Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
The Jews are the one ethnic minority the hard-Right actually likes (or claims to). Rishi needs to withdraw the whip from any Tory attending this event for political reasons if no other - if the electorate gets wind of the fact that the Tories are now taking their instructions from American fundamentalist religious preachers then it's curtains.
Plus the Hindus, which includes Rishi (plus any from other minorities who hold conservative values). Without the populist and nationalist right as part of his coalition Rishi has no chance of winning another Tory majority and he knows it
Rishi has no chance of winning another Tory majority and he knows it.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Presumably living in Edinburgh she was most familiar with KX.
Yep, Edinburgh to Kings Cross becomes quite a special journey if you live here - usually means something exciting at work, a flight from Heathrow to the other side of the world, or a catch up with old friends.
If we want housing to be built and to avoid backlash (at least backlash to a degree that blocks building; there's always someone who'll object to anything, but this would sufficiently marginalise people like that):
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. - Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. - Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. - Supported self-build made available on these sites. - Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. - Funding for LAs to build social housing. - When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built.
You'd see the benefit within a year.
I quite like the idea of building the streets, sewers, schools etc. then selling the plots individually - max one entire street.
This was done in Victorian/Edwardian times - which is why often one side of the street looks a bit different to the other… different builders
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
Bloody Nazis, ruining extreme nationalism by demonstrating what happens when it actually has any power.
In the same way as it ruined socialism by demonstrating what happens when it actually has any power?
Nationalism at its best is nothing remotely like the Nazis, any more than socialism is. I don't like socialism, but just because the Nazis were called National Socialists I wouldn't falsely equate the two.
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
I still find it a bit mystifying how anyone can feel "pride" in their nationality, given that one's nationality is not for most people something one has any influence over.
But if one is pushing national pride as a rational emotion, perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about Adolf Hitler.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
This amused me also:
"The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children."
I mean why name check only the Jews? It is just funny/bizarre on so many levels.
The Jews are the one ethnic minority the hard-Right actually likes (or claims to). Rishi needs to withdraw the whip from any Tory attending this event for political reasons if no other - if the electorate gets wind of the fact that the Tories are now taking their instructions from American fundamentalist religious preachers then it's curtains.
Definitely expel them from the party - don't they know that Sunak himself is the only one permitted to destroy the party's electoral prospects?
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Maybe not in the mid-1990s.
I used to travel regularly back to Derby from it in the early 1990s. It was still magical - although I missed the heyday of the Peaks. Getting an HST from under that overall roof was great - and the old booking office was an architectural splendour.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not economic collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course
"I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century."
I still find it a bit mystifying how anyone can feel "pride" in their nationality, given that one's nationality is not for most people something one has any influence over.
But if one is pushing national pride as a rational emotion, perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about Adolf Hitler.
You must be fun.
I guess you must equally find it confusing when people feel "pride" over their football team winning, when they weren't themselves on the pitch?
If England win the Ashes will you find it odd that people are proud of that?
People in a free society can choose their nationality, just like they can choose their football team, cricket team or anything else - and can feel pride in any of them.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
StP - Sheffield - Leeds - Carlisle - Scotland.
If that’s a direct train it runs incredibly infrequently…
I haven't looked but I don't think it runs direct now, but it used to, at least as far as Carlisle. I know because I have done it, maybe about 40 years ago in a corridor train. The Leeds-Carlisle stretch was and is of course one of the classic set pieces of rail travel. St P to Carlisle took pretty much all day.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not economic collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
Truss's programme wasn't particularly libertarian in nature.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Even Darlo has a nice station.
The view of Durham, either way you go on the train, is spectacular. It is just magnificent. A truly beautiful place.
Until you go into the city centre and its all empty shops, aggressive begging and a bus stations redevelopment that is months overdue.
Can I give a shoutout for Edinburgh Waverley? A well-organised station, hidden away in a depression slap-bang in the middle of the historic city; overlooked by the castle and the Scott Monument. I always feel uplifted when I arrive there. Although I love Edinburgh, so I'm perhaps biased.
Yes, Waverley is lovely - one of the few railway stations right in the middle of its city. Actually midway between the Old Town and the New Town. New Street is also right in the middle of Birmingham, and jolly convenient, but even its mother would be hard pressed to describe it as 'lovely'. It's as if its architect had a list of all the elements which made or could make 'lovely' and decided to see if he could make a station without any of them.
On the subject of loveliness, the loveliness of the ECML is noted above, but I would actually say the WCML north of Wigan - i.e. the equivalent stretch - is lovelier still and weirdly unappreciated.
Waverley used to have a dark wooden booking office in the middle of the quadrangle where the clerks lurked:
It was still sooty when I began to get to know it, with a parcels and advance luggage office at the top of the two ramps, but suffered from expedient add-ons and piewcemeail repairs particularly ion the eastern concourse. It all got sorted out about 20 years ago and has been much better to look at ever since.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not economic collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
"The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization."
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Maybe not in the mid-1990s.
I used to travel regularly back to Derby from it in the early 1990s. It was still magical - although I missed the heyday of the Peaks. Getting an HST from under that overall roof was great - and the old booking office was an architectural splendour.
I got to know it a little earlier. I'm pleased it has become much more used now, so no complaints at all, but even more pleased I saw it in its original relative purity, with the booking office used as it was intended.
Coincidentally I'l reading this thing, about the railway lands as a whole: I had no idea that the area had such a complex history
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Small Axe
I see.
Or anything by Ken Burns. The (Vietnam) War as an example.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, I would say, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge and ask questions. He was given very wide leeway in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Birt. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules that Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that outside the BBC also gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
It could be better and less polemically put.
The middle way is Toryism. Both collectivism and individualism are out. The small platoons are the thing. Individuals all have connections, such as family and friends and neighbours, in identifiable communities on common concern. They express identity and loyalty in local social and civic concerns, including in matters of religion which should be tolerant, voluntary and local. Sexual expression is closely associated with love, family and long term commitment.
Freedom is essential. It is principally freedom to live well in the infinity of good ways there are to do so. Freedom without constraint and law is without meaning.
Any political parties getting close? This Tory is voting Labour next time, as the nearer thing to the Tory vision.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
Indeed: the focus on the Bible rather than the Church is more typical of US Protestantism than UK Protestantism.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
Number 4 is utterly batshit crazy and completely against the American Constitution and thankfully English practice.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Freddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
That seems a rather asinine way of reporting a speech. If the speech lasted 15 minutes or longer, you'd expect a variety of things to come under discussion. Listing them all separated by commas isn't particularly helpful.
It’s the things separated by commas that suggest he’s a nutter. Do you think paganism and Gnosticism are key threats to the UK?
Hayward's rather silly report doesn't say that Kruger highlighted these two things as key threats to the UK. I am faintly interested in how they came up, but he doesn't cover that.
Note also the 'hilarity' above over someone saying they've been communing with Thatcher - presumably a joke? Do we really think he came on, looked people in the eye and announced his communing session?
Conservative opponents in don't like people expressing conservative sentiments NON SHOCK.
