Sir Cliff Richard
Discussion
Oakey said:
The only thing worse than him not telling us who he is, is you alluding to knowing and not saying who he is. This is worse than that time we figured out Tommy from Trainspotting is a PH'er
I've stated who I think he is way back, but to save you reading all the posts, I think he is Peter Coyle who was the songwriter in the Lotus Eaters and that the song he gets royalties from on a regular basis is 'The first picture of you' which charted at no. 14 in 1983HTH
P.S. I don't claim to be the first PHer to think that he was in the Lotus Eaters
ATTAK Z said:
I've stated who I think he is way back, but to save you reading all the posts, I think he is Peter Coyle who was the songwriter in the Lotus Eaters and that the song he gets royalties from on a regular basis is 'The first picture of you' which charted at no. 14 in 1983
HTH
P.S. I don't claim to be the first PHer to think that he was in the Lotus Eaters
I don't know who Peter Coyle is HTH
P.S. I don't claim to be the first PHer to think that he was in the Lotus Eaters
Oakey said:
I don't know who Peter Coyle is
here's a clue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lotus_Eaters_%28b...
ATTAK Z said:
Slightly before my time, I'd have been 1 in 1982!Oakey said:
ATTAK Z said:
Slightly before my time, I'd have been 1 in 1982!
Super Slo Mo said:
V8 Fettler said:
A bizarre contractual arrangement. Framework structure with a few contractors bidding for individual assignments would cut costs. Probably lead to a substantial reduction in income for the various contractors, but there we are.
High horse? Not particularly, I want the BBC to be accountable to the people who pay for it
Ok, it just seemed like that was where you were headed, apologies. High horse? Not particularly, I want the BBC to be accountable to the people who pay for it
To be fair, SKY aren't particularly accountable either, although you could argue that you as an individual have a choice as to whether or not to subscribe to SKY whereas with the BBC you don't, unless you don't watch live TV.
Logsitically it's very difficult to operator a news helicopter in the way that you suggest, although for 'normal' TV filming you can, and that is, of course, exactly how it works.
The snag is that you can't just get a helicopter at short notice. If it's not booked out for the day, and there are pilots around with sufficient flying hours available for the day/week, and there's a camera and a camera operator available; then you have to get the camera and operator to the aircraft, rig it, and get airborne. As an absolute minimum you could realistically get in the air within 4 to 5 hours of the initial call, which is quite likely to be too late for some urgent news stuff.
Instead they (and SKY) have the whole caboodle on standby, and can be airborne within a few minutes. They go up and shoot stuff more often than you'd think actually, including non-news footage.
Also, the people who operate the helicopter are among the cheapest in the country; there is very little profit in operating an aircraft, and they don't charge for the machine when it's not running, although of course there's a charge for the staff etc who are looking after it.
I suspect it's a case of if you require a helicopter to be available at short notice, there's realistically only one way to do it.
On the conspiracy/not thing, the answer is most likely to be somewhere in the middle. Sounds like I'm sitting on the fence but let me explain...
It's true that most of the blogs/videos/claims from the Fellows/Fay/Spivey lot quickly descend into lizard-esque wackiness. Case in point: following the police decision that there was no evidence to pursue Ken Clarke, Ben Fellows (claimed to be the victim) now claims to have had visits from the Knights Templar/masons. Another one: Spivey claims that Brenda and Phil actually kidnapped children on a royal trip (1970s in Canada, I think?) Oh, and supposedly Theresa May is a bloke called Terry! Whenever you look into these blogs, you're never more than 1 click away from Icke. So it's easy to dismiss as ludicrous. That much is true.
But turning a blind eye, conspiracy and covering-up for expediency are part and parcel of how much of life works. Partners will do it for lovers. Friends will do it for colleagues. Forces will close ranks. Why should politicians be any different? Especially when they have whips - people employed specifically to use any means - including indiscretions - as persuasion. If Edwina Currie knew about Peter Morrison having sex with under-age boys and did nothing, don't you even begin to wonder how the whips/etc used the same info? Did the newspapers of the time ignore it, too? It seems unlikely (to me) that senior police officers knew nothing, and so it's only right that we should be asking why they did nothing. What were the reasons for leaving some people alone?
Conspiracy isn't that rare. If you watched the 'Oranges and Sunshine' film (of the scandal discovered by Margaret Humphreys), you'd have seen another type of conspiracy - where local authorities and HMG and the Oz government simply decided to keep schtum about what they'd done. Thousands of children were forcibly removed from Britain, and hundreds of them were physically and sexually abused (e.g. at Bindoon).
The government just wanted the problem (which was not the policy itself, but the policy being discovered) to go away. It didn't but it still took them decades to admit it and apologise to the victims. My own feeling is that governments deliberately take their time on these issues to get some distance from the events themselves, and to allow perpetrators to die rather than give evidence. That isn't just IMHO.
So, it's clear to me that there has been a conspiracy on this, I just don't know how wide/deep/scandalous it is. But for sure, the longer that HMG drags its feet now, the fishier it stinks.
It's true that most of the blogs/videos/claims from the Fellows/Fay/Spivey lot quickly descend into lizard-esque wackiness. Case in point: following the police decision that there was no evidence to pursue Ken Clarke, Ben Fellows (claimed to be the victim) now claims to have had visits from the Knights Templar/masons. Another one: Spivey claims that Brenda and Phil actually kidnapped children on a royal trip (1970s in Canada, I think?) Oh, and supposedly Theresa May is a bloke called Terry! Whenever you look into these blogs, you're never more than 1 click away from Icke. So it's easy to dismiss as ludicrous. That much is true.
