The perfect gift for a book lover is not...

 

....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.

Ramadan & Easter coincide...

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"...

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....

From Mayfair to Park Lane I have been watching again again...

This month (thanks to Ava Alexis’s Christmas presents) I have been mostly watching You Rang, M'Lord? – Croft and Perry’s final sitcom offering – this time in an unusual 50 minute format… a sitcom length that had only just become known after Only Fools and Horses expanded to it …and has seldom been repeated as an experiment….

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…”

Wiggles the Caterpillar now identifies as a rabbit 🐇

 

Must be 🐰 Easter

So anyone know what's wrong with Kate?

Best theories I've heard so far are...

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....

Invites

Some interesting friend requests on Facebook recently.  However, if you claim to be studying at Cambridge University and your mobile phone has a Nigerian dialing code that seems unlikely.  It seems particularly incongruous too when your profile pictures (which are all else that remains of your profile) depict you as both a young black man and a young white man.  That said it is quite an achievement for a young 20 year old of any ethnicity to be driving a sports car and working as a manager at a top UK share trading company since 1980 when he would have been minus 20.

I would remind you all that if you want to be my Facebook friend you are up against some pretty stiff competition including senior programming managers at Facebook who never talk about code and young ladies who cordially invite me to visit third party websites to show me photographs of themselves.

Say what you like about Elizabeth II..

Say what you like about Elizabeth "I have to be seen to be believed" II ...She could get off her death bed for a photo ... 

 

People raffling glass houses

These "stunning houses" omaze are trying to raffle always seems to contain a lot of glass.  Can't fool me.  I know the difference between a mansion & a greenhouse.
 

Maths News

 

Spot the difference

One of these images is manipulated.

The other is not ...

Can you tell which is which?

It's your own fault for introducing the 1902 Education Act

All this slashing pictures and toppling statues stuff is entirely down to one thing. The decline of Guy Fawkes Night. In the past all of these activities could have been simply avoided by burning someone in effigy.

Meanwhile over the pond...

 

Attendees at a Kansas Republican Party event on Friday paid to punched and kicked an effigy of President Biden on Friday.

This is not normal.
pic.twitter.com/IwnHMuzuZi

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 11, 2024

He is Risen

Has anyone told him Jesus rose from the dead and the Pope is the direct successor to St Peter yet?

So sad that despite the wide dissemination of Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms so many people still seem not to have heard the Good News 

Windmill

Top tip: New comics.  During the 1950s many famous comedians learnt their trade by appearing between the striptease acts at the Windmill Theatre.  Having to stand out from soft pornography really sharpened their comedy.  Today you can recreate this  learning experience much more quickly and easily by simply posting a joke on twitter and hoping somebody spots it between the AI porn bots.

Octopus

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs, 

Is those arms antisemitic legs? 

University Challenged Octopus 

What do you mean you will sue Us?

SCOTUS!

 

At the end of last year ….

…it was possible to believe that Donald Trump might eventually come to trial in one of his 4 criminal cases soon… but the wheels of justice would seem to still be turning at a glacial pace …

At the moment there are 4 potential criminal trials….

They are:

DC Trump Case: United States v. Donald J. Trump – This is the Federal level case about election interference brought by special Counsel Jack Smith

Georgia :  The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. – This is the one about the telephone call to the Georgia official asking him to find votes and the hounding of election officials in Georgia

Mar-a-Lago : United States v. Donald J. Trump, et al. – This is the one about the Top Secret documents that Donald stored in his bog to read on the toilet.

New York 2016 Election Interference Case : The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump – This is the one about Donald paying off Stormy Daniels for shagging him before the 2016 election.

An authoritative timeline of all the trials of Donald Trump is available on the Just Security website

Of these the nearest one to reaching an actual trial is the New York 2016 Election Interference Case.  

