GOOD TV

[Stanley]

BBC2 last night. Welcome return of Simon Schama talking about portraits.....

[Wendyf]

I enjoyed watching Simon Schama but am relieved that I didn't pay to see him talking about his book on the subject at the Ilkley Literature Festival in a couple of weeks! A friend and I are going to see Melvyn Bragg talking about his new book on the Peasants Revolt...looking forward to that.

[Stanley]

I think I know what you mean Wendy. I love his history but admit he gets a bit heavy as he ages. Have you ever read his 'Landscape and Memory'? I think it would be right up your street. I particularly like his take on forests......
Did you watch Who do you think you are last night? I knew about partition but not the individual horror stories...

[Wendyf]

I was tempted to go and see him talk, but tickets were £25 (book included). If I had spent that much I would be a bit miffed that I can see him for free on tv before the event!

[Stanley]

Spend it on landscape and Memory less than £7 on Bookfinder.... and a hard cover at that! (http://www.amazon.co.uk//gp/offer-listi ... ndr76-b-21)

[Wendyf]

Agreed Stanley, "Who Do You Think You Are" contained some truly shocking stuff last night. We are used to seeing people weeping sentimentally over ancestors who spent time in the workhouse, but Anita Rani coped well with hearing how women in the Punjab were treated during partition.

[PanBiker]

Compulsive viewing in our house Wendy. I knew a bit about the deprivations of partition but did not know the scale of the brutality against the women at the time. Talk about skeletons in your cupboards! Anita did well to cope with that.

[Stanley]

It brought tears to my eyes....

[Stanley]

I watched Edward Snowden on Panorama last night and was quite impressed by him. He didn't come across as a bad guy.....

[PanBiker]

Cunning developing clandestine spy software for CISCO routers. It was intimated that the powers only target particular routers at strategic junctions within the backbone infrastructure. Nothing to stop propagation wider afield I think as probably 75% of the entire internet infrastructure will be running on CISCO kit.

[Tripps]

Tremendous programme on Dennis Healey on BBC 2. See quote of the day.

I think I saw a young Jeremy Corbyn seated next to Tony Benn, in one clip.

[Stanley]

I agree David and Simon Schama was good immediately afterwards. Two hours of fascinating TV.

[Stanley]

I noticed the other night that a new channel has appeared on Freesat. It's the American Public Broadcasting Service (Channel 160 on Freesat). They show good archival documentaries and I've found some interesting films on there.

[Moh]

I enjoyed watching the NZ v Australia rugby match - what caught my attention was how the players seemed to respect the referee and id as he asked - not like the namby pamby footballers!

[PanBiker]

Dead right Moh and also the transparency of the refereeing with the ref being miked up so that you can hear his comments. "Now think on, no swearing, remember you're on telly", absolutely priceless. Ref's are not holier than though either and will have no hesitation in asking for a second opinion or a video playback. All in all a far superior game in both playing and organisation. A pleasure to watch honorable men who play to win but within the spirit of the game.

[PanBiker]

Britains Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield

Scary stuff with Professor Jim Al Khalili looking at all the facilities and process undertaken at Sellafield. A history of the plant at it's inception as Windscale with it's primary role of producing enough plutonium for a British bomb through to it's present role as dustbin for the worlds nuclear waste. It includes the 1957 fire which is still burning and describes that the plant now claims to reprocess 97% of the nuclear material it handles. It's the hundreds of tons in the 3% that's left that is the problem. This is high level waste where the only solution at the present is to chop it up, mix it with glass beads and then cook it until it vitrifies, this process makes it easier to handle but does nothing for it's 100,000 year toxic half life, where the only option is to bury it in concrete. All this just 62 miles up the road as the crow flies.

