Category Archives: Personal Stuff

Seafood Pornography

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There’s a superb episode of The Simpsons where various discussions of actor ‘Troy McClure are taking place:

Louie: Hey, I thought you said Troy McClure was dead.
Tony: No, what I said was: “He sleeps with the fishes”. You see…
 …..

Homer: You know, his bizarre personal life. Those weird things they say he does down at the aquarium. Why I heard…
Marge: Oh, Homer, that’s just an urban legend. People don’t do that type of thing with fish!

Now, before we go any further, I definitely have to point out that should you be a fish fetishist like Troy McClure then you won’t find anything of interest in this piece. But what I do want to talk about is late night TV, on a satellite channel, oh yes…

Rick Stein!

I’m not a great fan of cookery programmes – I cook a lot but don’t usually get much out of watching other folks cooking (except for the superb and much missed Keith Floyd) – but I can watch Rick Stein for hours.  I love seafood – which helps enormously – and I love the combination of heartiness and simplicity that many of his recipes have.  And he’s a great people person – watching him work with the local chefs in whichever part of the country (or world) he and his team end up in is always a great pleasure.

Stein scores for me in a very big way – I actually want to eat the stuff he produces.  The other evening he cooked eels, and whilst normally I’d probably draw the line at eating them, I quite fancied trying one out.  Then there was a (non-seafood) French hotpot dish that involved a side of belly pork, sausage and vegetables.  Oh my….just the sort of stuff I love to eat.

It’s a great irony in my life that whilst I love seafood and the sea I live in Sheffield – a rather land-locked place which has the Irish Sea and the North Sea as the closest bodies of salt-water to get to.   There is a good local fishmonger down in Hillsborough – Mann’s – and we’ve also got a couple of Sushi and Noodle bars in Sheffield City Centre which are pretty reasonable.  But I would love to be able to go and eat in a dedicated sea-food restaurant, on the sea-front, somewhere.  The only time I’ve actually achieved this was back in 1993 in Vancouver – and it was fantastic.

Back to Rick Stein – a second strong point for me is the love and passion he has for his craft and calling – and it comes out in what he does and his narration of the programmes.  I like listening to people who are genuinely passionate about what they do – it comes out in every word they say, and in their body language.  Floyd was the same – it’s something fantastic to see. 

But having said all that, it was still a brave man who first ate an Oyster, and that’s one thing I’ll definitely not be eating!

Politically Correctly Dead

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This story is desperately, tragically sad on a number of levels, and also makes me pretty angry.  Read the story – unless you’ve had a very sheltered life (oh, working in the public sector or the hallowed halls of academe or parts of the media)  then it’s almost certain that you’ll have come across  similar situations over the years.  A couple of friends – one white and one from another ethnic background – engage in banter in which each takes the mickey out of the other’s background or ethnicity.  I’ve certainly been there – I’ve had my religion described as a ‘lifestyle choice, not a real religion’ and been described as a ‘white bastard’ and in turn have suggested that we don’t upset one of my friends as he had a rucksack and wasn’t afraid to use it (immediately after the 7/7 bombings here in the UK).

Now, before anyone reading takes instant exception, I should point out that these comments were made in groups of people who love and respect each other, and who’ll almost certainly stay friends until the day they die.  It’s called bantering, having a joke, whatever you want to name it.  It’s happening between individuals who’ve known each other for years, who know exactly what the other people think of them and who also know that when the chips are down, they can call on these friends to help out.

And the bottom line is, that if it’s OK between these folks who’re directly concerned, and they’re not being a deliberate nuisance to anyone else, then it’s no other bugger’s business what X calls Y.  Especially when X and Y are laughing about it and each is giving as good as they get.  It’s called friendship.

It’s tragic that Mr Amor made a joke to his friend, who is black, and who took the joke in good heart, only to be reported by a work colleague.  And then Mr Amor shot himself.  No man should die because he told a politically incorrect joke.  And to be honest, no one should be grassing people up for making a humorous comment about the situation they were in, that the people immediately involved both found amusing.

No sensible person would suggest that jokes at other people’s expense are ever amusing; jokes about race, sexuality or religion told with the deliberate intention of hurting or offending should be dealt with appropriately.  Banter and chit chat between people who’re actually taking the jokes made about them in a good natured way, because they know the people telling them have good hearts, are not the thing, in any sensible world, that should be reported as an offence.

