There’s planes scattered at random airports all over the region this morning. Loads of flights to Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan all cancelled for at least the next two days.
Thankfully it appears that there was just about enough warning to get commercial air traffic clear of the area, but must have been scary as Hell for a lot of pilots and passengers.
That was his worst moment, although I think he just got his dates wrong, and when pushed eventually managed to admit that he “mis-spoke”. He also struggled to answer the question on late term abortions, which are absolutely legal up to nine months in Minnesota.
A much better debate than we saw from Trump and Harris, who clearly think each other are evil. Vance and Walz were civil and polite, even when they disagreed.
A surgeon at a crisis-hit NHS trust used a Swiss Army penknife to open up the chest of a patient because he claimed he could not find a sterile scalpel.
University Hospitals Sussex has said the operation was an emergency, but the surgeon’s actions were “outside normal procedures and should not have been necessary”.
Police are separately looking into at least 105 cases of alleged medical negligence at the trust and considering manslaughter charges.
The surgeon in the penknife case, who the BBC is not naming, was operating on a patient at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton when he struggled to find a scalpel.
Instead he used a Swiss Army knife which he normally used to cut fruit for his lunch.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
I'm willing to believe that half a dozen MPs might, theoretically, belong in jail. Perhaps even a handful of individuals in the civil service, if only by the law of averages.
50k civil servants ? That's the idle dream of a would be authoritarian.
If she had said 50,000 should be sacked, it would be extreme but one could make an argument based on the classic big four model of chopping the bottom 10%. But for her mind to go straight to imprisonment? Bonkers.
To be fair she doesn't think 50,000 of them should be in jail. She thinks todays politicians can say what they want, without it being accurate, or even true, as long as they indicate whose side they are on. She might be right.
Well, she knows all about today's politicians being able to say things without them being accurate .
And now she knows that sometimes it is so blatant that they *do* get held to account.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
Can we add it to 'legitimate concerns', which functions in a similar way, and just means 'concerns'
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
Similar in a way to the many shows which seem to have to include gratuitous shockingly gory scenes, or very graphic sex, in order to get noticed.
Another thing that annoys me is tacking the word 'comedy' onto dramas which don't have any jokes or humour in them. It seems to be a get out clause for having completely unbelievable characters, plotlines with gaping holes, and stupid dialogue.
Mr. F, without spoilers, would you say House of the Dragon series 2 is overall worth watching or a big step backwards from the first season?
I’m only going on what I’ve read/clips I’ve watched. I believe a major problem was the writers’ strike cut the series from 10 to 8 episodes, so that the finale is an episode that’s meant to build up to the finale.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
Similar in a way to the many shows which seem to have to include gratuitous shockingly gory scenes, or very graphic sex, in order to get noticed.
Another thing that annoys me is tacking the word 'comedy' onto dramas which don't have any jokes or humour in them. It seems to be a get out clause for having completely unbelievable characters, plotlines with gaping holes, and stupid dialogue.
Your second point also describes Kemi Badenoch's leadership campaign.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
Similar in a way to the many shows which seem to have to include gratuitous shockingly gory scenes, or very graphic sex, in order to get noticed.
Another thing that annoys me is tacking the word 'comedy' onto dramas which don't have any jokes or humour in them. It seems to be a get out clause for having completely unbelievable characters, plotlines with gaping holes, and stupid dialogue.
There’s a place for extreme violence, but it should be used sparingly.
A big issue for me with Game of Thrones was this constant switching between glorifying cruelty, and condemning it, which became jarringly inconsistent by the end.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
Can we add it to 'legitimate concerns', which functions in a similar way, and just means 'concerns'
Not sure about that one. My four year old has just woken up with 'concerns'. In this case, definitely not a synonym for 'legitimate concerns'.
So a nonish event. Did anybody watch it.... who would watch Rayner v anyone....