The DC Trump Case has been stalled because Trump argues that he has “absolute” Presidential Immunity and has taken his claim all the way up to the Supreme Court who will not be sitting again on it until April 22nd.  

Whether a Trial can be stayed by the Supreme Court investigating the liability of the President to prosecution is a matter that under the constitution  varies from state to state.  This is the reason that the DC case is stayed and the New York case is still on.  Also, the New York case is about actions that Donald Trump took before he became President and therefore it is much harder for him to claim Presidential immunity with regard to them as he was just an ordinary citizen at the time…

Donald Trump’s many legal nonsenses seem to be partially indulged by some people within the judicial system who are painfully aware that imprisoning the potential Presidential nominee could effectively create a constitutional crisis.  This may be why the Supreme Court is entertaining Trump’s claim of some form of Presidential immunity.  It may be they claim he has partial immunity for some actions that he or others perceive as “official acts”…

There have also been various attempts to get Trump removed from the ballot under the 14th Amendment for Inciting Insurrection.  However, the Supreme Court has just ruled that this clause can only be implemented by Congress.  Any other ruling would have caused a Constitutional Crisis of the Judiciary vs Voters.  However, the can has in some sense just been kicked down the road – there could still be a challenge between the election and the inauguration… Interestingly this also throws open the question that if it’s up to Congress to enforce the exclusions does this mean that the exclusion of non-US-born citizens is also effectively overturned and now just for Congress to police if they’re in the mood…?

Could the Simpsons vision actually happen?  Of course, the election isn’t ALL about Trump …there are many issues and well as Bill Clinton would have said “the economy, stupid”.  America’s recently had a tough time… and if you’re a Republican Trump is THE candidate… the other nominees with the exception of Chris Christie being, as Mrs Slocombe would have said, as weak as water.   I don’t want to be ageist but my parents are 84 and spend a lot of time in the evening and afternoon sleeping.  The idea Biden is fully awake … then again Biden has staff…. 

Another bizarre facet of the process is that Donald Trump seems to be allowed by the GOP to avoid ever publicly debating with his party  opponents meaning few of his  arguments/statements are being scrutinized.  It's hard to imagine such a thing happening in the UK where every party elects it's candidates using local hustings... But then under our Parliamentary constitution even the PM has to face a weekly grilling by MPs.  All the Trump has to endure is some "Town Halls" and hand picked sycophantic journalists.  The penny seems to have finally dropped for Ms Hayley  that if she's going to even dent his following she has to risk attacking his base ... There's a psychological and practical reason parties don't want to defrenstrate their leaders.  Since the Conservatives dumped Boris Johnson in response to his Partygate criminal fines they've suffered catastrophic polling results...

Such is an existential crisis.  Dumping your leader for criminal behaviour can have devastating consequences... Even when it's just for sharing a birthday cake during lockdown... Some of this can be explained by the economy... But what is a personality cult if you lose the personality?  Trump seems to tap into some level of nostalgia and seems now to be able to sell his former presidency as a golden age when people were better off...

The gloves come off between the Judiciary and the former POTUS when Jury selection starts on March the 25th.  That trial will last a couple of months.  The SCOTUS should hear aural argument on former Presidential Immunity on April 22nd and then…?  There is also the question of cash…  Trump owes $450,000,000 from his Civil Fraud Trial and is running out of time to find money for a Bond.  He also owes $83,000,000 in punative libel damages; he also recently lost a libel action in the UK High Court.  A GoFundMe was launched but is only raising enough money to cover the daily interest… His legal representatives consequently seem to go even more downmarket and eccentric…

Even if he is clearly guilty will he actually be convicted or will the jury return a perverse verdict knowing the constitutional consequences of a guilty verdict?  

Sometimes you just have to take your hat off to George

 

A section of the interview on Sky News with George Galloway responding to criticism leveled at him by British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak.

