The Big Balls of Courage?

Apparently, to be a true 'warrior' you have to have big balls.  Literally, it seems.  Self styled US Secretary of 'War' Pete Hegseth's latest obsession is apparently the testosterone levels of US servicemen - he thinks they have to be sky high if they are to be effective killing machines, sorry, 'warriors'.  It seems that there are to be compulsory tests of testosterone levels for US servicemen, with booster shots on offer if they are too low.  No, I'm not making this up, it's the latest policy announced by Hegseth.  Bearing in mind this buffoon's intelligence levels, he probably really does think that you can measure male testosterone levels by the size of someone's balls.  So his compulsory tests will probably involve lines of soldiers dropping their pants and having their knackers sized up.  You can just see it, some Master Sergeant taking a tape measure or steel rule to soldiers' testicles, weighing them up on a set of scales in order to decide whether they 'make the grade'.  Of course, this obsession with testosterone levels might end up conflicting with one of Hegseth's other obsessions, that of beards.  Having declared war on facial hair in the military, (and very upset at the fact that it is being ignored in many quarters), it seems somewhat perverse to propose injecting servicemen with testosterone, which could well promote facial hair growth.

Yes, we all should be worried - the idiocracy truly has arrived and the self-styled 'world's most powerful nation' is currently in the hands of the sort of morons who take everything literally:  they really do think that when someone is described as having cojones, it means, quite literally, that they have big balls which account for their supposed bravery.  It's the sort of simplistic world view that equates testosterone-driven aggression and thuggery with the idea of a 'warrior class'.  The likes of Hegseth have clearly seen far too many ludicrous Hollywood action films and read far too many war comics.  Next thing, they'll be promoting military guys on the size of their dicks - nothing under ten inches if you want to be a general.  It is perhaps appropriate to reiterate here that the Ancient Greeks, considered the progenitors of western thought and civilisation, were of the opinion that, far from being a sign of prowess, large genitalia were an indication of a bestial, unintelligent and uncivilised nature.  Which why most male sculptures from the era are modestly endowed - that was considered a sign of civilised values.  Something for Hegseth and his buddies to ponder on, I think.

In the Dark...

I don't want to keep harping on about this Ann Widdecombe business, but with the police investigation seemingly in chaos and contradicting itself, isn't it about time that they called in Miss Marple?  I mean, this sort of thing is right up her street: some bigoted old spinster gets offed in a remote and obscure village in the rural south west of England, there's no shortage of people who hated her thanks to her views and political connections, while the local police are a bunch of carrot crunchers.  I'm sure that Miss Marple would have it all tied up in no time, with assistance from the local vicar's daughter and the village cub scout pack.  Now, at this point, I was going to go off onto a complete tangent about some model railway stuff I'd just bought at this evening's local model train and toy fair, but at just after ten, the power went out, meaning that I have no internet, other than the very expensive minutes on my mobile phone - some of which I've been forced to waste making an outage report to the electricity company, (you can't just call them and report this sort of thing anymore - you have to fill in, in the pitch dark with a half charged phone, bloody online forms).  But hey - it's just come back on, so let's hope that, once the broadband connection has reset, it stays on long enough to get this finished and posted.  So, anyway, the stuff I got tonight:

These are a couple of the old Hornby 57ft coaches from the late 70s/early 80s.  They were actually mostly based around a generic moulding with a few variations to produce 'Southern', 'Great Western' and 'LNER' coaches. The latter had beading around the windows and doors and a teak finish, while the only difference between the 'Southern' and 'GWR' coaches, apart from the liveries, were their roof designs.  The upper of the two here was a unique later addition to the range, a restaurant/buffet car that was only offered in GWR (and later BR Western Region) livery.  The lower one is the 'Southern' version of the corridor composite.  I have no idea what I'm going to do with them -  they were bought on a whim because they  were cheap.  Both will undoubtedly be repainted and renumbered, then I'll figure out what to do with them - the 'Southern' coach will probably end up as part of a boat train formation.

These three are some rather tatty Trix wagons which I picked up very cheaply.  They all have various marks on their bodies, (the container wagon's other size has what look like several melt marks from a soldering iron on it). and one has a missing coupling.  But there's nothing that can't be repaired (even the soldering iron attack aftermath).  These will supplement my Trix locos and, with the use of the converter wagons I now have, will also be able to run in formations with stock and locos with Triang-style couplings.  

