I was just sitting on my golden toilet the other day when I started to wonder what happened to Donald Trump's "Liberation Day" Tarrifs. After a stock market meltdown in May and a recalibration of policy with reality .... It seems Donald has backed down from his original position of hitting everyone with like 25-50% and things have settled down now at 10->15% for most countries except those who are on the US Naughty Step like China, Iraq and Iran...
According to the Trump Administration's United States Trade Representative (USTR) the tariffs "are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners", aiming to "drive bilateral trade deficits to zero" which came as news to Australia which has a baseline tariff of 10% despite the US running a trade surplus.
Reuters Reported on November 14th that Trump on Friday rolled back tariffs on over 200 food products, including coffee, beef, bananas and orange juice, in order to head off inflation and many tarrifs are not yet in full effect (see here). Other factors such as the current orders looking like they may be struck down by the Supreme Court as executive overreach some time soon may be keeping a lid on things... and it's hard to get a full picture of the US economy because of the government shutdown a few months back but ... things don't seem to be as awful as predicted... partially because Trump has chickened out. Although small businesses don't seem that happy...
When I was a child we were brought up not to "accept sweets off strangers" so it's always interesting at Christmas to observe the Royal Family doing the exact opposite. This isn't a one off and I've often wondered what becomes of these gifts. I kind of used to imagine that for security reasons MI5 would quietly and swiftly whisk any boxes of sweets or chocolates off to some DSTL laboratory like Porton Down where lots of men in white biohazard suits would spend hours analysing them for traces of novichok, anthrax or cyanide before destroying them in a hospital waste incinerator for good measure... as the position of food taster seems to have gone out of fashion.
That said apparently President Obama definitely had a food taster so they haven't died out completely (occupational hazard?) but.... then again according to a policy published on the Royal Family website Family members are indeed allowed to have a good chow down on these gifts... so that they can come to learn what Sainsbury's food tastes like as opposed to just Fortum and Mason and M&S.
They are also allowed to give them to charity which raises the spector of some foodbank customer somewhere just keeling over because they've scoffed a box of Quality Street containing a deadly nerve agent... but personally I still reckon they go to a DSTL laboratory.... which would kind of make giving the Royal Family children sweets a next level pointless gesture...
Does anyone know why passengers on Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin Amazon rocket have to wear a blue uniform? Why can't they just wear their own clothes? I was just about to pay £235,000 for a trip into space but Bezos started telling me that I needed to wear some shit Spandex spacesuit. "Fuck off, mate," I said. "There's nothing wrong with a rugby top and jeans. I'm not going into space looking like Jimmy Savile? Can we compromise on a business suit?". "No," he replied. Honestly you don't see this on Star Trek ... So anyway I decided to stay home. But it just goes to show Prime membership gets you nothing....
It seems that threatening to starve yourself to death is back in fashion as a method of changing government policy. Several Palestine Action protesters on remand have taken to hunger strikes in order to challenge the government for not letting them out on bail and various other demands that are rather convoluted. The government says it can do nothing due to the separation of powers. However, I seem to remember that when the Suffragettes went on hunger strikes the Asquith government responded with the "Cat and Mouse Act" (see here) which allowed people who were starving themselves out of prison so that they could be rearrested after they'd had a good chowdown.... If the government could catch them. It was later repealed by section 54(2) of, and Part I of the Fourth Schedule to, the Prison Act 1952 but presumably could be activated again.
Historically hunger strikes have seldom been politically effective - although the Suffragettes got lots of publicity out of the horrors of force feeding. You'd think force feeding would have died out but apparently many of the Guantanamo Bay detainees were force fed during waves of multiple hunger strikes. This was even filmed and there was a court case about trying to get the tapes released. Richard Reid tried it at one point but was also force fed by the US. Bobby Sands starving himself to death never endeared me to his cause. I'm still with Mrs Thatcher on that one - more fool you. The ANC toyed with hunger strikes as a tactic but Nelson Mandela called it off because he didn't see the point. The most famous proponent of the tactic was Ghandi who used to use the tactic as part of his philosophy of Ahimsa (non violent direct action) but even Ghandi stopped at approximately 21 days max ... and effectively used it as a political stunt without actually endangering his own life.