The whole interview was hilarious. Enjoy this segment.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/qNV2KekWrw

— 🇮🇪Ireland4Palestine🇵🇸 (@HensonJames11) March 1, 2024

Our Exclusive Serialisation of the Red Queen by Lord Ashcroft

Angela has red hair and works for a party whose logo is Red so I call this bird the Red Queen cus she is like wot the Queen would be (the dead one not Charlie's bit of fluff) if she had been a commy like.  She lived in a council property (like the Queen did except Angela only had one) but she is one of them wot bought it cheap off Thatcher but wants us all to believe she ain't a Tory but she sure acts like one!  

Being a posh bully I went down the Council offices and poured over the Public Version of the Electoral Register to try and find some evidence to show that she had abused the right to buy scheme.  There weren't none so I went down Somerset House and found the birth certificates of her sprogs.  What I found was astonishing.  

Despite being supposedly married this bird don't live with her husband but he has his own home 352 yards away and they wonder why they split up?!  

Clearly she moved in with him and left her Council House empty while not registering that she had moved which is FRAUD! despite there being no financial gain except continuing to pay council tax on two properties.  Did she claim the single person discount?  I don't know but I'm going to imply she did while her brother was living there looking after her premature babies!  If that's true, who knows what you can believe with this bird?  She should have paid Capital Gains tax when she sold it if she wasn't there absolutely every minute of every day as since she bought it off the Council it went up in price £48,000.  10 per cent of that is £4,800.  Thieving cow!  See I knows everybody's income and wot everybody earns and I carefully compare it with the income tax returns...

We spoke to a neighbour whose sprogs had broken one of her windows with a football and he says she like sat outside their house in her Audi demanding several tonnes to fix it when it was only double glazing and should only cost a pony when she lives supposedly next door and could have shouted over the garden fence like what people does in Belize.

Do you want this bird as your Deputy Prime Minister?

No, thought not.

Me neither!

Silliest comment of the day

You cannot murder 1,200 people and take 253 hostages without consequences. Jewish blood is not cheap. This is reality. Accept it.

— Benjamin B@dejo (@BenTelAviv) February 27, 2024

607 people are murdered in the UK every year.  If the UK Police took the IDF's approach to solving these murders there'd be 14,000 collateral deaths a year caused by ongoing murder investigations.  All human life is of equal value.  At least that's what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says ...

Never Repeated? Oh dear, how sad, never mind... there's always DVDs...

One day when I was child my mum was driving us out of a Reigate car park when a small man in large Rolls Royce made way for us… it was Melvyn Hays who at the time was at the height of his It Aint Half Hot Mum fame.  It was the first time I had ever seen in real life however fleetingly someone who actually worked in entertainment.  And not just worked in it but had the trappings of success to go with it.  I say it was a Rolls Royce… it may have just been a big car but it was a Rolls in my imagination.  

Thanks to the wonder of some DVDs that Ava Alexis bought me for Christmas I have now re-watched the entirety of “It Aint Half Hot Mum” which has never been repeated by the BBC because it includes Windsor Davies liberally calling all the members of the concert party “poofs” and Michael Bates who grew up in India playing an obsequious Indian bearer called Ranji Ram in what some people have since described as “blackface” but Jimmy Perry described more diplomatically as a “light tan”.  Having watched all the episodes sequentially I have to say the lightness of the tan depends very much on who was make up artist from week to week… the sweat patches on everyone’s uniforms seem to become less or more pronounced as the weeks go on too almost finally disappearing by the end...