I watched it. Very cordial and polite, exactly what a debate should be. No shouting, no talking over each other, substantive discussion of policy differences. They both deserve huge credit.
But guess what, the media much prefers the shouting match and the candidates telling constant lies about each other, as we saw with Trump and Harris. So the reporting on last night’s debate is rather subdued.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
The term “lived experience” dates back to 1889. I think you can use it safely and ignore that it seems to trigger some conservative snowflakes.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
You complain about House of the Dragon not reflecting “the source material”. The source material was written by George RR Martin. George RR Martin co-created House of the Dragon. I think George RR Martin knows what is in the source material better than you.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
Can we add it to 'legitimate concerns', which functions in a similar way, and just means 'concerns'
There are illegitimate concerns (immigrants are eating pets) and there are legitimate concerns (Badenoch keeps saying wild things). These are both concerns, but they are different.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
You complain about House of the Dragon not reflecting “the source material”. The source material was written by George RR Martin. George RR Martin co-created House of the Dragon. I think George RR Martin knows what is in the source material better than you.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
Historical dramas have always been anachronistic. See all those 1950s Westerns with 1950s make up and hairstyles etc, or the 1970s attitudes in "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" or "Dads Army".Or 1930s attitudes in "Gone With The Wind" etc.
Historical dramas have always been heavily influenced by the period that they were made, as much as the one they are set in, not least because they are entertainments rather than historical replication, so designed for audience interests and attitudes of their time.
Indeed this is part of the interest for film buffs like myself. M*A*S*H tells us more about attitudes in America to the military post-Vietnam and pre-Reagan than it does of Korea. And could the Original Star Trek have been made any time or place than peak America in the 1960's? Or would Buster Keaton set "The General" in such a "Noble Cause" narrative of the American Civil War nowadays?
So don't sweat it and expect historical accuracy, these pieces tell us about our own times too.
One can’t miss the irony if an October surprise of sorts ends up being caused by the SC ruling on Presidential immunity .
Judge Tanya Jackson has to decide the merits of the refiled case by the prosecutor Jack Smith into whether Trump acted criminally in trying to overturn the 2020 election .
The irony is of course that the SC effectively told lower courts they have to weigh up whether a case can survive that immunity ruling, then the case would likely head back up the chain .
The debate is over how much evidence can be released to the public , Trumps lawyers want more redactions .
So something to watch out for over the next few weeks .
Dr. Foxy, I can certainly agree the Netflix 'documentary' tells us a lot about rewriting history, prioritising ignorance assuming wrongly Africa = black, and a commitment to ideology over accuracy.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
You complain about House of the Dragon not reflecting “the source material”. The source material was written by George RR Martin. George RR Martin co-created House of the Dragon. I think George RR Martin knows what is in the source material better than you.
Martin was recently very critical of Season 2.
When Alan Moore was very critical of the film adaptation of “Watchmen”, he made sure his name was nowhere in the credits and he abdicated all his royalties from the film to Dave Gibbons (the comic’s artist). That’s how you do “very critical”.
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
The term “lived experience” dates back to 1889. I think you can use it safely and ignore that it seems to trigger some conservative snowflakes.
It's a clunky phrasing but does mean something different, meaning first hand experience. So I have experience of life in rural Malawi, but not lived experience of it. I have experience of diabetes, but not lived experience of it, at least not yet.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
You complain about House of the Dragon not reflecting “the source material”. The source material was written by George RR Martin. George RR Martin co-created House of the Dragon. I think George RR Martin knows what is in the source material better than you.
Martin was recently very critical of Season 2.
Film/TV making rules -
1) hire expert(s) on subject your are filming 2) ignore expert(s)
No doubt she has been "misrepresented" by the media yet again.
You don't think between 5 and 10 percent of civil servants are very bad?
I think it's more the "should be in prison" that people will take issue with. The bar for incarcerating people is - one would hope - a high one.
