• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
Just a reminder, tonight, BBC 2 at 8, Jacques Peretti covers how internet transactions are the new gold rush. Be careful of those payment details!

Once again, an excellent and worrying documentary, this one about how we have all enabled ourselves to be made of money. You know the small print that tells you your details will be passed on to other companies? Billions of dollars are being made out of your details, and you're not seeing a penny. Lots of fascinating bits, like how buying without cash actually makes you spend more because psychologically it's more agreeable. It started in Kenya, and now Apple, Google, Facebook, all those online giants, basically have a licence to print money. Except they don't print money, it's all in the ether. Their ether.
 
Last Peretti doc on BBC2 tonight, I'm a bit late with the heads-up but you can catch it on iPlayer. This one was all about work, how work related stress makes it more likely you'll have a stroke (30-50 age bracket seeing a big increase there), how there's no such thing as a job for life anymore, how your boss is now more likely to be an algorithm, how the powers that be plan to phase out teachers in schools because kids will learn better staring at a screen (what was that Azimov story?) - except they don't, and how AI advances mean we're only suitable for the most menial jobs even the machines don't want to do.

Not exactly cheery viewing, but forewarned is forearmed.
 
Money! It's a gas!

Techy and I were talking about Pink Floyd recently. Everyone loved t'Floyd when I were a lass - most old fans still do - but I was put off by what I considered poor singing. Techy reckons it was a case of 'It's MY band, they're MY instruments, I wrote the songs so I'M singing!'
 
A series of five 15 minutes spoken essays on Memory on Radio 3. Should interest the Fortean among you, as memory effect are implicated in all sorts of paranormal phenomena. Three are on the iPlayer, two to come.

The Fallibility of Memory
The Strangeness of Memory
3/5 Forensic psychologist Fiona Gabbert explores the strength and weaknesses of human memory.
View Programme information

False Memories
The Strangeness of Memory
2/5 Psycologist Chris French looks at childhood memories and asks how reliable they are.
View Programme information

Touching the Void
The Strangeness of Memory
1/5 Adam Zeman on the void of amnesia and how it impacts identity and consciousness.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006x3hl/episodes/player
 
BBC Radio 4 extra - The Darker Side of the Border Episode 1 of 3, The Captain of the Polestar

As a Dundee whaling ship becomes trapped in the Artic, strange cries sound across the ice at night and a figure is glimpsed on the floes.

Is it the Captain's lost love come to reclaim him?

Written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and dramatised by Marty Ross.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00cb1ts
 
Cool (er, literally); thought I knew about ACD's extraholmesian stuff, but never heard of this. Sounds like a perfect listen for a dark autumnal night. Downloading, ta!
 
BBC Radio 1 Stories - Britain's Young Witches

Alice Levine investigates the growing number of young people in the UK getting involved in witchcraft. With a rise in witchy YouTubers, online courses for witchcraft and trending hashtags like #witchesofinstagram, you could say being a witch is very in right now.

So why are some young people today drawn to witchcraft? How different is this new generation of witches to previous ones? Alice meets people who are practising witchcraft in 2017 to find out what part it plays in their lives, and how the Internet is helping them further their craft.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05b8jtl
 
Just been watching that Joe Orton doc on iPlayer, excellent and recommended, it's there for another couple of weeks I think. But I had no idea there was a mystery about his death - he was definitely murdered, but the last few pages of his diligently kept diary were missing... and nobody knows what happened to them, they stop mid-sentence about six or seven days before he died. They were even alluded to in Halliwell's suicide note. Wonder what they said?
 
Just been watching that Joe Orton doc on iPlayer, excellent and recommended, it's there for another couple of weeks I think. But I had no idea there was a mystery about his death - he was definitely murdered, but the last few pages of his diligently kept diary were missing... and nobody knows what happened to them, they stop mid-sentence about six or seven days before he died. They were even alluded to in Halliwell's suicide note. Wonder what they said?
It's possible (and I conjecture here) that somebody well-known or important was mentioned or implicated as one of Orton's dalliances - and they may have been removed by persons or agencies unknown.
 
It's possible (and I conjecture here) that somebody well-known or important was mentioned or implicated as one of Orton's dalliances - and they may have been removed by persons or agencies unknown.

They don't speculate in the documentary, but there is an implication the agent took the pages when she liberated the diaries, or it might have been the producer who was a nasty piece of work according to all who are interviewed (the great Kenneth Cranham really doesn't like him!).
 