I don’t use the phrase Political Correctness very often on this blog – it’s an over-worked phrase, but today I needed to use it.  Just be careful out there, folks, there are likely to be sneaks listening in to make sure that the banter you and your workmates share together, and that offends no one, is ‘OK’.

It’s not new, of course.  Some years ago in one European country every workplace and block of flats had someone whose job it was to report on whether people they overheard were ‘toeing the party line’ when chatting.  It was East Germany, and the people concerned were agents of the Stasi – the secret police.  And prior to that were the hated ‘Blockleiters’ of Nazi Germany.

Totalitarianism starts small, with small minded people who hate the idea that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.  We need to start telling these people to keep their noses out of our business.

Arrogance 2.0

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Maybe I’m just old, or maybe I just don’t get some aspects of modern business – or are some people online purporting to be business experts just arrogant and opinionated folks with insufficient experience and a habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious as if they’d just discovered a Unified Field Theory?

And what triggered this off?  As frequently happens these days, I came across something on Twitter that just bugged the Hell out of me.  And it was the following:

“Book publishers. Stop talking about cannibalisation. Create and invest in businesses and services which destroy today’s model.”

I guess the reason why this statement annoyed me is that I’ve had books and magazine articles published, starting in the early 1980s, and I suppose I have an emotional attachment to the whole paper based ‘traditional’ publishing business.  One of the aspects of that business I like even now is that there was an element of quality control involved that the current ‘anything goes’ online world lacks.  Those nasty gatekeepers called ‘editors’ used to brass all of us off, but they at least ensured that what was published fitted the style of the magazine, was reasonably well written and was believed to be good enough for other people to spend money on.

Because the traditional publishing business did something that most modern online publishing isn’t managing to do – make money based on quality, focused product.  Why buy content when the Internet is full of it?  Getting people to buy text content is increasingly difficult and I’ve seen more than one magazine that I used to buy regularly go to the wall because of the free availability of published material on the Internet.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is that whilst there might be items of high standard on the Net (I hope I produce a few myself) what is lacking is the focus and selection that went in to a magazine – in one pace you had a series of relevant articles, of high quality.  Over the years we’ve kept getting the promise of ‘The Daily You’ online – a one stop web site which you will be able to configure in such a way as to get material that interests you.  That promise has never delivered.  Whilst there are a number of issues that I have with the concept in general (not going to go in to them here – that’s for another day) the basic problem is that whatever ways have been used to try and put something together that gives us relevant and quality content, like RSS feeds, it’s never quite worked.

To be told by someone ‘go and destroy today’s models’ sounds like iconoclasm of the worst sort.  Destruction of what doesn’t work is one thing;  destruction of a market place and set of products that does work is quite sad, especially when the new products and services coming to replace what is going has elements of ‘The Emporers New Clothes’ about them.  And a lot of ‘new media’ stuff does start with cannibalisation – when you aren’t paying for content, you start by linking to it, re-hashing it, etc.  Whilst there are markets for new, paid for content on the Internet it’s frequently poorly paid and provides little stimulus for authors to spend time in developing engaging content when they’re going to see very little recompense for it.

The freetard mentality is again coming through with so many of these Business 2.0 zealots – I have news for you.  Free doesn’t survive hard times.  It’s not enough to say ‘the content is out there, just find it’.  People like to pay for organised and focused material because it saves them time.  Destroying today’s models before there is anything to replace them is simply the business plan of the would-be market dictator – those who would come to lead a mediocre market with mediocre products because the good stuff has already gone to the wall.

Apple – why 2014 could be like 1984

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Back in 1984, Apple had Ridley Scott direct a very imaginative advert to launch the Macintosh computer.  It ran twice – once on a small TV station late at night to get it in the running for some awards, and the second time at half time in the Superbowl American Football game on 22nd January 1984.  And it never ran again.  The message from Apple was that their new machine would shatter the conformity that people like IBM (and by extension Microosft) were putting on the computer market, by making computing available to the masses.

The advertisement ends with the line:

 “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984″. ”

The problem was that the Macintosh was so expensive that few people could afford it.  It was a pain in the rear to write software for – so relatively few folks wrote software for it, especially as the market was small compared to that offered by the PC.  As it turned out, 1984 wasn’t at all like 1984, but no thanks to the Macintosh which even today, in all it’s forms, occupies only 10% of the computer operating system market space, even if you include iPhones.

