Hroth

All I need say at this point is "Sinclair RAMPack wobble"... The amount of blutack that got stuck above the expansion port of the ZX81 must have been phenomenal!

and in Boots, and in WH Smith, and in.... The only early 80s "home computer" that wouldn't work on was a Jupiter Ace.

Who could forget this? The BBC news article originally included this pic from The Avengers, but substituted it for a more dodgy one of Steed hooking his umbrella in her top... Not cool!

And who could forget this? Nice to see that the villain thought to pad the rails for her... The BBC had this shot in their news item, but changed it for a more dodgy one of Steed hooking his umberella in her top... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54106509

I don't see it ending well, it could be dodgems at the first turn.... At least that's the entertainment for the next season sorted out!

Still got one, though I don't know why! Completely manual connection, dial the BBS on the (rotary dial) phone and as soon as it started screeching slam it down and let the modem (on a line splitter) take over. Then slowly watch the FIDO greeting appear in the terminal software... I remember seeing poor sods on the train in the evening, searching through reams of green lined fanfold straight from the lineprinter, searching, searching, searching...

Sorry for the OT rant, lets return to examining the trials and tribulations of F1...

Possibly because The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club aren't swayed by Sky channel exclusivity There doesn't appear to be mega-bucks sponsors involved Tennis is "niche" and not a big money spinner in the eyes of the broadcasting parasites I don't know. Perhaps the BBC is clinging onto its last big sports event. If you like tennis, thats good because you don't have to break every 15 minutes for "a word from our sponsors".

The X and the H dipoles. I can't remember which was for which, but I suspect the H was for BBC reception. I could be wrong...

The BBC were divested of all their money-spinning activities because they were "anti-competitive", they were forced to hand large parts of their programme making to independent companies because keeping it in-house was "anti-competitive" and now they don't even get the maximum cash benefit from repeats on Dave, etc, for those programmes. They couldn't compete in the broadcast rights sales for all the major sports, imagine the howls of outrage from the anti-licence fee mob if they had stuck their necks out and paid up for Premier football for example. They were forced by the government to absorb the cost of giving over-75s free licences, and now its the BBC who are getting it in the neck for reducing the free licences to those on pensioner credit, when its the government who are to blame for not funding the BBC properly and heaping toxic liabilities on them. They're cutting back on broadcast channels because they can't afford them, they were denied the ability to have a Plus One channel for BBC 1 because, you've guessed it, it would be "anti-competitive". The BBC website is under attack for being "anti-competitive" too, and there's yet another push to abolish the licence fee. Of course, one of the best reasons for having the BBC broadcast anything is that programmes don't get diced up into segments so that there can be at least 15 minutes of adverts per hour...

As a rule GWR locos had cast numberplates and it would have been a bit of a faff to recast them with a regional prefix number. Why they didn't just whip the cast plates off the loco and paint new numbers on, selling the plates for scrap/collectors, I don't know!

I've a couple of factory weathered Hornby locos, the weathering of which gives the impression that the loco has been driven wheels-deep through a cattle slurry pit. Hornby sometimes do "weathering", but its done VERY badly! I must add that I didn't buy them because they were weathered, but because they were cheap!

One of the reasons we knock off the "real". Estate Agents deal in complete and utter fantasies. I know, I'm trying to buy a house... Mr Ed has the patter to a T!

Probably the best possible thing. Sky don't add any value for the viewer over what we were able to see on the BBC, etc.

Well my gran and aunt were safe, they were in mid-Atlantic on a Cunard liner the way back home from New York. I've even got the ships newspaper! Somewhere...

Or as might be "sung" on the Last Night of the Proms, "Rule Brittannia, Brittannia waives the rules..."

And until 2006 Radio 4 began their broadcasting day with the UK Theme. Before the mid-60s, you had a choice of two, unless you lived in the borderlands and could get, if "lucky", four! (BBC, ITV, BBC Wales, HTV) What usually happened was that one set of channels or the other would arrive in an electronic snowstorm and if you were really unlucky you got Heddiw and Pobl y cwm. If you are "very" old you only got one channel until 1955...

Some 30 years on from Daniel Deronda, and a scene for Castle Aching, the wife of the Vicar of St Tabs goes visiting the deserving poor.

The kiddies were more likely to ingest lead through chewing painted surfaces than from drinking water delivered by lead water pipes, unless the water was "soft". The furring deposited in the pipes in hard water areas stopped lead leaching into the water. Or not, as the case might be. Non fatal lead poisoning diminishes learning capacity. Can't have our nice pure arsenic contaminated by brick fragments!

I had a 6-transistor pocket radio, and used to listen to Caroline when I should have been asleep. It was heavy on those little 9v batteries! As did Betamax, but for some reason people preferred VHS...

According to that fount-of-all-knowledge Wikipedia*, Napoleon expired from a peptic ulcer/stomach cancer, the autopsy being carried out by his personal physician. Though there was arsenic in his hair at the time of death, It is possible to build up an "immunity" to arsenic poisoning over a period of time (See DL Sayers "Strong Poison" for a fictional example of this), so any arsenic in the wallpaper would be mere background to his system. The miserable conditions at Longwood House are more likely to have weakened him and hastened his death. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon

I think the Americans got a bit confused. I thought the "Queen’s Head" was the special facility for Royal visits?

Seeing as the shops are now rolling out their Christmas stock, a warning... HoHoHo

Try listening to Smooth. All they play is the stuff that made you give up listening to Radio 1!