James Norman

@SangitaMyska @sakisrendi I seem to recall when people pointed out the figures were good, they then fine tuned that excuse as ‘you can’t purely go on overall figures, it’s the drop off over the three hours’

@sakisrendi But but but… It was, according to my former employer because no one was listening to the show.. lol.

‘Now ranked 20th out of 21 with only the US seeing its population live for fewer years in good health.’ UK healthy life expectancy falls by two years in past decade bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@JamesWi15183190 @RodneyMarshall1 Great album. Played again for the first time in few years just last week. You’ve no doubt got this beauty too

@RodneyMarshall1 I have that dialogue about dinner in between the music on this fantastic record.

Ringer kickstarts The Sweeney. Written by Trevor Preston in just six days after creator Ian Kennedy Martin withdrew all his storylines and left the building. Regan & Carter introduce themselves to a young tearaway: "We're the Sweeney, son, and we haven't had any dinner!"

@Dr_TheHistories @archeohistories An expert in field fortifications, it was his quickly drawn plan for a defensive perimeter that was used.

@Dr_TheHistories @archeohistories Commissary Dalton’s contribution was key. A retired Sergeant Major. As Max Hastings points out and backed up both senior officers and others testimony, by far the most experienced soldier there and responsible for persuading Chard that withdrawal in the open would be suicide.

Lieutenant John Chard, who famously commanded the British forces at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879... At 31 years old, with eleven years of military service and not a single day of combat behind him, John Chard assumed command of 150 men — thirty of them hospital patients — and held a fortified station against 4,000 Zulu warriors. He had spent his career as a Royal Engineer. Bermuda, 1870. Malta, 1874. Constructing fortifications. Improving sea defences. He was a lieutenant assigned to repair a pontoon bridge at the Rorke's Drift mission station when, on the morning of 22 January 1879, news arrived from Isandlwana: over 1,300 British soldiers had been killed. And 4,000 Zulu warriors were crossing the valley. Chard was the senior officer present — not by merit, by the date of his commission, three years earlier than his counterpart's. Command fell to him by technicality. He ordered them not to retreat. A garrison of 150, moving through open ground with carts of hospital patients, would be run down. He directed the rapid construction of a defensive perimeter from mealie bags and biscuit boxes. When the hospital was breached and set on fire, he ordered an inner redoubt built from biscuit tins to save those still inside. For ten to twelve hours, he held that line. The Zulus attacked in mass waves, hand to hand. Seventeen of his men died. Four hundred of theirs did not leave the station alive. The Victoria Cross citation was published in the London Gazette on 2 May 1879. Queen Victoria invited him to Balmoral in October of that year and presented him with a gold signet ring. Historical analysis of the defence, conducted across the following century, concluded uniformly that his specific engineering decisions — the perimeter, the inner redoubt — were the reasons the garrison survived. The institution had a different conclusion. In the months following Rorke's Drift, those above him privately characterised Chard as a dull, heavy man scarcely able to perform routine work. They placed eleven Victoria Crosses at Rorke's Drift alongside political calculations they resented, and Chard absorbed the consequence. He was quietly assigned to Cyprus. Then Singapore. Then Perth, Scotland. He held these posts for eighteen years. He did not see combat again. He accepted each posting without recorded complaint. He continued to serve as a Royal Engineer — doing the work he was given in the garrisons he was sent to. In January 1893, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. On 8 January 1897, he was promoted to Colonel. Ten months later, on 1 November 1897, he died of cancer of the tongue at the age of forty-nine. Every subsequent military analysis of the defence of Rorke's Drift has confirmed the same conclusion: his decisions — made in the first minutes of command, without experience, without preparation, on the basis of engineering logic applied to desperate necessity — are the reason 133 men came home. Military historians have, in the decades since, systematically dismantled the characterisation that followed him through the last eighteen years of his career. © Reddit #drthehistories