From day one, there was always something ‘control freak’ about Macintosh, all of it’s successors, the iPhone and now the iPad.  As I mentioned above, the original Macintoshes were not easy to write software for, and Apple didn’t make life easy for developers.  the situation persists today; to write software for an iPhone, iPod or iPad, you have to run the emulator kit on a Macintosh of some sort.  Let’s do a quick comparison – if I want to develop an application for my Blackberry, I download teh tools from the Blackberry website and get it running on my PC running Windows.  For free.  If I want to write an application for an iPod or iPhone….I first of all have to join the Developer Program at $100 a year.   Then I can download the SDK.  To run the SDK I need a machine running Mac OSX.  Oh look…only Mac’s can legally run Mac OSX…very much a closed garden.

Early Macintoshes came with no network connection; obviously this is no longer the case but it should have given us the hint that Macs were not really designed to talk with the rest of the world.  Fortunately for Apple, some of the people involved saw sense and gradually the more open Macintosh that people use today in it’s numerous forms came in to being.  And gadgets like iPhone, iPod and iPad emerged in to the market, able to interact with the Internet and other media.

But let’s look at what this actually means.  First of all, aaccess to applications and media for these latter machines is very much controlled by Apple in terms of:

  • Control of the means of production – make sure non-Macintosh / Apple users cannot easily develop applications.
  • Control of the means of distribution – iTunes store, various recent high profile cases of applications being banned from the iTunes store makes it difficult to get applications in to the world.
  • Control of the means of communication – these devices lack the ability to easily handle ‘standard’ add ons such as USB or cheap memory cards, like SD.  iPhones have also frequently been tethered to particular telephone companies. 
  • The fact that  iPad comes without Flash, for example, suggests that Apple are adopting a policy of attempting to control content that is usable on their kit.

Let’s ignore the stupidities around making devices reliant on rechargeable batteries in which the battery can only be changed by returning it to the manufacturer. 

The natural progression for Apple would be to continue growing as a media and services company, rather than as a hardware house.  By an iPad, and rely on Apple for much of your available content and software.  And Apple can also ensure that you don’t leave the ‘walled garden’ of Apple acceptable content by making sure that the inbuilt iPad browser doesn’t handle some common media formats like Flash.  How will they fund all this?  Easy – you’ll pay.  Apple have already stated that they are rolling out an advertising model for iPad / iPod / iPhone applications in which the application provider would be able to get 60% of advertisng revenue generated via their application – the other 40% going…well….you know where.

Control of content, hardware and communication.  2014 could very much be like 1984 if Apple gets it’s way.

A hint of mortality

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Today Guy Kewney died of cancer.  He’d been ill with Liver and bowel cancer for a year.  For those of us who got involved in personal and home computing ‘at the start’ Guy was effectively ‘Mr Personal Computer World’.  He didn’t own it, but his column was often the one we all read first.  One of Kewney’s claims to fame was that he invited the ‘Uncle Clive’ persona for Clive Sinclair – true or not I guess we’ll never know, but it did wonders for Sinclair and his machines. Kewney also had a massive amount of influence in terms of how he got a lot of folks interested in writing for the magazines – even those of us who never wrote an article for Kewney felt motivated by him.  There’s a nice piece here by Jon Honeyball, which sums up Kewney pretty well.  The sad thing is that for many people he’ll be remembered not for his journalism, but because the BBC ended up interviewing a taxi driver called Guy Goma instead of Guy Kewney a couple of years ago.  Typical BBC….

I had a certain sympathy with Kewney because he wrote the ‘NewsPrint’ section of PCW which gave industry news- I did a similar job for a few months for a small technology newsletter, and the job almost killed me.  Guy, thanks for the articles and the inspiration.

Over the years I’ve been saddened on a number of occasions by writers that I first encountered in my childhood or teens.  Back in 2008 I commented on the passing of Sir Arthur C Clarke, and a few weeks ago I learnt that a radio amateur called Norman Fitch, who for 21 years had written a column about VHF radio communications for the UK Amateur Radio movement’s ‘house magazine ‘Radio Communications’ had died.  Way back in 1989, I remember reading about the death of a chap called MG Scroggie, who’d written one of the books that got me interested in amateur radio in the first place. 

When Johnny Cash died I was saddened – another part of my childhood passed away.  I guess that when people that we grew up knowing, or those that are our contemporaries, die, it’s a constant reminder of our own mortality.