Objectively a bunch of nasty dangerous nutters, though. I don't think these guys are a fair representation of conservative sentiments. Hope not.
you can watch the joke here if you want, it didn't seem to get a laugh and the guy goes on to be quite specific about what Thatcher wants us to do
Surely people wanting to be nationalists wouldn’t be importing their political ideology from another country? It is an all-round odd statement of British nationalism.
Mm, further on that conference: from the Graun feed I see that Mr R-M is being adduced as evidence for the dodginess and intent of Tory changing of electoral law:
'In the Commons the Labour MP Dawn Butler suggested that it might be appropriate for the police to investigate claims that the government changed voting law for its own electoral advantage.
In a point of order, Butler said she was “deeply troubled” by what Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory former cabinet minister, said yesterday about the government law requiring voters to have photo ID amounting to gerrymandering. She said this implied that ministers misled the country when their described their motives in passing the Elections Act. She went on:
It is deeply concerning to see the blatant, could-be politicisation of policy and organisation intended to ensure the fairness and security of our democratic process …
The justification for the policy was to combat voter fraud. It seems to me there’s a real possibility that the only fraud could be this government.
Butler asked Dame Rosie Winterton, the deputy speaker who was in the chair, she should report this matter to the parliamentary commissioner for standards, or to the police.'
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not economic collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
"The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization."
It gets pretty bad when someone like HYUFD is ashamed to defend it as it stands.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Small Axe
I see.
See what?
He sees that Small Axe is woke rubbish and he prefers Love Thy Neighbour.
More 'there's nothing wrong with X, it's just that it hasn't been implemented properly yet' news.
When Dixie said last night the conference was a gift to Labour, they hadn't even Godwinned it!
Freddie Hayward in his Staggers morning email:
'But this is the least of their worries. In his speech yesterday, Kruger railed against the following: paganism, the Bank of England, austerity, open borders, cheap credit, Gnosticism, lockdowns. It reminded me of a recent Reform UK rally, which I sketched over the weekend, where attendees associated finishing Brexit with everything from recycling to Yes Minister. I’m only being partly flippant when I call the “NatCon” conference a group therapy session. The speakers offloaded a deluge of gripes without offering coherent solutions. Even if they did, you don’t hear this list of problems and think, ah yes, the Conservative Party is the answer.'
That seems a rather asinine way of reporting a speech. If the speech lasted 15 minutes or longer, you'd expect a variety of things to come under discussion. Listing them all separated by commas isn't particularly helpful.
It’s the things separated by commas that suggest he’s a nutter. Do you think paganism and Gnosticism are key threats to the UK?
Hayward's rather silly report doesn't say that Kruger highlighted these two things as key threats to the UK. I am faintly interested in how they came up, but he doesn't cover that.
Note also the 'hilarity' above over someone saying they've been communing with Thatcher - presumably a joke? Do we really think he came on, looked people in the eye and announced his communing session?
Conservative opponents in don't like people expressing conservative sentiments NON SHOCK.
Objectively a bunch of nasty dangerous nutters, though. I don't think these guys are a fair representation of conservative sentiments. Hope not.
you can watch the joke here if you want, it didn't seem to get a laugh and the guy goes on to be quite specific about what Thatcher wants us to do
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
If any of these idiots read the Bible it would blow their tiny minds.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
I've lived in multiple countries and chosen to make this one my home. Its where I was born, but could have settled elsewhere. I have family in multiple nations, who have taken citizenship of the countries they've moved to.
People are free, within reason, to change countries. Nationalism is no more and no less than a belief that the best people to choose who to run a country, is the people of that country. That the best people to choose who to run India is Indians, Polands is Poles etc. Nationalism at its best is an anti-imperialist belief.
Imperialism is a belief that your nation should run other countries, India should be ran by Britain, etc.
The Nazis were anti-Nationalist. They were imperialist. They didn't want Poland ran by Poles, they wanted it ran by Germans. Same as the USSR. Countries like Poland etc were only free of imperialist oversight once they had national self-control via independence, rather than being compelled by force to be subjects of Russia, or Germany, or anyone else.
St Pancras is the greatest station in the world in the greatest city in the world.
There is really is no comparison.
And the food is great, and good value, and even the shopping is elegant.
Wonderful.
I was really surprised that JK Rowling made the London terminus for the Hogwarts train King Cross. St Pancras seems a much more magical location.
Hogwarts is in Scotland. I appreciate a magical train could technically go anywhere but imagine the flack she’d have got from the trainspotter crowd pointing out you can’t get to Scotland from StP. The trans lot would pale by comparison.
StP - Sheffield - Leeds - Carlisle - Scotland.
If that’s a direct train it runs incredibly infrequently…
I haven't looked but I don't think it runs direct now, but it used to, at least as far as Carlisle. I know because I have done it, maybe about 40 years ago in a corridor train. The Leeds-Carlisle stretch was and is of course one of the classic set pieces of rail travel. St P to Carlisle took pretty much all day.
I remember travelling from Kilmarnock to St Pancras on a Sunday in 1972. It took about 12 hours. The journey started to pall around Leicester. However, I would sooner spend 12 hours in a side corridor compartment travelling by the GSWR and S&C than 4 hours on a pendolino in a hard seat not lined up with a window!
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
If any of these idiots read the Bible it would blow their tiny minds.
It’s all other people should read the Bible, other people should respect the sanctity of marriage… None of it is intended to apply to themselves.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Note also the phrase "to establish a more perfect union" in Principle 3, which is a direct lift from the Preamble to the US federal constitution. (Other than that it uses 'form' rather than 'establish').
In fact, it's interesting that they haven't bothered to de-Americanize it, even to such direct references. Lazy, unaware, or in thrall to the US [right]?
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
If any of these idiots read the Bible it would blow their tiny minds.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
Reminds me of a tiny number of posters here whom I won't name, but utterly alien and balmy to everyone else.
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Support for family life, marriage and children is not economic collectivism but a core conservative value. That can include homosexuals who are married with children too now of course.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
"The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization."
Scratch the adulterers and divorcees and parents of extramaritally conceived children. In fact scratch anyone who had a feel before marriage. Never mind the gays.
Just wondering whom they can have in mind, and just as importantly whom they have forgotten about.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Note also the phrase "to establish a more perfect union" in Principle 3, which is a direct lift from the Preamble to the US federal constitution. (Other than that it uses 'form' rather than 'establish').
In fact, it's interesting that they haven't bothered to de-Americanize it, even to such direct references. Lazy, unaware, or in thrall to the US [right]?
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
I've lived in multiple countries and chosen to make this one my home. Its where I was born, but could have settled elsewhere. I have family in multiple nations, who have taken citizenship of the countries they've moved to.
People are free, within reason, to change countries. Nationalism is no more and no less than a belief that the best people to choose who to run a country, is the people of that country. That the best people to choose who to run India is Indians, Polands is Poles etc. Nationalism at its best is an anti-imperialist belief.
Imperialism is a belief that your nation should run other countries, India should be ran by Britain, etc.
