What TV shows have you been watching ?

  • BBC drama I'm currently watching:


    The Pact, in which factory workers play a prank on their repulsive boss but it escalates wildly out of control.


    The Terror - fact-based on a 19th-century polar expedition mystery with a group of mariners getting into what you might call a spot of bother, with supernatural overtones.


    The Pursuit of Love - early/mid 20th-century wayward girl and her more sensible cousin, who narrates it, getting into love/lust-related scrapes. I've only watched the first episode so far but will continue, admittedly for not entirely artistic reasons.

    Abandon all reason

  • I watched 'The Pursuit of Love' too. Loved the series. :)

  • Tribes of Europa on Netflix. Above average gritty dystopian series, seems to be German. It has a terrifically brutal female villain among other things.


    I also watched Awake, a movie on Netflix. It had potential but the makers blew it.

  • Watched the docuseries called Wild Wild Country on Netflix. Boy was that something else!


    Currently watching Unforgotten on Amazon Prime, a British series with Nicola Walker. VERY GOOD. I love British shows, but my wife needs the subtitles. She doesn't understand "English" English LOL

  • Watched the docuseries called Wild Wild Country on Netflix. Boy was that something else!


    Currently watching Unforgotten on Amazon Prime, a British series with Nicola Walker. VERY GOOD. I love British shows, but my wife needs the subtitles. She doesn't understand "English" English LOL

    This reminds me of the time we took our then 4 year old home to Ireland. Paw Patrol here in the US is done with American actors, over there it looks identical but is done with British actors. Her question to us: "why is it in Spanish?" 😆

  • Just started 'Katla' on Netflix. Fiction show set in Iceland against the backdrop of a continuously erupting volcano. Damn this is some unsettling viewing, and the scenery/landscape is just ridiculous.

  • I watched the last episode of season 8 of The Blacklist a couple of weeks ago. I hesitate to use such language about a network TV show, but it hit me really hard. I actually lie awake at night thinking about it. The show is never going to fall into the category of classic TV, but the impact of 8 years of following a labyrinthine story only for it to end suddenly in a gut-wrenching, shocking way is very, very hard to generate (and pretty hard to describe).


    My kudos to the writers who I suspect never thought it would go as long as it did, but somehow managed to pull together a cohesive end and made it feel like something predestined from the first scene of the first episode.


    Edit: dialogue from S1E5 (on my rewatch)

    Cooper: "You killed three people!"

    Red: "No one's perfect"

  • A BBC Scotland documentary about Flat Earthers. Educational, in a "They walk among us" kind of way!

    I'm sorry to say they have quite a presence in my part of the forest. That said, you don't see it so much now but after we first moved here we kept seeing 'Flat Earth' spray-painted on walls and road signs, then found there was a Flat Earth Society HQ of some kind in Inverness city centre. It was a shopfront with 'Flat Earth' in big letters above it and a load of their doolally literature in the window. I noticed they'd also appropriated all the chemtrails, 5G and vaccine paranoia nonsense.


    I once stood and read some of the window stuff (don't worry kids, they didn't convert me), there was an FAQs of which I can't remember anything other than "Q: So if the earth is flat, where does a ship go when it disappears over the horizon? A: Duh, obviously it's just gone too far away for the human eye to see it anymore, idiot." I may be paraphrasing, but anyway the whole list was along those lines.


    All I ever saw in the Flat Earth 'shop' was a heavyset man in an ill-fitting grubby white t-shirt, sitting on a couch. Occasionally there were one or two other blokes of the same ilk. They weren't doing a great job of recruiting or selling, it has to be said. When I last walked past there the place was all boarded up and the window bare.


    Years ago when I first became aware of the Flat Earth Society I thought they didn't literally believe the earth is flat, but used it as an attention-grabbing name for a group of people and a mindset urging us to not automatically accept convention and orthodoxy, to question for ourselves what we're told, and consider the possibility of alternative explanations. I didn't have a major problem with that and thought it was a perfectly reasonable standpoint in many ways.... Then it dawned on me: no, they actually really do think the earth is a flat sheet. Ah.

    Abandon all reason

  • Yes, some of the programme was filmed in Inverness, then they followed their "campaign" bus to Perth.


    If they understood the principles, they'd realise that, if your eyes are above the ground, and a ship sails away, given powerful binoculars/telescope, it would never disappear. I believe this was the first clue to the scientists way back that the Earth may NOT be flat. Talk about adding 2 and 2 and getting 5!


    It makes your realise how truly amazing the fantastic minds of people from the past like Galileo, Faraday, and my all time hero (The greatest Brit, never mind what the BBC polls some years back concluded), Sir Isaac Newton, really were. Now THERE was a mind!

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • Yes, some of the programme was filmed in Inverness, then they followed their "campaign" bus to Perth.