And oddly enough, whilst I’ve been writing this piece, I heard that Malcolm McLaren, one time manager of the Sex pistols and arguably the creator of much of the UK Punk Scene – and very much a figure from my own teens – has also died today at the age of 64.

Too few experiments in school science

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I’m a science geek – always have been, always will be.  When I was a kid I had microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets – anything that allowed me to do experiments.  By the time I went to secondary school I was already pretty practically inclined in the laboratory, having done quite a few of the experiments that I was expected to do at school in the garden shed at home.  Fortunately I managed to avoid explosions, poisoning, fire and accidentally opening portals to other universes a la Fringe.  I appreciate that i was lucky in having parents and an aunt and uncle who actively supported my interest in matters scientific.

Articles like this from the BBC, noting that there is inadequate experimental science done in schools, sadden me greatly.  In the early 1980s I was involved with writing computer software for schools.  It was suggested back then that ‘virtual labs’ could replace some of the practical work carried out, saving money, reducing the need for equipment and also offering health and safety advantages.  I was quite a supporter of this idea for a while – thankfully some of my colleagues talked me out of it.  They were wise enough to realise that so much of science education is the tactile, the experiential – the smells, sounds and sights of experimentation. 

It’s easy to think that there is little value in repeating ‘classic’ experiments – after all, the answer is already known!  However, the importance is in understanding what theories the experimental results supports and in learning how to actually do an experiment – the theory and practice of the scientific method.   And there’s enormous value to be obtained in experiments when, despite care and attention, the results aren’t what’s expected – that is when true scientific investigation can begin at any age.

Unless we do something to re-discover the rich practical experiences offered to science pupils 20 or 30 years ago, it’s inevitable that the standing of this country in terms of research and industry will falter.  We cannot built a modern scientific and technological economy based purely n the ‘soft science’ that seems to be offered in today’s classrooms.  Whilst it’s useful to be able to debate the pros and cons of social policies on scientific issues, it’s equally important to be able to identify fallacies in scientific arguments, and perhaps even put together simple experiments to demonstrate complex issues – after all, ‘hands on’ experiences tend to cement learning.

A breathtaking example of how simple, practical science brings home concepts was given by the late Richard Feynman during the enquiry in to the explosion that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle.  In a simple experiment involving ice water and a piece of rubber, he showed that at low temperatures the rubber (which was the material used as O ring seals on the booster rockets of the Challenger) became hard and distinctly un-rubbery, and was no longer fit for purpose.  He cut through months of bullshit in 5 minutes, in an experiment of elegant simplicity and with a little showmanship.  The perfect demonstration of scientific principles applied to solving a major engineering disaster.

My own contribution to trying to make science a more practical business for both school and home is a new web site I’m starting up called Hands On Science.  It’s hopefully going to be full of experiments and demonstrations that can be done with the minimum of equipment but that demonstrate in an interesting way many scientific principles.  It’s only just started up, but I’d welcome comments over the weeks to come – and ideas!

The ‘father’ of home computers dies…

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A few days ago one of the pioneers of the home computer revolution of the 1970s died.  Ed Roberts, an MD in Georgia, died after a long battle with Pneumonia.  Back in the 1970s his company, MITS, moved from model rocket telemetry, to calculators, then to building the first ‘computer kit’ – the Altair 8800 – for which Bill Gates and Paul Allen provided a BASIC interpreter.  The Linux and Apple Fanbois amongst you may now know who to blame for Microsoft… 🙂

It’s debatable that without the Altair 8800 another home computer – in kit or ready built form – would have come along.  The Apple 2 followed behind theAltair, as did many other similar machines, but the Altair was first.

The Altair 8800 was basically a microprocessor chip with enough associated ‘gubbins’ to make it work – it could be chipped up to have 8k of memory – my laptop here has 4,000,000 k of memory – and could even handle a keyboard and eventually a video display – although when you got it out of the box (and after you’d soldered the thing together) it'[s user interface was a bank of toggle switches and some LEDs.

Yup – you programmed it, entered data and read the output in binary.  It was safe to say that in the mid 1970s, as far as computers were concerned, men were real men, women were real women, and real programmers did it in binary with a soldering iron tucked behind their ear. The fact that within 10 years of the Altair being launched teenagers were typing their own programs in to Spectrums, ZX-81s, BBC Micros, Apples and the rest is a monument to the excitement and speed of those early days of computing.

