberies?"
"Yes."
"Were you the inside man?"
"Yes."
"Who else was in the gang?"
"Well, there was Mad Mick McEvoy. Do you want his address?"
"No, we've got that."
"Then there was..."
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Mick Harper
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This programme underlined something I have been advocating for ages (alone, as usual)

Abolish offshore banking

Don't reform it, don't regulate it -- everyone has been advocating that for ages (as usual). You just can't. If someone can tell me the need for it -- no, if someone can tell me one useful purpose it serves that can't be performed by ordinary banking -- then I'll listen, but otherwise just close the lot down.

You've got a year to get your dosh out or you lose it. And if that means either losing it or bringing it back home and going to prison, well boo hoo.
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Mick Harper
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"And how many of your lonely crusades have born fruit so far, Mick?"
"I don't have the actual figures to hand."
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