Four years ago I wrote:
What with one thing and another, it's been two years since I posted something from this series. So let's carry on the with the first part of its treatment of Roman Leicester.
It's time we had the second part. Its YouTube blurb says:
In part 2 of this episode exploring the archaeology and legacy of Roman Leicester, we examine the lifestyles of Ratae's former residents, uncovering amazing stories of love, life and death in the town.
Our Headline of the Day Award travels down the A508 to the Northampton Chronicle & Echo.
A wonderful homage to the Sixties as they were or should have been. Rita Tushingham. Harold Wilson. David Hemmings. David Bailey. The Avengers. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
A film made by the Penge Rotary Club in 1964. It provides a useful corrective to the view, widespread on Bluesky, that we all lived in shoeboxes and ate gravel until about 20 years ago, while showing us why the Sixties had to happen.
The former canal mentioned is the Croydon Canal; note too the children playing cricket without being organised by adults and an unexpected appearance by the Crystal Palace dinosaurs.
As to the palace itself, my father remember being woken as a small boy in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1936 to see the glow on the northern horizon that was it burning down.
Then steel yourself for an appearance by the feared Penge Formation Dancers, before the demise of Penge's council is mourned.
As ever in such films, it is the street scenes that are the most interesting.
There was a new supermarket, a derelict canal warehouse with a top ghost sign (someone told me there had been plans to convert it into a restaurant but they had fallen through) and lots of empty space.
If you want to know why it hasn't been more comprehensively redeveloped, and a BBC News feature from 2004 is enlightening:
For 15 years there has been a hole in the heart of the north Shropshire town of Ellesmere.
Ever since the Dairy Crest creamery shut down, efforts have been made to develop what is a prime canalside site, but all have failed.
In 2003 it looked as if things might finally change with the latest plans to redevelop the 50 acre site on the canal wharf.
Property developers Burbury Investments, which bought the site when the creamery closed, submitted plans for a retail village on the site.
It included shops, a supermarket, garden centre, caravan park, a 60 bed hotel, a wine bar and housing, with its own access from the A495.
The plans were enthusiastically backed by Ellesmere's Chamber of Trade and the Town Council, and permission was granted by North Shropshire District Council.
A vote run on the Ellesmere Community website showed roughly 85 per cent support for the scheme, with 15 per cent against.
But the town had reckoned without John Prescott. He called in the planning application and then ordered a public inquiry. The inquiry, chaired by a government inspector, sat for a week and recommended approval. Then Prescott overruled the inspector. The developers went to court, but there challenge to Prescott's decision failed.
At the time of writing in 2004, the site was "empty and dotted with derelict and overgrown buildings". That would have been fun to explore. It's much tidier today, but not what it might have been.
Here are some photos I took in August. This is the first of what will be a series of posts looking back on my holiday.
James Murray asks what true pragmatism look like in an age of climate crisis: "How is the rational choice the one that drives up emissions that are triggering climatic tipping points and increases reliance on fossil fuels when volatile fossil fuel prices are the primary source of the current economic pain?"
"A mother whose toddler was removed from her care over a petty crime she committed 20 years ago has finally been reunited with her son after a months-long court battle." Amy-Clare Martin reports on the continuing inhumanity of New Labour's flagship Imprisonment for Public Protection law.
Mark Follman on how ChatGPT fed a mass shooter's violent fantasies and helped plan a massacre.
No, we don't have a lizard brain lurking beneath our rational minds, Hannah Critchlow reassures us.
"Like Stanley Kubrick, Wilder mastered a variety of genres and displayed a range rarely seen in the profession. Ace in the Hole was a scathing satire of the newspaper industry, Witness for the Prosecution a hugely influential courtroom drama and The Lost Weekend dealt with alcoholism in a way that was unprecedented in the 1940s." Darren Richman looks forward to a celebration of Billy Wilder's remarkable career.
The first test innings I can remember is Colin Milburn hitting the Australians all round Lord's in 1968.
And here it is, with John Arlott adding his comments.
The innings in question took place on the second morning of a rain-ruined match, and Milburn was the top scorer in England's first innings with 83.