So my advice is it's Christmas so ... Have a break, have a KitKat.
In other news the farmers have bullied the government into raising the inheritance tax threshold by threatening to top themselves ... so maybe there's something in this emotional blackmail thing ... Don't like a policy? Threaten to top yourself.
Yesterday I was unfriended by someone on Facebook. I questioned the narrative generally wheeled on in articles such as this that all the BBC's destruction of archive material was accidental. I said we know that this is not entirely the case. The evidence I presented comes from the late Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook (see here). This recalls Peter Cook discovering the BBC was planning to destroy the master tapes of "Not Only... But Also" and writing to them pleading for them not to. He even offered to replace the video tapes with blanks and store the originals at his own expense but the BBC bluntly refused stating this was against policy and destroyed them anyway.
I have since depersonalised this post to remove that contemporaneous discussion as it isn't really the point I was trying to make and if the BBC can delete embarrassing material so can I... so astute readers may notice that this page has been rewritten several times and been airbrushed better than one of Joseph Stalin's photos.
I'm still not sure what ethical boundaries my original comments crossed that caused him to unfriend me apart from "spreading conspiracy theories" but in my defence I would say that the central claim that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a conversation with the BBC protesting that their tapes were scheduled for deletion is fairly well sourced. However, I'm not a professional historian. I do remember from GCSE history (which is where my education level ends) that you should have at least 2 primary sources to stand something up ... Not just one secondary one and I think Harry Thompson spent a ridiculous amount of time researching what actually happened here and still couldn't get to the bottom of it perhaps because there's nothing to find but shadows... Is it then irresponsible to speculate on it ? Perhaps my acquaintance is right and it is so here are my mad "conspiracy theories" on my blog where they cannot offend anyone because I largely talk to myself here and most of the protagonists are dead. I find myself to be most agreeable when taking to myself but strangely however to benefit humanity however much I plan, yet everybody says I am a disagreeable man? But anyway just keep in mind that some of the below may be bollocks.
The central story about Peter Cook is almost certainly true but it is still only one incident in one book and perhaps we shouldn't read too much into it but it shows a case where an author and performer who clearly shared the copyright with the BBC wrote to them and literally begged them not to destroy the only existing copies of his performance and the BBC callously ignored his pleas. Why? Was it because Equity feared that repeats would destroy work for new actors? Was it a policy? Ironically I can't tell you the exact story because it's in a 500 page book that I sent to the Saint Christopher's Charity Shop at the end of last year because I didn't regard it as of enough cultural value to hang onto but copies are out there somewhere for some keen archivist to recover.
Jimmy Gilbert and his quality combover
In the light of considerable sustained interest in this page by the kind of people who think there is no surviving BBC TV footage of WWII because the BBC deleted it to hide coded wartime messages, I got hold of the digital version of Harry's book. It actually opens with the story of the tape wiping which may be why I remember it so vividly. Scanning it closer for the word "wipe" I found a bit further in where Jimmy Gilbert (then Head of Comedy) explains how the BBC's myopic wiping policy for Comedy at the end of the 60s actually worked in practice:
"The Head of Comedy simply didn't know anything about tape retention. When I was head, Bob Galbraith, who was my organiser, used to come in with these print outs, and he would say "We're only allowed to keep eighty shows, so I'm suggesting we have the first and last of this and the first and last of that." I believe the thinking was, in a hundred years time you'll at least get a flavour. But the first and last of every series meant absolutely nothing".
The Gnomes of Dulwich might concur with this sentiment if they hadn't been completely exterminated. It's hard to tell but it may be that what Gilbert is saying here is that given an invidious choice, it made more sense to him to jettison entire series and serials than to preserve a collection of "orphan" episodes. It's also pretty amazing how he can abjure all responsibility whilst claiming to have been in a meeting discussing the subject. It may have been the last subject on the agenda but... There used to be a joke that the BBC TV Centre was a circular building to reduce the chances of executives being stabbed in the back... Well, certainly the blame seems to go round in circles...
