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.

Two early screen appearances by Patrick Stewart (1940-2026)

The actor Patrick Stewart died yesterday. This story from the Hollywood Reporter concentrates on his appearances in Star Trek and X-Men, while some of us will think first of his appearances in Smiley's People and I, Claudius. In both he was a uniquely powerful presence.

Over the years I have posted a couple of clips of him from even earlier in his career. Here he is in Joby from 1975. 

This was an adaptation of the Stan Barstow's 1964 novel of the same name. It was filmed  in and around Horbury, the village near Wakefield where Barstow himself grew up. We lost so much with the demise of the regional ITV companies.

And from 1969, here he is acting a scene from Hamlet with Ian Richardson and Ronald Lacey. This is an extract from one of the episodes of Kenneth Clark's series Civilisation.

GUEST POST Is Isaac Asimov's psychohistory fiction or reality?

Peter Chambers mixes science fiction with computer games, the numerical simulation of history, computer games and a take on political warfare.

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".

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.

GUEST POST Doctor Who: The most golden era?

Peter Chambers weighs the Doctor Who era I remember from my childhood and does not find it wanting.

No Doctor Who fan is without an opinion on which era was a golden era. This is evident in that someone who professes otherwise is not a true Doctor Who fan. Douglas Adams would have understood. And gone for lunch.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, here in Liberal England, that our host remembers that the Pertwee era was the best, because he remembers Pertwee as "my Doctor". Is he right? Can we adduce evidence for this? Or are we condemned to find evidence to the contrary.

I will contend that he is half-right. Does this make me half-right? Are we both half-wrong? I shall explain.

I shall describe an era by the name of the Producer who was in charge at the time. Implicitly I shall claim that the Most Golden Era was within the Classic Period, but the Moffat-Capaldi era featured some material as good as any in the Classic Period. This will not be further discussed here, and is obviously true in the Douglas Adams sense. A list of Producers and the episodes they supervised is given on the Tardis Fandom site.

Our host’s theory that the Most Golden era starts with the first Pertwee episode equates to saying that the serial Spearhead From Space is the start. This is coincidentally the first serial I ever watched, the first colour serial, the first Pertwee episode, and the first Caroline John (Liz Shaw) episode. It is reviewed by a credible commentator who uses the name The Watcher on Who.

The Watcher asks if Spearhead is a 'soft reboot' of Doctor Who. The second Doctor wished to leave the show, and monochrome was to be replaced by colour, which meant that the cost of colour production had to be absorbed by the existing budget. 

The previous production team made some plans for this and used the last monochrome serial, The War Games, to set up the transition. This has been rendered in colour and is now on iPlayer. It is a nice contrast to Spearhead. The previous producer, Derrick Sherwin, stayed on for Spearhead, then handed over to Barry Letts.

Jon Pertwee exits the Tardis surrounded by smoke and collapses on the ground. It is the 1970s. Soon a scientist called Liz Shaw meets a Brigadier in a building in London. Soon they are up to their necks with Autons. A little like the events of 2005 in the Modern era. Start with a bang and work your way up from there.

Pertwee and Letts entertain us until the end of Season 11 – Planet of the Spiders. Then Philip Hinchcliffe becomes Producer and Tom Baker takes over as the Doctor. This starts what is known as the Hinchcliffe-Holmes years, which I believe is the second part of the Most Golden era. 

Robert Holmes was sometimes script editor, and sometimes writer. Many of your favourite episodes from that time might turn out to be written by him, possibly under a pseudonym. Spearhead was one. The Deadly Assassin was another. (Did he and Moffat ever go down the pub? Who knows...)

The Hinchcliffe-Holmes years continued until the end of Season 14, when the team met the most frightening monster to threaten Doctor Who. No, not Bonnie Langford, Mary Whitehouse.

Mrs Whitehouse spoke out for a moral majority of people in Britain that no one could quite remember the names of. The National Viewers and Listeners Association. They contended that some giant spiders and people running down corridors from monsters in cheap plastic costumes constituted a threat to the moral character of the nation. 

Some of the senior management of the BBC agreed with them. The show Had To Change! Hinchcliffe was shown the door. Gothic horror and drama was out. Light entertainment was in. Comedy. Escapism. The Most Golden era was over.

Robert Holmes provided a low key note of revenge in Season 15 – a transitional season – in The Sun Makers, when Louise Jameson is shown throwing Capitalist Landlords from the top of "kilometre high towers". Philip – thou art avenged!

So perhaps Jonathan is half-right and I am half-wrong. Or so it seems. Please avoid pressing Like or Subscribe as these functions are not provided here. Perhaps comment down below, and certainly watch a few favourites over on iPlayer. 

There is no paid sponsorship, but do have a pint of real ale in your local before it is closed down by a Private Equity firm. Or it burns down due to wild fires and climate change. You heard it first in The Green Death. Which also warned you about AI.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire. The photo of Jon Pertwee is from New Zealand Archives.

The Joy of Six 1554

"The idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile." Stephanie Brown says Andy Burnham’s No 10 North has a precedent in medieval York.

Nafeez Ahmed examines the links between George Cottrell’s Reform UK network in Montenegro and sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.

Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."

Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.

"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.

Sylvester McCoy and Sheila Hancock on The Happiness Patrol

In this British Film Institute video Sylvester McCoy, Sheila Hancock and members of it production team discuss the 1988 Doctor Who story The Happiness Patrol.

You can watch all three parts of it on the BBC website.

My Doctor was Jon Pertwee, though in those days the Brigadier and Roger Delgado were a large part of the success of the show. These days I'm not a great Doctor Who fan, but I am a Sheila Hancock fan.

The Joy of Six 1501

Samira Shackle meets victims of successive governments that have sought to reduce immigration while insisting universities recruit more overseas students: "Each year, about 400,000 international students are granted study visas to the UK. A significant proportion do so with the help of education agents: middlemen paid by universities to find foreign students. In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate."

"In places like Kootenai County, where white Christian Republicans hold a supermajority, local politics is mutating into something undeniably extreme. North Idaho offers a particularly stark example. A decade after Trump took over the GOP, the Coeur d’Alene region finds itself beset by a ­vexing mix of far-right activists and white nationalists who are trying to drive moderate voices out of political life." Michael Edison Hayden talks to the locals who are fighting back.

"Does the democratisation of information and access provided by social media help or hinder women in political careers? Is it an essential tool for visibility and mobilisation or another obstacle that disproportionately discourages women, especially those from marginalised backgrounds?" Georgia Richardson reports on a discussion of these questions.

Michael C. Munger recruits an unlikely pair of thinkers to question naïve optimism about government intervention in the economy: Adam Smith and Michel Foucault.

"The newly exposed floodplain was cracked and parched, the slate river chugging along in its rediscovered course. I’d hoped to see a fish or two; instead, the river practically vibrated with them. Salmon skittered from pool to pool, shark-like dorsal fins waving above the surface, dozens of Chinook chasing and nipping and circling each other in ancient dance." Ben Goldfarb celebrates the rebirth of an American river.

Ryan Lambie on the importance of Professor Quatermass: "ITV didn’t launch until September 1955. As a result, The Quatermass Experiment was viewed by just about every British person who owned a television; it was reckoned that some 3.4 million people tuned in to watch the first episode, and that the figure steadily climbed to a staggering five million by the sixth and final episode, which aired that August."