England then skittled Australia in their first innings (David Brown 5-42) and made them follow on, but didn't have time to force a win. The full scorecard is on cricinfo.
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull has given Louder a guided tour of the band's many albums.
When it gets to 1978 and Heavy Horses, he says:
You have to remember, this was at the time punk’s final embers were burning out and you had bands like The Police and The Stranglers, who were, collectively speaking, a bunch of old hippies. The brave new world of punk rock had perhaps become commercialised at that point. But bands like those two used punk as a means to get their foot in the door, just as I did with the blues in 1968.
And he has a point. Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers was in a school band with Richard Thompson, who became a founding member of Fairport Convention in 1967. Andy Summers had been on the scene since since the early Sixties and was 35 when The Police formed.
That's him on the left in the photo above with Zoot Money, photographed in 1964.
In 1994, Hogben wrote about those days for the London Review of Books:
"Everything on the Normandy beachhead will hang on your weather," said the D-Day planners, assuming that we meteorologists had total control of the elements. "Just name us five fine, calm days and we’ll go."
A hundred years of weather records suggested there was no hope of their getting this. They limited their demand to "a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days."
On top of this, the military insisted on a late full moon for the parachutists, plus a tide that would be high three hours after pioneer forces had landed at dawn to clear paths through the beach mines and other obstacles.
Tides and moon being fully predictable, they would determine possible dates. July would be too late, and May too early. That left just four possible days: 5, 6, 19 or 20 June. We worked out the odds on the weather on any one of these four dates conforming to requirements as being 13 to one against. So meteorologically, D-Day was bound to be a gamble against the odds.
The planners had originally wanted to know how far ahead a correct weather forecast could be made and who should make it. "We can make it, one, perhaps two days ahead," said the Meteorological Office. "We can make it up to five days ahead," said the American Air Force. "But do they know anything about the sea?" asked the Royal Navy, who made no promises.
To satisfy pride, and to get the best possible forecast, the solution was to form a committee made up of the three groups. However, fear that loud-mouthed Americans might shout down mild British civil servants, or even battle-hardened naval officers, brought about an administrative compromise.
The D-Day forecast became a telephonic affair: the six forecasters would stay in three separate centres, joined to one another, and to Eisenhower’s headquarters, by GPO telephones (which worked). A non-forecaster 'presenter' would moderate our debates and then explain our agreed forecast to Ike and his staff.
And, as Hogben goes on to explain, this unlikely approach produced an an accurate forecast. Eisenhower was persuaded to stage D-Day on 6 June rather than his original preference of 5 June, and the waiting a fortnight until the next possible dates would have led to a military disaster.
"Money matters in politics, especially if you have a lot of it. Alistair McAlpine understood this all too well. 'If you’ve got £1 million or £2 million to spend on political advertising, forget it,' he told a journalist three decades ago. 'If you’ve got £8 million, you can make people believe anything you want.'" Peter Geoghehan examines our continuing failure to regulate party funding.
Aaron Tucker says facial-recognition technology is scarier than you think.
"What happened to Luna reflects the mental health struggles of many young people, but it is also, in part, a story about money: a private education industry that has grown increasingly reliant on the fees international students bring, propped up by a patchwork of private companies that profit from these children while carrying almost none of the legal obligations that would normally come with caring for them." Samira Shackle on the death of a 16-year-old from Hong Kong in Shropshire.
Geraldine Kendall Adams goes to see the Bayeux tapestry: "Then there’s that special moment when we get our first glimpse of the tapestry from above, stretched out so long that it almost seems to disappear over the horizon. I wasn’t prepared for how much this sight would move me: it genuinely took my breath away, and I could see it did the same to other visitors. In terms of pacing, this overhead view is a masterstroke of suspense-building and payoff."
"This delightful gem of a movie is, for me at least, ironically not only the best Warner Bros film released so far this year, it also is, hands down, the best animated/live action hybrid since Robert Zemeckis’ classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit hit screens four decades ago." Pete Hammond reviews Coyote vs Acme.
For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day, writes Jazz Monroe in the Guardian:
There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.
And his new album as This is Lorelei?