Well, the power's still on, (I'm guessing that it was a tripped fuse at the sub-station, although, until they find out why it tripped, there's a risk it'll go out again), so I'll post this and e-mail the police as to why they haven't got Miss Marple on the Widdecombe case yet... 

Disrespecting the Dead?

I see that the right-wing snowflakes have been out in force following this Ann Widdecombe business, working themselves up into their usual frenzy of self-righteousness over anyone perceived as 'disrespecting' their fallen 'heroine'.  We had their 'thought police' in the form of the right-wing press fuming because Sky's Adam Boulton had apparently described her as an 'old maid' and a 'spinster', forcing him to issue an apology.  Now, I'm no fan of Boulton, although his Alistair Campbell-induced on air meltdown in the aftermath of the 2010 general election was hugely entertaining, but seriously, we're meant to condemn him for simply stating facts?  It's a fact that Widdecombe never married, making her, by definition, a spinster and at her age, 'old maid' is also a pretty fair description.  If I'd been in his position, the only apology I'd have issued would have been along the lines of  - 'I'm sorry that you are so oversensitive that you feel the need to censor public speech you don't deem to be 'woke' enough'.  I mean, it's just political correctness gone mad, isn't it?  Bloody right wing woke bastards getting upset over nothing!  It's just words, for God's sake!  

But we're back in that strange world where you aren't allowed to speak ill of the dead.  Well, not if they were some kind of right-wing icon, that is.  I'm sure that if, say, Jeremy Corbyn, had passed away, regardless of whether he had died of natural causes, or been assassinated by an axe-wielding neo Nazi maniac, indoctrinated by years of listening to the speeches of Nigel Farage, whilst making jam or planting tomato plants on his allotment, the right-wing press would all be telling us that he had been a loony left-wing extremist hell-bent on having us all raped and murdered by one-legged transsexual illegal immigrant terrorists.  Yet if, say, I was to (accurately), describe the late Ms Widdecombe as a 'bigoted old biddy', then I'd doubtless find myself facing the opprobrium of her, equally batty and bigoted, admirers.  It's the same across the pond, where politicians from across the board feel obliged to find positive things to say about the recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that he was a hypocritical Trump-enabling right-wing reactionary who had long ago destroyed whatever credibility he might once have had.  We really need to start questioning all this nonsense about 'respecting the dead' and 'not speaking ill of the dead'.  Look, once someone is dead we can say what we like about them - legally speaking, you can't libel the dead - so why are we so reticent about actually speaking the truth about them?  Just because I think, correctly, that Ann Widdecombe espoused and worse still, put into practice when in government, some utterly repugnant ideas which should have no place in any civilised society, doesn't mean to say that I think she deserved to be bludgeoned to death.  I'm entitled to express my opinion, for God's sake.  It's called 'free speech' you right-wing woke warrior snowflakes!

White Rage

It was another of those times when you could just feel that mixture of fury and frustration emanating from the racists over on Twitter when a suspect in the Anne Widdicombe was arrested and turned out to be a white British national.  Once again, their dreams of stirring up more race hate, a few riots and some burnings down of hostels housing asylum seekers had been foiled by inconvenient facts.   They'd all been banking on it being a racially-motivated murder and had already started drooling over the sort of provocative headlines that would follow the killing of a well known extreme right-wing politician with hardline views on immigration, by a non-white perpetrator, preferably an illegal immigrant.  So, naturally, they're all venting their frustrations, raging how the police wouldn't have mentioned the suspect's race if they'd been non-white, (despite the fact that nowadays, thanks to lobbying by extremists like them, the authorities have to mention such things, regardless of relevance), and trying to find ways to redefine 'white' as maybe 'not quite white', or clutching to straws, like the idea that the suspect might actually be a naturalised UK citizen from Eastern Europe.  It's surely only a matter of time before they start claiming that the suspect is non-white, but wearing 'white face' as a disguise.