    If they understood the principles, they'd realise that, if your eyes are above the ground, and a ship sails away, given powerful binoculars/telescope, it would never disappear. I believe this was the first clue to the scientists way back that the Earth may NOT be flat. Talk about adding 2 and 2 and getting 5!


    It makes your realise how truly amazing the fantastic minds of people from the past like Galileo, Faraday, and my all time hero (The greatest Brit, never mind what the BBC polls some years back concluded), Sir Isaac Newton, really were. Now THERE was a mind!

    They have a campaign bus?! :D


    I hope it didn't get a FLAT on its way to Perth...


    Their inability/unwillingness to grasp the basics of geographic curvature is one drop in a raging torrent of idiocy. You could launch a barrage of questions about astronomical observation, day and night, equinoxes, etc etc at them and as I recall from the stuff in their window they will have some boneheaded answer for all of them. On top of which they of course reject any evidence such as space-flight photography and scientific measurements as faked. I've never understood what they think is the purpose of the evil authorities deceiving us in this way, but then I have more constructive things to think about so I don't really care.


    As if the Church of the Flatterday Saints weren't bad enough, I've recently picked up on a growing belief that the moon is fake. No, that's not "the moon landings were faked", but the moon itself isn't real. Someone said they got in a cab and the driver started bending her ear about this, suggesting the moon isn't real and saying "I know it sounds daft, but..." Yeah mate. It does sound daft, in fact it sounds prancingly pirouettingly dimwittedly stupid. I think a UKIP candidate tried pushing this line as well. How would a moon be faked and what would be the point?!


    Buzz Aldrin had a bit of a reputation as a lively, rather volatile character and I like the story (apocryphal or not) that at some event one of these doubters went up to him and said, be honest now you didn't really go to the moon did you? Whereupon by way of answer Aldrin just decked him.

    Abandon all reason

  • I used to frequent the Flat Earth Society online and actually signed up to their forum so I could interact with them. Their theories were so ridiculously far fetched I found the whole thing hysterical, and best of all was their ability to repel *any* attempt at logic.


    I think their explanation for gravity is that the flat earth disc is moving upwards at 9.8m/s. The sun is a spotlight of some sort located 50 or so miles up. And on and on.


    I actually argued things from the flat earther perspective for amusement until they realized what I was doing and kicked me off. If memory serves in one exchange, I argued that the moon was a projection from an enormously powerful projector. A normal person asked me "why don't we see shadows from birds and things flying in front of it?". I replied, duh, the projector is so powerful any creature that flies in front of it would be instantly incinerated. I asked for proof that birds were not being incinerated, and when none was forthcoming claimed it as "a big win for FE". This is actually their MO. Claim lack of evidence contrary to some outlandish claim as victory.


    Oh, their maps are hilarious too, with the deformed continents and massive ice wall all around.

  • They have a campaign bus?! :D


    Buzz Aldrin had a bit of a reputation as a lively, rather volatile character and I like the story (apocryphal or not) that at some event one of these doubters went up to him and said, be honest now you didn't really go to the moon did you? Whereupon by way of answer Aldrin just decked him.

    It WAS a MINI-bus! :)


    Yes, I've heard that Buzz Aldrin story too. Can't be sure, but I think I heard him confirm it after being asked on a chat show.

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • I've been watching a late 50's/early 60's series called "One Step Beyond" on Talking Pictures TV lately. It's a bit like the Twilight Zone, except this series is claimed to be based on actual events.


    Last night's episode was called "The Vision". It recounts the tale of a vision in the skies over Europe during WW1, November 14th, 1915 to be precise. Curiousity got the better of me, as I suspected this to be the famous "Angel on Mons" incident. Sure enough, this is the event that inspired Steve Hackett's instrumental of the same name.


    Sadly, Talking Pictures TV don't to on-demand, and given that there are about 96 episodes, even if they start again after completing them, you'd have to wait about 3 years for it to be re-transmitted. Fortunately, it's on Youtube, officially it seems:


    ▶ "One Step Beyond": The Vision. - YouTube

    Ian


    Putting the old-fashioned Staffordshire plate in the dishwasher!

  • Not sure if this is TV?...But I would find this amusing to read people's verdicts of the flat earth.:D

  • Just finished watching the Jeremy Clarkson's season the Clarkson's Farm season 1. Very funny and amusing with real characters. This is nothing like Top Gear but has the usual Jeremy's wit. Worth watching. This is definitely a real documentary of owning a farm and the struggles farmers face in UK are leaving the EU.

  • Alright….question for my UK brethren in here.


    My wife and I love British television. We watch a host of British shows on Netflix, NBC, Amazon, etc.


    Why do the British omit the word “THE” when mentioning hospitals?


    “He’s been taken to hospital.”


    “My mother is at hospital,”


    etc. I adore British English, but man, that sounds awkward? Why do British say the store, the alley, the tennis courts, the parking lot, the field, the yard, but with hospital, no article!? 😂😂😂😂