AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

You can rest your case, Grant.

[Mick Harper]

But to answer Ishmael's query: a Meal Deal consists of 'a main', 'a snack' and 'a drink'. I conducted some primary research on his behalf (he's in the food business himself) at Tesco during my weekly shop.

I deliberately sought the most expensive 'main', what the rest of us call 'a sandwich' and came up with Tesco Finest New York Deli-inspired Pastrami and Emmental £4.00
My favourite snack: Walker's Cheesy Wotsits grab bag £1.20
The most expensive drink: Red Bull Sugar-free Energy drink 330ml £2.35

Total: £3.50. That's why us cheapskate Brits love 'em so.

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

A Meal Deal always costs the same irrespective of the three items* you buy. £3.50 in the case of Tesco (which is about average). I don't understand the economics of it... it doesn't seem to be a loss leader.

* Not any item, they are the ones marked as 'Part of Meal Deal', though there is a vast range of each on offer.

[Mick Harper]

I Got This Today As A Netflix Flyer

[Grant]

It was somewhere in Wales, wasn't it?

[Mick Harper]

I had it somewhere oop north. Stoke on Trent? Perhaps we all have different oop norths. The programme isn't available till Sunday so I'll report back then.

[Mick Harper]

Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax (Netflix)

I'm only ten minutes in and I'm totally shocked. How come I've never heard of this? It was only 2016 for Chrissake and must have been all over the MSM. I accept I don't read the tabloids and steer clear of BBC1 and ITV1 news, but I've got a water cooler.

As for the programme itself, my jaw is thudding regularly to the floor at the sheer inanity of the principals. Both hoaxers and hoaxees. There's an hour still to go so maybe it will grow legs.

If they had a sense of humour I would suspect Netflix of pulling my leg.

[Mick Harper]

I've finished it now and it proved both less and more important than I supposed. It cleared up the mystery of why I had never heard of the Hampstead Paedophile Hoax. There were no criminal prosecutions (until much later) only Family Court proceedings (which could not be reported at the time).

[Mick Harper]

Car Pound Cops: Give Me My Car Back! (Channel 5)

Not a vintage series in this essential genre. Too many middle-aged men placidly putting cars on tow trucks and too few middle-aged women getting aerated in the pound office about leaving their cars in front of someone's driveway for a few minutes while they popped into the hairdresser's for a quick cut and blow dry. For goodness sake.

[Mick Harper]

New ground broken on Countryfile this week. A farmer admitted he was making money. You could just see Adam Henson off camera making those palms downward movements. There is no chance of their winter fuel payments being reinstated now.

[Mick Harper]

Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax II

It happened thisaway (though it's hard to believe... or all too easy to believe):

1. A child abuser moved in with a hippy-ish woman who had two children at the local primary school.

2. He trained the children to tell lurid stories of how parents at the school were satanically abusing the children there.

3. The school (very foolishly but I suppose guided by 'full disclosure') alerted all the parents.

4. The police quickly established none of it was true and they and the school, essentially, washed their hands of the whole business.

5. But (of course) someone had put it all on the internet, including school lists of children's addresses and whether their parents had been named as satanic abusers.

6. The man skedaddled, the mother said it was all true, her two children were taken into care.

7. This involved various court hearings and the mother insisted on being represented by an unqualified American woman crackpot satan-expert (this is allowed in Britain by the so-called 'Mckenzie Friend' exception) who kept the cauldron bubbling with professional zeal.

8. Meanwhile the internet (but not the MSM as far as I can tell) was going crazy since it ticked all the right conspiracy theory boxes.

9. People started to come from all over the world to harass the 'guilty parents' who hit back in fine style and forced the extremely uninterested authorities to take action.

10. Eventually the mother got nine years. Which is ludicrously long but otherwise well deserved.

[Mick Harper]

An exceptionally heartwarming ('Quiet at the back!') Countryfile was all about storks. What storks? Exactly. They haven't been seen in BBC-land for six hundred years. The last recorded one died in Edinburgh, since you ask.

But the weird thing is that, for the whole of that time, storks would fly over from the Continent but, seeing no storks here, flew back again. I find it difficult to believe but that's what they said.

[Mick Harper]

Two perfect encapsulations of the current Woke Wars yesterday. Listen to the first item on Radio 4's The Media Show here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002d11p

The newly appointed--and newly embattled--head of American public broadcasting is being interviewed. She had clearly assumed she would be given an easy ride by her counterparts at the good ol' BBC but, instead, was given a grilling as to why PBS et al were so hopelessly and haplessly left wing.

After denying there was any left bias in public broadcasting (no, really) she ended up arguing essentially that pointy-head liberals were now such an endangered species in America they needed their own subsidised network!

The other programme was the second episode of the Fare-dodgers series I have already intanced. Nothing to do with fare-dodging -- denouncing which seems genuinely interdenominational -- but one sequence was filmed in a station on the newly-named Windrush Line.