Sick Again

Welcome, healthy reader, as this week I've been struck down with some nasty virus again. I've had a temperature and generally flu-like symptoms for a few days now, which has put paid to that idea of going to the football game today.

What do you do when you're sick? You watch TV. And as we've already discussed, watching American TV is a little bit like watching time go slowly backwards. Instead I've been running marathons of various British TV shows through the BBC iPlayer.

I started out with Brian Cox's Universe. Oh my goodness this is dull. I'm sure it was a lovely excuse for Brian to visit some great locations where the camera crew could get some appropriately moody shots, but it's so, so slow: this reminded me very much of Paul Ross's daytime quiz of yore "No Win, No Fee", which, if I remember rightly, went so slowly that they only asked 4 questions in a 30 minute quiz show. It's like Brian was enjoying his holidays so much that he left his textbooks at home and just thought they'd skip the science part of the show and replace it with nice pictures. About the only thing I learned is why stuff near a black hole can apparently be travelling faster than light, so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of time.

It also seems to be structured in some weird way - there's a segment at the end of most of the shows called "Exploring the Universe", where some proper space scientists talk about a space probe or mission, but this is so tacked on that I can believe in some markets they just don't show that piece.

Next up I watched all the 2021 episodes of the astronomy magazine show and TV institution The Sky At Night. The Sky At Night contains more factual material in its first 10 minutes than Brian Cox got through in 5 1 hour episodes. It doesn't feel fast, although it is actually quite information-dense, and as a result they can't help but repeat themselves a bit, even over relatively short periods of time. You hear from genuine experts and the excitement is palpable, even when it's just Pete in Leicestershire telling you he can't see anything because it's cloudy. Again. And to top it off, the theme music is Sibelius, so there's not a lot here to dislike.

Next up was something called The Century of the Self, which suckered me in by calling one of its episodes "8 people sipping wine in Kettering". Turns out this isn't a rejected Monty Python sketch, but actually a perjorative description of a political focus group. The series focusses on how psychoanalytical techniques were used in the 20th century to sell us products and control us, and then how a rejection of these techniques "liberated" us, but were then used to discover and deliver our desires, mostly through focus groups. Interestingly this last episode turns into a fairly damning indictment of New Labour as an explicitly non-ideological collection of quite specific crowd-pleasing policies, which isn't how I remember it at all. Still, this was incredibly interesting stuff from start to finish - or maybe just disturbing if you're of that disposition.

So yeah, bit of politics there. It's going to get worse so if that's not your thing you might want to stop reading now. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Next up was "Thatcher: A Very British Revolution", which as it says on the tin, is a documentary series charting the rise and fall of Grantham's very own Margaret Hilda. You might wonder why someone as politically opposed to this person as me might want to watch this, but I'm pretty sure people would pay to see a 5 part documentary about Voldemort, so there's your explanation. What immediately struck you from watching this, however, is that the story is now ancient history: Thatcher left office 31 years ago, and although I remember that very well, trying to make a documentary about the events of 1959 back then would have left you realizing that most people that were there are... well... dead. So the same is true here: only 3 or 4 members of the first Thatcher cabinet survive, so it's hard to get a sense for what was really going on. As we move to the later years, there are more survivors to speak to, and you get a genuine sense for how bonkers things must really have been.

What I'm left thinking, of course, is that literally none of what I've been watching could possibly have been made in the US. I can watch as much Dr Pimple Popper as I like, but something genuinely serious? That's not happening.

Well, we'll watch the Big Game from Stanford on the telly, because one thing you can of course rely on here is there being sport on the telly. Let's hope we have something more exciting to talk about next week! For now, here's some gingko leaves: