The Joy of Six 1601

"This low-cost strategy of largely relying on conditionality and sanctions to get unemployed claimants into work has clearly failed, as numbers have gone up since 2016, and the binary nature of our welfare system pushes our ageing and increasingly impaired population to claim incapacity benefits over limited working with in-work financial top-ups." Paul Gregg introduces the new Resolution Foundation report What's Gone Wrong With Welfare?

Flynn Devine and Hannah Perry, meanwhile, introduce a Demos report on how the lack of impartial local news sources fuels asylum housing clashes and what can be done about it.

"But what a diagnostic label cannot do is tell a teacher how a child learns. Those of us who have taught in classrooms know that two autistic children may need very different support." Mark Mon-Williams and Karen Guldberg call for a shift from a "diagnosis-dependent" system of helping children with special educational needs and disabilities, to a "needs-led plus diagnosis" one, where support is not withheld while waiting for a diagnosis.

Francisco Garcia on the Student List's victory in Serbia: "From the start, the student movement was determinedly horizontal. There were no leaders and decisions were taken collectively at assemblies. Over time, the movement agreed on a few key demands, with elections chief among them."

Stephanie Seul introduces us to Avis Waterman, the woman who covered the First World War on the Italian Front for The Times.

"Pawlikowski does not make arty films in which the imagery stops the story to admire itself. But he depends on the force and the simultaneous distancing of black and white, the way it tells us we are seeing something that has been chosen." David Thomson praises Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland (2026).

John Rogers walks from Herne Bay and Reculver to Margate

John Rogers writes on YouTube:

This picturesque walk takes us across the vanished landscape of the Wantsum Channel which once separated the Isle of Thanet from the mainland. 

We start at Herne Bay Pier and talk about the great French artist Marcel Duchamp's relationship with the town. At Reculver we explore the ruins of the medieval church and monastery and the Roman fort. 

Then we walk across the windswept land that once lie under the sea before strolling in the sunset through Birchington-on-sea, Westgate-on-sea and arriving in Margate in the dark. A truly memorable walk.

I have been to Herne Bay and Reculver myself. Sad to say, John does not comes across an establishment that Lord Bonkers occasionally mentions: the Home for Distressed Canvassers, Herne Bay. But he does mention Tarkovsky and Marcel Duchamp.

John Rogers has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

Fortean Times nods on yoghurt and the Stiperstones

I went into Leicester today to see Pawel Pawlowski's new film Fatherland and also to buy the new issue of Fortean Times at the T.G. Jones on Leicester station.

Fatherland is well worth seeing, but here are a couple of minor quibbles occasioned by my flick through the magazine on the bus home.

David Hambling writes in his regular science column about some regions' claims to have lots of inhabitants who have lived well past the age of 100 – and about how they generally prove to be unfounded upon investigation.

One region that made such a claim was Abkhazia in the Caucasus, which used to be part of the Soviet Union. Today it is recognised by most countries as part of Georgia, but it is occupied by, or at least economically dominated by, by Russia.

Hambling says of Abkhazia:

A 1970 census showed that 40 per cent of the population claim to be over 90, but were remarkably youthful looking. This was partly attributed to yoghurt, a novelty in the West at the time, and Danone used the claims in a successful yoghurt advertising campaign.

But yoghurt was not a novelty in the England by 1970. I can remember regularly choosing a pot for breakfast from the milkman's float as a small boy several years before that.

A BBC News story confirms my memory:

In 1963, Swiss-invented Ski was launched in the UK. With added sugar and real fruit it was an instant hit and launched a yoghurt revolution on our supermarket shelves.

And the Ski television commercial above dates from 1967.

Danone, I suspect, were behind the Chambourcy brand, which I also remember from childhood. Maybe they were launching it in 1970?

And then Alan Murdie's Ghostwatch column refers to:

Wild Edric, an Anglo-Saxon noble who resisted the Normans between 1067-70, appearing on the jagged Stiper Stones, Shropshire, on the longest night.

"Stiperstones" as two words? The term describes a five-mile ridge, not just the outcrops at its highest point.

