AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Grant]

I’ll rephrase my question: why would a leader who has decided that his tactics for the next election are to say and do nothing substantive, leaving the Tories to self-destruct, appoint an unpleasant loose cannon like Thornberry?

The only chance the Tories have now is to get the illegal immigrants on the plane to Rwanda. If they manage that Thornberry will be slagging off ordinary British people who think that’s a good idea.

[Mick Harper]

Homeward (BBC4)

One of those slight films that tell you a lot. It concerned father-and-son Crimean Tartars taking the body of the other son, killed fighting Ukrainian separatists insofar as one could work it out, for burial in Crimea. Made after the Russian occupation of Crimea but before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

What did it tell? The squalor (but not poverty) of everything 'Russian' for a start. In that regard it has a lot in common with America, always a shock to people used to the apple pie order of western Europe. But mainly about how you run multi-ethnic societies when there isn't a supra-authority keeping everyone down, but in order. Highly recommended.

[Mick Harper]

Dominoes (Radio 4)

A play about a young West Indian Briton visiting an old West Indian Briton in a care home. Barrel of laughs, radio drama. Unlike me and my mum, they mainly played dominoes. We were cribbage fiends. The older often rebuked the younger because he declined to smash his domino on the table each time as if to signal the Last Trump. He played à l'Anglais, placing said domino on said table without fanfare of any kind.

On this I firmly side with youth. When I was a porter in a well-known London teaching hospital, I sat all day (there were too many porters to make rising from the cumbent position a frequent duty) listening to British West Indians slamming dominoes on a table. Is it any wonder that I quickly transferred to Head Night Porter where it was Harper's Rules?

[Mick Harper]

A Little Lateral Thinking (R4X)

I discovered in the course of this programme that I once wrote for the same publication, Games & Puzzles Monthly, as Gyles Brandreth though of course at the time we were both unknowns. I became less unknown, among gamers and puzzlers at any rate, when the editor asked me for my views as to the general policy and future direction of the then fairly new magazine and I obliged with a forthright critique of the various contributors. Which he then printed in the Letters to the Editor section.

[Mick Harper]

Eurovision Song Contest (BBC1)

So we came second-last. I'm not surprised, what would one expect staging the event in Liverpool, better known for its whingers than its singers? If only they had listened to my suggestion, Eel Pie Island.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Banging lovely isle, but tore my ligament doing Da Jizzy Eel Pie Jive. Happy days.

[Mick Harper]

I'm the only person of my generation who didn't see Mick and Keith cutting a rug there. I saw all the others. Jeff Beck, Long John Baldry (Elton John as he became), Jimi Hendrix... but not those two.

[Wile E. Coyote]

Wiley is crowd funding an injuction against the BBC for discrimination against moi. Here is my letter. Your are invited to contribute to this worthy cause.

Dear Dominus Generalis,

I have instructed my learned solicitor that you have now cast four Scottish actors in the starring lead role "The Doctor" (Medicus Mysterium) in your popular television series Doctor Who.

Whilst Sylvester McCoy, David Tennant, Peter Capaldi and now Ncuti Gatwa are all no doubt highly capable journey man actors, we note that under the BBC charter you do have a duty to consider all actors irrespective of their specie, and that your continual refusal to consider a well known, much loved performer Wiley E Coyote (Lupus Extinctor), we believe constitutes discrimination.

Unless this is remedied ASAP, I intend to seek damages, and not just to myself this time.

Yours.....

[Mick Harper]

Put me down for a fiver. Journeyman is one word. Specie refers to money unless you were being satirical. Anyone who was at Eel Pie Island in its trad jazz days is indeed a Time Lord. Give all our regards to Lord Reith unless he too is Scottish.

[Mick Harper]

I'm obliged to Newsnight for news of this scheme whereby you get ten thousand pounds for not fathering children. Instead you are provided with already pregnant women (mainly Vietnamese, I understand) and you just have to put them on your passport or something. Believe me, at my time of life, that's about all I can manage. They didn't say how many one is allowed but I've always had a hankering for a large family.