Maybe  the usual rent-a-fascist mob will gather outside wherever the suspect is being held and try to storm the place, armed with damp cloths with which they'll try to wipe the 'white face' off to reveal that they are actually a Somali illegal immigrant.  Indeed, maybe this could be the start of a new campaign by the right-wing press to expose the 'army' of disguised illegals living, unsuspected, in local communities.  'How many of them are living amongst us?  Is your neighbour a secret illegal immigrant?  Do they ever go out in the rain?'  Readers could be encouraged to 'accidentally' spray suspected neighbours with a hosepipe, to see if their 'whiteness' washes off, (obviously, hosepipe bans have nothing to do with the heatwave - they're a liberal conspiracy to stop the exposure of those illegals falsely living as whites).  Doubtless any white celebrities who have spoken compassionately about the plight of immigrants and asylum seekers will be targeted as potential illegals in disguise. 'Is Gary Lineker really a Bangladeshi immigrant?  He comes from Leicester and the place is full of brown people - is he secretly one of them?  We challenge him to wash his face live on TV to see if the white comes off!'.  After all, everybody in the tabloid media knows that you can really boost sales if you can link celebrities to a contentious issue - who cared about peadophiles until they started unmasking celebs as kiddy fiddlers?  So, why not do it with immigration?  It's only logical.

One of Us?

God help me, I think I'm beginning to become acclimatised to these plus thirty temperatures.  I've found this latest bout far easier to live with than the previous two.  Of course, the wider question is just how acclimatised to Nigel Farage's grift the voters of Clacton have become.  Because that seems to be the main plank of his campaign for re-election in a self-inflicted and entirely unnecessary by-election: 'What's the world coming to when a man can't accept the odd five million quid here and there without having to account for it?  It's bloody outrageous!'  A bold platform to campaign on - I mean, I'm sure that many, many people in Clacton can identify with his dilemma.  But while the whole business seems to be sliding into farce - with the main parties refusing to play Fartage's game and not running candidates, it looks like he'll be spending the campaign debating a man with a bin on his head - there is, obviously, a fundamental principle at stake here: the accountability of elected representatives.  It's clear that Reform UK doesn't subscribe to the idea that if you are elected to office, then you are held to a higher standard and that all of your conduct, particularly your financial affairs, are up for scrutiny.  At least, they don't accept that such standards apply to them - they seem more than happy, though, to try and call members of other parties to account for alleged transgressions. 

Farage can wriggle around at claim that, technically, he wasn't an MP when he accepted that five million so it didn't have to be declared, but the fact is that he is an MP now and bearing in mind his interest in promoting dodgy crypto-schemes, (lobbying the Bank of England not to impose restrictions on transactions, even), the fact that he accepted this sum from a crypto-currency billionaire is a matter of legitimate public interest.  Trying to avoid accountability in the matter by resigning and forcing a by-election so that he can try and turn the whole issue into one of 'The Establishment vs The Little Guy', is so transparently dishonest that surely nobody is fooled.  But then again, part of his success has been based around selling himself to voters as 'one of them' - despite the fact that, even before that five million quid - he was a very wealthy individual from a privileged background - he's a public school boy - with a prior career in the city.  But this time, he may have overstepped in this regard: 'ordinary' people don't get cash gifts of that kind.  Moreover, he won't be up against 'The Establishment' in this by-election - he'll be up against Count Binface, who could be heading for a record share of the vote in a by-election.  It'll certainly be more than the ninety five votes he got at the Makerfield by-election.   It's all pointless, anyway.  If Farage wins and resumes his position as MP for Clacton, then the Standards Committee investigation into the five million will simply resume and could result in another by-election being forced upon the voters of Clacton.

Yesterday's Zaniness...

Just recently I've watched a number of episodes of the Kenny Everett Video Show.  I'm not sure his posthumous reputation as some kind of 'zany comedy genius' can stand many more of these repeats.  This is the show he did for ITV, for its final series, it became Kenny Everett's Video Cassette, but the format was much the same.  Anyway, watching it now, it is hard to believe that this was ever considered 'cutting edge', let alone 'daring'.  Basically, each episode is simply a platform for a couple of performances from well known pop acts of the era, punctuated by some very weak, sub-Monty Python shenanigans, some involving Everett dressing up as various characters and cracking lots of corny old jokes and the dance group Hot gossip performing some supposedly 'naughty' routines.  The lack of a studio audience doesn't help - instead we hear the studio crew cackling away every so often, which simply gives the impression that this is Everett performing for his mates down the pub.  The only segments which still seem mildly amusing are the animated 'Captain Kremmen' episodes - by the final series, though, these had been replaced by vastly inferior live action versions.  It's not that it is irredeemably awful - Everett exudes a great deal of charisma which carries the show through its many longueurs - it is just that even when it was made, it was all very old hat and derivative.  That, combined with an air of quiet desperation which accompanies many of the skits, (they aren't developed sufficiently to be described as sketches), leaves one wondering just why Everett was so popular back in the day.