Still, I am happily reminded of the young son of a fellow Liberator collective member who was delighted that we had found "the stiper stones" when we reached those outcrops in the rain, much as Christopher Robin was convinced Pooh had found the North Pole.

The Joy of Six 1600

"In a sacred ceremony dating back to time immemorial, a researcher from a poverty charity or housing campaign group raises their mournful head from the Budget small print and confirms to their line manager that no, there is no money assigned to raising Local Housing Allowance in line with rents and yes, that means housing benefit for private sector tenants in all but the cheapest homes is being cut. Again." Chaminda Jayanetti says John Healey's "breathing space" Budget has ensured the noose around the neck of the poorest private renters gets ever tighter.

Daniella Shreir reports on the unrest in France: "Despite three weeks of blockades and protests that had already led to more than six thousand arrests (most of them of minors), Macron claimed to have been surprised by the scale of the protests on 17 October."

Shem Law argues that the BBC's decision to close Radio 4 Extra is a terrible mistake.

"Illich’s censure of industrialized society originated in his criticisms of the Catholic Church. As a young priest of formidable intellect, Illich was known in the Vatican and seemed clearly destined to become a prince of the church. But his experience of missionary attitudes, first in Puerto Rico and then in Brazil and Mexico, turned him into a vociferous critic of what he saw as a corporate-religious developmentalism that paved over Indigenous customs and encouraged dependency." Justin McGuirk looks at the ideas of Ivan Illich in his centenary year.

Malin Hay visits the Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends exhibition at the Young V&A: "Of late, a note of techno-optimism has crept into the Aardman canon. The most recent Wallace and Gromit film, Vengeance Most Fowl, feints towards a Luddite message, as Wallace’s obsession with gadgets threatens Gromit’s peace and the simplicity of their lives."

"The history of an organisation's change programmes can tell you a lot about what is behind its current initiatives. Sometimes they are a reaction to what went before, other times they are an attempt to do the same again, only with different language. Often, there is little understanding of why the last change attempt failed. People want to bury the embarrassment of previous projects and move on." Flip Chart Fairy Tales undertakes some workplace archaeology among the ruins of past change programmes.

The Joy of Six 1599

James Graham reads Roz Savage's pamphlet for Compass, Liberalism Alive: "Whether you are the biggest Ed Davey fan or not, the fact is that the hard work to develop a post-Davey vision for the Liberal Democrats needs to begin. Whether he stands aside on this side of the election or not, he will not go on forever."

"What is unfolding before us at national government level, reminds me of what has happened to local government over the past decades. For different reasons, the obligations – the things local govt had to do – became more and more onerous, precisely at the same time as their spending power was hammered. As a result, the political complexion of any given council mattered less and less. They had fewer and fewer discretionary decisions they could take, whatever their political desires might have been." Lewis Goodall explains why budget day was boring.

"There is a response to the housing crisis hiding in plain sight. Back in 2020, a National Acquisitions Programme or Conversion Fund was recommended by the Affordable Housing Commission. This fund would provide grants to social landlords and community housing providers to purchase existing private rented homes and convert them into social and affordable tenures." Helen Dennis says buying back ex-private rentals is often cheaper and faster for councils than building homes from scratch, but they need funding to do more of it.

Ben Curtis on how the Senghenydd colliery disaster revealed the true price of coal: "The blast on October 14 1913 killed 439 men and boys, with another dying during rescue operations. It was, and remains, the worst coal mining disaster in British history and also the sixth worst in the world."

"Each stage was specially designed to accommodate a different era or style of drama; Greek, Elizabethan and Modern on the Olivier, 18th, 19th and early 20th century on the Lyttleton and experimental productions on the Cottesloe. The Olivier theatre has a thrust stage, pushing forward into the audience. The Lyttleton is more traditional, with a proscenium arch, and seating into two tiers. The Cottesloe, (now called the Dorfman), is the most basic and flexible of the three, with three tiers of seating, with a gallery level looking down on the stage in a courtyard style." Modernist London marks 50 years of the National Theatre.