The Nazis were anti-Nationalist. They were imperialist. They didn't want Poland ran by Poles, they wanted it ran by Germans. Same as the USSR. Countries like Poland etc were only free of imperialist oversight once they had national self-control via independence, rather than being compelled by force to be subjects of Russia, or Germany, or anyone else.
What you’re talking about is the policy of national self-determination, as favoured by Lenin, which is not the same as nationalism.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Note also the phrase "to establish a more perfect union" in Principle 3, which is a direct lift from the Preamble to the US federal constitution. (Other than that it uses 'form' rather than 'establish').
In fact, it's interesting that they haven't bothered to de-Americanize it, even to such direct references. Lazy, unaware, or in thrall to the US [right]?
tbf (why, you ask) it does say it is a joint US, UK, and European project with its last conferences in Orlando, Brussels and Miami before this one.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Note also (for example) Newsnight's illegal immigration investigation, which seems to have done a significantly better job than the Home Office...
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
I am interested in people. I'm neither particularly interested nor totally uninterested in the social history of minorities in late 20th century Britain, but my 'I see' was a reference to a previous discussion I'm sure we had regarding attitudes to what television should do - uplift, entertain (me) - mortify, purify (you), where I am sure this particular programme was used as an example.
If we want housing to be built and to avoid backlash (at least backlash to a degree that blocks building; there's always someone who'll object to anything, but this would sufficiently marginalise people like that):
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. - Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. - Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. - Supported self-build made available on these sites. - Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. - Funding for LAs to build social housing. - When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built.
You'd see the benefit within a year.
I quite like the idea of building the streets, sewers, schools etc. then selling the plots individually - max one entire street.
This was done in Victorian/Edwardian times - which is why often one side of the street looks a bit different to the other… different builders
And it avoids the blandness and uniformity of some modern developments. Diversity is interesting.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
If any of these idiots read the Bible it would blow their tiny minds.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Note also the phrase "to establish a more perfect union" in Principle 3, which is a direct lift from the Preamble to the US federal constitution. (Other than that it uses 'form' rather than 'establish').
In fact, it's interesting that they haven't bothered to de-Americanize it, even to such direct references. Lazy, unaware, or in thrall to the US [right]?
It seems to be a pretty American website. Almost all if not all of the signatories on the bottom seem to be American institutions too. Can't see any overtly British signatories, even the Spectator signature belongs to the Washington Editor of the Spectator.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Small Axe
I see.
See what?
He sees that Small Axe is woke rubbish and he prefers Love Thy Neighbour.
I have never watched an episode of Love Thy Neighbour and I have no interest in doing so.
Basically every country I go to now has a better high speed network - or is building one that will open soon - compared to the UK
How much did each one cost ?
Less than HS2 probably. We seem to have an amazing ability to delay and fiddle with a project until the costs spiral out of all control then build a ¼ of it to "save" money.
Does HS2 still reach as far as Brum these days or does it now stop at Aylesbury?
Our system of government in which MPs are closely tied with individual constituencies probably doesn't help. Every decision is made with regard to its possible effect on each particular local MP's chances of reelection. It may be no coincidence that the US, with a similar style of government, also seems to struggle with large infrastructure projects.
It’s an interesting comparison. America used to be good at this stuff, too. The original US railways from coast to coast were phenomenal achievements
And the freeways are sometimes majestic. The road from Denver to Salt Lake City through the Rockies is, in places, sublime
And yet now they struggle - like us
The original railways in the US were the product of corrupt crony capitalism colluding with governments to enrich their spivvy promotors like Stanford and the Associates.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Ken Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented Ken Clarke instead.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
I am interested in people. I'm neither particularly interested nor totally uninterested in the social history of minorities in late 20th century Britain, but my 'I see' was a reference to a previous discussion I'm sure we had regarding attitudes to what television should do - uplift, entertain (me) - mortify, purify (you), where I am sure this particular programme was used as an example.
I see.
I don't have a view as to what television should or shouldn't do and I'm pretty sure I didn't say it should mortify or purify anyone but if you pull the quote I'm ready to accept that is what I said although I can't reconcile it with what I think right now.
Television should and could do anything and indeed does. From Naked Attraction to A Secret History: The Troubles.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Succession.
I should get into that. I'll look at Topping's Black Mirror recommendation too.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
Yes.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
Second cabinet minister to attend the conference. The Nationalkonservative Britische Rentnerpartei have gone mainstream.
Well worth reading their Statement of Principles.
A couple I found particularly funny including:
"Among the causes [of the threats to the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations] are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life."
This has religious fundamentalist preacher condemning homosexuality turning out to be gay written all over it.
And why have they used the American spelling of 'licence'?
I'm surprised LuckyGuy is defending this stuff, since he's generally one of our more US influence phobic posters. It's fairly blatantly a collection of US right wing memes.
What have I defended? I'm just left fairly cold by the sort of inane cackling based on what seem to be misrepresentations we're seeing about this event from the PB peanut gallery.
Misrepresentations? Read the statement of principles yourself.
Principle 5 is interesting… It shows once again that this is a US import.
Though Principle 4 is also interesting - " 4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities [...]"
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
If any of these idiots read the Bible it would blow their tiny minds.
It’s all other people should read the Bible, other people should respect the sanctity of marriage… None of it is intended to apply to themselves.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
I don't agree that nations are ethnic.
Rishi Sunak has British nationality as does anyone else who has British citizenship.
An emigré born in England who has given up citizenship to become an American, does not.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented instead by Ken Clarke.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and commercial, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was in some ways the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
The BBC can rediscover that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
LOL at the Clark/Clarke.
Look at what was about to be unleashed in the '90s. The internet, then streaming, then multi-platform delivery (as one lecture once put it at the time - in the future the only difference between your television and your computer will be what room it is in), then all hell broke loose. The BBC had to change and I don't think it lost too much in so doing.
I have mentioned podcasts. People consume their entertainment in many different ways and the BBC remains at the forefront of many of these new channels small 'c'.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
Yes.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
You really can't see any contradiction between the first word of your reply and the rest?
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
Do you have any examples of really great recent programmes? Genuinely interested - I admit I tend to enjoy a lot of programmes from the 90's and earlier.
Succession.
I should get into that. I'll look at Topping's Black Mirror recommendation too.
It is phenomenal. I watched it all during lockdown which might not have done too much for my state of mind but it was fantastic nevertheless. I think it's all on Netflix.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
Yes.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
You really can't see any contradiction between the first word of your reply and the rest?
And you call other people insulting names ...
No, there's absolutely no contradiction.
It takes two to tango. If I want to go somewhere, and that somewhere wants me, then I can go there and nobody here should be able to say otherwise.
If somewhere else doesn't want me, then I either need to make myself more appealing or find somewhere else to go or some other means instead. I want is not I get, but if I want something and they want it too, then free people in a free society ought to be able to reach mutually beneficial agreements.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
I don't agree that nations are ethnic.
Rishi Sunak has British nationality as does anyone else who has British citizenship.
An emigré born in England who has given up citizenship to become an American, does not.
Many of the world's problems came from the elision of ethnos and nation.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
I don't agree that nations are ethnic.