The late Harry Thompson with one of his girlfriends
In the article linked to above contemporaneous with the release of his biography of Peter Cook, Harry mocks the BBC for having the cheek to call their VHS "The Best of ... What's left of" when it's pretty much the only extant material, most of which was illegally filmed live off his own TV by the Producer who feared his creations being wiped... As indeed they were. "That's why the so-called classic scenes from the series are the only ones you ever see," said Mr Thompson, "It's the only ones they've got." That's all there is, there isn't any more... as Ethel Barrymore used to say.
The generally accepted view is that all this destruction was accidental and no doubt much of it was. Videotape was expensive and reusable so many tapes were simply reused. The BBC's website puts the cost of a Quadruplex 2 inch tape in the late 1950s shortly after it was invented at ~£2000 a reel inflation adjusted for today. However, there were still political decisions to be made about what was and was not important. And £2000 was probably still only 5% at most of most program's budget so how much was this policy of recycling tape like scenery really about the money even if we factor in storage costs? That said, to an accountant 5% is ... 5%. It's hard to know what program budgets were in the 1970s but Jon Pertwee claimed to be on £350 an episode some time in the 70s. If the Quadruplex tape's cost was still the same as when it was invented - reverse inflation adjusting it would give £182 in 1973 ... Half of Pertwee's salary.
Frank Bough and his quality combover
So I think my 5% guess is reasonable.... As there was no FOI in those days it's hard to know what people were on unless they leaked the info. Recently Selina Scott claimed that at the start of Breakfast Television in 1983 she was on £50,000 a year (a figure so shocking it was discussed in Parliament) whilst Frank Bough was on £200,000 (a figure that wasn't shocking because he had a combover and wasn't a bird). Colin Baker is quoted as once saying he was on £1000 an episode in 1986 but I can't source this. Peter Purves said on a DVD commentary somewhere that he was on £50-60 an episode around 1966 with Hartnell believed to be on about £300 an episode by the end although we don't have that latter figure from the horse's mouth. The Telegraph (which like a broken clock is sometimes right twice a day) claimed that recordings were ranked on a scale of A to E and the responsibility of deciding what to tape over was made by individual producers. But someone still had to come up with the ranking system and categorise things. That's a political decision not just a technocratic one...?
Christmas Tree 🌲
Now going off on a bit of a mad tangent we do also know that despite it's much vaunted independence from the government that from the late 1930s until 1984, MI5 stationed an intelligence officer (latterly Ronnie Stonham) at the BBC to vet editorial applicants because this was revealed by a 1985 Observer investigation. The personnel records of anyone suspicious were stamped with a distinctively shaped green upward-facing arrow resembling a Christmas tree. Barry Letts who had strong left leaning political credentials expressed some astonishment of having ever made it through such a vetting process. Many journalists were blacklisted. Given the BBC was at the time probably the most powerful media organisation in the country by a long chalk it would be a bit surprising if there wasn't some such arrangement but... well... okay... now then now then now then ... Now, it's a bit of a leap to say from this that the BBC had a deliberate policy of deleting potentially embarrassing material but it's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that MI5 was at the BBC to shape policy and that by extension the policy of what to select for deletion and preservation may have been shaped in some way by such an arrangement. For example Thompson said that many of the "Not Only... But Also ..." tapes were reused for News because it was seen as a priority to save every news item ... even local news. We know News was where vetting was at it's most active and what the government was most interested in so it may be this priority was set or influenced by ...
The purpose of vetting is to create thought conformity. Therefore it may be that the fact that the BBC erased 60 to 70 percent of it's own archive over 30 years is not an accident or a conspiracy but a classic example of Groupthink. This is normal, so it must be sane. "Jimmy Gilbert, head of comedy at the time said there was no opposition to the order," recalled Thompson... even though there was. It was ignored. Indeed, however you spin it.... in the case of "Not Only ... But Also..." the policy does appear to have been directly challenged which does make the destruction of the material apparently for it's own sake to comply with "a policy" a deliberate and conscious decision and not just a case of "just following orders" ... at least on this one documented occasion.
