AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

It's a mystery why nobody has taken Joe Inwood aside to tell him you don't wave your arms around when you're a TV talking head. How he became the International Editor of Newsnight without knowing this is an even greater mystery. Still now they've all read this, everything should be fine from now on.

It's a great responsibility being the only person who watches Newsnight.

[Mick Harper]

The BBC has, I suppose, the best back catalogue of radio programmes in the known universe so BBC Sounds which features gems from it is a pretty good resource. Its only drawback is that it is owned and operated by the BBC. So you can be sure BBC Sounds is highly vexing to use on a day to day basis but it is when it crashes one's digibox that it is shown off to best effect.

What the BBC needs is more administrators to draw this to the attention of whoever's in charge of the BBC.

[Mick Harper]

[Grant]

There is no official start to Spring, despite what the BBC meteorologists would have you believe when they talk of the "official" start of Spring.

Spring actually started last week when the large Camellia in our garden unfurled its first red flower

[Wile E. Coyote]

I always thought it was traditionally when the snowdrops came out, then someone from AE ruined it by insisting that these foreigners were not native to Britain, so I then plumped for crocuses but, nope, not native again. Camelia it can't be as they only existed in Britain since round about 1730, and Spring surely existed before that.

So traditionally first sign of spring must have been when we foraged for native wild garlic.

[Mick Harper]

As we wrote in The Megalithic Empire farmers don't need stonehenges et al for any calendrical needs they may have because they don't have any. The calendar is irrelevant to growing stuff because every year is different.

But if you're going to go round using words like 'spring', as Adam was, they must have some meaning. There are only two natural annular changes -- getting warmer, getting colder -- so to arbitrarily choose to have four seasons, you must have four three-month units. Spring can either be March, April and May (o.n.o.) or winter and/or summer. will be in trouble. They made the rules, I didn't. I think seasons are daft. Won't have 'em in the house.

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

Forensics: The Real CSI (BBC2)

Not the least interesting part of last night's interesting programme was the fact that a council flat in a Birmingham high-rise was left unoccupied for nine months and only came to anybody's attention when the police identified a body found in a dumped freezer cabinet to be its tenant. Birmingham City Council recently filed for bankruptcy and this, maybe, suggests one of the reasons why.

[Mick Harper]

Strike Boy: "Policing the Pickets" (BBC R4)

There have been a plethora of stuff commemorating forty years since the Miner's Strike. This is right up the BBC's current alley and all programmes have shared a common theme: everyone was a victim, striking and non-striking miners alike. Even the police have been given a kind of 'let's bury the hatchet' free pass. There is only one universal foe nobody has any time for, miners and police alike, and we know who that will be.

The Met.

[Mick Harper]

Blood in the Machine BBC R4

Following Strike Boy as Book of the Week is this paean to the Luddites. Hundreds of men, marching forth with hammer and cutlass, through the same West Yorkshire/Nottinghamshire villages as King Arthur's Flying Pickets. Not pit villages churning out coal this time but factory villages churning out cheap textiles on the new machines of the Industrial Revolution.

The Left is supposed to be the breaking wave of the future so why does it always find itself trying to cling to a fast vanishing past?

[Mick Harper]

With the ordinary news so samey I have taken to listening to business news. There is a plethora of such programmes on Radio 4, the World Service and Al-Jazeera. At first it was all rather refreshing but gradually I realised that they were treated as filler by the main news people and most of it was just ordinary news -- exactly the same ordinary news --selected from the main bulletins on a 'could be considered business' basis. 'Biden launches recovery programme', 'China growth rate in the pits', that kind of thing.

When they do occasionally offer up the genuine article, it's amateur hour. Take last night's "World banana crop in danger from climate change'. That's new and worth five minutes of my time. First ask yourself (a) who is ostensibly the best person in the world to talk authoritatively about this and (b) the worst. Well, it's the same person, the bloke in charge of banana exports at the world's largest banana producer, Ecuador. So we were none the wiser.

[Mick Harper]

The Rise & Fall of Boris Johnson Channel 4

This is a six-hour all-dancing no expense spared extravaganza so (I'm reporting in only after the first half hour) it is remarkable what they haven't bothered to tell us thus far.

1. His grandfather is a one-year-old orphan in Turkey. Next thing he's in unspecified but clearly aspirational circumstances in England. Doesn't that require a line of explanation?
2. He joins the RAF, has an accident, becomes an alcoholic, has no visible means of support, and yet has managed to father the apparently high-end Johnson clan. Doesn't that require a line of explanation?
3 His father is racketing around doing a plethora of short-lived jobs in London while maintaining a a family of four in an Exmoor sheep farm. Doesn't that require a line of explanation?
4 Then Johnson Snr is 'trying to be a Euro-MP in Brussels'. Well, was he or wasn't he? He sends Boris to public school. On what? A Euro-MP's salary? I don't think so.
5. Next thing, Boris himself is 'using his connections' to get a job on the Times. Well, come on, tell us what these are. A young shaver has to have pretty good ones to land such a plum job.
6. Then this 'trainee journo' is sacked for making up a quote. For someone so well connected, it hardly seems a hanging offence but what happens next? He is immediately taken on by the Telegraph. "I see from your CV, Mr Johnson, you've done fuck all except blot your copybook. Welcome aboard."

I'm beginning to wonder if Boris Johnson ever existed.

[Grant]

British politics is full of such mysteries.

My favourite is that mediocrity, John Major. His father was a music-hall performer turned garden gnome maker. John achieved three O levels at school and was turned down for a job as a bus conductor. He then joined a bank and progressed a couple of rungs up the corporate ladder, at the same time as working as a local councillor and ingratiating himself in the local Conservative Party.

After the obligatory stab at a hopeless seat, he was then handed the safest Conservative seat in the country in 1979. Twelve years later he was PM.

How did he get this seat? There must have been hundreds of better qualified people who had passed a few exams, been well connected or rich. But the good burghers of Huntingdon chose the most boring politician ever to hold office.

Must have been the three O levels

[Mick Harper]

But he did pull off a miracle win in 1992. All the while Edwina Currie was pulling off etc etc

[Mick Harper]

Dog in the Manger Radio 3