"I invited guests to play with bomb in my garden"

Embed from Getty Images

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award:

Valerie, however, feels sorry to see it gone.

She says she stood the bomb by her shed so anyone who wanted to could look at it. "People used to think 'that's marvellous, where'd you get that from? Is it alright?'.

"They all used to play about with it and say it was a bit of a party piece.

"When anyone came around, I'd say: 'Do you want to see the bomb?'."

The Joy of Six 1457

"What the US needs to understand is that hybrid warfare isn’t simply a weapon used between and against states. It’s a strategy being deployed by your very own government. This is both kinetic warfare – bombs and missiles – and information warfare – false constructs, false narratives, false justifications." America is not our enemy, but it's a danger to itself and the world, says Carole Cadwalladr.

Rowan Williams reminds us that migrants are at the heart of our culture: "Many of the most characteristic forms of western medieval architecture ... owe their development to the to-ing and fro-ing of engineers and architects between western Europe and the Middle East during the Crusades. And we find it easy to forget that most of the stylistic repertoire of modern western popular music would be unthinkable without the Black American tradition that itself adapted and reshaped African idioms in the new and terrible world of enslavement."

"Decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behaviour are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities." David Roberts argues that the cure for misinformation is not just more information or smarter news consumers.

"Norwich, contrary to the county town image that some may have of it (though that too was true), was a densely-settled, industrial city which came under Labour control in 1933. The Council built over 7500 houses in the 1920s and 30s (twice the number of new private homes built in the same period) and rehoused some 30,000 people – almost a quarter of the population. Mile Cross was the finest of its new estates." Municipal Dreams on the history of a Norwich housing estate.

Francis Young reviews Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell: "[Tony Cornell] was wary of supernatural explanations but was open to a complex view of human psychology in which people who simulated paranormal phenomena were not always aware they were doing so, or did not necessarily see a distinction between their own agency and that of the supernatural power they believed in."

Petra Tabarelli explains the appeal of Midsomer Murders: "The characters are not merely bizarre, eccentric or exaggerated; they are condensed allegories, just as the Midsomer backdrop is itself an allegory for the idealised English landscape."

At last! Proof that BBC East's Joint Account quiz existed

In a 2018 post on my three encounters with Glyn Worsnip, I wrote:

Move on to the summer of 1978 when I was about to go to university. My mother and I won BBC East’s quiz Joint Account, a show that is so obscure it is not on the BBC Genome site.

It's still not appeared on Genome, but I now have two pieces of evidence that Joint Account existed.

The first is that it's mention in the Independent's obituary of Worsnip. The second is this photograph of him, which someone sold on the French Amazon site a few years ago.

Its caption is in English and runs:

Glyn Worsnip plays Chairman and Bank Manager in BBC East's knock-out quiz series "Joint Account", broadcast on BBC East

This may be of more interest to the writer than the reader, but then I have reached an age when it's good to have your memories confirmed. Now I even fancy I can remember Worsnip dressing like that.

Replacing Trowse railway swing bridge outside Norwich in 1987

This Anglia TV programme from 1987 is concerned with the electrification of the line from London to Norwich, and in particular the replacement of the Trowse swing bridge over the Wensum just before trains reach Norwich station. The best thing in the show is the footage of the old bridge in operation.

Today, the new bridge is again seen as a bottleneck, as there is a only a single track across it. This despite the fact that it hardly opens to shipping any more. It seems that if you give seven days notice, the may open it for you at 4 AM on a Sunday.

So there is talking of building a new bridge with more tracks, and the odds are that this one won't open at all.

And a word about Bygones. 

When we moved to Market Harborough we found ourselves in a part of the town that received East Anglian local programmes rather than Midlands ones. That meant Look East, the evening news magazine on BBC, which always seemed to be concerned with the port of Felixstowe and strikes at the Perkins diesel engine factory in Peterborough.

As to sport, though Ipswich Town was then one of the best teams in Europe, the coverage concentrated on Norwich City, whose ground was just down the road from the BBC East studios.

Anglia, the ITV regional station, had its networked successes: Tales of the Unexpected, the wildlife series Survival and the quiz Sale of the Century.

But when you switched over, it always seemed to be showing Bygones with Dick Joice. This was a nostalgia show about old country ways. Each week it featured a mystery object from Joice's own collection of bygones, which usually turned out to be intended for doing something unspeakable to sheep.

I don't remember these 'specials', but this one is certainly a step up from the usual Bygones shows.