I suppose it was inevitable that opponents of health care reform in the US would turn on the NHS in an attempt to use it as a negative example, to suit their needs, since it is the most obvious example for them but the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" in use obscure the importance of having universal basic healthcare. There is, for me at any rate, one important thing to remember about my country's healthcare system:

Without the NHS, I would most likely be dead.

As a diabetic, I have a chronic medical condition which requires a constant basic level of medical treatment in order to prevent me from dying from the condition's effects. I'm not a member of a rich family, so if the NHS wasn't around, we would struggle to obtain such treatment and without the annual flu vaccinations, the chances of my making it through the winter on my compromised immune system would be fairly slim and let's not even talk about swine flu.

Every day I survive is in more than small part thanks to the National Health Service. It certainly isn't perfect but it's also certainly better to have it than not to and I still haven't yet heard a suggested replacement that wouldn't put my life at greater risk than it is now.

As far as I'm concerned, one of the most entertaining things ITV has ever managed (back in those now swiftly vanishing days when they did quality entertainment) was Heat of the Sun, three feature length episodes set in the Kenya of the 1930s, starring Trevor Eve as a Police Superintendent sent out to set up CID operations (as well as to get him out of the public eye after a scandal caused when his principles run up against upper-class depravity).

He's pretty much a fish out of water in the colonial society he finds out there and he does tend to rub people up the wrong way by insisting that the law applies to everyone, no matter how rich and powerful they are but he keeps going and makes some good friends along the way as well as confounding some of his critics. The African scenery provides an excellent backdrop to all of this and from first broadcast, they've always stood re-watching.

There was a VHS release some time back but it has taken 11 years for these episodes to get a UK release on DVD. There is a US box set but I found the inserting of little commentaries to screen by Diana Rigg at the beginning and end of each episode broke up their flow too much for me to enjoy them. I know many American viewers liked these a lot, with the information on the period and the location but I just couldn't get past the disconnect.

Having this land on the doormat this morning has helped rebuild a day that began with my ISP threatening to cut off my broadband for daring to move my phone package to a different provider and makes up for the fact that it's the last episode of Tour of Duty on FX this afternoon. By the end of the day, I'll have finished collecting that on recordable DVD and can bin my old video tape copies at long last. Another of those series that bear re-watching, I shall miss those guys.

It's not exactly a blizzard outside today but it has been steadily snowing since yesterday afternoon and it's lying, so I think doing the food shop yesterday was the sensible move. I really wouldn't want to be taking the car out in this weather, nor to be walking about, given that my typical footware is mostly canvas, as light as possible to avoid causing more damage to my feet. Great a lot of the time but not for trudging through snow.

I wish anyone trying to get into the university library today the very best of luck. A long ramp with a metal surface is always 'fun' at this time of year. ;-)

1. Bold the programmes you watch/used to watch.
2. Italicize the programmes you've seen at least one episode of.
3. Underline the programmes you own on DVD (or VCR tape).
4. Post your answers.

50. Quantum Leap
49. Prison Break
48. Veronica Mars
47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
46. Sex & The City
45. Farscape
44. Cracker
43. Star Trek
42. Only Fools and Horses
41. Band of Brothers
40. Life on Mars
39. Monty Python
38. Curb Your Enthusiasm
37. Star Trek: The Next Generation
36. Father Ted
35. Alias
34. Frasier
33. CSI Las Vegas
32. Babylon 5
31. Deadwood
30. Dexter
29. ER
28. FawltyTowers
27. Six Feet Under
26. Red Dwarf
25. Futurama
24. Twin Peaks
23. The Office
22. The Shield
21. Angel
20. Blackadder
19. Scrubs
18. Arrested Development
17. SouthPark
16. Doctor Who
15. Heroes
14. Firefly
13. Battlestar Galactica
12. Family Guy
11. Seinfeld
10. Spaced
09. The X-Files
08. The Wire
07. Friends
06. 24
05. Lost
04. The West Wing
03. The Sopranos
02. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
01. The Simpsons


Underlining usually means I own or have recorded some rather than all of the episodes. So many shows, so little time and even less money, worse luck.