It's possible (and I conjecture here) that somebody well-known or important was mentioned or implicated as one of Orton's dalliances - and they may have been removed by persons or agencies unknown.

That's certainly possible. Orton knew some famous people. Homosexuality was still illegal at the time of his death, so perhaps if a politician or senior police officer was mentioned in connection with Orton or his gay friends, well, there's yer motive. A need to protect some powerful person's 'good name'.
 
...the last few pages of his diligently kept diary were missing... and nobody knows what happened to them, they stop mid-sentence about six or seven days before he died. They were even alluded to in Halliwell's suicide note. Wonder what they said?

Orton and Halliwell used to cut pictures out of library books and use them as wallpaper - in which case, maybe it was some Islington librarian's revenge. (Although, much as I'm sure it would be a talking point, I'm not sure that wallpaper describing Orton's escapades with two Irish dockers and a rolled up copy of Razzle in the toilets at Baker Street station would be a popular line at Liberty's.)
 
Last edited:
Orton's escapades with two Irish dockers and a rolled up copy of Razzle in the toilets at Baker Street station

Orton certainly lived a busy life. His diaries describe at least one occasion when some passer-by pops into the public lavvy for an innocent slash and freezes in disbelief at the satyriacal scene before him.
 
They interviewed one of Orton's conquests on the programme. Just made eye contact in the street, something clicked and they made a beeline for the nearest department store gents'. Simple as that!
 
Jean-Claude Van Johnson is now on Amazon Video as a six-part series. Very funny in places, but just plain weird in others, as if it's been badly translated from the Belgian. But more proof that Van Damme will always be better than Seagal.
 
I'll probably get expelled from the board for this but The Lowe Files is on History at the moment. We have watched a couple of episodes and it is surprisingly good fun. Rob Lowe and his two normally-named sons knock about with each other and vaguely "investigate" paranormal stuff. Don't expect to learn anything or see any subjects dealt with properly but switch off your brain and enjoy. We are definitely going to try the remote viewing experiment ourselves!
 
I'll probably get expelled from the board for this but The Lowe Files is on History at the moment. We have watched a couple of episodes and it is surprisingly good fun. Rob Lowe and his two normally-named sons knock about with each other and vaguely "investigate" paranormal stuff. Don't expect to learn anything or see any subjects dealt with properly but switch off your brain and enjoy. We are definitely going to try the remote viewing experiment ourselves!

Mr Lowe seems like an anomaly in himself, I've often thought, so I can see why he'd be a good match for this subject.
 
I'll probably get expelled from the board for this but The Lowe Files is on History at the moment. We have watched a couple of episodes and it is surprisingly good fun. Rob Lowe and his two normally-named sons knock about with each other and vaguely "investigate" paranormal stuff. Don't expect to learn anything or see any subjects dealt with properly but switch off your brain and enjoy. We are definitely going to try the remote viewing experiment ourselves!
I watched a couple of shows. They don't really discover much but seem a pleasant bunch and more watchable than the fat, hairy, shouty rednecks on Mountain Monsters :)
 
Just found this old broadcast on the Radio 4 site from 9 March 1983, BBC World Service - Network UK, Occult

Witchcraft and wicca, a look at the rise in popularity of the occult in the UK with warnings from Michael Marshall, Bishop of Woolwich, a guide to occult accessories from Chris Gray and a witch explains her craft.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037727j

Edit*

Looking through the BBC Radio archives and found this other interesting series of 6 short programmes on the occult symbolism of different shapes, originally broadcast way back in 1995,

BBC World Service - Shapes Of Power

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p033wrdf/episodes/guide
 
Last edited:
Feud: Bette and Joan is available as a "box set" on BBC iPlayer. I watched the last episode tonight, and although some of it I would query (Robert Aldrich never shagged Bette Davis), as would Olivia De Havilland who is suing the producers, it got better as it went along and by the end was unexpectedly moving.

Case in point, I was discussing it with a friend and he says someone he knows who is much younger said she couldn't get into it because she didn't know who Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were, which sums up the conclusion of the series nicely. Or sadly. Two seconds in the obits after a lifetime of ploughing away to make a success of yourself...
 
Not Fortean, sorry, unless there's mention of spooky Heysham! but on BBC2 in a bit (3:15) there's an edition of The Great British Winter about estuaries, which discusses Morecambe Bay, an area beloved of several of our posters.
 
Back
Top