I have to admit, that I never saw these shows when they were first transmitted, so this isn't a case of revisionism on my part.  Perhaps younger me would have found them amusing at the time, but decades later, they do little for me.  I came to Kenny Everett on TV after he moved his show to the BBC and it became the Kenny Everett Television Show, an entirely different kettle of fish.  This was a fully fledged sketch show, where Everett's characters were given more room to develop and better scripts.  The range of characters on display was wider, with running gags and catchphrases established, helping the show to achieve a much more polished finish - it actually felt like a proper TV show rather than simply a self indulgent video Everett had recorded with his mates.  The presence of a studio audience not made up of employees and mates helped - the laughter didn't feel forced.  It proved a popular format, propelling Everett into the mainstream of TV entertainment.  But, inevitably, he threw his success away, not by breaking broadcasting standards, as he has when working on BBC radio, instead by appearing at a pre-election political rally for Maggie Thatcher.  He made all kinds of excuses for his appearance and various of his friends and associates tried to claim that he was essentially non-political or even politically naive, claiming he only appeared at the Tory rally because they'd asked him first, but it was to no avail - he'd alienated part of his audience.  It's difficult to present yourself as an anti-establishment, anarchic, comedian when you end up supporting the most establishment political figure of the time.  Viewing figures for his show began to decline - perhaps coincidentally, because it certainly felt as if it was past its prime and running out of steam - and Everett gradually vanished from our screens.  As I say, looking back now at his ITV show, on which his TV fame was built, it's difficult to see why it was considered so 'daring' - maybe it's a case that you had to be there at the time to understand it's success.

Glorious Counter Revolution (Part Two)

Getting back to that idea of bringing the US back under the umbrella of British rule after their, frankly disastrous (for the rest of the world) 250 year experiment in independence, I think that we need to do more to expose their foundation myth as the pack of lies it really is.  As we've already established, that whole business about throwing off the shackles of a tyrannical king was all utter bollocks - George III, like every British monarch since William and Mary was a constitutional monarch with very limited powers.  It was really about the fact these revolting colonists didn't want to pay tax - most specifically the taxes which would pay for the UK's defence of them against the expansionist French, (we were, after all, in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars at the time).  But even then, it wasn't quite that simple, as it wasn't everyone who would have been paying the lion's share of those taxes, the main burden would have fallen on the wealthy. Like their 'Founding Fathers'.  These guys were the eighteenth century equivalent to today's billionaires and, like those contemporary guys, just don't see why they should pay tax.  Any tax.  So, again, just like today, these rich creeps decided to manipulate the populace into acting against their own interests.  Rather than trying to buy the system to elect their own right-wing millionaire clown, they instead cooked up a revolution by mobilising the masses against British rule.  Which, of course, involved lots of misinformation about the British.  Like the King being a tyrannical absolute monarch.

One of the supposed key events in working up this revolutionary fever was the so called 'Boston Massacre', when British soldiers allegedly opened fire on protesters in Boston, resulting in casualties.  It was the basis for much revolutionary propaganda.  But, bearing in the mind the parallels we've been drawing between 'Founding Fathers' and today's billionaires and their MAGA mobs, how do we know that these really were British soldiers?  I mean, the MAGA crazies like to claim that those January sixth whackos weren't really extreme right-wing Trump thugs fired up by Trump himself, but actually Antifa agitators in disguise, their actions designed to discredit Trump and his supporters and backers.  This is a narrative spun not just by the usual online crazies, but by wealthy Trump supporters, too.  So, is it inconceivable that those wealthy 'Founding Fathers' didn't organise some revolutionary cronies to dress up as British soldiers and shoot colonists in order to ferment dissent and slander the British?  Far fetched?  No more than that Antifa-disguised-as-MAGA January Sixth bollocks - and large numbers of Americans seemed happy to swallow that, so why shouldn't we use our version to further erode their foundation myths?