I agree, but civil servants are agents of the state. If they do a bad job, and potentially their bad job is motivated by a wish to do down the Government of the day or frustrate their plans, that situation is a sticky one to a far greater degree than a lousy cashier or a decorator who leave the pictures up and paints round them. I am not sure all cases of the sort are worthy of a trip to the gaol, but nor can they be tolerated.
Yeah, but most civil servants - by number - have very little to do with the actions of ministers. They are junior staff in Swansea dealing with driving license administration.
But they could be Home Office staff running the asylum and immigration system, where what appears to be willful dysfunction (see the waaaay higher success levels of UK applications than the rest of Europe) has fuelled the migrant crisis.
Not to defend the civil service but our laws and legal rulings are completely different to France so blaming our high asylum success rate to a lower European one on the civil service seems like a big stretch. It needs legal reform to lower that rate which the Tories had 14 years to push through.
As far as I am aware, we have not been outliers in application success like this in the past. I think you have a partial point - Theresa's stupid modern slavery legislation hasn't helped, but the Home Office is willfully uncooperative - whistleblowers have revealed evidence that supports this fact.
Being uncooperative would make no difference if the laws were properly tightened (including the ridiculously broad modern slavery definition that allowed Albanians to win asylum claims on the basis that they were being enslaved by other Albanians) then the judgements would follow. That's on the politicians not the blob.
The "Blob" is usually just an excuse for incompetence and laziness on the part of politicians.
The Thatcher Government faced both civil service intransigence and EEC legislation. Yet it managed enormous changes.
I think the real difference is that in the 1980s, there will still politicians of substance. The Thatcher cabinets from 1979 to 1986 were extraordinarily talented. And even the opposition benches contained many people who - even if I disagree with them - were clearly moral, hard working and dedicated.
Today, who would go into politics?
Indeed, I honestly don't think I could afford the pay cut to be an MP while my answer to TSE was glib it has a big element of truth in it, the last time I looked into it running to be an MP would work out to a pay cut bigger than 50% for me and at that point who pays the mortgage?
And on the flip side I'm not sure that someone who doesn't know how to live on £90k is going to be much use solving the challenges this country faces.
(Glib, sorry, not directed at you personally, more that once wealthy you get yourself into a different world - big mortgages, private school fees etc that completely detach you from the lived experience of 99% of Britons)
"Lived experience" means exactly the same as experience (it essentially means you're saying 'experienced experience') and is a new part of Woke lexicon to essentially say you cannot challenge any aspect of my recalled experience, because it's mine and not yours. All sorts of negative things follow from it, including people's own versions of the truth, ascribed motives for others, and even their own facts - some of which are highly questionable.
I hate it. It's just experience. "In my experience." And sometimes in one's own experience your recollection or versions of events will be incomplete or wrong.
Very fair point, I shall (probably) stop using the phrase. Thanks.
The term “lived experience” dates back to 1889. I think you can use it safely and ignore that it seems to trigger some conservative snowflakes.
You have to be so careful nowadays not to offend people.
I think lived experience is a useful term when describing something that had a profound effect on you and has shaped your behaviour in a way that other people won't be able to fully understand.
Being sexually assaulted, being knocked off your bike by a lorry, killing someone in battle are examples, I'd guess.
Ministers are being asked to draw up billions of pounds in cuts to infrastructure projects over the next 18 months despite Rachel Reeves pledging to invest more to grow the economy, the Guardian has learned.
Members of the cabinet have been asked to model cuts to their investment plans of up to 10% of their annual capital spending as part of this month’s spending review, government sources said.
Fucking dumb.
Probably but it's pretty standard practice when the word from on high is costs have to be reduced. When I was in local Government, we would routinely model 10, 15 and even 25% reductions in budget to see where the axe could fall if necessary.