One characteristic of Groupthink is the existence of "Mindguards". Persons who act as self-appointed censors to hide problematic information from the group. Much like me being ejected from a Facebook conversation half way through and becoming completely confused by what was said and the sudden ostracisation. No one told me what the problem was, I was just cut dead. The explanation I was given for my ejection was "persnicketiness" - that I was putting too much emphasis on "minor details". That's one way of looking at it. Another is I was rejected by the group because my ideas did not meet with the group's need to reach a unanimous consensus. I guess we're all guilty of blocking people on social media who we find annoying... but there is a downside to this. We create our own echo chambers...
Harold Wilson using his pipe as a prop
One criticism of conspiracy theories is that they are unrealistic because real conspiracies are actually hard to conceal and frequently leak information. How then did the BBC manage to keep it's Christmas Tree Files secret for 50 years? And did the BBC having a secret vetting system stop being a conspiracy theory when it was found to be true? I joked that the BBC had deleted "Not Only ... But Also..." on some kind of instruction from Harold Wilson. This didn't happen but what did happen is that straight after resigning as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson went into TV Presenting with the help of David Frost. He hosted some of the worst chat shows in history. Is this what was taped over Not Only but Also ...? During Christmas 1978, Wilson appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. Wilson's TV career was a bit of as a disaster as his dementia prevented him interacting with enough mental agility - his best output "A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers" for Yorkshire TV is still worth a watch ... as it was prerecorded Frost & Wilson were able to work around the dementia problems. But anyway, the point is there was a bit of a revolving door between the government and the BBC at the time... and at the end of the day the various board members are political appointees... So Wilson may not have had the motive or opportunity but we can place him at the scene of the crime - the BBC Comedy Department during the late 1970s.
A cyberman who was deleted
One of the things that makes conspiracy theories so popular with their consumers is that they are emotionally satisfying. If we are to believe Sue Malden's official BBC account of the archive gaps, video tapes were simply bunged after 3 years into a blanking machine having been stamped only with three words "No Further Interest". At least if there was a conspiracy it would suggest someone cared about archiving and preserving the past even if they made the wrong decisions. Actually, if the truth is simply no one was interested - no one cared at all - that's actually more shocking. Then again, Sue tells us that everything was recorded so it must be out there somewhere. This isn't true. Almost all the original 60s black and white Dr Who that exist ...only exist because film prints were made for overseas sale. At the end of their life they were either returned to BBC Enterprises to be destroyed or destroyed by local broadcasters who were required to provide a "certificate of destruction". Most of the remaining episodes that still exist today ... exist only because of localised disorganisation at purchasing TV networks. These avenues of recovery have been almost completely exhausted now which is why the BBC is in seemingly endless negotiations with "private collectors" - people who either half inched the films instead of throwing them in the bin, picked them up at a jumble sale or found they'd fallen off the back of a lorry.
An Expensive Gloat
Unfortunately if you have something unique it is more or less priceless so there are financial issues in getting hold of these telefilms. There's also the fact that many of the film collectors are now so old that they've literally forgotten what they own due to various forms of dementia... There's also the question of whether not sharing your collection with someone is a power trip. Why would you just sit on an archeological discovery when... ? Taxes the mind... There's also ethical issues raised by the fact that these telefilms which should have been destroyed and were rescued by various dumpster divers actually belong to them or ...
Wiping the videotapes of "Not Only... But Also" might be classed as a stupid decision . Wiping the master tapes and physically destroying the telefilms of Doctor Who simply to stop anyone else watching them is such next level incompetence, it's hard to believe there was not some degree of malice. The peak of the BBC's wiping is said to have been reached in the late 60s/early 70s when the launch of BBC2 doubled the number of videotapes needed overnight... This is why there are bizarrely more extant William Hartnell Dr Who episodes than Patrick Troughton... For anyone wanting to know the minutiae of Dr Who mastertape wiping this is recorded in painstaking detail in Andrew Molesworth's book "Wiped!". 67 and 69 were peak years but the BBC were merrily blanking away Pertwee's stuff right up till 76. It also recalls all the known telefilm copies and when they were made so if you have a spare decade you can probably work out what might possibly turn up if... Still, none of this stopped the launch of the Target Novelisation range in 1972...