Because, you know, it's important to disabuse Americans of their self-aggrandising creation myths, from which they derive their extraordinary hubris that makes them think that they are somehow the God's 'chosen people', the 'Land of the Free' and the 'Greatest Nation on Earth'.  While Trump's reign might have started to beat some humility into some of them as a result of the US' subsequent lack of popularity in the rest of the world, it's important to remember that Trump isn't really that much of an aberration.  The US has always been a hypocritical bully that likes to preach its supposed democratic values at the rest of the world whilst simultaneously taking opportunistic advantage of the misfortunes and weakness of other nations in order to extend its wealth and power.  It's just that under Trump, the bullying and hypocrisy is undisguised.  But with their perfidy out in the open, it means that we no longer have to listen to their tiresome lectures about their supposed moral superiority, their claims to be a bastion of free speech or how we all 'owe' them for World War Two. (ignoring the fact they couldn't be bothered to turn up until some of us had already been holding off the fascists for nearly three years).  It's time we started reminding them that, in reality, their whole state was founded on lies, the creation of a bunch of super-rich scumbags who gaslit their population into a 'revolution', which swapped rule by an elected parliament (albeit in London), for rule by the aforementioned super-rich under the cloak of local 'democracy'.  An exaggeration?  Well, maybe a bit, but ultimately I'm so tired of being lectured by Americans about the UK's 'awful' imperialist past and all the bad shit done in our names back then.  But at least we acknowledge the evils of our past and accept that our prosperity was based upon the exploitation of weaker nations.  So, I think it's about time the Yanks started critically evaluating their history and accepting that their prosperity is equally based upon the bullying and exploitation of weaker nations and that they also have been responsible for a lot of nasty shit.  They aren't the greatest nation on earth by a long chalk, just another country founded on the lies of the rich.

Some Seventies Sitcoms Revisited

Seventies sitcoms are a funny thing - and not necessarily funny in the way intended by the makers.  Watching them now, from a distance of fifty-plus years, you are sometimes left wondering exactly why some of them were so popular at the time.  Of course, in part, for me, the answer lies, partially, in the fact that when I first saw them, I was a child and far less critical, not to mention far less aware of the gender, class and racial politics that underpinned the humour.  While most of them seem dated, to put it mildly, I many of their attitudes, as always, we have to put it all in context and accept that, at the time of their making, these merely reflected the wider social values of the time.  Well, usually.  Even as a child back in the seventies I thought 'hilarious' ITV race comedy Love Thy Neighbour was offensive, it's supposed humourous look at race relations in the UK simply an excuse to for having every offensive racial epithet for non-whites spoken on air in the guise of it all being 'a joke'.  'But the black characters give as good as they get', was the excuse used by the makers.  Except that a black man calling a white man 'honky' (the extent of the white epithets used), is in no way equivalent to a white man calling a black man by the N-word (amongst other offensive terms).  Mind Your Language, which came later in the seventies is another ITV sitcom which often gets bracketed with Love Thy Neighbour as being irredeemably racially offensive, but, having recently seen most of the first series again, for the first time since its first screening, I'm left feeling somewhat ambivalent about it.

The thing about Mind Your Language - which is based around a class of English as a Foreign Language students and the tribulations of their teacher as he tries to teach them the language - is that it isn't so much that it bandies about racial epithets, but that it trades in some truly outrageous racial and cultural stereotypes.  Where it does employ terms of fairly mild racial abuse, it puts them in the mouths of non-white characters, most notably the Pakistani and Sikh students, who engage in an ongoing war of words.  At the time, this must have seemed a smart way to get away with generating a few cheap laughs from their use without seeming to be endorsing white vs black race hate.  But it is those stereotypes which seem most jarring today - they really are crude in the extreme, but at least not confined to non-white characters.  Whilst the Pakistani, Sikh and Indian characters do, indeed, speak in the stereotypical 'amusing' fashion popularised by Peter Sellers, complete with mispronunciations and malapropisms, so do the Greek, Italian, Spanish, Austrian, French, Japanese and Chinese characters, just with different accents.  They all conform to the appropriate cultural stereotypes: the Austrian woman is stern and frosty, the French girl a sexy tease, the Italian guy a sex maniac, the Chinese girl a propaganda-spouting devotee of Chairman Mao and so on.  The thing is that the stereotypes are so lazily obvious, that they simply fail to offend.  That, combined with the fact that the characters, regardless of race and culture, are presented as being sympathetic defuses the potential offensiveness of the situation.  Which isn't to say that the series isn't as corny as hell, peddling in hoary old jokes and running through all the farcical stock situations so beloved of seventies sitcoms.  But was very popular back in the late seventies.  So popular was it in overseas markets that, incredibly, five years or so after its initial run had ended, another series was made for export, featuring many of the same characters and stereotypes.  Even foreigners, it seems, can enjoy a good stereotype, even of themselves...