[Mick Harper]

War on Trial: The Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (PBS America)

I'm still trying to get my head round Srebrenica. I don't mean the horror or the cruelty or whatnot, I know all about that. About average, in my experience. Eight thousand is actually a bit minor as these things go. It's the why. The politics. This wasn't done in the heat of the moment, there was nothing shamefaced or underhand about it, there was not even the rationale that the people concerned had been doing terrible things to them. Bosnian Muslims might have been resisting the Bosnian Serbs but they had no record of committing atrocities against them. Even if they would have done if the boot had been on the other foot -- they're all pretty much the same people.

[Mick Harper]

No sooner do I post up a story about the Titanic https://medium.com/p/e93b8122d658 than Channel 4 News runs a story about the Titanic. Is the news media dancing to my tune or am I in tune with the zeitgeist? That'll probably be my next story on medium so stay tuned.

[Mick Harper]

War on Trial: The Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia Part Two

Another eight thousand corpses, this time in Kosovo. And an even weirder political act than Srebrenica. On the face of things it was very successful. By sending in what looked for all the world to be ordinary Serbian conscripts to occupy a random town and start butchering the locals, the Serbs had achieved, as the Nazis might have put it, an Albanian-frei Kosovo. We know from similar episodes elsewhere what should have happened: one point five million Albanian Kosovans eking out existences in temporary but permanent refugee camps in Albania while Serbs take over those of their former residences that have not been put to the torch.

Only this was (just about) within the ambit of western television crews so NATO told the Serbs to take a hike or they'd bomb Belgrade into ... mmm, smart bombs ... the Bronze Age. "What did we do wrong?" they asked in bewilderment, but eventually had to cry uncle. The Kosovar Albanians returned, got their independence (from Serbia, they very wisely declined to join Albania) and Milosevic was able to resist being summoned to the War Crimes Tribunal due to six million Serbs waving their fists angrily at the very idea their hero could be guilty of anything. A bit later Milosevic lost an election, refused to recognise the result, and was packed off to the Hague by six million Serbs waving him bon voyage.

After a five year trial and just as the verdict was about to delivered, Milosevic died of natural causes. So endeth all war criminals.

[Mick Harper]

All-Inclusive Holidays: Unpacked (ITV-1)

An illuminating example of the 'bogus list'. We think we know the drill. All-Inclusive holidays are fine if you eat in and drink alcohol in reasonable quantities. If not, not. All very simple. They must work overall because they're always making telly programmes exposing them. Bogus list technique is also simple: the first example is always absolutely on the money.

We hear from a couple who were terrorised by a bunch of rowdies getting plastered on free booze. Good point so… We shift to Megaluf, rhymes with had enough, and trying to get rid of the rowdies. How is this related to hotels offering all-inclusive holidays? “We are going to insist they serve only three free drinks per meal,” says the Mayor of Megaluf.

Next, we hear from a couple who holidayed in the Canaries. "We've had lots of happy all-inclusive holidays, but this time the hotel was infested with cockroaches.” They were included in the price, I expect. So the film crew moves on to a Canary hotel building site, “Are you going to go all-inclusive?” “We might do, they’re very popular, but they do attract the rowdier element.” I think that was a maybe. Then it was cruise ships. Hang on, aren’t cruises all-inclusive by their nature? We quickly leave cruise ships.

To wrap the show, travel trade experts warned us of the perils of the all-inclusive holiday. The talking heads told us in various ways, "They're OK if you eat in and drink alcohol in reasonable quantities. If not, not." One of them added, "Otherwise you'll be subsiding all the people who do." And that’s your bogus list. One good example followed by a string of nothings but you leave with the impression you’ve been quite snowed under.

[Mick Harper]

The Assassination of Olof Palme (Sky Documentaries)

I am halfway through this mildly gripping four-part series and it has clear lessons for us conspiracy-theory theorists. It has a lot of parallels with the Kennedy assassination but some important differences too. Notably they haven't caught the perpetrator. This has allowed the grassy knoll aspect to be given much freer rein: so far, the CIA, the KGB, the Swedish secret services, the Swedish right, the Kurds and the Serbs have flittered through the conspiracy net.

That last one reminded me of the Dando case, a comparison heightened by the (extremely dullard) Stockholm police rounding up the local nutter and getting him put inside on the flimsiest of evidence. He also got freed after a year when the flimsiness outweighed the necessity. I will watch on and report back.