Olivia Rutigliano recommends 17 films with sinister pagan festivals, cultish locals and witchy witches. We're talking folk horror.

Joe Jackson: Breaking Us in Two

Breaking Us in Two comes from Jackson's 1982 album Night and Day. 

The railway in the video is the Keighley and Worth Valley. And the station is Oakworth, which was the station in Lionel Jeffries' film of The Railway Children.

David Hemmings film of David Bowie concert tour to be seen at last

Embed from Getty Images

Here's some good news from the Guardian. David Hemmings' film of David Bowie’s 1978 Isolar II tour will be seen next year, thanks to the present-day director Brett Morgen’s painstaking remastering of the footage.

As the paper explains: 

Bowie intended for the footage to be released as a concert film that could, according to his associates, play in nontraditional venues such as concert venues in lieu of him touring himself. After the Isolar II tour, Bowie would not tour again until the 1983 Serious Moonlight run.

But the always fast-evolving musician soon became busy with other projects: recording and releasing Lodger, working with John Cale on music that was never released and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).

While an acclaimed live album of the tour, Stage (recorded at US dates that spring), was released in autumn 1978, the footage never saw the light of day. 

"I simply didn't like the way it had been shot," Bowie said in 2000. "Now, of course, it looks pretty good and I would suspect that it would make it out some time in the future."

The photo above shows Hemmings on the set of Just a Gigolo with Kim Novak, Maria Schell and Bowie. This film proved a notorious flop and more or less put an end to his promising career as a director for the big screen.

As Hemmings later said of the Eighties: "People thought I was dead, but I was just directing The A-Team."

What we want now is to see his all-but-lost first film Running Scared (1972), which was shot largely on the Grand Union Canal at Braunston in Northamptonshire.

The Joy of Six 1596

Chris Grey detects "an upsurge of discussion about whether and how the UK could join (or 'rejoin') the EU, whether that would be welcomed by the EU, and, if so, on what terms and in what timescale."

"In place of declared 'diplomats' well known to local counterintelligence officers, operations have been outsourced to disposable proxies recruited for a pittance. These people are often unaware of who their handlers are or their mission’s real goals." Russian sabotage efforts now draw upon the gig economy, explains Elena Grossfeld.

"At GCSE level, when science is compulsory for all students, Franklin is the only woman mentioned. At A level, Lehmann and Tharp appear solely in geology, a subject taken by less than 2 per cent of science students." Stephanie Buttigieg, Gregory Cooke and Skyla White find that women who changed science missing but are missing from school exam syllabuses.

Roger Protz says the planned closure of Marston’s in Burton-on-Trent is like a death in the family: " I have been to the brewery many times and delved deep into its history of pale ale brewing and its commitment to the Burton Union system of fermentation."

"What I’m talking about here is leaving some un-colonised space for a child’s imagination to grow into, rather than rushing in to fill that space with an insatiable desire to flog as much merchandise as possible to a malleable audience of trend-conscious juveniles." Alan Moore gave a discursive interview to The Daily Grail in 2017.

Simon Matthews watches The Runaway Bus, a comedy film from 1954 starring Frankie Howerd, Margaret Rutherford and Petula Clark.

The Joy of Six 1595

Ian Lucas argues that Andy Burnham has the opportunity to lead the fight against Russian interference: "The threatening alliances now emerging worldwide between the tech platforms, politicians not committed to democratic principles and donors committed to hard right views demand that those countries and individuals who are committed to democratic principles must act together now."

Hannah Jane Parkinson reports from Teesside, where maritime livelihoods are under threat and, as a new documentary reveals, crews are sure the local freeport is to blame. 

"What makes school or college debating, and political debates on TV, exciting is the theatre. As such, debate is not an entirely separate creature from professional wrestling, even if wrestlers have better costumes." Jonathan Beecher Field doubts the value of formal debating in education.