Rishi Sunak has British nationality as does anyone else who has British citizenship.
An emigré born in England who has given up citizenship to become an American, does not.
Many of the world's problems came from the elision of ethnos and nation.
Indeed and hopefully in the 21st century we've moved well past the idea that nations are ethnic in nature.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Ken Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented Ken Clarke instead.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
Radio 4 is still pretty much like that, IMO. I can turn it on at pretty much any time and find what's on interesting.
Except Gardener's Question Time. One Sunday when out walking along the seabanks of Essex, the only thing I could get on my cruddy Walkman was GQT. I felt like throwing myself in the Crouch.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
Yes.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
You really can't see any contradiction between the first word of your reply and the rest?
And you call other people insulting names ...
No, there's absolutely no contradiction.
It takes two to tango. If I want to go somewhere, and that somewhere wants me, then I can go there and nobody here should be able to say otherwise.
If somewhere else doesn't want me, then I either need to make myself more appealing or find somewhere else to go or some other means instead. I want is not I get, but if I want something and they want it too, then free people in a free society ought to be able to reach mutually beneficial agreements.
You really don't see any contradiction between what you said before
(1) "People in a free society can choose their nationality ..."
and what you're saying now
(2) "It takes two to tango"
For Heaven's sake, did you not see in the first place how stupid what you were saying was?
But still you claim
(3) "there's absolutely no contradiction"
But still no doubt you'll carry on ad nauseam ....
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
Yes.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
You really can't see any contradiction between the first word of your reply and the rest?
And you call other people insulting names ...
No, there's absolutely no contradiction.
It takes two to tango. If I want to go somewhere, and that somewhere wants me, then I can go there and nobody here should be able to say otherwise.
If somewhere else doesn't want me, then I either need to make myself more appealing or find somewhere else to go or some other means instead. I want is not I get, but if I want something and they want it too, then free people in a free society ought to be able to reach mutually beneficial agreements.
You really don't see any contradiction between what you said before
(1) "People in a free society can choose their nationality ..."
and what you're saying now
(2) "It takes two to tango"
For Heaven's sake, did you not see in the first place how stupid what you were saying was?
But still you claim
(3) "there's absolutely no contradiction"
But still no doubt you'll carry on ad nauseam ....
There is absolutely no contradiction, which is why you can show no contradiction.
I can choose to be a wicket keeper. Doesn't mean I have the right to demand Jonny Bairstow hands me his gloves.
Millions of people every decade migrate to this country, by choice, and make it their home.
Millions of people every decade emigrate from this country, by choice, to make other nations their home.
If you're too small-minded to understand that, then I pity you.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
Certainly not 'always'. The nation state is a fairly modern invention. Citizenship is certainly institutional - but also (from at least the time of ancient Athens) also cultural.
Questions of identity are complicated, and forever evolving (as is the concept of the state).
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Ken Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented Ken Clarke instead.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
Radio 4 is still pretty much like that, IMO. I can turn it on at pretty much any time and find what's on interesting.
Except Gardener's Question Time. One Sunday when out walking along the seabanks of Essex, the only thing I could get on my cruddy Walkman was GQT. I felt like throwing myself in the Crouch.
Not just Radio 4 but BBC 4 as well. Although sadly I understand they are going to get rid of that.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented instead by Ken Clarke.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and commercial, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was in some ways the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
The BBC can rediscover that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
LOL at the Clark/Clarke.
Look at what was about to be unleashed in the '90s. The internet, then streaming, then multi-platform delivery (as one lecture once put it at the time - in the future the only difference between your television and your computer will be what room it is in), then all hell broke loose. The BBC had to change and I don't think it lost too much in so doing.
I have mentioned podcasts. People consume their entertainment in many different ways and the BBC remains at the forefront of many of these new channels small 'c'.
Well, I think we'll have to partly agree to differ on that, Topping. I agree the BBC had to change, but I personally would say it could have changed more in distribution and technology than creative substance, and still been very successful.
Another very important point to consider, is that many of these changes were in reponse to the multi-channel environment rather than the internet. By around 1998 many of the differences in programming and style from the early '90s were set, and if the internet had inherited the public and broadcasting culture of the early rather than 'late 90s, we'd be living in very different times.
Sadly the race may be boring but the aftermath could get exciting very rapidly if the wrong man wins.
I find it difficult to believe that the US is actually considering electing Trump again. It defies logic.
You yourself wrote a compelling piece which explained clearly exactly why they might.
Sadly yes. But I thought that con would only work once. I never imagined that after having so clearly been taken for a ride they would actually fall for it again.
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Ken Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented Ken Clarke instead.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
Radio 4 is still pretty much like that, IMO. I can turn it on at pretty much any time and find what's on interesting.
Except Gardener's Question Time. One Sunday when out walking along the seabanks of Essex, the only thing I could get on my cruddy Walkman was GQT. I felt like throwing myself in the Crouch.
The great thing about radio is that there's no possibility of the sort of mindless long pauses that they have on tv - Brian Cox (inevitably) explaining the universe (usually poorly), and then some visually appealing but really rather dull cgi.
I can't think of a better example of the sort of programmes the BBC should be making than IoT.
It's odd that the BBC really had a good hold on long-form tv - of all sorts - many years ago, and yet failed to quite pick up on that in recent times. I can't think of a factual series recently of any merit (admittedly I watch little tv), but the series the English was quite good recently.
I think much of the issue is that tv producers now want to avoid people switching channels (so keep it too simplistic), and don't want to assume people have seen the prior episodes, or even prior minutes (simplification, and mind-numbing repetition)
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It's the price we pay for living in a free country. I've read reports of people visiting North Korea and saying how much they enjoyed the lack of things like shopping malls and adverts, even though they knew what sort of country it was.
The point is that anyone older than 45 remembers a time before late capitalism…
True and if they had any sense they would prefer today's version to the one 45 years ago.
I appreciate that the PB demographic is one that can afford to reminisce about there being no choice on the shelves (for poor people) or how wonderful it must be in North Korea without all those shops selling ghastly tat but in the real world capitalism develops in line with the majority of its constituents and people want that stuff.
Not refined people like you and me who find the whole "Duty Free" thing quite distasteful, but *those* people. They like it.
The thing is, in a couple of areas, a couple of the range of predictions you're caricaturing there, have in fact come to pass.
Look at media, and public life, for instance. In the late 1980's when I started working for the BBC, there was frequent comparison between British TV, often regarded and also still by some of our European counterparts as the best in the world, and the American "supermarket" approach to broadcasting, then very different to ours, of hundreds of channels of unashamedly much lower quality.
Fast forward thirty-five years, and many of the predictions about British TV, made at the time by those characterised as "stick-in-the- mud", retrograde, or "left-wing elitist", have come to pass. This doesn't only include commercial channels, or ITV and Channel 4, but the far more commercialised ethos, following Birt's market reforns, of the BBC itself ; with the result now that BBC TV often struggles to be sufficiently distinctive, and has in fact weakened itself by doing this, too.