And, by golly, it was FUN! Even the act of getting your computer working in the first place was part of the game – you learnt to code in machine code from day one because either nothing else was available or you realised that in order to make anything useful happen with only a few HUNDRED bytes of memory you needed to right VERY ‘tight’ code.

I built my first computer in the mid-1970s – well, not so much a computer as a programmable calculator.  I took an electronic calcul;ator and wired up the keyboard to some circuitry of my own invention that mimicked keypresses.  Programming this beast involved changing the wiring in my circuit – running teh program involved pressing a button and after a few seconds the answer would appear.  I then got even smarter, and managed to work out how to introduce some decision making in to my gadget.  Fortunately, I blew the output of the calculator up soon afterwards – I say fortunately because I then found out about microprocessors and ended up building some simple computer circuits around 6800 and Z80 microprocessors, rather than carrying on with my rather ‘steampunk’ programmable calculator!

Ed Roberts’s machine wasn’t an option for me; my pocket money wouldn’t cover the postage from the US.  But the fact that people were doing this sort of thing was very exciting, and by the time I left university in 1982 I’d already spent time with ZX81s and Apple 2s, and had written my first article for the home computer press – a machine code monitor and loader program for the ZX81 in ‘Electronics and Computing Monthly’.  I was reading in the magazines about the developments of software from up and coming companies like Microsoft – even in those pre-PC days – and for a few years in the early 1980s the computing field in the UK was a mish-mash of different machines, kits, ready made stuff – and most people buying these machines bought them to program them.  How different to today.

I have to say that I’ve always thought that the fun went out of home computing when the PC came along, and when Microsoft and Apple stopped being ‘blokes in garages’ and started being real companies.

Ed Roberts – thank you for those fun packed years!

Dr Who – lazy writing or social engineering?

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And so the new incarnation of Dr Who has his first adventure on BBC One, with 27 year old Matt Smith as the latest actor to portray the eponymous Time Lord.  The one thing about Doctors these days is that if you don’t like the current one, there’ll probably be another one along in a couple of years…. 🙂

As well as teh Doctor, we have his new assistant, Amy Pond, played by Karen Gillan, who encounters the Doctor whilst dressed as a Kissogram Policewoman and agrees to travel with him.  She does, however, insist that she comes back before the following morning, as she has ‘stuff’ to do.  What we know, but what she doesn’t tell the Doctor, is that the stuff is her Wedding Day.

Hold on a minute…picking up a new assistant at the time of her Wedding…haven’t we been there before with the dreadful Donna Noble, who turns up in the TARDIS actually in her Wedding Dress on the day of her Wedding?  Come on folks – that is laziness of the highest order.  There are lots of ways in which assistants have been introduced to the Doctor, but to have two of them introduced in what has to be an unusual way like this is really lazy writing and serious imagination failure.

Or…could it be another piece of social engineering on behalf of the Dr Who / Torchwood writing ‘establishment’?  OK – I know that may seem a little extreme but I’ve muttered on numerous occasions in the past about the rather ‘heavy handed’ PC attitudes that have permeated some of the episodes of both Doctor Who and Torchwood – to the degree that some of the dialogue grates.  Several of the characters have frequently seemed to fit a set of PC stereotypes, and I’m afraid that this introduction of a second assistant at a point in which she is basically committing herself to a traditional lifestyle again grates. 

Just think about it – a Doctor who appears to be getting increasingly younger with each incarnation, in looks and behaviour.  An occasional character in the form of Jack Harkness who cannot die and is forever young.  A young woman running away from what some folks would label the ‘humdrum’ of normal life.  Just seems a little bit ‘Lost Boys’ here – reflecting a lifestyle and belief structure in which people are unwilling to grow up.

A millstone around their necks

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Easter is the holiest time of the year for Christians – this year has been special for all the wrong reasons as well, though.  The recent stories around what appears to be institutionalised failings in dealing with accusations of and cases of Child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in different parts of the world are the sort of things that make any decent people – Catholic or Protestant, believer or non-believer, recoil in horror from the initial breach of trust and then the ongoing failure of the institutions and organisations involved to deal effectively with the offenders.

The fact that some of the stories also allegedly involved a department of the Church that was the responsibility of the current Pope, then Cardinal Ratzinger, makes the whole situation so much worse.  The Pope himself has commented on the affair; the institution of the Vatican, on the other hand, seems to have made a total mess of every aspect of the business, and one can only hope that the legal authorities in the countries in which these crimes have taken place can get enough evidence together to pursue the whole business through the legal system, and clean house where the Vatican has failed to do so.

