Recommended Television Programmes

[MrGongGong]

I would love to be in the Euro. All that faff about having to get 'new currency' when I cross the channel.

[teamsaint]

There are good things about membership of the EU. For the UK, ( and many other countries) having the Euro really isn’t / wouldn’t be one of them.

And incidentally, my humble credit card seems to work fine in the Eurozone, and my local post office does a good deal on currency.

[Conchis]

There are good things about membership of the EU. For the UK, ( and many other countries) having the Euro really isn’t / wouldn’t be one of them.

And incidentally, my humble credit card seems to work fine in the Eurozone, and my local post office does a good deal on currency.

Charges on non-UK currency. And the exchange rate has been generally lousy for the last three years.

[teamsaint]

Charges on non-UK currency. And the exchange rate has been generally lousy for the last three years.

Just a very small part of the overall picture. And, FWIW, the pound has been pretty close to its long term norm for the last three years, having had a year or two of exceptional high.
But we have thrashed this all out before.

[MrGongGong]

There are good things about membership of the EU. For the UK, ( and many other countries) having the Euro really isn’t / wouldn’t be one of them.

And incidentally, my humble credit card seems to work fine in the Eurozone, and my local post office does a good deal on currency.

It would for me
It's a pain to have to have accounts in multiple currencies
and some countries in the Eurozone find it hard to pay people who don't have a bank account in €
Given the very tight margins on touring musicians we need all the help we can get....

[Richard Tarleton]

I would love to be in the Euro. All that faff about having to get 'new currency' when I cross the channel.

At an individual level, yes. I like having and spending euros...but it was a flawed political concept applied to an economic situation....the consequences of the differentials between the north and south European economies have been only too apparent in recent years - PIGS - and are only likely to get worse.....

[Serial_Apologist]

Not what I have seen recently, but a programme coming on BBC1 at 9pm this evening:

The Murder of Jill Dando

I have a very particular interest in this story, having had what I can only describe as a partial premonition that something very wrong was afoot for Jill before her murder. It is one of the very small number of instances I have experienced throughout my life that suggest that there may be something to the notion of ESP.

Jill had been one of the presenters of the BBC TV Holiday programme - always cheery, seemingly uncomplicated: one of those slightly flipperty-gibberty characters who can sometimes seem annoying for their perennial sunny dispositions but one also wishes there were more of to make up for so much neurosis and hostility in the world. A week or so before the murder took place, Jill was featured on the front page of Radio Times, dressed in black leather, Emma Peel-style, sporting a machine gun, if my memory serves me right. I remember at first glancing at the picture, and just thinking how stupid and inappropriate the image was to the person depicted wearing it, and tut-tuttingly put the mag down to go off and do whatever I had intended doing next. Then something seemed to draw me back to that picture; I stared hard at it, and a feeling came over me that there was something very wrong about it, though I could not think quite what. I had had such feelings before, as I expect have others, and never given further thought to them. Indeed, in this instance I put them to the back of my mind and just went about my business. When the news of the murder came - as I remember it was very soon after that particular edition of Radio Times - A very strong chill came over me, since when I've thought that if only I had taken the original feeling more seriously, I would have done my utmost to contact Jill, or the BBC, to warn her, even if this would have been deemed mad at the time. But we don't give much credence to hunches - especially ill-defined ones; particularly those that seem to lie outside the realm of rationality.

[jayne lee wilson]

Not what I have seen recently, but a programme coming on BBC1 at 9pm this evening:

The Murder of Jill Dando

I have a very particular interest in this story, having had what I can only describe as a partial premonition that something very wrong was afoot for Jill before her murder. It is one of the very small number of instances I have experienced throughout my life that suggest that there may be something to the notion of ESP.

Jill had been one of the presenters of the BBC TV Holiday programme - always cheery, seemingly uncomplicated: one of those slightly flipperty-gibberty characters who can sometimes seem annoying for their perennial sunny dispositions but one also wishes there were more of to make up for so much neurosis and hostility in the world. A week or so before the murder took place, Jill was featured on the front page of Radio Times, dressed in black leather, Emma Peel-style, sporting a machine gun, if my memory serves me right. I remember at first glancing at the picture, and just thinking how stupid and inappropriate the image was to the person depicted wearing it, and tut-tuttingly put the mag down to go off and do whatever I had intended doing next. Then something seemed to draw me back to that picture; I stared hard at it, and a feeling came over me that there was something very wrong about it, though I could not think quite what. I had had such feelings before, as I expect have others, and never given further thought to them. Indeed, in this instance I put them to the back of my mind and just went about my business. When the news of the murder came - as I remember it was very soon after that particular edition of Radio Times - A very strong chill came over me, since when I've thought that if only I had taken the original feeling more seriously, I would have done my utmost to contact Jill, or the BBC, to warn her, even if this would have been deemed mad at the time. But we don't give much credence to hunches - especially ill-defined ones; particularly those that seem to lie outside the realm of rationality.

Extraordinarily honest & insightful post (especially in our much more media-aware age...)... thank you for it... and for the reminder... I'll set the PVR for this.

[vinteuil]

But we don't give much credence to hunches - especially ill-defined ones; particularly those that seem to lie outside the realm of rationality.

... and therein lies wisdom. We 'remember' things that seem significant, part of a pattern; all the millions of times we have 'hunches' that turn out to have no significance, we ignore/forget them. Basic statistics, but the human brain is badly wired to compute probability : our human psychology needs to find patterns and meaning even in things that don't have them, so we see what we wish to see.

Sorry, serial - but no need for ESP.

.