Eh? I think it is a truth universally acknowledged that some of the best TV on the planet is being made right now. In the UK, the US, France, the Nordics, Israel, you name it.
There is still good programming being made at times, but, on the international view, I can only pass on some what people from Continental Europe have said to me ; it's a very long time since British TV was considered the best in the world, and the public broadcasters of France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere regularly broadcast the kind of more challenging material the BBC and Channel 4 have long-ditched.
When I was Greece a couple of years ago, I saw a two-and-a-half-hour programme about John Le Carre, on the national state channel. The two interviewers went to the West Country to interview him, chatting over his life while looking out to sea, and included an exhaustive and challenging section of the political and cultural background of Britain between the 1950's and 1990's, with my friend translating some of it for me. This is the sort of unashamedly in-depth programming that completely disappeared from British TV in the late '90s, because of the ultra-commercialisation of our broadcasting and public culture ; it's still there in parts of the Continent, though, and raises the general cultural level.
Is this one of those I am a socialist not because I love the poor but because I hate the poor-type posts? I think your big problem is that the lower classes now have the vote and I'm afraid that genie isn't going back in the bottle.
I will say again that the everywhere, including the UK is producing absolutely banging TV right now. You can stick your two and a half hours of John le Carre (whose work is, frankly, "populist", if I may) where the sun don't shine.
It's not really anything to do with hating the poor. I woulfn't say. The BBC got huge audience throughout the '80s for TV plays and offbeat documentaries, although it was also helped by a lack of multi-channel TV culture at the time.
It's not at all impossible to make things that are both very challenging and very popular ; it's just usually more risky, and more difficult, so the most directly commercial logic tends to steer to both the conceptually familiar and tried-and-tested, and the creatively easier, for those two reasons.
Jeez yet again you are missing the most amazing TV that has been made these past decade or two. Plus you are ignoring the other mediums that have arisen since John Reith (and you it appears) were at the Beeb. I'm not going to list every great programme that has been produced, although that is always a PB favourite but I will take as an example In Our Time, hosted by Melvin Bragg. Gives absolutely no quarter to populism and has been on every week for the past who knows how many years.
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
There is certainly always good TV being made here and there, but the idea that the 1965-95 period of British TV did not produce much more challenging material than now just isn't supported by the evidence. Even here on PB, for instance, a couple of times in the last two years or so, people have posted older schedules from BBC2 from the early '90 for comparison with now, and even some of our more hard-right posters have been surprised in the difference in how much more challenging and interesting the older material is.
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge, and ask questions. He was nurtured by the BBC in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Bir. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
And he is still producing cracking programmes today. 11th May episode of IoT was on The Shimabara Rebellion. Why he hasn't got a Lordhood goodness only knows.
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
Well, Ken Clark's Civilisation was very much of the patrician part of '60s, although I like the idea of it being presented Ken Clarke instead.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
Radio 4 is still pretty much like that, IMO. I can turn it on at pretty much any time and find what's on interesting.
Except Gardener's Question Time. One Sunday when out walking along the seabanks of Essex, the only thing I could get on my cruddy Walkman was GQT. I felt like throwing myself in the Crouch.
Horses for course. Same as you except I enjoy GQT, but then I garden. However Women's Hour I hate. I'm sorry this might sound sexist, but often really too much information for me.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
I've lived in multiple countries and chosen to make this one my home. Its where I was born, but could have settled elsewhere. I have family in multiple nations, who have taken citizenship of the countries they've moved to.
People are free, within reason, to change countries. Nationalism is no more and no less than a belief that the best people to choose who to run a country, is the people of that country. That the best people to choose who to run India is Indians, Polands is Poles etc. Nationalism at its best is an anti-imperialist belief.
Imperialism is a belief that your nation should run other countries, India should be ran by Britain, etc.
The Nazis were anti-Nationalist. They were imperialist. They didn't want Poland ran by Poles, they wanted it ran by Germans. Same as the USSR. Countries like Poland etc were only free of imperialist oversight once they had national self-control via independence, rather than being compelled by force to be subjects of Russia, or Germany, or anyone else.
I suggest one runs from the other.
A Google search for the definition of nationalism throws up 'identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations'.
So if you accept that, I think that then mindset promotes imperialism. Again, Goole throws up as a definition of imperialism as 'a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means'.
So, if you are primarily concerned with your nation's interests at the exclusion of those of other nations, it isn't a great leap to persuade yourself that extending your nation's power, wealth, etc, through colonising other countries and building an empire is a good, and justifiable, thing.
I think you would be hard pressed to persuade most informed people that the Nazis were anti-Nationalists. The accepted view I think is that they were extreme nationalists. See the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft', for example. The party itself emerged from a volatile soup of extreme nationalist groups that had been around in Germany for some time before WW1.
Sadly the race may be boring but the aftermath could get exciting very rapidly if the wrong man wins.
I find it difficult to believe that the US is actually considering electing Trump again. It defies logic.
You yourself wrote a compelling piece which explained clearly exactly why they might.
Sadly yes. But I thought that con would only work once. I never imagined that after having so clearly been taken for a ride they would actually fall for it again.
I think I understand why @Chris is getting so stumped and seeing an apparent contradiction where there is none. He's making the "Incel" mistaken belief that someone else's consent being required is a restriction on your freedoms. It is not.
In a free society you're free to have sex with whoever you choose to have sex with . . . but their consent is still required.
If you want to have sex with Liz Truss @Chris and she says she wants to with you, then the state should not be saying that is forbidden as it would in Iran or Saudi Arabia or other. If on the other hand you hit on her and she says she's not interested, then she's not interested, your rights have not been impeded you were simply rejected.
In a free society you're free to choose, but if your choice requires a third parties consent, then you need the third parties consent. If you get it, then our state should not be getting involved. That is freedom. Demanding others give their consent whether they want to or not, is not freedom.
If you want to have sex with a third party, and they consent, or you want to emigrate to a third party, and they consent, then our state should not be forbidding it. There's no contradiction there, while still allowing people to give or refuse consent.
On topic, this For me WH2024 looks set to be the most boring one ever with the WH2020 nominees being the ones who fight it out next year.. assumes Trump will be the nominee.
I still think it quite likely he won't be.
It's become a bit of a niche view on PB but I agree. He's the frontrunner for the nomination right now but I can see quite a few scenarios where it doesn't end up that way.
I dream we get Trump running as an independent against a different Republican nominee, with so much down ballot disruption that the Dems take the presidency, the House and 60 seats in the Senate.
Why would he do that? And how?
I said it was a dream, not a prediction.
In the unlikely event that the Republican Party sees sense and dumps Trump, I can readily imagine Trump doing anything he can to attack the GOP, including running as a third-party candidate where he can.
Those places are few and far between. Most states now have sore-loser rules, where someone who enters a primary race is only allowed to compete in the general election under that party's banner.
I agree that he'd react with fury if he were dumped - but that again is another reason to think he won't be, if he's not actively prevented from running.
The state "sore loser" laws precluding candidates who lose in primaries from running in general elections, generally do NOT apply to presidential elections.