A plot
According to Wikipedia a conspiracy is a plan or agreement between people for an unlawful or harmful purpose. Well, the routine wiping of video tapes and the routine destruction of telefilms certainly fulfills the criteria of a secret because the BBC told no one about it. As BBC archivist Sue Malden says... when she started work there she expected it all to just be on a shelf. It wasn't. There were big gaps all across the archives. One argument advanced for the BBC's deliberate destruction policy was that if it had been learned that they were spending a lot of money archiving old material then there would have been public outrage at the waste. But would there? We don't know because no one outside the BBC was told of the policy. Perhaps a deal could have been done with the National Archives or the BFI or some other institution. Indeed, the BFI seem to have been one of those institutions in the 70s pressuring the BBC to... The BBC told Peter Cook that they couldn't allow copyright material off the premises but also that it had no commercial value anymore. There is an obviously illogicality here. If it had no value why was Cook not allowed to buy the tapes? The bizarre situation was that only British Television Licence Payers were not allowed to buy the tapes. Foreign TV stations were still allowed to buy them until every penny of their foreign resale value had been drained. Ironically Peter probably could have saved his tapes if he'd pretended to be a foreign TV station. The thing is he wouldn't have known about the activities of the BBC's commercial arm because before the Freedom of Information Act 2000 the government and the BBC didn't have to tell the public anything. When I was a Civil Servant in the 90s literally everything was an official secret. Even stationary deliveries...
To what extent can we blame the Actor's Union Equity? Well, I don't know. But I will say that whilst the closed shop was supposedly abolished by Mrs Thatcher, whenever I performed at an Arts Centre rather than the back of a pub, they always asked if I had unnecessary Public Liability Insurance which I always suspected was a backdoor method of checking that I was in Equity who offer insurance as a freebie... but that's another story...
Unfortunately satirical comedy has very little resale value. Even in the 80s tapes of programmes like Radio 4's Week Ending were routinely wiped (which is probably for the best). When they released a complication tape sketches had to be rerecorded. Still, as Peter Baynham once observed... very few people are interested today in once up-to-the-minute jokes about Gladstone and Disraeli... That said if I'd really thought my old reel-to-reels were the only extant copies of some of R4's less exiting output I may not have sent them to landfill... It's something I think of more now Harry Thompson & Bill Dare are no longer with us...
A balloon debate
So anyway I suggested there might be a political angle to some of the BBC's wiping decisions. By that I don't mean that some producer sat down and decided to record over Peter Cook's tapes out of malevolence or personal spite (although someone clearly personally tipped him off) but there might be an element of prejudice in what was selected for deletion which could contain political motivations. After all, if you were a 70s producer and you had to select something to tape over because that was your job you'd probably select something you didn't like - if it was me there'd be no Test Match Specials or old episodes of Question Time or... If we look at this decision making on a macro level you could say the selection of material for deletion must have mirrored at some point a balloon debate engaging the worst excesses of socialism and capitalism wrapped together which is probably hilariously recorded in an archive somewhere - we can't consider anything's economic value more than three years ahead and at the same time we must create work even if it means destroying things so we can rebuild them. One could argue that the latter argument contains a certain logic since a huge industry has been created in recovering, remounting and reanimating old work. In that sense the policy has in fact been a tremendous success. It's just in terms of archeology that we see a problem...
Coronation Street Battle-axes
Then again having said there was no malice involved, who can forget the time Michael Grade said he "hated" Doctor Who? That's a very strong word suggesting not just a lack of interest but an active dislike. I don't particularly like Coronation Street (of which interestingly Granada has kept all 11,746 episodes back to 1960) but I wouldn't go around saying I "hated it". It doesn't surprise me that Doctor Who & Peter Cook were among the first on the blanking machine. I don't think they represented a view of the world that those in authority wanted to preserve for posterity...