Honestly, I didn’t really remember Bates’s character from original broadcast probably because he died after series 5 and I think I must have only started watching from series 6 when they have moved from India to Burma.  It follows then that if the BBC’s rational for not repeating it ever is Bates performance that only actually puts the first 44 episodes as verboten for terrestrial broadcast… there are still a further 20 without Michael Bates that could be theoretically repeated?  Perhaps there are other taboos surrounding British Empire adventures in India that make the BBC queasy…   Along the way there are passing references to many fragments of now forgotten bits of Empire/Indian history …such as the Thug Cults, the Black Hole of Calcutta, Clive, the Indian Rope Trick … that probably are best forgotten and yet were once probably common knowledge to a certain generation but are now seldom mentioned except in Indiana Jones films.  One has to wonder how contemporary audiences viewed them … but let’s not wander down that road today… I’ll leave that to "La-De-Dah" Gunner "Paderewski" Jonathan Graham with his degree from Oxford or Cambridge depending on which one the writers’ thought was funnier week by week…

Perry and Croft’s rational for casting Bates as an Indian was there were at the time not enough skilled Indian actors in the profession in England to cast and he spoke fluent Urdu.  This seems to me to be a bit of a lame excuse.  After all, there never will be if you don’t give anyone a chance making it bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy… How hard did they look? On the other hand, Bates is a really good actor and if one compares his performance as Ranji Ram to his performance as Blamire in “Last of the Summer Wine” it is really hard to recognise them as the same person.  Not only has Bates let his beard grow and (“tanned up”? © Jimmy Perry) but his whole physical presence and body language is different.  One can see the possible attraction for Bates in playing a more complex character like Ranji Ram after a lifetime of being cast as authoritarian bullies and there’s no doubt that his ability to convincingly speak Urdu helps sell the character.  He also succeeds in making Ranji likeable which is no mean feat given the obsequious and devious character that is written.  The central joke that Ranji perceives himself as British not Indian does wear a bit thin though by series 5 and there is of course always the worry that people are laughing at him and for the wrong reasons which is probably one reason the BBC are … Bates was fairly right wing.  According to Peter Sallis during filming of the early series of “Last of the Summer Wine” Bates and Bill Owen were so near to their characters politically (far left and right) that “the series nearly didn’t get made” due to bitter arguments in rehearsals.  A particularly interesting development in Perry and Croft’s writing is the use of Ranji Ram as a narrator who breaks the fourth wall at the beginning of each episode to introduce the plot and at the end of each episode usually with some homespun twaddle “old Indian” proverb.  In some of the more ambitious storylines several two-part episodes are bridged with Rangi Ram laying out all the dilemmas facing the characters and encouraging us to “tune in next week for the next thrilling instalment” Dick Barton style.  A device later used by Rene in Allo Allo…

Rangi’s sudden disappearance at the end of series 5 (Bates died) is never explained.  Instead, Chai Wallah Muhammad (Dino Shafeek) who sells tea to the troops gets a bigger part – see there were some Indian actors after all.  I remember being particularly moved as a child by the scene at the end of the penultimate episode where Muhammad waves goodbye to the concert party as the boat back to England takes them back home.  

Barbar Bhatti the punkah wallah who pulls a string all day to keep the officers cool also mysteriously disappears for the last couple of series.  I expect he got fed up with being kicked… Mainly he speaks complicated passages of Urdu which lapse into English in the last few words which constitute the punchline – a device since substantially employed by the Fast Show Channel 9 sketches and also to some extent by Rowley Birkin QC except that Bar is speaking real Urdu … perhaps now the technology is available they could provide subtitles…?  His replacement is the Chinese Chef played by Andy Ho who in a reverse of this joke doesn’t actually speak any Chinese … of course one could criticise the characters as racial stereotypes but then all the characters a pretty much 2D stereotypes...  

Possibly the most three dimensional is Windsor Davies as Battery Sergeant Major Tudor Bryn "Shut Up" Williams a man who is simultaneously at the pinnacle of his career and at the same time looking redundancy and obsolescence in the face for when the war ends so almost inevitably will his job… something that does eventually happen.  His superiors – the pompous  Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Arthur Digby St John Reynolds and the ineffectual Captain Jonathan Tarquin "Tippy" Ashwood are, like the concert party, also not professional soldiers but conscripts and also secretly harbour the desire for the avoidance of actual violence and danger.  Indeed, it is the very real threat of death around the corner that pushes this sitcom into sometimes quite powerful emotional territory.  When characters get a chance to leave the concert party for a better position there is always the moral dilemma that this would effectively mean the party being disbanded and their comrades being put in the path of mortal danger …although Bombardier Beaumont seems far more concerned by the “horrible creepy crawly things” that inhabit the jungle than the Japenese.