Note that in 1980, John Anderson ran for POTUS in Republican primaries . . . then when he lost GOP nomination to Ronald Reagan, ran as an Independent in the general election. AND was on the ballot in EVERY state and District of Columbia.
SSI - question for you. The scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation is commonly referred to as “Watergate” which means a scandal about water. Why? Should that term not be reserved for some impropriety over sewerage works or similar? Makes no sense.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
I've lived in multiple countries and chosen to make this one my home. Its where I was born, but could have settled elsewhere. I have family in multiple nations, who have taken citizenship of the countries they've moved to.
People are free, within reason, to change countries. Nationalism is no more and no less than a belief that the best people to choose who to run a country, is the people of that country. That the best people to choose who to run India is Indians, Polands is Poles etc. Nationalism at its best is an anti-imperialist belief.
Imperialism is a belief that your nation should run other countries, India should be ran by Britain, etc.
The Nazis were anti-Nationalist. They were imperialist. They didn't want Poland ran by Poles, they wanted it ran by Germans. Same as the USSR. Countries like Poland etc were only free of imperialist oversight once they had national self-control via independence, rather than being compelled by force to be subjects of Russia, or Germany, or anyone else.
I suggest one runs from the other.
A Google search for the definition of nationalism throws up 'identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations'.
So if you accept that, I think that then mindset promotes imperialism. Again, Goole throws up as a definition of imperialism as 'a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means'.
So, if you are primarily concerned with your nation's interests at the exclusion of those of other nations, it isn't a great leap to persuade yourself that extending your nation's power, wealth, etc, through colonising other countries and building an empire is a good, and justifiable, thing.
I think you would be hard pressed to persuade most informed people that the Nazis were anti-Nationalists. The accepted view I think is that they were extreme nationalists. See the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft', for example. The party itself emerged from a volatile soup of extreme nationalist groups that had been around in Germany for some time before WW1.
I don't accept "especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations".
Gandhi was a nationalist, he wanted India to be ran by Indians instead of Brits. How was that to the detriment of other nations?
Politically I may agree with Churchill on more than I agree with Gandhi, but on a nationalism basis I agree with Gandhi not Churchill. They should be free to run their own country, not have it ran by us. Just as the Poles should be free to run their own country, not Germans or Russians.
PS the National Socialists party also originated from Socialist groups. Many socialists would perfectly reasonably agree they'd moved past and beyond the acceptable realms of socialism.
People in a free society can choose their nationality ...
If only people like you had the slightest sense of irony or self-awareness ... !
I have both, I'm just not sure what someone as ignorant as you is trying to make as your point.
You think that everyone should have the freedom to choose their nationality? Yes or no?
I suddenly don't have the freedom anyt longer to be both UK and EU. I wonder why?
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
Nationality and citizenship are, and always have been, two different things. Nations are cultural-ethnic things; states are institutional - administrative, legal, political and military etc).
I don't agree that nations are ethnic.
Rishi Sunak has British nationality as does anyone else who has British citizenship.
An emigré born in England who has given up citizenship to become an American, does not.
Many of the world's problems came from the elision of ethnos and nation.
Indeed and hopefully in the 21st century we've moved well past the idea that nations are ethnic in nature.
A few countries predominantly in the West (though with quite a few interesting exceptions*) have made that transition but there are still many where the ethnic group and the nation are seen as synonymous. Mono-ethnic states. China, Japan and Korea are 3 such cases, China so much so that it actively considers people of Han Chinese ethnicity who are citizens of other countries to be Chinese and subject to its rules. Likewise a lot of Eastern Europe, sharpened in recent years by the tensions of the migration crisis and the enemy-within perception of Russians. There are also countries that are de-facto monoethinic but simply by force of circumstance rather than any exclusionary ideology, such as Iceland or Bhutan.
The exceptions are interesting as they include settler states (Brazil and all of Latin America, Mauritius, Singapore etc), states united more by religion than ethnicity (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and then some deeply troubled states where ethnic and religious conflict is rife but the conception of the nation state is intended to rise above this (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Sri Lanka, much of the Sahel belt, former Yugoslavia, India).
Re; the points on BBC Radio, I agree that it often and in some ways still does act as an incarnation of the range the BBC used to be so good at.
Unpredictable, challenging, popular, engaging, the whole suite. But then it's also been subjected to much less pre-market-testing of programmes, and less of a market research-led approach than BBC TV, and left much more to its own devices for many years, for many and varied structural reasons.
Talking of cultural Marxism and the necessity of social equality, I have just been given my own villa on the seafront at Alexandria, courtesy of the Four Seasons hotel
Talking of cultural Marxism and the necessity of social equality, I have just been given my own villa on the seafront at Alexandria, courtesy of the Four Seasons hotel
Talking of cultural Marxism and the necessity of social equality, I have just been given my own villa on the seafront at Alexandria, courtesy of the Four Seasons hotel
Did you ask them to take the extra place settings away as you will just be the one?
Its a pleasant way to kill time while awaiting the flight. If you don't want to buy something, nobody puts a gun to your head to make you - they couldn't get that past security and this isn't America.
Airport shopping malls strike me as universally seedy. You are literally forced to walk through them to get to your flight, usually along a winding route to maximise boredom. They benefit from tax avoidance by selling fags and booze (which are taxed highly for a reason, not just revenue) free of tax, resulting either in cut-price ways to kill yourself or obscene profit margins or both.
Otherwise, yes, they're fine.
Yes my blood boils as I am forced to meander through some obscene temple to overpriced and undertaxed consumer bullshit, under boiling hot lights and bombarded by the stink of some vile "fragrance" called Tart's Boudoir or something similar, before arriving at the waiting area which invariably has too few seats because so much space has been given over to hawking said consumer bullshit to all the basic leisureware morons at the airport. A good bookshop and somewhere to buy snacks, plug adaptors and tiny tubes of toothpaste is all you need. Everything else is just the monetisation of boredom, late capitalism's most profitable income stream.
It is possible to have a life and never go near an airport. Hunter gatherer communities manage this feat. So do some non- hunter gatherers in the UK. It helps save the planet too.
I rather like airports in general. They are archetypal liminal spaces. So are large railway terminals (and trains themselves for that matter). And ferry ports. But ferry ports are generally not very well appointed or pleasant.
Of all those, my ideal is a large railway terminus with a grand cafe with high ceilings where you can sit and daydream for an hour or so before the overnight express train pulls in. Followed by a very large hub airport with long travelators and the varied peoples of the world wandering about in it, or a smaller European airport with pleasant half-empty lounges like the Eventyr lounge in Copenhagen.
A railway station is infinitely preferable to an airport IMHO, as it usually has some nice Victorian architecture, much more space and fresh air, fewer aggressive attempts to rob you blind, and contains trains, the finest machines ever created. The ideal station is a little delapidated and broken, evoking romantic memories of a vanished age, and contains a grubby caff selling tea, crisps and unappetising sandwiches, with blue clouds of diesel smoke lingering under the canopy.