[jayne lee wilson]

... and therein lies wisdom. We 'remember' things that seem significant, part of a pattern; all the millions of times we have 'hunches' that turn out to have no significance, we ignore/forget them. Basic statistics, but the human brain is badly wired to compute probability : our human psychology needs to find patterns and meaning even in things that don't have them, so we see what we wish to see.

Sorry, serial - but no need for ESP.

.

But isn't SA's OP more about cultural phenomenology, sexual stereotype and (given the possible culprits of the Dando murder (or execution)) an evocation of the law of unintended consequence?
All playing into his intuitive perception....?

Watch the programme, and see what you think....

***
As for the much vaunted Line of Duty.... is it the passing years that makes me less tolerant of grittier & more realistic forms of onscreen violence, or was it actually very nasty indeed, more so than the previous series...?

Still full marks for back-references, variable & convoluted plot lines...

[Stanfordian]

Not what I have seen recently, but a programme coming on BBC1 at 9pm this evening:

The Murder of Jill Dando

I have a very particular interest in this story, having had what I can only describe as a partial premonition that something very wrong was afoot for Jill before her murder. It is one of the very small number of instances I have experienced throughout my life that suggest that there may be something to the notion of ESP.

Jill had been one of the presenters of the BBC TV Holiday programme - always cheery, seemingly uncomplicated: one of those slightly flipperty-gibberty characters who can sometimes seem annoying for their perennial sunny dispositions but one also wishes there were more of to make up for so much neurosis and hostility in the world. A week or so before the murder took place, Jill was featured on the front page of Radio Times, dressed in black leather, Emma Peel-style, sporting a machine gun, if my memory serves me right. I remember at first glancing at the picture, and just thinking how stupid and inappropriate the image was to the person depicted wearing it, and tut-tuttingly put the mag down to go off and do whatever I had intended doing next. Then something seemed to draw me back to that picture; I stared hard at it, and a feeling came over me that there was something very wrong about it, though I could not think quite what. I had had such feelings before, as I expect have others, and never given further thought to them. Indeed, in this instance I put them to the back of my mind and just went about my business. When the news of the murder came - as I remember it was very soon after that particular edition of Radio Times - A very strong chill came over me, since when I've thought that if only I had taken the original feeling more seriously, I would have done my utmost to contact Jill, or the BBC, to warn her, even if this would have been deemed mad at the time. But we don't give much credence to hunches - especially ill-defined ones; particularly those that seem to lie outside the realm of rationality.

The murder of Jill Dando has always fascinated me. It's hard to believe that the police ever thought that Barry George committed the murder. I've read about a number of theories but I'm not confident that the identity of the murderer and the reason behind it will be found.

[Serial_Apologist]

... and therein lies wisdom. We 'remember' things that seem significant, part of a pattern; all the millions of times we have 'hunches' that turn out to have no significance, we ignore/forget them. Basic statistics, but the human brain is badly wired to compute probability : our human psychology needs to find patterns and meaning even in things that don't have them, so we see what we wish to see.

Sorry, serial - but no need for ESP.

.

Well, you may be right vints, but what seemed immediately strange and disturbing about the way Jill was depicted on the front of RT was not in accordance to some pre-learned pattern recognition on my part, but its very anomalousness. Also, put it down to Romanticist fallacies if you like, but I'm one of those people who lays great store by the intuitive. Why do you suppose (supposing you do) that the Western Judaeo-Christian heritage, on which so much of our way of life has been taken for granted, is so hostile to it? I've never gone so far in this direction as those of my once upon a time hippy milieu who would pointedly accuse me of indulging in "head trips", ie explanations too much subject to logic and rational deduction, but I go along with those who have argued that too much rationalism has left the world a dessicated, soulless and over-analysed place, with little place for credence in it. One of the arguments put forward is that over-development of the analytical side of the brain, or at any rate too much reliance on it for reaching "truths", some of the faculties that enabled survival on the early stages of human existence, such as the ability to "sniff out" danger and find attraction in others without a priori navigation of todays intermediating signifiers, which only end up classifying and reifying people and other living beings. And in whose interests, ultimately, is the perennially unresolved political dimension, it nearly goes without saying. Maybe we've lost how to connect with some wavelength, equivalent to the Madhyamika doctrine of interconnectedness, that science, like the dog mentioned on yesterday's news that can apparently intuit bowel cancer in another, will eventually understand, and apply to ourselves as normative strategies of adjustment.

[Serial_Apologist]

But isn't SA's OP more about cultural phenomenology, sexual stereotype and (given the possible culprits of the Dando murder (or execution)) an evocation of the law of unintended consequence?
All playing into his intuitive perception....?

Watch the programme, and see what you think....

To avoid any misunderstanding () I think I should clarify that I was in no way sexually attracted to that Jill Dando front cover - or covering myself for any associated conscience confusion that might have played a part in seeing its wearer as in danger - I harboured no male fantasies about domination, then or ever, please believe me!! Really!!! I really did think the black leather uniform to be absurd.

***
As for the much vaunted Line of Duty.... is it the passing years that makes me less tolerant of grittier & more realistic forms of onscreen violence, or was it actually very nasty indeed, more so than the previous series...?

Still full marks for back-references, variable & convoluted plot lines...

Hard to get that final shot on the jetty out of ones head.......

[Bryn]

. . . I harboured no male fantasies about domination, then or ever, please believe me!! Really!!!

Are you saying that, for you, it's no fantasy, it's the real thing?

[Serial_Apologist]

Are you saying that, for you, it's no fantasy, it's the real thing?

The real thing is unbeatable!