Britains Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield

[Tizer]

Ian, I wish we didn't have to use nuclear fission to generate electricity but we need it until other sources of energy are available and the human race, worldwide, accepts the need to get on with the job. It's also worth considering where we would be if we hadn't taken advantage of nuclear power from the 1950s onwards. It's no use assuming the developed countries would have been happy to put up with `life as it was pre-war' and that population control could have been used to keep a cap on energy needs. Large increases in energy yield were needed to fuel our demand for late 20th Century life and the only other answer at the time would have been to burn more coal and oil...and the oil companies and mine companies would have made sure that was the route we took. By neglecting nuclear energy we would have avoided producing around 80,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste...but instead we would have generated billions of tons more CO2 than we've done by using nuclear energy as part of our portfolio. In recent decades the use of nuclear energy has avoided the emissions of about 2.5 billion tons of CO2 every year. So over that time since the 1950s it must have avoided emissions of at least 50 billion tons of CO2, perhaps much more. Without nuclear energy we would have added all that extra CO2 to the atmosphere and probably ended up with catastrophic climate change before we were anywhere near able to combat the changes. And as I've often mentioned before, a proportion of the CO2 that we pump into the atmosphere will still be there 100 years from now, some of it 1000 years from now. It's not an easily reversible state. Without nuclear energy the coal and oil producers and burners would have become even more entrenched and it would have been almost impossible to convince the politicians, let alone the public, that we were heading for a climate disaster. The important thing we must do now is ensure the worldwide safety of nuclear power stations and the competence of those who work in and with them. [End of today's sermon ]

[PanBiker]

I take all your points of course Tiz. The planet is in a catch 22 situation I suppose damned if you do damned if you don't. Nuclear is a proper Pandoras box which can never be closed, certainly not with our current knowledge and technology. My only problem with Nuclear as long as it's properly run, secure and regulated is the absence of a proper exit strategy and the legacy we are leaving behind for subsequent generations.

[Stanley]

Can't you imagine someone in the future deciding to fire the waste into the sun.... Using our source of all life as a waste dump would be par for the course....
Roll on Fusion! All we have to worry about then is heat rise.....

[Stanley]

I watched the Panorama programme on hackers last night and while factually accurate it concentrated too much on the power of the hackers and not enough on the measures individuals could take to protect themselves. All the instances of bank accounts being cleared out they quoted were the scam that I almost fell for the other week, no doubt fuelled by earlier hacks of Talktalk. As I have said before, they were very clever and all that saved me was the fact that Firefox was on the job and blocked the site and as I was not on Windows the other route they use to get you to the malware that takes over your computer didn't work either. It was only when they started to talk money as a last resort that the penny dropped.
On a separate matter, I see that BT are modifying their systems to close the loophole whereby a line can be left open even though you have hung up which means that no matter what number you dial takes you straight back to the miscreants. About time!

[Moh]

Good to have Ice Road Truckers back on Friday nights.

[Stanley]

I watched an episode Moh. They must pay a good wage..... Hard way to earn a living.

[Tripps]

I've surfed my way into two programmes on minority channels, about Henry VIII and Ann Boleyn, over the last two nights. I think I know enough now to try Wolf Hall again.
The way of life reminds me of the current ISIS / ISIL regime. "Life was short and brutal, and the church was the only way to save you from hell, and get you to heaven."

[Stanley]

David, It's one of the biggest hurdles people reared in modern societies have when trying to understand history. Our frame of reference has to be reconstructed before we can understand things like the Pope bribing people to go on the first Crusades by promising them remission from any spiritual penalty if they killed 'non believers'. It's ridiculous to us but it worked. IS and other fundamentalists had nothing on the early church!

[Tizer]

On the weekend we watched a recording of `The Engine That Powers the World' in the Timeshift Series, Episode 3.
Very enjoyable and I learnt more in that one programme than in most other TV I've watched!

"The surprising story of the hidden powerhouse behind the globalised world - the diesel engine, a 19th-century invention that has become indispensable to the 21st century. It's a turtle versus hare tale in which the diesel engine races the petrol engine in a competition to replace ageing steam technology - a race eventually won hands down by diesel. Splendidly, car enthusiast presenter Mark Evans gets excitedly hands on with some of the many applications of Mr Diesel's - yes, there was one - original creation, from vintage submarines and tractors to locomotive trains and container ships. You'll never feel the same about that humble old diesel family car again." Diesel