As an aside, apart from the crassness of Kemi Badenoch's comment about "locking up" 10% of civil servants (almost Trumpian in its stupidity), there's a wider question about the role of civil servants. Is it the role of the civil service to carry out Government policy without question, hesitation or deviation or is there a responsibility incumbent on the civil service to point out where following Government policy might be a) illegal or b) impractical?
The civil service would read the manifesto of any incoming Government and through channels establish priorities in terms of legislation but would also be bound to point out potential problems with any legislation.
I suspect Badenoch's frustration comes from having her plans and ideas questioned by senior civil servants, presumably on grounds of legality (Rwanda). Government can make the law but Government cannot break the law.
It's the role of the civil service to advise where a government policy might be (a) illegal or (b) impractical, but to also offer alternatives that would mitigate the obstacles or might better discharge the policy intent, if the minister decides otherwise to then find ways to carry it out without question, hesitation or deviation to the best of their ability.
They are civil servants. And their role is to advise and not decide.
This works both ways though. Politicians have to own the decisions they make and not blame civil servants when things go wrong. My lived experience is that ministers increasingly expect civil servants to both implement their policy and insulate them from any political consequences. "We believe in cutting back the state so do that but don't withdraw any of your current services because it's close to an election and we don't want to annoy any interest groups".
Dr. Foxy, I can certainly agree the Netflix 'documentary' tells us a lot about rewriting history, prioritising ignorance assuming wrongly Africa = black, and a commitment to ideology over accuracy.
My point is that is not unique to our times.
All historical drama and fiction is influenced by the society and individuals that generated it, including attitudes that nit-pick over detail rather than use poetic licence to tell a story.
Ministers are being asked to draw up billions of pounds in cuts to infrastructure projects over the next 18 months despite Rachel Reeves pledging to invest more to grow the economy, the Guardian has learned.
Members of the cabinet have been asked to model cuts to their investment plans of up to 10% of their annual capital spending as part of this month’s spending review, government sources said.
Fucking dumb.
Probably but it's pretty standard practice when the word from on high is costs have to be reduced. When I was in local Government, we would routinely model 10, 15 and even 25% reductions in budget to see where the axe could fall if necessary.
As an aside, apart from the crassness of Kemi Badenoch's comment about "locking up" 10% of civil servants (almost Trumpian in its stupidity), there's a wider question about the role of civil servants. Is it the role of the civil service to carry out Government policy without question, hesitation or deviation or is there a responsibility incumbent on the civil service to point out where following Government policy might be a) illegal or b) impractical?
The civil service would read the manifesto of any incoming Government and through channels establish priorities in terms of legislation but would also be bound to point out potential problems with any legislation.
I suspect Badenoch's frustration comes from having her plans and ideas questioned by senior civil servants, presumably on grounds of legality (Rwanda). Government can make the law but Government cannot break the law.
It's the role of the civil service to advise where a government policy might be (a) illegal or (b) impractical, but to also offer alternatives that would mitigate the obstacles or might better discharge the policy intent, if the minister decides otherwise to then find ways to carry it out without question, hesitation or deviation to the best of their ability.
They are civil servants. And their role is to advise and not decide.
This works both ways though. Politicians have to own the decisions they make and not blame civil servants when things go wrong. My lived experience is that ministers increasingly expect civil servants to both implement their policy and insulate them from any political consequences. "We believe in cutting back the state so do that but don't withdraw any of your current services because it's close to an election and we don't want to annoy any interest groups".
Equally, some civil servants think that the politicians are there to take the blame. During Covid, some civil servants were outraged to discover that ministers would not take responsibility for actions that were *directly contrary* to their (the ministers) instructions.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Thing is, you can do great shows with great characters where the main hero is female or black or gay and write in the challenges of that. The problem is not so much that as the shit writing, where the $characteristic dominates the character and they lose all the complexity of any normal human being.
I gave up on rings of power after 3-4 episodes, because it was just poor.
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Thing is, you can do great shows with great characters where the main hero is female or black or gay and write in the challenges of that. The problem is not so much that as the shit writing, where the $characteristic dominates the character and they lose all the complexity of any normal human being.