That might seem a leap but here's an example from my own life (sorry, if it's not in a book yet - I'm too busy to write one)...
A few years back YouTube decided to delete an old YouTube channel of mine. After a two year investigation by the Information Commissioner it was recovered and restored. Google claimed that this was because the channel had been deleted in error and it has to delete material because of the sheer volume of material uploaded to YouTube. [They estimated their worldwide upload rate at 400 hours of video uploaded every minute] .... and this may be true but I have another personal private channel the public can't even see that's never been deleted and you'd have to be the world's least skeptical person not to ever get an itchy chin given the political nature of the material.
Data deletion and selection for deletion isn't a problem that's going away because of changes in technology. Indeed, with more data being produced than ever before there will be more problems than ever before. The placing of data in "the cloud" as a safe place might in fact make some of it more ephemeral. I personally lost quite a bit of data when Xtranormal went bust. It was wiped by the administrators and cannot be recovered. Companies going bust or amalgamating can be a major reason for archive material being lost. In fact some companies have reportedly fallen on such hard times in the past that they've melted down their own film stock to resell the silver in the silver nitrate ... Sort of Cash My Silver TV...
Anyway, I also questioned whether the BBC's claims that it's deletion of material was just "standard industry practice" holds up to scrutiny. The level of material deletion in the 70s and 80s varied a lot partly because of the regional franchise model of ITV creating a lot of autonomous regional franchises but some people had a more careful attitude towards their archiving. Much of the material Lew Grade of ATV/ITC produced still exists because he insisted on using film so they couldn't be taped over and even filmed in colour before Britain had colour TV so that he could maximise overseas sales. Meanwhile the BBC at the beginning of the 70s was left with a lot of black and white footage that was hard to sell abroad because it was late to the colour market producing eventually big archive gaps at the end of the 60s as few film video transfers for overseas sales were made.... Still PAL produced a better and more stable picture than NSTC so swings and roundabouts...
Quadraplex Tape Machines
Oh well, as Sir Arthur Greeb-Streebling used to say hopefully the purpose of studying history is that we will all learn from our mistakes so we can repeat them exactly... a bit like the BBC who despite sitting down to draw up a new archive policy for videotape in 1978-9 were still destroying film cans when Ian Levine turned up at BBC Enterprises in 78 and found all 7 negatives and positives of "The Daleks" marked "to be junked". He only gained access by waving his chequebook at them and expressing an interest in buying old prints... Sue Malden over at the main archive was unaware films that were missing from her videotape library were being methodically dumped in a skip to "make space".
The BBC whinged a lot about space. They claimed in their 1978 report to be have a library of 350000 cans of film and 60000 spools of videotapes which was expanding at a rate of 12000 cans of film and 6000 spools of videotape a year. Barry Letts said that you'd need somewhere about the size of the Albert Hall to house it all. I think that's a slight overestimate. Looking just at the tape because we can accurately calculate it's physical size ... 60000 tapes x 0.05m tape thickness x 0.30m tape diameter = 750m^3 . The volume of the Albert Hall is ~80,000 m^3. If we take the cubic root of 750m^3 the 60000 spools should all fit into a cube 9m x 9m x 9m. Or a 2 storey building (i.e. ~ 2 m high a story) of 375 m^2 footprint. Or 19m x 19m footprint. Perhaps a 4 story building if we allow for walkways and racking. Mind you maybe they'd have required less space if BBC Enterprises warehouse wasn't duplicating much of the main archive because of a lack of internal communication..?
Patrick Troughton filming the War Games at a rubbish dump which is where many of his telefilms were shortly to turn up...
Of course one other issue that we could consider is that, for example, any reels of film sent to Landfill are actually still technically costing the government money to store. These days there are higher "Landfill Taxes" to dissuade businesses from just throwing things away rather than recycling them... Strange, isn't it? People spend their time making nice things and other people come along and brake them.