"The Social Network hardly portrayed the Facebook founder and his company in a hagiographical light (Zuckerberg later described the film as 'hurtful'), but there was at least an element of the plucky upstart to the rise of Zuckerberg as he takes Facebook to 500 million users and a valuation of $25bn ... The Social Reckoning picks up from there, with a clear perspective that both the founder and his company – as well as the industry they represent – are corporate villains now." Dan Mimo says tech execs have become the film villains of our age.

Snigdha Poonam takes us inside the lucrative world of literary scams: "This was undoubtedly a scam. Genuine book clubs don’t ask for money from authors. But who was behind it?" 

"The ancient City of London is protected by dragons that guard the main roads into the city from perfidious invaders. They look ancient, yet the dragons around London are fairly new, albeit based on something that can trace its origins back to the Great Fire of London." Ian Mansfield on the dragons that guard London.

The Joy of Six 1593

"Reform’s problems today, reflected in its diminished polling, stem in large part from the difficulties and limits of professionalisation. The attempt to derive discipline from insurgency has exposed, rather than resolved, the tensions at the heart of the Reform project. And the fallout risks turning latent vulnerabilities into permanent liabilities for the party’s brand." Josh Self asks if the Reform project is unravelling.

"Just as David Tennant’s character bemoans the lack of training or education for young men in custody, so do prison staff across the country. They know what is blindingly obvious: angry people don’t come out of prison less angry if they’ve been banged up for 23 hours a day." Former prison officer Alex South watches the TV drama Time.

Geoff Mulgan makes the case for cognitive rearmament: "That process of developing robust critical thinking skills needs to start early, in primary school. Finland is a trailblazer and has for several years ensured that young people learn about disinformation. Denmark has done the same. But education is just as important for the adult population and should become a primary duty of public broadcasters."

Emma Brookes says Donald Trump seems to be losing his battle with the BBC.

"Like American films of the 1930s and 40s who had to make gangsters pay for their crimes to justify the preceding hour of swagger and violence, British ones of the late 1960s had to make sure the swingers suffered for their pleasure." Ray Newman examines how sickness, sex and death got tangled up in British films 1968-72.

Paul Rees tells the story of the making of Jethro Tull's 1977 album Songs from the Wood, though I loved it then because its songs featured poachers as well as sprites.

An article for Lion & Unicorn: Malcolm Saville and the children’s holiday adventure

I'm back on Lion & Unicorn today with an article on the children's writer Malcolm Saville. I look at adventure stories in general and at his first two books, Mystery at Witchend and Seven White Gates, in particular:

Having clearly read adventure stories themselves, the five set up a secret society, signing its rules in their own blood. Rule 5 says the club is for "exploring and watching birds and animals and tracking strangers," and it gradually becomes clear that the strangers they duly track are German spies and fifth columnists intent on blowing up the reservoir’s dam.

There are unexpected mentions for the Bloody Sunday inquiry and Dr Beeching.

Many thanks to Lion & Unicorn for publishing it.

The Joy of Six 1592

Thom Hartmann says Trump is teaching America what every dictator knows: "When we think of strongman dictatorships we often imagine tanks in the streets, but those usually come in the later stages of repression (think Tienanmen Square) and often are never even needed (think today;s Russia). Instead, as every dictator on Earth can tell you, you don’t have to silence the entire country; all you have to do is shut up a few strategically selected people visibly and publicly enough and the rest of the country will get the message and back away." 

Zack Polanski did not handle the Green conference motion on Zionism well. But, asks Sangita Myska, why did his own party put him in the hold where he now finds himself?

"Her IHT policy would give older people who wanted to avoid inheritance tax a massive incentive to overinvest in property as a tax shield – to upsize or upvalue as far as they could so their heirs could benefit. It would put the top end of the housing market into a deep freeze. Moreover, it would divert spare cash away from investment that could help the British economy grow, into unproductive housing assets." Jill Rutter argues that Kemi Badenoch’s inheritance tax proposals represent myth-based policy making at its worst.

Municipal Dreams looks at how the London Borough of Hackney came to embrace high-rise housing.