My Political Views
I am a left social moderate
Left: 5.69, Authoritarian: 0.79

Political Spectrum Quiz

or rather the reappearance of an old favourite. The RedShift theme for Firefox has at last been adapted to work with Firefox 3.0+. This makes me happy as it's a good theme, if you like dark themes (and I do). The creator promises that the rest of the Shift theme family (BlueShift, GreenShift, GoldShift, OrangeShift etc) will be made available again after Firefox 3.1 is launched. Now all I need is a new version of the MAB and my collection of favourites will be complete again, at least until Firefox goes to another new version.

You know, I promised myself that I was going to stay out of it this time and I have managed not to get dragged into it on the DW communities, largely by ignoring them as hard as I can but I can't seem to help myself in the less fandom areas into which discussion of the controversy has penetrated, especially since the sour grapes of the disappointed began to ferment into nasty little rumours of racism at the BBC.

It's all so bloody tragic.

Why can't people just let it lie until we've actually got some evidence of how the new boy is actually going to do? Yes, most people's favourite picks for the role didn't get it. This is the cause for momentary disappointment, not for torrents of foaming idiocy. Oh well, at least there haven't been any death threats so far, so they're one up on the series logo controversy...

Given that I face the prospect of moving back to the South East sometime in 2009 (depending on the housing market) I was looking up the proceedure for changing a driver's license and preferably getting a photocard license instead of the old paper one and what became clear was that the best way to go about it was to have an up to date passport, something I've been meaning to get around to for years. I haven't been out of the country since the '80s and I figured that the passport I got to go to Italy when I was 13 must have expired 20 years ago and more but what the hell, it's a full adult passport, so that means it's a renewal and I get to avoid having a passport interview, which would probably be massively inconvenient, given how far out in the back of beyond I am, as well as how bloody painful travelling is.

Imagine my surpise when I dig the old passport out and see that it had been renewed just after my 18th birthday and only properly expired in '92. I simply don't remember getting that done. The photo was pretty horrible though. Having this beard has been the making of my face ;-) Still, the form is filled out and is off to get an old friend of the family to countersign it, together with my old passport and the deed poll document from when I adopted my grandfather's surname in place of my father's. Still, with more recent developments, I may not need to update my license in the end...

Since this discusses events at the end of the last season of Doctor Who, follow this cut just in case anyone is still feeling sensitive about spoilers (also cut for size): ( Read more... )

In all my years of watching Doctor Who, it has never managed to totally cut the ground out from under my expectations like that.

Now I've got to get through a whole week before the final part. Never have seven days seemed so bloody long!

At the moment, as far as I'm concerned, coincidence is when my mother, sister, brother in law, nephew and niece go on holiday to a holiday development in Devon, only for my mother to see a familiar face on her first day there and thus discover that the holiday place belongs to one of the daughters of her closest cousin, something that they genuinely didn't know up until they got there. Now that's a coincidence.

At the present time, I am assiduously putting aside a little money each week towards the Series 2 boxset of Torchwood, which is due out at the end of June and isn't exactly cheap. A lot of people are in this position and many are going to have to wait until the thing is cheaper, like I do with the Doctor Who box sets (still haven't got Series 3). A few days ago, the news swept the fandom that Play.com were offering the set for some ridiculously low price, £14.99 or something like that, prompting a whole bunch of people to order it. The price was reflected on my pre-order and though I was sceptical, having been through this with other retailers over the years, I shrugged and let it pass.

Now, as you'd expect, a 20-something pound discount on a premium item really was too good to be true. A couple of days later my pre-order was back up to the former price and the hopeful multitude were getting emails from Play telling them that the price was an error and the set couldn't be supplied at that price, so their orders were being cancelled. As you'd expect, the fan communities exploded in rage...

I know, it's disappointing. I'd certainly have liked the price cut but it was hardly credible and when it went away again, I put it down to experience. However, I read a lot of people saying how they were so angry at Play that they were taking their order to Amazon, where it was actually cheaper and that gobsmacked me. Yeah, it's listed as 50p cheaper than the Play.com price but that's before you take into account nearly £1.50 in postage and packing charges that get added on top before you receive it. In the end, the Amazon customer is still paying more than the Play customer and this is a fairly standard situation, which is why I switched buying DVDs from Amazon to Play in the first place.