Further research reveals that actually this Peter Cook incident wasn't a one off. Monty Python also entered into negotiations to buy their tapes off the BBC. Terry Jones recalled to the Daily Express that the BBC "hated the show" and that he and Michael Palin smuggled tapes out to copy for preservation on Mr Palin's own domestic video recorder. I'm not sure how you could copy a 2 inch Quadruplex tape onto Betamax or VHS but maybe this was a copy of a copy making a copy. Separately Terry Gilliam claims that the BBC master tapes only still exist because he purchased them off the corporation... Oh well, at least policy changed ... The BBC regularly claims it had no archiving policy till 1978 or something but ... That can't actually be true as labelling tapes A to E would actually be a policy, wouldn't it? Or was that Sue Malden's 1968 numbering system? I'm lost now... Then again given they taped over the Moon Landings maybe ... The survival of more mid seventies programs might also have something to do with the replacement of Quadruplex tapes with Type C 1 inch tape which took away the commercial advantage of recording on a format that by the mid 80s was drifting into obsolescence... until the invention of helical scanning in the mid 70s there hadn't been a major format advance in a quarter of a century...
Of course it wasn't always the production company's decision to erase material. On some occasions it would be due to a contractual agreement with the artist. Producer Peter Morley of Associated Rediffusion recalled how Benjamin Britten did a reverse Peter Cook and contractually demanded the destruction of a tape of "Turn Of the Screw" made for Associated-Rediffusion in 1959 two years after it's broadcast. This resulted in "a ceremonial wiping of the master tape". "It was," he said, "like attending a wake." The footage was later recovered as a film can ...
At the bottom of the heap and fastest on the blanking machine appears to have been children's TV. About 3600 Quadruplex tapes of Playschool dating back to the 60s were wiped ...some as late as 1993. When the Philip Schofield scandal was in the papers I discovered most of his broom cupboard links had simply never been recorded at all...
I was watching some old documentary on WWII the other day and the first twenty minutes was the historians discussing why they were making yet another documentary on WWII when the subject would seem to have been relentlessly explored. They said that there are always more angles to be explored and more perspectives to view things from ... Which reminded me of an old Alexei Sayle routine about professional historians continually having to come up with new theories about history because that's their job and if they didn't constantly come up with new material like comedians...
I was wandering down the sewer of twitter/X the other day when I finally wondered why I never see Garfield there anymore despite following him. It seems Garfield gave up posting in 2023. Maybe he's got nothing to plug at the moment, or maybe Twitter is no longer a healthy environment for family entertainment or maybe there's no room for him with the 10 Stalinist style Elon puppet accounts that follow me every week... But he's still on BlueSky so I guess it's Elon he hates... and Mondays...
X/Twitter continues it's descent into the sewer as my timeline now appears full of Russian proxies wittering on about "Europe poking the bear". It really is a sewer of the maddest people. Fanatics who go on about God. Atheists who go on about God. Anti-vaxers offering sage advice on how your child will "just recover from measles". Members of the GOP stating NATO should be abolished because the threats disappeared with the USSR (wasn't the only time Article 5 has been invoked after 9/11)? Yeah wanted us then. Piers Morgan giving a platform to some unpleasant incel who giggles that "Hitler was cool". The newspapers are full of NATO leaders telling us to be ready for war. A lot of hard work has been undertaken by a lot of people to bring all civilisation to the brink of WWIII. It's all depressing and there is no jollity. Shoplifting is at a record high as the pigs are too busy locking up Palestine Action protesters to crack down on organised crime. Was it always like this? But peak creepy goes to this video from Russian Television of Cadets at the Kremlin looking forward to becoming canon fodder promoted by a homophobic nutter. None of the cadets are women but every one has a woman. Surely statistically someone should be on their tod? Russia's current deaths are probably somewhere north of 450000... So about half way to WWI casualty rates ...so we all know that if Putin withdrew now his regime would undoubtedly collapse politically so Trump's peace plans are piffle... A lot of people have worked very hard to plunge us into WWIII. I hope they're very proud...
🇷🇺 Over 3 thousand young cadets at the Xth Jubilee Kremlin Charity Ball.
Sitting Labour MP Tulip Siddiq recently told the BBC that no one had contacted her about her corruption conviction in Bangladesh. She simply read about it in the newspapers and they should have written to her at the Palace of Westminster.
