In the news

it's removing things from uncontrolled public consumption

Looks at internet. Ha ha good luck with that.

He really is a horrible prick, isn't he?

French riot police are known to be scumbags, stoking riots etc.

My partner is French, his brother has seen it himself a cop disguised in plainclothes smashing in a shop window so they can blame the protestors.

So not completely surprised, but also WTF.

Some funtime on the horizon for sure

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53019360

UK economy shrinks record 20.4% in April due to lockdown

That's why Johnson's swearing to defend Churchill statues with his life on twitter, to distract from those figures.

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1271388188544827394

Anyone know what eurozone (or German, say) GDP drops were to compare?

The World At War

While there is a lot that's great about it, there's plenty that is a bit iffy.

Just as an eg the episode on French preparation and the invasion of France is full of contradiction and inaccuracies. Overall it very much supports a Anglo-centric world view.

All that said, you've got to consider when and where it was made. The first hand accounts are deeply moving and should form an essential part of our collective memory.

Removing old tv because of offensive content galvanises opposition to BLM and makes it easier to think of it as just a bit more 'PC gone mad'?

removes tinfoil hat

(not my idea but I can't find where I saw it)

Euro zone second-quarter GDP was likely to fall at an unprecedented rate of around 10% compared with the first quarter, IHS Markit said, marginally less severe than the 11.3% slump predicted in a Reuters poll last week.

Aah - apologies, was that in the article. That's astonishingly badly handled by Johnson then.

I assume that the furlough scheme doesn't actually contribute here, as that's neither creating or destroying money (i.e. it's just putting money in peoples bank accounts, which is then counted in GDP) - is that correct?

That's astonishingly badly handled by Johnson then.

I'd be wary about comparing apples with oranges. The extract from Reuters describes eurozone GDP drop per quarter, whereas the UK report is talking about a single month. It all depends on what happens after April, and if April was 'the bottom'.

I assume that the furlough scheme doesn't actually contribute here, as that's neither creating or destroying money (i.e. it's just putting money in peoples bank accounts, which is then counted in GDP) - is that correct?

Yes - the P in GDP is product, i.e. widgets that rolled out the factory, not shuffling money around.

For me it's the interviews that make it a great TV show. Probably the last time when decision makers and senior officers were alive in large enough numbers to do this sort of thing.

Oh, and the theme tune/credits really stuck with me over the years

Maybe, but so what?

You are never going to change the mind of these people so might as well forge ahead.

Anybody upset about a tv show being taken down is a lost cause anyway.

Those flames..

Not much on the Poles either, it was claimed there were zero leading interviews with Polish people the entire series.

Could that have been influenced by access to the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain at that time?

(granted they seemed to overcome a lot of other political obstacles to reach other interviewees)

It has been a few years since I last watched it but that sounds pretty likely to me.

My point was more that it isn't't tub thumping pro British glorifying war nonsesne.

We watched the holocaust episode for History GCSE. Required a parental permission slip. The only time I've seen a classroom of schoolchildren sobbing in unison.

Everything is PC gone mad anyway, it is just a "look over there, not here" term. Already seen what you mentioned in my Facebook wall, yey...

Removing Golliwogs from sale was probably also "pc gone mad" 🙄

It wasn't perfect by the standards we have today perhaps, but I don't know that it was ever surpassed nor will it be I think. I can't imagine a prime-time WW2 documentary being commissioned or shown these days. The Ken Burns stuff is pretty close but obviously fairly US-centric.

I think they tried to address it but may not have had access to still living participants (edit) of the invasion of Poland after both German and Russian massacres (like Katyn).

The producer touches on that in the second episode (A distant war).

"Tells it very much from a British point of view, the title gives it away. There was nothing distant about the war in the Autumn of 1939 if you lived in Warsaw".

At 18 minutes into the program they have a Conservative MP (Lord Boothby) who states "We'd gone to war for the defense of Poland. In the event we did nothing to help Poland at all. We never lifted a finger."

Needing film stock from Russia may also have played a part.

If anybody wants a copy of the series PM me. I have kept it on the harddrive for years (20GB).

-edited.

Moorhouse points in particular to Thames TV’s 1970s documentary The
World at War, which, throughout 26 hour-long episodes, did not feature
one interview with a Pole.

“It’s absurd: the producers were willing to fly to Moscow to interview
[Soviet General Georgy] Zhukov or to Heidelberg to meet [Hitler’s ally
Albert] Speer, but they didn’t get the train up to Edinburgh to speak
to Polish General [Stanisław] Maczek, who settled in Britain after
liberating Belgium and the Netherlands.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/oct/20/world-on-fire-bbc-war-drama-polish-londoners-epic-series-relcima-their-past

That and the fact that the trigger for Britain declaring war was the invasion of Poland, we essentially went to war in an effort to protect Polish sovereignty,but come the end of the war Britain was forced to allow Poland to essentially be controlled by the Soviets. Something that did not sit well with Churchill or many of the other key players in British political leadership. Despite this the treatment of Poland post WWII was swept under the carpet in the UK for a long time it's only in the last 2o years that this has become acknowledged at all let alone widely, outside of the polish community in the UK and some academics.

At 18 minutes into the program they have a Conservative MP (Lord Boothby) who states "We'd gone to war for the defense of Poland. In the event we did nothing to help Poland at all. We never lifted a finger."

Going to leave my post up but hadn't read this before posting and, obviously, hadn't remembered that this was in the documentary. I still maintain that it is highly unusual to acknowledge this fact at the time the documentary was made

Sunday will be the 80th anniversary of the first arrival of, mostly Polish, prisoners at Auschwitz.