AE on Telly News (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Car Pound Cops (Again)

Everyone's always going on about there not being enough police (especially the police) so I thought I'd offer these two twopennyworths to the debate.

Two policemen are driving along. A beeper goes off. The car in front of them isn't taxed. They stop the car. The vicar and his wife apologise fulsomely, they'd forgotten it had just run out. The vicar and his wife are given a ticket and go off to look for a minicab. The two policeman wait languidly and patiently for a carpound towtruck to arrive. Is this the best use of their time?

Is this the best use of towtrucks (huge beasts with cranes)? Assuming the car 'has to be taken off the road because it is illegal' why can't one of the policeman drive it to the carpound? Assuming he can't for some reason, why is it necessary to have the full panoply of a towtruck to do it? A landrover with a towbar would be just as good. Always assuming the towtruck driver's oppo couldn't drive it to the carpound. Or, I suppose, the vicar and his wife could.

[Mick Harper]

Someone Like Me, Tales from a Borrowed Childhood BBC R4X

This is the (beguiling) autobiography of the young Miles Kington, the man famously beaten in a Time Out short story competition by the young Mick Harper. Anyway he's got his own back by reducing me regularly to tears by reporting conversations that went, "Mother said... to which father replied... but I said..."

My own childhood did not feature such episodes. Not that I had an unhappy childhood or that I was in any way unusual. In my corner of the shabby genteel lower middle class inter-familiar exchanges of any sort were few and far between. You were expected to be out and about among your own kind, treating home as a refuelling and kipstop.

But I wasn't half envious.

[Mick Harper]

Carpound Cop: We're seizing your scooter.
Youth: What for?
CC: You've got an L plate at the back but not at the front.
Youth: Sorry, I didn't know I had to. I'll get one.
CC: I'm sure you will, it's one endorsement and a fine.
Youth: So why are you seizing the scooter?
CC: Ninety-nine percent of people will get one but we have to guard against the other one percent.

[Mick Harper]

Countryfile BBC1

Countryfile lasts an hour. I watch it because it usually has a ten minute segment on some aspect of rural policy which won't get covered anywhere else. I can fast forward through

(a) the bit about some cuddly animal or other
(b) the bit about underprivileged kids doing something or other down on the farm
(c) the bit about some ye olde craft being revived
(d) the bit about some rural artist doing something or other and
(e) the bit about the weather expected for the next seven days.

This one was packed from start to finish about the New Technology made essential now we can't import cheap labour to do it all. They're worth itemising...

[Mick Harper]

The one I liked best is the AI milking parlour.

* The cows are contentedly grazing some sylvan sward.
* Whenever they want (some of them like to do it five times a day) they wander down to the AI milking parlour.
* They can choose which stall to enter (they have their favourites).
* A machine cleans their udders, attaches suckers to them, removes the milk, cleans their udders again.
* The cow leaves its stall, avoiding the robot machine that is keeping the parlour clear of slurry.
* And returns to a different sylvan sward selected by a gate (or it may be the old one).
* The farmer and his wife are on the French Riviera watching all this on their dedicated TV channel.

[Mick Harper]

Second favourite was the AI sugar beet weeder powered by solar panels on the roof.

* Sugar beet is planted in straight rows, regularly spaced as far as the eye can see.
* As soon as the plants peep above ground, the AI SBW arrives.
* Straddling six rows, it examines each one and removes anything that isn't sugar beet plant
* At the end it manoeuvres to face the other way and starts on the next six rows.
* The farmer and his wife are on a world cruise watching it on their dedicated channel.

[Mick Harper]

Shardlake (ITV-1)

Starts tonite. He's a Tudor 'tec. (Aren't they all?) I only came across him on the radio so I shall be intrigued to discover why he has been catapulted to such fame. Unless--and this is entirely possible given my shaky grasp of popular culture--he's already huge.

[Mick Harper]

Shardlake confirmed the old principle 'the more money spent on sets, the slower the action'. ITV can only afford to put on a few of these set piece series since the streaming channels started taking its territory so it is odd they only commission series that are in direct competition with them.

You would have thought they might try to corner the market in 'pared down drama'. After all, that is how ITV made its name when it was itself trying to carve out a space on terrestrial TV. Better television too as we see so frequently on the Talking Pictures channel.

The other oddity is how highbrow it all was. I thought ITV was for the plebs [© Andrew Mitchell]. You needed a solid background in Tudor history to follow the plot as Thomas Cromwell manoeuvred against the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Though oddest of all was the villainous Abbot played by Lenny Henry in full Theophilus P Wildebeest mode (or it may have been a typecast Ice-T, I didn't stay for the credits).

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

Disney appear to have also cancelled their participation in Dr Who, again it's a case of British audiences like the extra money put into their shows (high production values, computer generated images, married with foreign locations) but don't like a few woke casting decisions that bring in the international streaming audience, which is what actually pays for the high production values etc.

I doubt the BBC will be able to fund WHO going forward. Without the Disney money it will be back to the old sets in Cardiff, rather than the CGI.

It would be better to end it altogether.

[Wile E. Coyote]

https://tinyurl.com/3axdmf8z

How on planet earth do humanoids think WHO can compete with globalism.

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]

You pay with a subscription for the best most modern content

You pay with your time (you have to watch ads) mainly older content.

You pay to have a licence and the BBC decides what you will enjoy.

It's really down to you to decide, unless you have a TV. Then if you decide to not get the licence, it will be free shows in HMP Wandsworth.

Which is going to be the model that survives?

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]

Refusing to pay and watching live TV or using BBC iPlayer without a licence will lead to prosecution and a court fine. You can be imprisoned for failing to pay a fine imposed by the court.

What they can't do is imprison you without giving you a chance to pay the fine.