In fact the Bangladesh's Anti-Corruption Commission have been perusing the case since December 2024. She resigned as a Minister in January 2025. In April the ACC issued it's arrest warrant. She was tried in-absentia alongside 26 others, on 11 August and found guilty this week. Her Lawyers say the charges are "politically motivated" and that the ACC had not brought forward any evidence to support its arrest.
Magna Carter : "NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right".
This section of Magna Carter remains active in British Law. It has been watered down over the years by concepts such as Fixed Penalty Notices and non-indictable offences but it remains a major inconvenience to successive governments.
David Lammy : "Magna Carta was a protest against state failure. If its authors saw the delays in our courts today, they would not urge us to cling rigidly to tradition. They would demand action.*
Well, that's a whopper, innit. Magna Carter was not a protest against state failure. The Barons we'rent protesting that public services weren't as good as they used to be. They were protesting against unchecked executive power.
The fact is the government's many political prosecutions often against protestors across the political spectrum fall apart time and time again because when it's cases get before a jury they're not having it.
The solution to the backlog in the justice system is not the abolition of the justice system in favour of Kangaroo Courts or Star Chambers, it is the reversal of decades of underfunding.
I'm not saying the Royal Family are lazy but Tom Baker finally wins an MBE at 92 and no actual Royal Family member can be arsed to turn up. The Lieutenant of Kent, Lady Colgrain is sent along instead. There are 800 MBEs each year and about 7 "full time working" Royals? If they divvied them up that's about 100 or so each? Okay, they're recently down a Prince or two but come on... Bone idle!
Once upon a time Up the Creek used to have a Sunday night gig with the open spots sandwiched in the middle. There would be an opening 20 from a pro act, and then the open spots, another interval , another 20 set and another interval and then the closer. Malcolm Harder used to kind of set up the open spots for failure and part of the entertainment was watching the new acts get booed off. I didn't get booed off but knowing Malcolm's modus operandi, I kind of sat at the back antisocially until it was time to go on. So without any ammunition from casual conversation, Malcolm introduced me as "some bloke at the back who I know nothing about, probably a peadophile". I went on, there were a few heckles. I went over them. It was okay. However, Malcolm's over the top defamatory introduction stayed with me and I found it amusing so I put it on my CV for a while until someone said "Take that off. Some people won't take it as a joke and peado stuff is something no one ever forgives anyone for." Sage advice. I did. But it made me wonder if Trump has finally done something the public will never forgive him for - I'm not saying he actually did anything but it's interesting that the Epstein files are a subject that Republican Congressmen and Senators finally seems willing to break ranks for. Of course MTG has been breaking ranks for a long time over Israel (I did not have her on my anti-Zionist bingo card) and other issues... But it's a bit of a shock that such a close Trump acolyte is prepared to go this far. After all, it wouldn't be the first time Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct... Meanwhile, I read that in Georgia the state level RICO prosecution for January 6th crimes is still ongoing with a new prosecutor being brought in to replace F Willis... Perhaps he hasn't evaded justice (and a constitutional crisis) after all...
A 64-year-old man has been charged following an investigation into a suspected fake admiral at a Remembrance Sunday event. "Captain Birdseye", from the Feltum area of Gwynedd, is accused of wearing uniform bearing the mark of His Majesty's Forces without permission. Images widely circulated in the press, television and on social media showed a man wearing the uniform and medals of a high-ranking navy officer whilst surrounded by children in Llandudno on 9 November. He will appear at Caernarfon Magistrates' Court on Thursday, 11 December.
Chief Inspector Trystan Bevan said: "We understand that this incident has caused significant public concern, particularly given his assertion that only the best is good enough for the Captain's table. We cannot have civilians dressing up in uniforms they have not earned. Who do these people think they are? The Royal Family? In response to the reports made to North Wales Police, officers have responded swiftly to make an arrest and proceed with charges. We urge members of the public to avoid online speculation and to refrain from sharing any content that could compromise future court proceedings such as fish fingers, frozen scampi or other frozen food products.
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