The Singer in My Band is alarmingly jaunty – an outlier in a bric-a-brac catalogue that has noodled from sad chamber pop to murky post-punk to midsize indie anthems. He knocks out twangy riffs, hearty harmonies and bunnyhopping basslines that hark back to his childhood under the spell of his bluegrass-maestro father, Bob Amos.
This is a track from it.
On the walk, I spotted this ghost sign near Parliament Hill Fields.
I suggested a couple of days ago that:
Becoming very knowledgeable about a niche subject is worrying, because you find much that has been published about it is wrong. And then it become more worrying, because you suspect this is true of every subject if only you knew.
A reader kindly sent me a link to an old Wikipedia page on the Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a claimed cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.
The effect is not formally recognized, but the concept has gained traction in critical thinking and media literacy discussions.
The term was coined by novelist Michael Crichton in a 2002 speech, naming it after Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with whom he had discussed the phenomenon.
John Rogers takes us on a tour through the history of Tottenham in North London, partly in search of St Loy’s Well.
The walk's blurb on YouTube says:
Starting at Bruce Castle one of the two largest Tudor houses in Greater London making Tottenham an important centre of London history. Our Tottenham history walk then takes in All Hallows Church, Lordship Lane Rec and talk about Tottenham resident Luke Howard and his classification of clouds. We then visit Luke Howard's home in Bruce Grove.
Walking down the ancient High Road Tottenham we talk about the various royal associations as we arrive at Tottenham High Cross which has stood on this site since at least the 12th century. From here we go to Page Green and discover where Seven Sisters gets its name.
John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.
There have been whispers about discontent with the party's leadership among Liberal Democrat MPs for some time. Now some of those MPs are talking, some more openly than others, to the media about their concerns.
This is from BBC News yesterday:
One frontbench Lib Dem MP told the BBC after Burnham's Labour conference speech: "Lots of us [are] struggling tonight with [a] Labour leader articulating Lib Dem values better than we do."
They pointed to Burnham's promises on electoral reform, social care, the water industry, and relations with Europe - all Lib Dem campaign points in recent years.
"I'm honestly utterly despondent with the state of things," another Lib Dem MP said.
Some senior Lib Dems believe Sir Ed's position as leader has been vulnerable for some time, even if they stressed no challenge is imminent.
"A plausible candidate could take him tomorrow in a bloodless coup," one prominent party figure said.
"But that person hasn't yet revealed themselves as far as I'm aware. Nobody is going to blow anything up without a clear plan to put something in its place."
A second report appeared on Sky News today, focused on dissatisfaction with our reaction to the government's proposals on social care and the triple lock. It seems there are some MPs who share my reaction:
Others, who don't necessarily agree with scrapping the triple lock, felt frustrated by the tone of Sir Ed's response - especially given he's been Westminster's most prominent campaigner in recent years for an improved social care system.
It's clear that the arrival of Andy Burnham at Number 10 has fundamentally changed the political landscape. I don't know if the Liberal Democrats need a new leader to navigate that landscape, but we certainly need some new thinking and a new approach from the top of the party.
I pleaded the case of BBC News and its
Car crashes into viral shop shutters where gran was hoisted into the air
Blackburn Reform councillor accused of farting at rival
I'm not happy. As the headmaster says in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On:
"Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall."
Still, I suppose you have to admire the Telegraph's front page. (The winning headline appears on the paper's website. The judges insist I have to be able to link to a headline for it to be eligible for this award.)
Chris Grey looks at the the speech's effect on the Brexit debate: "In personal life, we rarely regard terrible decisions we have made as being unalterable, or at least not for long. We may, moralistically, tell ourselves that we have 'made our bed and must lie in it'. We may, stoically, insist that we 'mustn’t grumble' and 'have to make the best of it'. But few of us are so moralistic, or so stoic, as to deny ourselves the chance to revisit our bad decisions, if it is possible. With Brexit, that has not, in the sense of realistic politics, been possible until now. Burnham’s speech this week has made it so."
Shropshire Live says:
The film, which has been produced by award winning Shropshire arts organisation MediaActive Projects, is a collaboration between local people and creative practitioners designed to raise awareness about the state of the Severn.