I gave up on rings of power after 3-4 episodes, because it was just poor.
Likewise.
The thing that gets to me, is that the “modern themes” injected into existing work are generally handled extremely superficially.
Black stormtrooper in Star Wars defects to the rebels? Used as a random plot token, no structure built around him…
New series of Slow Horses is shaping up well. Jackson Lamb one liners are worth watching it for alone.
I'm REALLY enjoying Baby Reindeer. Unexpectedly good. Short, but powerful - and funny. The new Fleabag
I am saving Shogun for an ucoming trip to Asia
Any others? PBers?
If you haven't already watched it Inspector George Gently got added to Netflix. It's absolutely brilliant, a bit depressing but a thoroughly realistic take on the 1960s and Martin Shaw puts in a top performance, probably the best of his career.
Ooh, thanks. On the list
It's a shame all the really big series have been so disappointing, the awful LOTR version, the Foundation or whatever it was, nearly all the Star Wars spins-offs. I like House of Dragons 1, but HoD2 is so slooooow
But there are lots of much smaller shows that are still high quality. The Golden Age of TV is not over, just more diversified maybe
I think The Golden Age of TV is over, sadly. Too much money is being spent on too many poorly received shows.
Rings of Power is costing Amazon ~$400m per season and they've contractually committed to 5 seasons at that level of spend with basically a break fee to the Tolkien family of whatever they don't spend from the $2bn. You'd think that Amazon would have brought in the world's foremost Tolkien lore experts and stuck to the storylines he wrote, instead they made a show for "modern audiences" but the "modern audience" is tiny, just as Sony found out with their bombed out game last month.
Companies are sadly making shows with huge creative compromises in them in order to appeal to a vanishingly small audience group and at the same time alienating viewers who want something authentic. Instead we get generic girlboss #17 who knows everything and is an all action star who always ends up being right and is the complete article with no room for growth surrounded by moron men who overrule hero bossgirl only to get proven wrong by her or soyboy men who sycophantically follow everything the hero girlboss wants to do and eventually dies for her.
I think I've basically described modern TV coming out of the US.
Go Woke, Go Broke.
Woke shows can succeed if they’re well-written (eg South Pacific). The problem, is they mostly aren’t. The show runners think it’s sufficient to cast Ann Boleyn or Cleopatra as black, to achieve something ground~breaking.
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
Similar in a way to the many shows which seem to have to include gratuitous shockingly gory scenes, or very graphic sex, in order to get noticed.
Another thing that annoys me is tacking the word 'comedy' onto dramas which don't have any jokes or humour in them. It seems to be a get out clause for having completely unbelievable characters, plotlines with gaping holes, and stupid dialogue.
There’s a place for extreme violence, but it should be used sparingly.
A big issue for me with Game of Thrones was this constant switching between glorifying cruelty, and condemning it, which became jarringly inconsistent by the end.
Game of Thrones crossed the line for me.
I wasn't OK with some of the stuff they showed, and stopped after The Red Wedding.
Yes, snowflake etc. but rape and murders and killing babies and burning alive just for entertainment isn't my idea of good telly.
Comments
Who won the debate
🔴 Vance 51%
🔵 Walz 49%
CNN
Thankfully it appears that there was just about enough warning to get commercial air traffic clear of the area, but must have been scary as Hell for a lot of pilots and passengers.
A much better debate than we saw from Trump and Harris, who clearly think each other are evil. Vance and Walz were civil and polite, even when they disagreed.
I would give it Vance 9-8 Walz.
University Hospitals Sussex has said the operation was an emergency, but the surgeon’s actions were “outside normal procedures and should not have been necessary”.
Police are separately looking into at least 105 cases of alleged medical negligence at the trust and considering manslaughter charges.
