@Curtmungus your honor of being more famous than me is quite deserved. I salute you.
Lies, Damned lies and BBC Documentaries.
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Afternoon Lord Flash(excuse the poetic licence!).
Glad I missed if then; I had planned to watch it, but my wife waylaid me.
Is a pity if it is incorrect in many details, as so many younger people will not know enough about it.
Have others complained? -
It’s got generally good reviews, though I doubt by anyone with any knowledge.
Dan Snow is said to have been critical, saying that Paxman knows nothing about it (which is painfully evident), but Snow probably wanted the job himself.
Some of the detail about the home front was OK, but placing the blame for the war fully on the evil German Empire was straight out of the wartime propaganda department, and was not balanced by any critical analysis of the role played by the UK government.
Watch it on I-Player, but be prepared for the archaic one-sidedness of it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01nprmc/Britains_Great_War_War_Comes_to_Britain/
Better still, watch the ZDF doc currently showing on Quest instead - much more intelligent and informative.
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Thank you. My wife and I plan to watch it, but she bought me Carcassonne, the board game, and it has become her favourite pastime! We played on the floor in front of the fire after we had put Maddy to bed.
I was good and did not drink!
I hope you are well. -
Having endured Paxman’s jingoistic series, rescued only by the “Cult of the Clitoris” story, we can look forward to two clashing docs:
Max Hastings restates the official “Germans are all evil” line, Niall Ferguson (a real historian) suggests otherwise:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/ww1/hdd.html#section-2
Just a pity Ferguson didn’t get the Paxman gig.
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Well let’s see today’s map…
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You need to wreck your hard drive installing media fire to get that.
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if you sign up with them it is MUCH easier. Just get an account.
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If documentaries had to report only historical accuracy there would be far fewer documentaries out there.
I can think of a dozen off the top of my head from the past 20 years that have no historical accuracy at all, but are still referred to as documentaries.
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Better still, watch the ZDF doc currently showing on Quest instead - much more intelligent and informative.
Flash, is there a way to stream Quest shows somewhere online? I’m stuck in the U.S., where all the channels that used to show documentaries (“History”, The “Learning” Channel, I’m looking at you) now exclusively air in-depth looks at trailer-trash child beauty pageant contestants and MYSTERIES OF THE BIBLE……on the HISTORY CHANNEL…I just can’t shake my head hard enough…
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“History” Channel should be forced to re-brand itself. Its like calling the cartoon network “World News Today”.
The ZDF doc isn’t up on YouTube, however the Quest showing seems to have been truncated. The third episode was promoted as tracing the career development of Hitler and Montgomery, yet they were never even mentioned.
Can’t find it on amazon either.
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