Numerous ideals are available. Adlestrop, or King's Cross, Rannoch, or ghosts like March. St Pancras with its sense that you can go from there to Vladivostock or Yerevan with a few changes
My favourite is not the terminus but the major intersection where there is activity all the time - literally every minute or two. Preston or Peterborough are good. Leeds is terminus and intersection, so is good too.
I like this conversation. I have often thought this - my favourite station in this regard is York. Which still retains an air of what it must have been like in rail's heyday.
Yes, York is great. The best fun with railways is when you have all day, nowhere you have to get to at any particular time and can train and people watch.
And think of all those people whose first experience of 'It's grim up north' is York Station followed by seeing Durham from the train in winter mist followed by crossing the Tyne into Newcastle. Though I live in north west not north east the memory still moves me.
The ECML gets almost uniformly beautiful from York onwards, with the best views probably on the stretch running up the Northumberland coast, followed by the bit between South Queensferry and Kirkcaldy.
Absolutely and it is vital that you are on the correct (ie right) side of the train as it passes through there and eg Berwick.
It's worth booking on LNER not the Trainline so you can choose your seats.
The thing that does my head in is split tickets which, unbelievably, are still at thing. Trainline is quite good at them (for an extra quid or so) while doing it on the operator's own website is slightly trickier.
I hadn't noticed (because I've never tried to do so) that you can't reserve seats there.
I was reading this recently: apparently there are specialist websites:
Re; the points on BBC Radio, I agree that it often and in some ways still does act as an incarnation of the range the BBC used to be so good at.
Unpredictable, challenging, popular, engaging, the whole suite. But then it's also been subjected to much less pre-market-testing of programmes, and less of a market-research-led approach than BBC TV, and left largely much more alone, for structural reasons.
You'd prefer no pre-market testing and less market research. LOL.
I am a socialist not because I love the poor, but because I hate them.
If you aren't available, btw, who would you have choose the programming on the BBC?
Comments
This was done in Victorian/Edwardian times - which is why often one side of the street looks a bit different to the other… different builders
The Conservatives are at their best way they embrace individualism. Collectivism should be the preserve of the socialists, not the Tories.
Nationalism at its best is nothing remotely like the Nazis, any more than socialism is. I don't like socialism, but just because the Nazis were called National Socialists I wouldn't falsely equate the two.
But if one is pushing national pride as a rational emotion, perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about Adolf Hitler.
Bit like Macron wanted to be.
Conservatism is not socialism but nor is it libertarianism either as Liz Truss quickly discovered
Meanwhile in your heyday there was Love Thy Neighbour and Crossroads and so on. You are misremembering a golden age of TV that really never was. It always was and still is an eclectic mix to cater for the tastes of people such as yourself (eg gigantic snobs) and the common people.
I guess you must equally find it confusing when people feel "pride" over their football team winning, when they weren't themselves on the pitch?
If England win the Ashes will you find it odd that people are proud of that?
People in a free society can choose their nationality, just like they can choose their football team, cricket team or anything else - and can feel pride in any of them.
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/the-ticket-office-waverley-station-just-before-it-was-demolished-1969--332210910008786365/
It was still sooty when I began to get to know it, with a parcels and advance luggage office at the top of the two ramps, but suffered from expedient add-ons and piewcemeail repairs particularly ion the eastern concourse. It all got sorted out about 20 years ago and has been much better to look at ever since.
https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/
Black Mirror also.
Coincidentally I'l reading this thing, about the railway lands as a whole: I had no idea that the area had such a complex history
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kings-Cross-Story-History-Railway/dp/0750985798/ref=sr_1_1?crid=9R0LU0OFGPRA&keywords=king's+cross+darley&qid=1684242477&sprefix=king's+cross+darley,aps,137&sr=8-1
Melvyn Bragg is an exemplar of that age of British broadcasting, I would say, nurtured then by the BBC when it was unafraid to challenge and ask questions. He was given very wide leeway in the '80s, in both drama and documentary, and his plays were broadcast throughout the '80s and early '90s, in the Dennis Potter era before John Birt. He turned Start The Week from a cosy chatshow to a weekly highbrow-fest, and for about as long as ITV was bound by the public service rules that Thatcher hated, his South Bank Show sometimes got big audiences on ITV. Most of that outside the BBC also gradually disappeared with the Tories' broadcasting legislation of the early '90s, which removed the public service requirements on ITV and Channel 4.
Very American in spirit even if not in the letter of the US Constituion. But England is already a theocracy with a state cult, anyway.
The middle way is Toryism. Both collectivism and individualism are out. The small platoons are the thing. Individuals all have connections, such as family and friends and neighbours, in identifiable communities on common concern. They express identity and loyalty in local social and civic concerns, including in matters of religion which should be tolerant, voluntary and local. Sexual expression is closely associated with love, family and long term commitment.
Freedom is essential. It is principally freedom to live well in the infinity of good ways there are to do so. Freedom without constraint and law is without meaning.
Any political parties getting close? This Tory is voting Labour next time, as the nearer thing to the Tory vision.
you can watch the joke here if you want, it didn't seem to get a laugh and the guy goes on to be quite specific about what Thatcher wants us to do
https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658064318229823489?s=20
'In the Commons the Labour MP Dawn Butler suggested that it might be appropriate for the police to investigate claims that the government changed voting law for its own electoral advantage.
In a point of order, Butler said she was “deeply troubled” by what Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tory former cabinet minister, said yesterday about the government law requiring voters to have photo ID amounting to gerrymandering. She said this implied that ministers misled the country when their described their motives in passing the Elections Act. She went on:
It is deeply concerning to see the blatant, could-be politicisation of policy and organisation intended to ensure the fairness and security of our democratic process …
The justification for the policy was to combat voter fraud. It seems to me there’s a real possibility that the only fraud could be this government.
Butler asked Dame Rosie Winterton, the deputy speaker who was in the chair, she should report this matter to the parliamentary commissioner for standards, or to the police.'
You want the entire schedule to be Ken Clarke's Civilisation whereas there is plenty of TV, much of it originating in the UK being played on all platforms, which does just that. I just mentioned Ken Burns (albeit he's not on the Beeb) but the UK continues to have amazing creativity and to produce, to use your language, educational and cultural programming.
I also mentioned Small Axe to @Luckyguy1983 which elicited what appeared to be a sneer and fair enough it is about minorities which may not interest him, but it is a hugely compelling and powerful account of life for black people in the UK over the past few decades and Steve McQueen specifically wanted it to go out on the BBC.
I've lived in multiple countries and chosen to make this one my home. Its where I was born, but could have settled elsewhere. I have family in multiple nations, who have taken citizenship of the countries they've moved to.
People are free, within reason, to change countries. Nationalism is no more and no less than a belief that the best people to choose who to run a country, is the people of that country. That the best people to choose who to run India is Indians, Polands is Poles etc. Nationalism at its best is an anti-imperialist belief.
Imperialism is a belief that your nation should run other countries, India should be ran by Britain, etc.
The Nazis were anti-Nationalist. They were imperialist. They didn't want Poland ran by Poles, they wanted it ran by Germans. Same as the USSR. Countries like Poland etc were only free of imperialist oversight once they had national self-control via independence, rather than being compelled by force to be subjects of Russia, or Germany, or anyone else.
