Exactly 70 years ago the somber voice of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke from the wireless announcing that Britain was now at war with Germany. Despite attempts and appeasement to avoid another war so soon after the carnage of the Great War, you can hear the sorrow in Chamberlain’s voice as he delivers the terrible news.

The Second World War is often not thought of as being as bloody a war as the Great War, but it was just as horrific, if not more so, especially for the civilian population of the countries involved. But this isn’t the time for horrors or statistics. It’s a time to remember, and pray never again.

Today Britain buries the last of its veterans of the Great War. It’s the end of an era – another link with the past has gone forever. But will we ever learn from the past?

Harry Patch died last month at the age of 111. A remarkable feat in itself. But Harry had been in the British Army during the horrors of the Great War and had fought at Passchendaele. He was a hero. All the men who suffered that war, whether volunteer or conscript, should be remembered with great honour and Harry symbolised the last of these men.

It seems that Harry had asked for his funeral to symbolise peace and reconcilliation – the unification of soldiers from the UK, France, Belgium and Germany stands as recognition of his wishes. All these countries that in Harry’s life time were at war not once, but twice, are now peaceful friends. But there is still war and fighting in the world. Perhaps we can all learn from an old man to live in peace. We owe him, and so many who have died before him, the peaceful lives we now live in our country.

We will remember them – it’s all we can do now.

Doctor Who – The Fires of Pompeii

[USUAL SPOILER WARNING]

The Doctor takes Donna supposedly to Ancient Rome, only it turns out they’ve landed in Pompeii instead (usual lack of control over the Tardis there?). It’s the day before the Vesuvius is due to erupt and Donna wants to warn everyone, but no one understands. There’s an alien threat trying to alter history by stopping the eruption and controlling the visions of the soothsayers.

I’m warming to the character of Donna with each story so far. She really seemed to have hear heart in the right place when she realised that she and the Doctor could potentially save all the people from dying in Pompeii. She also really showed the Doctor what it is to be human when faced with possibilities like that; he seemed all distant and Time Lordy, going on about fixed points in history. In the end, the only way to save the world was to kill all the people in the town.

I really loved the humour and in-jokes that appeared in the episode – the additions of Caecilius, Metella and Quintus from the Cambridge Latin Course I did at school (and according to Doctor Who Confidential, so did Russell T Davies and Phil Collinson)! Interestingly, for the books, they were based on real people who lived in Pompeii and I appreciated that Donna persuaded the Doctor to save them. And then there were the Asterix (whom I also love) type gags of TX Maxximus and having all the Pompeiians thinking the Doctor and Donna were Celtic (or was it that they were speaking Welsh?) when they spoke Latin.

And the “I’m Spartacus” “Me too” line made me laugh too.

It’s fifty years today since Sputnik was launched.

On 4th October 1957 Korolev and his team successfully launched the first artificial satellite into orbit around the Earth. It was the beginning of the Space Race which put man on the moon and gave us those Space Pensthat everyone thought so clever (apart from the fact that an ordinary biro will work in space). 

Sputnik also scared the living daylights out of the non-Soviet world as no one expected the announcement!

ITV began their new series Raiders of the Lost Archive last night. The concept was good, of showing old and rediscovered clips to the performers who were in them. Unfortunately the programme didn’t live up to its promise. Most of the clips were not shown in their entirety, and then what was shown was talked over by either the performer in question or by Patrick McGuinness, the presenter. (I was also not impressed by the way McGuinness kept implying that he’d done the research and found these films, but that’s just the presenting style the programme seemed to be taking.)

I will keep watching, if only to see Bill Oddie reunited with clips from The Goodies in Engelbert with the Young Generation, some of which I saw at the Missing Believed Wiped screening in December.

I suppose I should be pleased that ITV are doing something positive towards items being returned to the archive, but it feels like they could have done so much more with the concept they had. 

Well the new series of Time Team began on Sunday, with possibly the best episode ever!

The team were on the Isle of Man (which I’ve always thought was worth a visit, and even more so now) to dig the last un-dug early Christian chapel thing. They thought they knew where it was (under a golf course!) and were expecting graves, but I don’t think they were expecting finds quite as good as they got. The highlights were a burial in an airtight, stone lined grave, which had preserved some thousand year old human hair, and a stone with ogham script on.

All very exciting stuff. I hope the series carries on being this good. I was worried that it was starting to loose its way.

On Saturday I went to the National Film Theatre for the Missing Believed Wipedevent, along with two fellow GROKers. It was mainly to see the recently found Goodies clip from  Engelbert with the Young Generation, but there were one or two other things I was looking forward to seeing too.

We were a little late arriving for the first session, Nuclear Threats, due to signal failure on the tube, so missed the introductions and the first couple of minutes of the first programme – a drama called Level 7, but we soon settled in. I had no idea what to expect from this first programme, and I’m sure it wasn’t supposed to be as funny as we found it, but I enjoyed it. The second programme was Nigel (creator of Quatermass) Kneal’s The Crunch, which was also good and a lot less funny than Level 7. It’s amazing how much scarier old black and white television can be, with it’s much slower pace and unashamed use of silences. We commented during the break that they could both be remade today and still be just as relevant, with their themes of nuclear threats and terrorism.

But it was the second session we were really there for. It began with Out of the Trees, the pilot for a comedy sketch show written by Graham Chapman and Douglas Adams. As you would expect, it was somewhere between Monty Python and Hitchhiker’s Guide. So kind of the absurdity of Python, but with a more logical spiralling of the steam of consciousness. I really liked it, but I’m not sure everyone did. I particularly liked the clever use of the television voice over and link man to hold the whole thing together. There was also a sketch about the theft of a peony which while watching I suddenly realised I’d seen that clip before and I’d never realised that Graham Chapman was one of the policemen!

Then it was time for The Goodies clip!  Fivewhole minutes of shiny, brand new Goodies to savour and enjoy. Ok, I realise it wasn’t new, and it wasn’t that shiny either – more like a very bad video copy of a copy, but it was still up there on the big screen. As I mentioned, the clip was one of the film sequences from Engelbert and the Young Generation, entitled (I think) ‘Bodyguards’. From what I gathered (not having seen the preamble in the office) the Goodies had been asked to protect Engelbert from his hordes of fans, so they practice various ways of doing this – boxing, fencing, shooting – with the usual hilarious consequences. It was wonderful to see, and I think I must have laughed almost continuously for the full 5 minutes! My only complaint would be that it was all over far too quickly. I’d love to see it again sometime …

Time Team 6pm Channel 4

Last night the team were in North Wales searching for a Roman bathhouse which archaeologists had discovered in the 1960s. So if it's been dug before, why go? Well it turns out that it was a good job they did. Some of the walls were re-excavated and turned out not to be Roman, so the bathhouse disappeared, to be replaced by a Roman ditch and some field walls. Various trenches across the village revealed nothing, and only the final re-excavation trench tuned up any Roman walls. This final trench also came up with a large, broken tessera, suggesting a building of some status with a tessellated floor. (Does one tile make a whole floor?)
There was a great mid-dig argument between Tony Robinson, Guy de la Bedoyere and some other expert about whether there still could be a bathhouse there; Tony saying there wasn't and Guy pointing out that just because they hadn't found it didn't mean it wasn't there, to which Tony replied that he was falling into the same trap as the 60s archaeologists. It's always good to see healthy debate! Guy will be missed from future Time Teams.