The surgeon in the penknife case, who the BBC is not naming, was operating on a patient at the Royal Sussex Hospital in Brighton when he struggled to find a scalpel.
Instead he used a Swiss Army knife which he normally used to cut fruit for his lunch.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62g7ed3qzxo
Buttigieg would have tied him in knots, but Walz doesn't have the same debating skills.
80% of those polled thought both men 'reasonable'.
Score draw (which is something of a win for team Trump).
Who won the debate?"
Vance: 42%
Walz: 41%
Tie: 17%
- CBS Poll -
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1841324830035186020
There’s a big problem in that writers of fantasy or historical drama increasingly feel they have to update the attitudes of the people they’re writing about. Hence, you get the women in House of the Dragon, agonising over the impact of war on the smallfolk, which is nowhere to be found in the source material. These are people playing high stakes politics in a medieval setting. They’d worry whether they or their families would survive war, but they would not worry about the smallfolk.
It’s the same mentality that gets the deaths of foreign slave labourers removed from The Dambusters.
A separate problem (and this plagued later seasons of Game of Thrones), is thinking that impressive CGI can make up for bad writing - characters acting out of character, implausible plot lines, teleporting armies and navies, contradicting facts that had previously been established etc.
And now she knows that sometimes it is so blatant that they *do* get held to account.
Mr. F, without spoilers, would you say House of the Dragon series 2 is overall worth watching or a big step backwards from the first season?
Another thing that annoys me is tacking the word 'comedy' onto dramas which don't have any jokes or humour in them. It seems to be a get out clause for having completely unbelievable characters, plotlines with gaping holes, and stupid dialogue.
A big issue for me with Game of Thrones was this constant switching between glorifying cruelty, and condemning it, which became jarringly inconsistent by the end.
What happened - all I have seen is something with King Charles in JD Vance's Barbie-pink (nearly) tie.
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1841324830035186020
But guess what, the media much prefers the shouting match and the candidates telling constant lies about each other, as we saw with Trump and Harris. So the reporting on last night’s debate is rather subdued.
Historical dramas have always been heavily influenced by the period that they were made, as much as the one they are set in, not least because they are entertainments rather than historical replication, so designed for audience interests and attitudes of their time.
Indeed this is part of the interest for film buffs like myself. M*A*S*H tells us more about attitudes in America to the military post-Vietnam and pre-Reagan than it does of Korea. And could the Original Star Trek have been made any time or place than peak America in the 1960's? Or would Buster Keaton set "The General" in such a "Noble Cause" narrative of the American Civil War nowadays?
So don't sweat it and expect historical accuracy, these pieces tell us about our own times too.
Judge Tanya Jackson has to decide the merits of the refiled case by the prosecutor Jack Smith into whether Trump acted criminally in trying to overturn the 2020 election .
The irony is of course that the SC effectively told lower courts they have to weigh up whether a case can survive that immunity ruling, then the case would likely head back up the chain .
The debate is over how much evidence can be released to the public , Trumps lawyers want more redactions .
So something to watch out for over the next few weeks .
NEW THREAD
1) hire expert(s) on subject your are filming
2) ignore expert(s)
I think lived experience is a useful term when describing something that had a profound effect on you and has shaped your behaviour in a way that other people won't be able to fully understand.
Being sexually assaulted, being knocked off your bike by a lorry, killing someone in battle are examples, I'd guess.
All historical drama and fiction is influenced by the society and individuals that generated it, including attitudes that nit-pick over detail rather than use poetic licence to tell a story.
I gave up on rings of power after 3-4 episodes, because it was just poor.
The thing that gets to me, is that the “modern themes” injected into existing work are generally handled extremely superficially.
Black stormtrooper in Star Wars defects to the rebels? Used as a random plot token, no structure built around him…
I wasn't OK with some of the stuff they showed, and stopped after The Red Wedding.
Yes, snowflake etc. but rape and murders and killing babies and burning alive just for entertainment isn't my idea of good telly.