Fine, they're upset but costing themselves money because of it is hardly sensible. Hopefully the next couple of months will be long enough for them to calm down and look carefully at their decision. For myself, it's back to the careful collection of the necessary funds.

The end of March appears to be quite significant for archive television. Well, alright, it's significant for me, as Network, those lovely people who do such good work bringing classic TV series to DVD are releasing two of the series I've been waiting for for the longest time and, co-incidentally, they both star Oliver Tobias.

Arthur of the Britons is a retelling of the King Arthur legend which strips away all the medieval trappings and tries to set the stories in a more authentic Dark Ages setting. The fact that it's one of the few things I actually still remember from the Seventies (though in repeat, since I doubt I'm remembering from when I was 2 years old ;-) ) shows the kind of effect it must have had on me at the time.

and then there's Smuggler, the Napoleonic era adventures of the smuggler Jack Vincent, another of my boyhood favourites and one of those series I've always thought deserved a DVD release.

I'm just glad they're coming from Network, since that's a company that puts out a quality product, even if they do take their time over it.

Looks like I'm going to have to rejuggle my finances again. I wonder what I can put off until I get a little money for my birthday?

Hell, both Barry Morse and Kevin Stoney have died recently. This is entirely bad news. I was just watching Stoney in The Tomorrow People recently and Morse's role in Space 1999 is a part of another of those faded childhood memories that I was talking about earlier.

For anyone who hasn't already noticed this, the BBC has confirmed reports that 'Reset', episode 6 of Torchwood will premiere on BBC3 next Wednesday evening (13.02.08) at 10.00pm, right after 'Adam', episode 5, has finished premiering on BBC2.

At this point, it is apparently "a one-week-only 'scheduling experiment'"

I do hate it when they mess things about in mid-run. So we lose one repeat of episode 5. That's going to hit the final ratings a bit. Well, I guess they ought to know what they're doing.

Yesterday afternoon, I was just sitting up here, working out how to allocate my meagre resources to Christmas presents, when I had a front row seat to another of those things I've never seen before. The road I live on has fairly heavy traffic, even though this is a small town, relatively speaking. I'm not on the main road but there are a DIY depot, livestock market and a sawmill up the end here which can all produce traffic, especially the sawmill.

So, I was sitting there, deciding who I can afford to buy presents for, when some twit in one of the huge trucks that thunder up and down here decided that for some reason, he needed to back up and so he did, a nervous business, I'm sure and rightly so as it turns out becauyse, as I watched, the clot reversed right into the street lamp on the pavement opposite my hose and left it heeled over at a drunken angle.

Now, this must happen a fair amount of the time, given the unwieldiness of trucks but it's still something that I've never seen before, so while the driver must have been having a bad day, the store of my experience went up one.

I don't know what I expected to find in the latest edition of The Lamp, Lampeter's own free 'magazine' but it really wasn't what I read towards the back, a death notice for Keith Hopwood, senior lecturer in Classics at the university here.

I've known Keith Hopwood for fifteen years. He was the very first lecturer I ever met here, being as he was the man who conducted my entrance interview back in 1992. I will always owe him for having seen through what I admit was a somewhat self-conscious and faltering performance on my part and passing me through to begin my long association with the university. In a big way, getting the hell out of London at that point saved my life and he was a key part of that. Through my course choices, I took a lot of courses he taught and they were always a highlight of their day, as Keith was always fascinating and highly entertaining. His lectures were very difficult to make cogent notes on but they were always extremely good value. Outside work, he was a very sociable person and I remember particularly the aftermath of various Classics Society meetings and suchlike, with the drinking, the eating and of course, the talking. Good times.

A bigger-than-life man at work and at leisure, I will miss him greatly and I pity the future generations of Classics students here at Lampeter who will never have the privilege of knowing him as I did.


This news has really upset me. Time to be elsewhere for a while...