But turning a blind eye, conspiracy and covering-up for expediency are part and parcel of how much of life works. Partners will do it for lovers. Friends will do it for colleagues. Forces will close ranks. Why should politicians be any different? Especially when they have whips - people employed specifically to use any means - including indiscretions - as persuasion. If Edwina Currie knew about Peter Morrison having sex with under-age boys and did nothing, don't you even begin to wonder how the whips/etc used the same info? Did the newspapers of the time ignore it, too? It seems unlikely (to me) that senior police officers knew nothing, and so it's only right that we should be asking why they did nothing. What were the reasons for leaving some people alone?
Conspiracy isn't that rare. If you watched the 'Oranges and Sunshine' film (of the scandal discovered by Margaret Humphreys), you'd have seen another type of conspiracy - where local authorities and HMG and the Oz government simply decided to keep schtum about what they'd done. Thousands of children were forcibly removed from Britain, and hundreds of them were physically and sexually abused (e.g. at Bindoon).
The government just wanted the problem (which was not the policy itself, but the policy being discovered) to go away. It didn't but it still took them decades to admit it and apologise to the victims. My own feeling is that governments deliberately take their time on these issues to get some distance from the events themselves, and to allow perpetrators to die rather than give evidence. That isn't just IMHO.
So, it's clear to me that there has been a conspiracy on this, I just don't know how wide/deep/scandalous it is. But for sure, the longer that HMG drags its feet now, the fishier it stinks.
EskimoArapaho said:
On the conspiracy/not thing . . .
A conspiracy only takes two people to start. Conspiracies are common.By the way, I had a visit from a mason. I was threatened and I believed it because there was a well known conspiracy going on which no one was really able to do anything about. This conspiracy was part of a murder, and it took in solicitors and a coroner.
Look up Harold Challenor. Again we have a situation where the only person who had any excuse for his actions was Challenor himself, a war hero, MM, and suffering from what would now be called PTSD. He was sent for psychiatric treatment and there was a full enquiry started - into why his illness hadn't been noticed.
What many people wondered was why the other officers, the lawyers, the magistrates and others did nothing about it. There were rumours, which many say was true, of a stipendiary commenting that he was fed up seeing the same half brick time and again.
I've mentioned before on here that a whole office in a local authority conspired together, from the bloke in charge to a typist. And they conspired with the bosses of various companies. And, the OIC was told, it is the norm.
You don't need a tin hat to believe in conspiracies. What you need are blinkers not to.
V8 Fettler said:
I can't think of a recent instance in the UK where the news item was so urgent and important that it needed a news helicopter on standby
In the days before either broadcaster had one, we used to get asked reasonably frequently to try and get one on station somewhere (that train crash where the land rover went onto the tracks springs to mind, probably around 2001).We provided the camera and operator for this kind of thing, the trouble is, there are only a limited number of each available in the country, and generally they're all working, in transit somewhere or in for maintenance (or the operator is on a day off).
Realistically you can't get a camera and helicopter airborne on the same day as you request it, unless you're very lucky. So your choice is either you don't have an aerial news facility or you have one on standby. Unless it's a long, drawn out affair, but breaking news tends not to be like that.
I'm not particularly offering an opinion, just trying to explain the options as I see them. Aerial filming is expensive, which ever way you look at it.
Derek Smith said:
EskimoArapaho said:
On the conspiracy/not thing . . .
A conspiracy only takes two people to start. Conspiracies are common.By the way, I had a visit from a mason. I was threatened and I believed it because there was a well known conspiracy going on which no one was really able to do anything about. This conspiracy was part of a murder, and it took in solicitors and a coroner.
Look up Harold Challenor. Again we have a situation where the only person who had any excuse for his actions was Challenor himself, a war hero, MM, and suffering from what would now be called PTSD. He was sent for psychiatric treatment and there was a full enquiry started - into why his illness hadn't been noticed.
What many people wondered was why the other officers, the lawyers, the magistrates and others did nothing about it. There were rumours, which many say was true, of a stipendiary commenting that he was fed up seeing the same half brick time and again.
I've mentioned before on here that a whole office in a local authority conspired together, from the bloke in charge to a typist. And they conspired with the bosses of various companies. And, the OIC was told, it is the norm.
You don't need a tin hat to believe in conspiracies. What you need are blinkers not to.
Criminality and the like have passed me by, thankfully in the main. Being too fat to hide behind lampposts (or big bins), I always tried to avoid such complications. Oddly enough I was once a Director of a company years ago where two other directors traded fraudulently unbeknownst to the rest of that company and made a great deal of money without anyone other than those two rogues having any idea what they were really up to.
First we heard was when the fraud squad turned up and arrested the miscreants who were both jailed.
Caused a hell of a fuss at the time and the uninvolved Directors (inc Moi) and staff were expecting serious questions from the Police, in due course, although we were all totally unaware of the complex fraud that had been perpetrated, until then. In fact we were exonerated from any responsibility by the Police within the first two days of their investigation and I was never even interviewed I am delighted to say.
I was most impressed that the Police were that clued up and thorough from the start. We had no idea what was afoot on the fraud side and the Police obviously realised without even speaking to the uninvolved staff and Directors that we were simply not involved. Impressed me then and continues to do so. I think the quieter backwaters of Accountancy are a lot less trouble.
Made me realise people lead very different lives. Most interesting and informative post,Derek.
Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff