To be divorced once is a misfortune. To be divorced twice, thrown out of the Conservative Party and thrown out the Labour Party looks like carelessness. Local joke Andrew Pelling now wants to be my local councillor. Not so much the bottom of the barrel but the liquid that leaked out into the cellar soil.
Wonder if he'll ever make it back to the Tories... I would say no but these days ...
"Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat." - Winston Churchill
First they came for the Kippers
And I thought why are they in Europe exporting their hate?
I thought they told us they didn't want to politically integrate?
It seems a slight anticlimax now the trial has come. For in a world where Iran, Israel and Gaza are at war whilst war in Ukraine rumbles on Donald's fate seems like small beer. He doesn't even make the front page or the 2nd or 3rd. Newsnight and Panorama skip it over. No crowds are lining up round Manhattan to support him. A few detractors shout slogans and wave banners. Just as they did or didn't for his civil fraud trial. This isn't January 6th - it's 6 weeks of legal process...The novelty of seeing a former President being ushered into judicial buildings has waned. The pedestrian business of jury selection shuffles on. Donald says nothing to avoid being held in contempt and even seems to be falling asleep. As Orson Wells would have said - Something had happened. A thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town, and now it had come at last; Donald J Trump was getting his comeuppance. He got it three times filled, and running over. But those who had so longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him. For such is the way with Justice and Vengeance, we often wish for them dearly only to be disappointed by their reality because when justice comes the perps disappear and new ones fill their vacuums.
It's hard too not to feel some sympathy for Trump. All he wanted to do was pay off a porn star, the problem is he did it with company assets and that's a crime ... because within Donald's companies there is no clear line between the companies and himself. Just as in the Classified Documents case Trump seems to not have been able to distinguish between the government's records and his own. Just as there is no clear line for Trump between winning or losing elections by a lot. Trump simply absorbs everything into himself and becomes more and more self absorbed ... by a lot.
April 8th Meet David CaMoron
April 9th Cheat at Golf
April 15th Go to Court to prove I didn't pay hush money
April 22nd Explain to SCOTUS why I'm an Absolute Monarch
June 1st Get Convicted of Election Interference
June 2nd Start Bigly Sentence
July 30th Go to Court to prove I did steal any documents
August 15th Get Convicted of stealing classified documents
September 1st Don't do any more trial because SCOTUS says I'm King
November 10th Win Election
December 1st Write book about My Struggle in prison
2024
January 21st Take Office
January 22nd Pardon Self
January 23rd Be dictator for a day <- should be done on 22nd but too busy so reschedule
January 24th Be dictator for another day
January 25th Be dictator for another day
January 26th Be dictator for another day
January 27th Be dictator for another day
January 28th Be dictator for another day
January 29th Be dictator for another day
January 30th Be dictator for another day
January 31th Be dictator for another day
Febuary Be dictator for a month
March Be dictator for another month
April Be dictator perpetually.
Today I have been cogitating on the similarities between the James Bond film Die Another Day and the Doctor Who story Enemy of the World. On the one hand Enemy of the World is clearly a rip-off/homage to James Bond. Both have plots driven by a Suncatcher device (in Die Another Day called “Icarus”). Both involve hovercraft. Both involve multiple identities Dr Who/Salamander and Graves/Moon. Both involve the main villain dying after being ejected from a vehicle – the Tardis/a plane. Maybe these similarities don’t all mean something – I won’t argue about that – but look at the number of them.
Shultz may be a genius but he has no ambition
beyond the acquisition of wealth and neither really do many of his criminal
associates. One can see future shadows
of Allo Allo in this as they all chase after the valuable McGuffin … Greed is a universal theme in drama but it's seldom explored as well as this. Forging money and the consequences of it open a pandora's box here where almost everyone who might be tempted is tempted and at the same time people team up to try and get the cash but never stand by one another as they are allies of convenience. A deeper theme under the surface is the ethics of using money as a weapon. Is it a war crime? And if it is what are the consequences of that? We all rely on money as a glue to hold society together - without it we're all reliant on barter and its double coincidence of wants. The idea of forging bank notes today seems positively quaint of course with money increasingly reduced to cards, numbers on computers and apple pay phones and watches. A wave of a wrist and thousands swish between IP connections... Gone are the days when Arthur Daley was always "holding folding"... Money is more ethereal than ever today but still as unreliable and prone to inflation...
Quite a dark element of the plot is the use of concentration camp labour – a brilliant performance by Cyril Shaps as Iphraim "Solly" Solikoff – who fortunately escape in the end … which seems to be what actually happened in real life. This keeps things slightly upbeat and there is final redemption for Shultz in the form of former prostitute Bertha Freya (Billie Whitelaw) who sex works at Salon Kitty where the rooms are bugged to try and extract information from the disloyal - here Shultz entrapped the adulterous Professor Bodelschwingh (David Swift) to solve all the mathematical problems....
Salon Kitty was also a real place and really bugged and used as an
industrial honeytrap by the Nazis.
Indeed, it’s fun working out which bits of history have been woven in
from where… so much of all this is forgotten history now. But I haven’t forgotten anyway…
Not just yet…
Once all this seemed a long way away but with Sir Alex Younger ex of MI6 being wheeled out to warn us we need to introduce Sweedish style concription WWIII looks closer every day...
That time of the year again when I force Vauxhall to fix my Corsa under it's now defunct 2010-2014 100,000 mile un-time-limited Lifetime Warranty deal and they look at me like I've got the Red Death as I patiently explain that the reason I paid them £16,000 in 2014 was I was well aware that it was the worst deal ever in motor retail history and it'd cost them more to deliver on than probably the car cost in the first place but that's tough... You have to keep fixing it now or get sued.
It has 60000 on the clock and does 2000 miles a year. Sorry but you're stuck with me till 2044.
Lot of unused coat hangers. One plate of an unidentifiable food substance. Liz Truss and a few of her spads. And a member of the bar staff proffering a single glass of white wine on a tray. Not exactly heaving, is it?
Seem to have upset some more Zionists on twitter. Whenever I pop back my timeline is full of responses which I have lost track of. I can't even get angry about most of them - they are too absurd and deluded for words... for example
...how are you supposed to even cope with this level of deluded... although this was topped by the person who thought that you can't hold a nuclear power to account...
...and for blatant porkies "there's no carpet bombing"...
...somebody tell the Financial Times (here) a well known loony left publication...
Meanwhile Donald Tusk of Poland is blowing very hard over the media that he's sure WWIII is coming probably quite soon. Where did it all go wrong? And where will it ever end? I'm sure they're getting us ready for conscription...
Most of the poor souls going to fight in WWI style trenches and practicing sleeping in puddles think they have to go as if Putin takes over he'll simply exterminate everyone. Perhaps but it all seems very hopeless... How many young men can they find? One thing hasn't changed. The front line troops are still mostly men. Perhaps that's why they decided this documentary should be fronted by a pregnant lady...?
....a mug printed with pictures of books...
...or...
...a hoodie printed with a picture of a cat reading a book...
... it's just another book.
Both Ramadan & Easter move so it's just a coincidence both occur simultaneously this year. I am religious and, as Father Jack would say ... "That would be an ecumenical matter"...
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Easter is any time between end of March and end of April as defined by the lunar calendar. Whereas Ramadan is tied to a calendar such that it moves 10 days in a year so we're likely to get several coincidences then none for a long time....
Watching it 30 years on from its original broadcast I appreciated it much more than the first time out …perhaps because the storylines are ongoing and I was able to follow them watching the episodes sequentially. When it first went out I was …well, young and always out …so though I liked the show and the premise I never really got that into it… Perhaps it stands up better now because of the distance in time from the broadcast of the preceding Hi-De-Hi. John Cleese said that one of the problems with using the same cast twice is that the audience then have the same expectations. At least that’s how he explained Fierce Creatures being a flop. Watching this again it’s much easier to accept Su Pollard, Paul Shane and Jeffrey Holland as their new different characters. Although there are similarities between Ted Bovis and Alf Stokes they are more recognisable as different performances now to me … similarly Spike and James Twelvetrees. Although I did find the name Tewlvetrees a bit hard to get my head round… Well, it could have been worse… Sevenoaks? Maybe we’ve all got more sophisticated as audiences these days and are more willing to accept actors in different roles. I saw an old TV interview on Facebook the other day where a forgotten TV interviewer interrogated Harry H Corbett for about 5 minutes on being typecast like it was the only thing to say…
Anyway…
Particularly clever is that Alf Stokes although lambasting the upper classes for their unearned wealth is so greedy that he immediately undermines his own arguments. Shane does a great job of making a potentially very unlikable character sympathetic. His relationship with Mrs Blanche Lipton (Brenda Cowling) is particularly upsetting as he spins her ever more elaborate lies for pecuniary gain. Even going so far as to have her cooking cakes for orphans that don’t exist that he sells commercially. When his daughter Ivy (Su Pollard) forces him to put an end to this obnoxious deception he is so deluded as to tell her that she is spoiling her inheritance – actually believing there were enough Mrs Liptons in the world (with their “excellent cherry cake”s that it could be somehow scaled up.
The upstairs cast is fleshed out with Donald Hewlett and Michael Knowles reprising their double act in a different form from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum… all of them are strangled by wanting relationships across class lines. The ensemble cast is too huge to detail individually but particularly memorable is Henry Livingstone (Perry Benson) the boot boy orphan so far down the pecking order that he hasn’t got a birthday “because I’m an orphan”. Although he’d not quite the bottom… below even him is the visiting domestic help Mabel “that’ll be nice” Wheeler (Barbara New) who isn’t allowed to even eat with the servants but instead is doled out leftover scraps to take home.
There seem to be more roles for women in this sitcom with monocled lesbian "Cissy" Meldrum (Catherine Rabett) and her cattish snobby sister Poppy (Susie Brann) rounding out the Meldrum family upstairs… or do I mean Downstairs? ….her eventual lumbering of herself with nice-but-dim Jerry (John D. Collins – finally given a role with more to say than “Hello!” in Allo Allo) is particularly sad… while Teddy (Michael Knowles) Meldrum’s eventual marriage to Rose is quite an uplifting ending for a character initially introduced to us as a sexual predator … would it be allowed today?
At the end when the Meldrums loose a lot of money it’s amusing to finally see Mabel and Henry move up the ranks… whilst other characters and relationships are left more open-ended…
Anyway, it was fun to watch again. I particularly enjoyed that they got Stuart McGugan back from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum ,the invention of the Whoopee Cushion (which has a fictional genesis not too far from its real life history), bakelite, ahead of their time jokes about slavery, Captain Dolby, Teddy's analysis of Bertie Wooster, Guy Siner (as Noel Coward) and Donald Hewlett’s intonation when he pronounces on the fortunes of the “Union Jack Rubber Company” …”Yes, that’s just one of our lines…”
Crohn's disease (explains abdominal surgery and long recovery time)
Mental Health issue (explains why she's only seen in fuzzy long shot / hidden in an attic like Mr Rochester's wife)
Lazy Cow (pretends to be ill but still pottering about as normal while on a sicky)
Estranged (has the hump with William so gone on strike)
**
Update: The correct answer was that like 1 out of 2 people during their lifetime, Kate sadly has cancer. It comes to every other one of us....
To be divorced once is a misfortune. To be divorced twice, thrown out of the Conservative Party and thrown out the Labour Party looks like ...