Travelling Hopefully...

According to Robert Louis Stevenson, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  Well, I'm betting that he wasn't trying to get to the coast from Crapchester on a summer's day.  It's just as well that I find the sight and sound of the sea relaxing - I needed to unwind after the nightmare journey down today.  OK, OK, I know that I started out late, so got caught up with school traffic and the like, but there was really no excuse for the sort of insanity on display on the roads today.  Along with far too many roadworks.  I was hoping that the journey back this evening would be easier, it usually is, but no, I found myself constantly hindered by slow drivers in front of me, tailgaters behind, over hesitant learners and even some idiots racing horses and buggies on the last stretch of dual carriageway before home.  I kid you not on that last one - it really happened, not for the first time, either.  So, was it all worth the effort and trauma?  Well, with more crazy temperatures forecast next week, I decided that I'd take the opportunity for a day out when it was warm enough to enjoy the beach, but still cool enough for getting stuck in seemingly interminable traffic jams without suffering heatstroke.  So, from that point of view it was worthwhile.  Plus, the beach made for a more unusual venue for my daily walk than the local park.  

Anyway, this was my second trip to the New Forest this week - the first time I've visited since they started charging for parking there.  The effects of the charges can already be seen: near empty car parks everywhere.  I know it is still early in the season, but in my experience, there's usually far more visitors than I saw evidence of at this time of the year.  The charges are an absolute pain - like most people I'll habitually visit a number of venues in the New Forest in the course of a day trip.  Now, it'll not only cost me a small fortune every time I go down there, but I'll have to go through the rigmarole of trying to pay via phone (they offer no alternative).  It's one of those bloody systems where you have to speak your registration number - which their software inevitably tells you it can't hear, or turns out to have completely misheard it.  Meaning, of course, going round the houses again and again - racking up charges all the time, which, of course, is the point of the exercise.  It does no good to try the option of texting the reg number as, when you call back, it claims not to have received it - more costs racked up.  I ended up shouting my registration down the phone in order for it to be correctly taken.  I then had to waste more time getting it to understand the make of my car - apparently it's never heard of a Saab.  Yet more shouting.  Incredibly, you can key in your card details - begging the question of why you can't key in the other details?  I must have wasted nearly half an hour trying to pay for an hour's parking on what Forestry England claims is a car park but, in reality, is simply a strip of unmaintained gravel at the entrance of an enclosure.  Bearing in mind that the New Forest is a national park and therefore belongs to the nation, ie taxpayers like me, it really is a bloody liberty to be trying to rinse us for money like this.

After Hours: Confessions of a Sex Pest From Outer Space

Back in the world of After Hours, can Dan guess who the real celebrity sinner is in ‘It’s a Sin!’? We get a preview of the new, non-woke, ‘Doctor Who’, while The-Man-in-the-Pub ponders the existence of an entirely unknown (to the public) regeneration of The Doctor. ‘Consumer Eye’, meanwhile, investigates a dodgy ‘On the Day’ hearse hire app, with explosive consequences, while the ‘Downey Bit Spaceman’, who terrorised the female inhabitants of a small village, is exposed, before we go behind the scenes at a tabloid newspaper.

Listen Here: Confessions of a Peeping Tom From Outer Space 

‘After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio, Chat GPT Reader and FreeTTS.  Sound effects by Freesound Community via Pixababy.  Music: ‘Spin the Wheel’ and ‘Cold House Files’ by Cosmiczebra via Suno.

We're at episode five already.  My battle to keep the running time continues, a battle I seem to be comprehensively losing.  Despite cutting out virtually all the inter-segment breaks, this one still weighs in at thirty four minutes.  It's still my aim to get down to around the thirty minute mark.  I think that next time around, I'll be curtailing somewhat The-Man-in-the-Pub's ramblings, as he is regularly the longest item in any given episode.  Anyway, overall, I'm pretty pleased with this episode overall - there is more completely original material, as opposed to stuff adapted from The Sleaze, than in previous editions.  I have no idea what's going to be in the next one so, until then, enjoy this one.