It features video footage, animation, and interviews with local river campaigners talking about the Severn and why it is so important to Shrewsbury.
Up Sewage Creek won't allow the video to be embedded on other sites – good luck with the campaign, guys – but if you click on my photo of the Severn in Shrewsbury above you will to taken to it on YouTube.
Following campaigning by the local MP and the local newspaper, a public inquiry was launched. At the time this was a new and novel response to a child’s death.
A previous inquiry in 1945 into the killing of twelve-year-old Dennis O’Neil was undertaken by a judge in private and took four days.The Colwell inquiry, however, was held in public...
But the inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill was not conducted by a judge. It was conducted by Sir Walter Monckton, who was a KC and soon to become solicitor general in Churchill's caretaker cabinet.
The Monckton Chambers website says of him:
Monckton served with great distinction as a soldier, then lawyer, politician and industrialist. As well as being recognised as one of the leading advocates of his day, he was adviser to Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936, was appointed Solicitor-General in 1945, served as a Cabinet minister under both Churchill and Eden in the 1950s, and subsequently became chairman of Midland Bank.
So he was many things, but he didn't do any judging.
And Sir Walter Monckton conducted his inquiry in public and its proceedings were widely reported in the national and local press across those four days. You can see the start of one such report above – it's from the South Wales Argus for 12 April 1945.
Incidentally, the lack of cooperation between services that Sir Walter identified as a problem here has also been found by every such inquiry since.
Our picture shows Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides, where the cafe in the island cafe dog snub row is to be found.
Grim Jim and his disembodied hands are new to me, but this is a good video. Though he talks mostly about Garner and his first two books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, there are passing insights into other fantasy writers too.
But that isn't going to stop me the final verse of a song written to celebrate the acquittal of five Tollesbury men charged with piracy in 1894:
The Tollesbury men and Mersea men
Know how to stand together;
The Burnhamites will not hurt them,
For they are tough as leather.
That comes from an article by Helen Matten in issue 172 (December 2020) of The Essex Family Historian. The piracy charges followed a clash between fishermen from Tollesbury and Burnham-on-Crouch.
Steven Beschloss thinks the Republican mid-term candidates now deserting Donald Trump have left it too late.
"Feltham was described as the most violent YOI at the time of inspection, with more than 400 assaults recorded in the previous year, including 126 involving weapons. Wetherby recorded nearly 500 assaults, although inspectors noted it held more children than Feltham or Werrington, which recorded 324 assaults." Joanne Parkes reads an HM Inspectorate of Prisons' report Children in Custody 2025/6. which concludes that standards across the youth estate remain woeful, despite some improvements at individual establishments.
"From a safe distance, the news that one of English football’s most successful clubs has been found guilty of more than 100 charges of financial irregularity, including “sham” payments totalling around £900m, may feel like so much so-what, a thicket of sporting arcana that even devoted fans occasionally struggle to parse. But, of course, the City case goes deeper than one club, one league, even one sport. Fundamentally, it is a parable of power." Jonathan Liew says the Manchester City case shows us how the global mega-rich now expect to operate with impunity.
Francis Young reviews a new biography of M.R. James: "It has been a long time coming, and eagerly awaited by many, and in this year of the 90th anniversary of James’s death, it does justice to the man and does not disappoint."
Farran Smith Nehme watches Quartet, Trio and Encore – three anthology films adapted from short stories by W. Somerset Maugham.
I heard this late one long ago night on Radio 3's Late Junction and thought I had discovered an obscure band to like.
Then I discovered they were the most fashionable new band in the world.
Russia's spy agency has opened a criminal case against a Liberal Democrat councillor, accusing her of being part of a terrorist organisation.
Ksenia Maximova, who was born in Russia, is a Lib Dem member of Ealing Borough Council. She is also the founder of the Russian Democratic Society, an organisation that works to counter authoritarianism and war by empowering democratic voices from Russia. It is designated "undesirable" under Russian law.
She told Sky News that being put on Russia's list of terrorists comes as no surprise:
"For years everyone was saying it's a bit random that I was still not on it. I guess I'm one of the last ones, I was a bit more careful."