Because it is essential that this business IS cleared up as soon as possible; the victims need justice and if at all possible what compensation and restitution can be offered.  The Church needs to be able to show that it has acted, and needs to be able to start regaining the trust of ALL Christians.  Whilst I continue to have Faith in Jesus Christ, and faith in the Anglican Church as an institution, my trust in the institution of the Catholic Church – not, I should add, individual Catholics – is currently being sorely tried.

I feel that the Archbishop of Canterbury didn’t go far enough in his recent comments, particularly after the Pope parked a few Ecclesiastical Tanks on the Lawn of Lambeth Palace in the issue of women Bishops in the Church of England.  But that, as they say, is another story.

For me, any cover-up is unacceptable; the Roman Catholic Church can not pretend these things didn’t happen; the current sight of senior Vatican officials doing the equivalent of standing there with their eyes and ears closed, hoping the whole thing will go away, is the most un-edifying and un-Christian thing that could possibly be done, and I hope that if proof of cover up and conspiracy is found, all responsible will be bought to justice.

There is a Biblical precedent which I hope that the abusers and their apologists will bear in mind.  Matthew 18:6, to be exact.  The King James Translation – still the best, as far as I’m concerned – says it wonderfully.

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

There we go.  Millstones, anyone?

And there’s one more thing…

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My guilty secret for today – I love ‘Columbo’.  No, not Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka, but Columbo, dishevelled Los Angeles murder squad detective in the 1970s TV detective series of the same name.  I’ve just watched an episode this afternoon – it’s sort of comfort TV for me, I have to admit.  No matter how smart the villain, how heinous the crime, you know that Columbo will eventually get his man (or woman) – you even get to see, in the first 15 minutes or so, the murder take place, who did it and how he did it.  The trick for Columbo, and the entertainment for the viewers, is trying to work out what tiny error the villain of the piece has made that will eventually be spotted by our scruffy and (at first glance) slow-witted hero and that will lead to their downfall.

Yes, it’s a derivative and predictable formula – and I think that that’s what makes it such wonderful ‘comfort TV’ – you know roughly what you’re going to get, how it’ll be paced, etc.  Classic ‘cliche’ Westerns were known as ‘horse operas’ – they had the same predictability of structure as did theatrical operas.  The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of the ‘space opera’ in science fiction – similarly stylised stories based on mainstream adventures, and of course we’re all aware of the soap opera – the less said about that particular genre, the better! 🙂

Columbo is undeniably ‘crime opera’ – it grew out of a series called ‘Mystery Movie’ that used to run on Tuesday or Wednesday evenings on, I think, ITV in the 1970s – it featured a number of different crime investigation based series – Macmillan and Wife and Banacek were two others I particularly remember.  They were staples of TV consumption in the Pritchard household in my adolescence, and I have particular memories of them being on TV whilst I was doing homework or dashing in and out of the garden!  Just like an opera which, by tradition, isn’t over until the fat lady has sung, an episode of Columbo isn’t anywhere near over until he’s turned to teh murderer when leaving a room, asked ‘Sir…just one more thing?’ and then asked the question that will eventually break the case. 

One of the things I love about Columbo – and I think a lot of the actors who took part also loved it – is that you get the chance to see a lot of stars play murderers or  victims.  Two of my personal favourites are Johnny Cash – playing a murderous musician – and Patrick McGoohan.  McGoohan turns up a couple of times as a murderer – in one episode he plays the commander of a military academy, and in a second episode he’s the campaign manager for a politician.  I doubt that this sort of casting would be possible today, and it’s a shame.

The ongoing ‘in jokes’ in Columbo – his rather elderly Peugeot car, his habit of getting mistaken for a delivery man or (worse still) tramp due to his dress, his apparent forgetfulness and rambling anecdotes – all contribute to the charm of the show.  And it IS a charming show – it’s gentle, mannered and definitely reflects a different age of TV entertainment as far as TV cop shows are concerned.  For me it provides happy memories of a time when my life was certainly simpler, and a reflection back on a world that seems much further away in history than 30 years.  And the stories and writing – there’s no post modernism, no ‘knowing nods’ to the audience.  It takes itself, on the whole, seriously and it works.

Now…how on Earth would he get on with Gene Hunt?