Having said all the above …to be fair to Jimmy Perry …perhaps there can’t have been that many Asian/Indian/Burmese actors in the UK as many Indian actors appear over and over again in the series in different small parts.  Then again Croft used many of the same actors over and over again in his work and we also see a pre-Hi-de-Hi Jeffrey Holland (twice) and a pre-Allo Allo Gordon Kaye.  Anyway, that’s the elephant in the room dealt with if you don’t count the memorable episode with the circus elephant which now wouldn’t be allowed.  This got me wondering elephant intelligence …no one’s quite sure of their IQ but it seems they can recognise themselves in a mirror which makes them quite bright… or so it seems...

I’ve now written 1000 words without really getting onto Windsor Davies, Melvyn Hayyes and Don Esetelle who are the real stars of the show and I feel probably how the BBC Board of the Directors must feel… you have to write all this before you can even get started on trying to review it objectively… if that’s possible…  It’s probably a problem too how Windsor Davies spends all his time calling the concert party poofs… but as Jimmy Perry used to say that was his real experience.  The insult isn’t just directed at Melvyn Hayes transvestite Gloria character who is ironically promoted to Bombadier as he’s the only actual professional “artist” but at the whole concert party as much of their act involves dressing up in drag for “our boys” on their way to the front as there are no real women available – at least not British ones …although several of the soldiers have dalliances with the natives...  In these days where the IDF has lots of women on the frontline dancing for TikTok for PR it’s easy to forget that in WWII all the frontline soldiers were men only some of whom dressed like contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race.  An inevitable theme of the sitcom is the repression of femininity to make violence easier which could be seen as very topical relevant issue...  One of the most amusing early episodes is where the concert party is booked to do a bit of moonlighting at a real commercial gig in a restaurant which would seem to be a front for a brothel.  Competing against real women their act(s) not surprisingly go down like a lead balloon.  With the exception of Gloria and George Layton’s character (a Bud Flannigan impersonator) who leaves after series 2 they’re all amateurs and a bit rubbish… Gunner Parkin the ventriloquist whose lips move, Nosher the paper tearer, MacIntosh the strong-man-who-can’t-quite-tear-a-telephone-directory-in-two, Nobby the bird impersonator … they’re the kind of acts that populate the bottom rungs of open mic circuit today… people who have an act but it can’t develop any further than five minutes…  Apart from Gloria whose thespian/drag skills are debatable, the only members of the concert party with possible real talent/skill are (“huniversity heducated Gunner Greyham” © Windsor Davies) and Lofty with his remarkable baritone that booms unexpectedly from his tiny frame in the same way Susan Boyle’s voice/image clashed on Britiain’s Got Talent years later… the Top of the Tops performance of Whispering Grass in on the DVDs although it starts and ends rather suddenly as if that episode was compered by member of Operation Yewtree…  Almost inevitably at one point they are threatened with the risk of being disbanded by the arrival of another act who can do everything (Jeffrey Holland – who also appears as a sex-starved solider)…

Particularly moving is the final episode where they all become civilians again.  As they pass through the processing centre one of the characters complains to the man in the clothing store room issuing their demob suits that they’re not being treated like heroes to which the man (Bill Pertwee I think) memorably replies that there’s “no shortage of heroes round here”.  For such is total war.  WWI and WWII affected entire generations changing society on every level… and leaving many, many people with deep psychological scars.  When I was a child such people were very much in evidence.  Today, not so much.  Perhaps that’s why war’s back in fashion…