Mark Kermode talks to Nick Newman about the restoration of Ken Russell's 1971 film: The Devils: "I always knew that there was something wrong with it because the first time I ever spoke to Ken about it, he said to me, 'It’s damaged goods.' That was the phrase that he used. He said, because they just took this stuff out of it, that left it with a hole. Something is damaged about it, and then you put it back in and go, 'No, that is better. That is what it always should have looked like.'"

"What works so well here is the author’s ability to look at this world objectively through Fanny’s eyes while also satirising this eccentric, privileged milieu with humanity and wit – Mitford is acutely aware of the absurdities of the system she is dissecting here." JacquiWine celebrates Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford.

The Joy of Six 1591

"Conservatives have called Burnham’s intervention 'dangerous and divisive', which could be interpreted as a denial that interference happened or just as a preference that it not be mentioned to protect delicate pro-Brexit sensibilities. Farage’s feelings were certainly hurt. He called the prime minister a liar and described the whole thing as a 'Russia hoax' – the formula Donald Trump applied to well-substantiated allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign got a helping hand from Moscow." Rafael Behr says Brexiters can't cope with the fact that Putin cheered them on.

Jack Dyson reveals how academy trusts try to justify the enormous salaries paid to some chief executives: "In July, the Department for Education named and shamed 56 trusts for high executive pay, ordering them to explain how the salaries were 'defensible' and represented 'good value for money'."

Rebekah Gear introduces her research on messy, risky outdoor play for children – and how adults stop them enjoying it. "Children expressed things such as 'I might fall', 'I don't want to get wet', and 'My teacher doesn’t let me'. These were not spontaneous fears; they were reflections of the messages the children had repeatedly heard from adults."

Wheat, apples and carrots are half as nutritious as they were in the 1960s, reports Rebecca Whittaker.

Malin Hay reviews a book on century of Hollywood flops: "The 1990s were the era of the swashbuckling action movie, but as well as The Mask of Zorro and The Mummy there were Cutthroat Island and The 13th Warrior (at a loss of around $133 million, possibly the biggest flop in movie history).

"Unlike many such cases which happen behind closed doors, Jeffrey Archer’s exclusion from the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord's Cricket Ground was well documented." Seth Thévoz on Lord Archer and the MCC.

Crash! (1971): An experimental television film with J.G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake

This film, made for BBC2 and broadcast in 1971, features J.G. Ballard and Gabrielle Drake. 

It must have been inspired by one of the linked stories – also called Crash! – from Ballard's novel The Atrocity Exhibition, which was published in 1970.

Ballard's novel Crash did not appear until 1973. It was adapted by David Cronenberg for a 1996 film that caused great controversy when it was released.

The Joy of Six 1589

Chaminda Jayanetti on successive governments' failure to grasp the nettle of social care: "As far back as 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour government launched a royal commission into adult care, only to then reject its calls for tax-funded free personal care and more support with residential care costs."

"Fascism is a strange ideology with a universe of conflicting and bizarre beliefs and rituals. Among the strongest is the ritualization of death that both mirrors and serves the main political drive of fascism: the creation of in groups and out groups. This is done through legal capture, the erosion and destruction of rights and protections, political framing of reality, fearmongering and weaponized activation, and the creation of religious cults of power, personality, and collective delusion." Jared Yates Sexton explains the fascist politics behind the public execution of Nidal Hasan.

Nick Baird asks where the Liberal Democrats' ambition has gone: "back in 2024, we were a Party on the up with a record number of MPs. The Tories were banished and in disarray. We talked, in all seriousness, about how we would be the Official Opposition after the next General Election. We looked admiringly at the Canadian Liberals who went from third place with a rump of MPs to an overall majority and thought 'that could be us'."

"I was confronted with a dilemma towards the end of writing my book because I had this line in the conclusion which I’d written a long time ago and thought was a really elegant, pithy sentence that summed up the argument of the book. But, as I was reading one of the final edits, I looked at it again and, having spent the last year immersed in AI slop on places like LinkedIn, I thought to myself, oh God, that sounds like something ChatGPT or Claude would write." Sarah O'Connor talks about her book We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work.