Now the Russian authorities have opened a case against Ms Maximova under Part 2 of Article 205.5 of the Russian Criminal Code, which concerns participation in an organisation designated as terrorist under Russian law:
Ms Maximova could face prosecution if she returns to Russia, but says she already knew she could not go back:
"The problem comes if they stick you on Interpol," she added, saying that could see her held up at passport controls when she travels.
The explorer said: "Unfortunately, while on leave back in the UK in the mid-1960s, I got phoned up by an old Eton friend."He had moved to a place called Castle Combe in Wiltshire, which had just been voted Britain's prettiest village."And this beautiful village was being attacked by 20th Century Fox, who were making a film there called Dr Dolittle."This involved turning the stream into a dirty great lake with a 20-foot concrete dam, ruining the village."Sir Ranulph continued: "My friend decided to bring this outrage to the general attention by blowing up the entire concrete dam the night before the film started."I had just completed an army explosives course, where you learn to blow up as much as you can using as little as possible."And I was pretty good at this. So he asked me to stand in," Sir Ranulph joked."Unfortunately, everybody was caught, we all ended up in Chippenham prison, and I was on police probation in Salisbury for six months."Finishing his thank-you speech to the university, Sir Ranulph said: "15 years after the Chippenham Assizes which found us guilty and fined us heavily, I went to the Isle of Wight."I met with the wonderful judge who had not put us in jail, and he said if we had done that one year later, he would have had to have given us seven years minimum."
Because of her performance as top board for the England women's team at the Chess Olympiad in Samarkand – she played all 11 rounds, recording six wins, four draws and one loss – Bodhana Sivanandan has qualified as the youngest ever holder of the women grandmaster title.
This video lists her many other achievements, except one: she is now two-thirds of the way to the full international master title, which is open to both men and women. This is the grade below grandmaster status.
There is already talk of how soon she will play for the open England team at the Olympiad. I note she already has a good line in glares for her opponents; this will stand her in good stead when she becomes a full grandmaster.
The term 'psychohistory' originated in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. He started writing this in the 1940s, and after a long gap following the first three books continued to the end of his life. They sold very well.
Psychohistory is the concept that the future of societies can be predicted – in outline – given a lot of data and a lot of computer power. At the time in which Book 1 was set, a Galactic Empire existed and its bureaucrats recorded more or less everything. Asimov was quite clear that he borrowed heavily from the Roman Empire. There were no Jedi nor Sith.
Book 1 was simply called Foundation. It was a collection of short stories that had been published in magazines. The Galactic Empire was falling and a bunch of academics wanted to preserve a kernel of knowledge. They established a sort of college on an obscure planet and had it chartered as a foundation.
They used psychohistory to map out the future and selectively interfere using forms of political warfare. Their planet mutated into a sort of mayoral republic: first a city state, then a nation state. Rome again. The mayors were portrayed a bit like New York City mayors. They used the predictions of the academics to operate a strategic plan. Sometimes they used propaganda, false religion, economic warfare or covert operations. It is reminiscent of the Cold War.
Book 2 was called Foundation and Empire. The principal tale concerns the last gasp of the old Empire and its best general, who might look like Scipo Africanus in certain lights. The Foundation deal with the Empire by essentially doing nothing. They manoeuver on the periphery and let the Empire become snarled in its internal politics in the centre. It reminds me of Imperial China around 1890.
The mercantilists become rich, and are a rising power. The imperialists become divided, and are a falling power. The second tale concerns a unique individual who could not be predicted by the old-school politicians. His name is not Donald, but nothing he does lasts and he does a lot of damage.
Book three is called Second Foundation. The old academics knew that psychohistory was only approximate, and there would be a residual error. There might also be random errors, such as Not-Donald. They founded an invisible college to deal with this, with the best computer – the Prime Radiant (data science!) – and new intuitive powers. Also whole food, fresh air and exercise. They fixed a few glitches. Manifest Destiny was back on. Also suburban life and atomic powered cars. Quite the Sixties.