In fact, it's interesting that they haven't bothered to de-Americanize it, even to such direct references. Lazy, unaware, or in thrall to the US [right]?
Just wondering whom they can have in mind, and just as importantly whom they have forgotten about.
Diversity is interesting.
Nor do I have the freedom to rearrange things so I was born in NI.
By the early '90s, just before Birt's market reforms, the BBC had arrived at a very interesting place. There was a good balance between the popular and challenging, and there was a strong sense that almost anything could turn up on what was essentially the flagship channel, 2, from night to night.
As someone posted on an article by Tony Hall in the Guardian recently, there were bizarre and offbeat and undergound films and documentaries, more traditional art and literature-type programmes, foreign films, and an engaging and unpredictable utter randomness.
The BBC can rediscover some of that, but it needs a change of ethos, and possibly a second restructuring.
I don't have a view as to what television should or shouldn't do and I'm pretty sure I didn't say it should mortify or purify anyone but if you pull the quote I'm ready to accept that is what I said although I can't reconcile it with what I think right now.
Television should and could do anything and indeed does. From Naked Attraction to A Secret History: The Troubles.
You pays your money (by law) and takes your pick.
Nobody should be compelled to live in a country they don't want to live in, that's the preserve of dictatorships stopping people from leaving like the Berlin Wall.
Not every country may want a potential migrant, but anyone who wants to leave a nation should be absolutely free to go anywhere they are welcome to go.
Rishi Sunak has British nationality as does anyone else who has British citizenship.
An emigré born in England who has given up citizenship to become an American, does not.
Look at what was about to be unleashed in the '90s. The internet, then streaming, then multi-platform delivery (as one lecture once put it at the time - in the future the only difference between your television and your computer will be what room it is in), then all hell broke loose. The BBC had to change and I don't think it lost too much in so doing.
I have mentioned podcasts. People consume their entertainment in many different ways and the BBC remains at the forefront of many of these new channels small 'c'.
And you call other people insulting names ...
It takes two to tango. If I want to go somewhere, and that somewhere wants me, then I can go there and nobody here should be able to say otherwise.
If somewhere else doesn't want me, then I either need to make myself more appealing or find somewhere else to go or some other means instead. I want is not I get, but if I want something and they want it too, then free people in a free society ought to be able to reach mutually beneficial agreements.
Except Gardener's Question Time. One Sunday when out walking along the seabanks of Essex, the only thing I could get on my cruddy Walkman was GQT. I felt like throwing myself in the Crouch.
(1) "People in a free society can choose their nationality ..."
and what you're saying now
(2) "It takes two to tango"
For Heaven's sake, did you not see in the first place how stupid what you were saying was?
But still you claim
(3) "there's absolutely no contradiction"
But still no doubt you'll carry on ad nauseam ....
They came along and found the weak spot.
https://youtu.be/mRCsO2kJwXw
I can choose to be a wicket keeper. Doesn't mean I have the right to demand Jonny Bairstow hands me his gloves.
Millions of people every decade migrate to this country, by choice, and make it their home.
Millions of people every decade emigrate from this country, by choice, to make other nations their home.
If you're too small-minded to understand that, then I pity you.
The nation state is a fairly modern invention. Citizenship is certainly institutional - but also (from at least the time of ancient Athens) also cultural.
Questions of identity are complicated, and forever evolving (as is the concept of the state).
https://twitter.com/NatConTalk/status/1658404877582712833?s=20
Another very important point to consider, is that many of these changes were in reponse to the multi-channel environment rather than the internet. By around 1998 many of the differences in programming and style from the early '90s were set, and if the internet had inherited the public and broadcasting culture of the early rather than 'late 90s, we'd be living in very different times.
I can't think of a better example of the sort of programmes the BBC should be making than IoT.
It's odd that the BBC really had a good hold on long-form tv - of all sorts - many years ago, and yet failed to quite pick up on that in recent times. I can't think of a factual series recently of any merit (admittedly I watch little tv), but the series the English was quite good recently.
I think much of the issue is that tv producers now want to avoid people switching channels (so keep it too simplistic), and don't want to assume people have seen the prior episodes, or even prior minutes (simplification, and mind-numbing repetition)
Best TV ever - The Wire!
A Google search for the definition of nationalism throws up 'identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations'.
So if you accept that, I think that then mindset promotes imperialism. Again, Goole throws up as a definition of imperialism as 'a policy of extending a country's power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means'.
So, if you are primarily concerned with your nation's interests at the exclusion of those of other nations, it isn't a great leap to persuade yourself that extending your nation's power, wealth, etc, through colonising other countries and building an empire is a good, and justifiable, thing.
I think you would be hard pressed to persuade most informed people that the Nazis were anti-Nationalists. The accepted view I think is that they were extreme nationalists. See the concept of 'Volksgemeinschaft', for example. The party itself emerged from a volatile soup of extreme nationalist groups that had been around in Germany for some time before WW1.
In a free society you're free to have sex with whoever you choose to have sex with . . . but their consent is still required.
If you want to have sex with Liz Truss @Chris and she says she wants to with you, then the state should not be saying that is forbidden as it would in Iran or Saudi Arabia or other. If on the other hand you hit on her and she says she's not interested, then she's not interested, your rights have not been impeded you were simply rejected.
In a free society you're free to choose, but if your choice requires a third parties consent, then you need the third parties consent. If you get it, then our state should not be getting involved. That is freedom. Demanding others give their consent whether they want to or not, is not freedom.
If you want to have sex with a third party, and they consent, or you want to emigrate to a third party, and they consent, then our state should not be forbidding it. There's no contradiction there, while still allowing people to give or refuse consent.
Gandhi was a nationalist, he wanted India to be ran by Indians instead of Brits. How was that to the detriment of other nations?
Politically I may agree with Churchill on more than I agree with Gandhi, but on a nationalism basis I agree with Gandhi not Churchill. They should be free to run their own country, not have it ran by us. Just as the Poles should be free to run their own country, not Germans or Russians.
PS the National Socialists party also originated from Socialist groups. Many socialists would perfectly reasonably agree they'd moved past and beyond the acceptable realms of socialism.
The exceptions are interesting as they include settler states (Brazil and all of Latin America, Mauritius, Singapore etc), states united more by religion than ethnicity (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and then some deeply troubled states where ethnic and religious conflict is rife but the conception of the nation state is intended to rise above this (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Sri Lanka, much of the Sahel belt, former Yugoslavia, India).
Unpredictable, challenging, popular, engaging, the whole suite. But then it's also been subjected to much less pre-market-testing of programmes, and less of a market research-led approach than BBC TV, and left much more to its own devices for many years, for many and varied structural reasons.
I am a socialist not because I love the poor, but because I hate them.
If you aren't available, btw, who would you have choose the programming on the BBC?
Situation is clear as mud.
Victim of a witch-hunt, as he claims, or a wrong-un, abusing his power?
Will we ever get to find out?