"Dadd seems to have been captivated by extreme contrasts of large and small, beautiful and grotesque – which are, of course, a feature of fairy folklore but had also been exemplified in earlier depictions of Shakespeare’s fairies (such as Joshua Reynolds’ famous Puck of 1789, and the fairy paintings of Henry Fuseli). Dadd, however, took the grotesqueness of fairies to a new level." Francis Young reviews the Royal Academy's Richard Dadd exhibition, which runs until 25 October.

Anne Bilson chooses 15 of the best movie car chases.

"A chap on his own gets a bit cracked sometimes": Michael Powell on Mr Colpeper

Michael Powell also had some interesting things to say about A Canterbury Tale in the 1981 interview I linked to in my post on Gone to Earth: 

I believe you once described A Canterbury Tale as a crusade against materialism?

One of the themes of the story was that. Emeric said, "Why don't we make a film about the sort of ideals we are fighting for?" Obviously, one of the most interesting characters in a discussion of that kind is the complete materialist played by Dennis Price.

At the climax he does get to play in Canterbury Cathedral.

Yes, but he's only one of the pilgrims. They all gt their desire. The girl finds her young man whom she thought was dead. John Sweet learns that his fiancée has gone to Australia with the WACs, Dennis Price plays the organ before going overseas and probably getting killed. All get their desire except Mr. Culpepper.

I find that the three pilgrims who get their desire are all learning. They have their traditions behind them, like Dennis Price who wants to play the organ properly. The American is interested in the English heritage. Eric Portman also reveres England but his other side is "The Glue Man", pouring glue on English girls to stop them fraternising with GI's.

The trouble with a man like that is that he's a loner. If he had a wife she'd have told him not to be so silly and taken his glue away from him. But he's a typical Englishman in that way. I tried to indicate that by the type of things he was interested in. You see in his room mountain climbing and walking scenes – things you do alone. So a chap on his own gets a bit cracked sometimes – monomaniac.

The film is set just before D-Day, which still lay the best part of a year ahead when it was shot, and I have always feared the two sergeants did not survive the war.

I would have liked to have heard Powell's account of the first of two scenes that run under the closing titles, as it points to a blessing for Colpeper too. Because of the time when the film was set and made, however, these scenes, where we see first soldiers and their girls flocking to one of Colpeper's lectures and then the boys playing football rather than war, can only indicate a possible future.

Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker discuss Gone to Earth and its restoration

The 64th New York Film Festival, which closes on Sunday, saw the world premiere of a new restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1950 film Gone to Earth.

This is one of their less celebrated films, but as it was shot in the Stiperstones in Technicolor, it is a favourite of mine. Because of my Shropshire obsession, I have made two people watch it with me and both enjoyed it.

Here Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker discuss the film and its restoration. One thing I didn't know before watching this is that both Powell's parents came from the Welsh border. In an interview he once said:

All my family on my mother's side come from Worcestershire and Shropshire (my father's side is from the Welsh Marches), so I was quite keen to do it as I knew the people, the country, the voices. It was a very good story but rather melodramatic.

The restoration of Gone to Earth was also shown in London this week. Someone who was there told me on Bluesky:

The restoration has greatly improved it. You are drawn into the story, and largely held by it, rather than being distracted by the decayed grading of previous versions. The sound has been cleaned up too, so the dialogue is more involving. Lovely touches of humour emerged.

A portrait of the last days of independent Penge

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.

The Joy of Six 1587

Cathy Mongaghan says Essex County Council's Operation Vanguard shows what can happen when a party built on amplifying fear and division takes control of the institutions needed to turn its political story into public policy: "Reform warned people that asylum seekers made their communities unsafe. Reform won power in Essex. Reform then spent council money putting private security on the streets in response to the presence of asylum seekers. The fear came first. The policy followed."

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.

Lawrence Hogben, Pressure and the meteorologists of D-Day

Lawrence Hogben (1916–2015) was of the meteorologists who produced the vital weather forecasts before the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. This, of course, is the process dramatised in this year's film Pressure.

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.