Book 4 is called Foundation’s Edge, but it could be called Third Foundation. Asimov seemed to reconsider his vaunted Trilogy and find it wanting. He invented a third power, which was aware of Empire, First Foundation, and Second Foundation. And it could meddle. But it wanted independent verification. Affirmation.
It viewed the Empire as now dead, the First Foundation as clunky as the Soviets were – coal, oil, steel, and ships – and the Second Foundation as some sort of computer-bound outfit with too many PhDs and too little wisdom. The book tours around and then ends. More books follow, but do not really matter: the characters were rubbish and the settings only sketched. They all sold well.
Almost everybody who read Foundation wondered if psychohistory could be real. Could Immanuel Kant be right that "we could reason together"? Could rational modern planning smooth out the economy and herald "an end to boom and bust"? Could we have five-year plans?
Obviously the whole concept was incredible. Impossible. Philosophically a category error of misunderstandings. Besides, the compute that would be required would be unheard of and the Data far too big. Where could it all be stored? It was pie-in-the-sky. OK, so a cloud. Most people with a STEM degree would have looked out the window, scoped it out and shaken their heads.
Until Peter Turchin. Around 2005. Peter discovered that there was data from early modern England, the Han and Tang China, and the Roman Empire that related population, state stability, growth, food production and the state of social elites. He called subsequent studies cliodynamics – the dynamics of power. These seemed to be related in dynamical oscillations across decades. The behaviour predicted can be quite interesting, such as "elite overproduction".
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| Figure
1: Population-Instability cycle in England, from Turchin, P. (2005) Dynamical Feedbacks between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States |
Dynamical means that the model predicts output from previous data using update rules (e.g. parents have children, surplus leads to more surplus). I first learned about dynamical models from the game Yellow RiverKingdom that came with the original BBC Micro. This was a port of the 1968 mainframe classic Hamurabi .
These games have the player as the manager of an agrarian society next to a river. You must manage population pressure, food production, famine, flooding, bandits, and social unrest. At first it is difficult to avoid instability: over-population, famine, flood deaths and so on.
So I looked at the BASIC source and wrote out the dynamical equations. Drew a few graphs. Used the game as a simulator. Soon I had stabilised society – with some effort – by raising the counter-bandit activity. The deaths of soldiers on counter-bandit patrols stabilised the runaway population explosion. Having done that, I found it easier to modify the BASIC code to make this easier to automate – Psychohistory in action!
The more alert reader might notice a similarity between counter-bandit patrols and having foreign wars of choice. As a tool of policy. You can – if you want – export instability. Second sons and all that. It might be more responsible to change your 'War Department' to a 'Ministry of Defence', and put more effort into foreign aid and exporting stability. This avoids what it called blowback.
"Monday’s judgment ... means that unless the client agrees to release the material, those private conversations are now beyond the regulator’s reach. This is particularly bad news for the SRA’s ongoing attempts to tackle SLAPPs, the abusive legal actions used by the rich and powerful to shut down scrutiny." Nathaniel Peutherer analyses a judicial ruling that threatens efforts to curb Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.
"He has no visible tattoos, no shaven head, no black overcoat or jackboots. No hood, no Confederate flag and no Nazi images appear in the background as he sits in front of a screen for a recent Zoom interview. Instead, the soft-spoken Christian school teacher and pastor of ... sporting a neatly trimmed beard, was dressed in a charcoal suit and sat in front of a fish tank that seemed straight off the set of Pixar’s Finding Nemo. Then he began talking about Jews." Bob Smietana watches the rise of America's Jim Crow theobros.
Sarah Ward explains trauma-informed care in schools: "Strict zero-tolerance approaches to behaviour are not in line with the ethos of trauma-informed care and practice. It can encourage the interpretation of certain behaviour as defiance rather than distress."
"We also have another appearance by James Wentworth Day, who was quite appalling on the previous release and doesn't really add much beyond being a handy reactionary-for-hire to add 'balance', a broadcasting illusion we can now see in action 70 years ago." Discontinued Notes reviews a selection of TV programmes presented by Daniel Farson in the late 50s and early 60s that focuses on social change.
Katherine Alejandra Cross watches Network (1976). Are we all mad as hell now?