@Dr_TheHistories @archeohistories Acknowledgement to rorkesdriftvc.com

The Loneliest Superpower on Earth America is becoming North Korea with a better GDP. Sit with that. Not as provocation. As diagnosis. A country that has torched its alliances, taxed its closest friends, threatened to annex its neighbors and walked away from the institutions it spent a century building has made a deliberate choice about its place in the world. Applauded at rallies, repeated in press conferences, performed for cameras with the confidence of people who have never had to live with the consequences of being wrong at this scale. The choice is: alone. And alone feels like strength right up until the moment it doesn't. By the time it doesn't, the damage is already structural. Every single day before this began, billions of dollars moved across the Canada-US border. Every morning, trucks crossed, goods moved, money changed hands, relationships held. That is now bleeding out. Tourism has collapsed. The travelers who used to arrive with money and genuine affection are going elsewhere, to countries that did not threaten to absorb them. The weapons contracts that underwrote American industry and cemented American influence across three continents are being quietly reviewed in defense ministries from Berlin to Seoul. Nobody announces these reviews. They happen in rooms Americans are no longer invited into. The military bases are the same story. Nobody publicly cancels a base. They stop renewing. They start asking questions. They begin building the infrastructure that means they will not need to ask America for anything next time. That infrastructure, once built, does not get dismantled out of nostalgia. This is how empires actually end. Not with a bang. With a series of very reasonable decisions made by very serious people in other countries, each one small enough to dismiss, each one slightly irreversible. There is a village in the mountains of every country in Europe that made this same choice, once. Not geopolitics. Just a village that turned inward, closed the market, pulled back from the road, decided it had enough and did not need the noise from outside. For a while it felt like dignity. Then the young people left. One or two at first, then more, because the young always follow the future and the future had quietly relocated somewhere with a road and a reason. The craftsmen followed, because craftsmen follow customers. The market that came through on Thursdays stopped coming because there was no longer enough to justify the trip. The houses did not fall down immediately. They just stopped being repaired. And the people who stayed told each other this was fine, that they preferred it, that the outside world was corrupt and they were better without it. The outside world did not argue. It simply continued without them. That is the mechanism by which America is currently operating, at a scale that would have been unimaginable two years ago. North Korea chose this mechanism, because the alternative was accountability. The country that once produced steel and traded across Asia now produces propaganda and imports famine relief. The turn did not happen overnight. It happened through a thousand small closures, each one justified, each one making the next easier. The infrastructure of self-sufficiency became the infrastructure of imprisonment. By the time ordinary North Koreans understood what had been surrendered, the price of getting it back had become impossible. Myanmar sealed itself away and emerged decades later to find the world had rearranged its trade corridors around the empty space where Myanmar used to be. Those spaces had been filled and were not available for reoccupation. Cuba still drives the cars from 1962. Not as charm. As evidence of what happens when the compounding runs long enough. These are not cautionary tales about ideology. They are cautionary tales about direction. About what happens when a country holds a position long enough to discover the world was not waiting. Isolation is not a destination. It is a direction. And directions maintained with sufficient conviction always become destinations. In any other functioning democracy, a leader who had done this much damage this fast would already be gone, through the ordinary arithmetic of people who understand what hurts a country and what helps it. Europe remembers what international trust costs because Europe spent decades rebuilding from the rubble of losing it. The countries that clawed their way back from nothing remember exactly what it is worth and exactly what it costs to squander. America, having never rebuilt from rubble, is learning this for the first time. The tuition is enormous. The researchers are leaving. The students are choosing other universities in other countries. The institutions that were magnets for the world's best minds were never great because of their buildings. They were great because of who wanted to come. That reputation is not a faucet you can turn back on. It returns, if it returns at all, over decades, when the conditions that created it are restored. The conditions are not being restored. The allies have started building what they used to have no reason to build. Europe is developing defense architecture, which is great and irreversible. Canada is rewiring its trade toward Europe and Asia. China is walking, unhurried and methodical, into every room America has vacated. These are not acts of aggression. They are acts of adaptation. The world is making sensible arrangements in America's absence. These are countries that named streets after American presidents, countries whose grandparents wept when the Americans arrived. Americans traveling in Europe now reportedly adopt Canadian accents to avoid the conversation, because the conversation when it comes is not gentle and Europeans are not known for sparing people from conclusions they find uncomfortable. The country that liberated a continent, that fed Europe when Europe was on its knees, that built the postwar order with its own money and for all its failures largely meant it, that country's citizens are now pretending to be from somewhere else so they do not have to explain themselves to a stranger in a bar. That is not a data point. That is a civilization telling you something is wrong. America was genuinely extraordinary. Not in the way its politicians perform it, hand on heart, flag in background, but in the actual unglamorous world-historical way. The Marshall Plan was the most strategically generous act in modern history and it worked. The idea that you could arrive with nothing and become something was imperfect, frequently brutal, riddled with contradictions, and real enough that people crossed deserts and oceans and razor wire to test it. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, almost everything. That America still exists. It has not been destroyed. It is being buried by people who have confused its confidence for arrogance and its generosity for weakness and its complexity for something that needs to be flattened into slogans that fit on a hat. Buried things, left long enough, stop being things you can retrieve. They become geology. They become the sediment layer that future historians will drill through and hold up to the light and say: here, this is where it changed. The people doing this call it winning. The rest of America is sitting quietly, trying to find the words to explain to their children that this is not permanent, hoping they are right, suspecting in the honest 3am way that the window is smaller than anyone is saying out loud. It can become permanent through compounding, through the slow arithmetic of a thousand reasonable decisions made by serious people in other countries, each one locking in a future with slightly less room for America in it than the last. The village does not announce its own irrelevance. It just gets quieter, until one day you drive through and the market is gone and the young are gone and the houses are not quite falling down but not quite standing either, and the people who remain tell you they prefer it this way. If this kind of analysis matters to you, subscribe. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

The results of Mandelson’s vetting process… youtu.be/uv5GR-DOwFA?si…

@CinemaTweets1 One of the greatest all time interviewee responses… youtu.be/V9VaLXr71LA?si…

I love Al Pacino. I love William Friedkin. But the two didn’t seem to love each other when they made Cruising back in 1980. I personally think this is a quality film & a great Pacino outing, but Friedkin & Al didn’t have the best on-set chemistry together. It’s worth exploring.

The 15th of April is a sad date in British comedy history. On this day we lost three of our greatest - Arthur Lowe in 1982, Tommy Cooper in 1984 and Kenneth Williams in 1988. Remembering them all today with a huge nostalgic smile.

Tunnocks got the sponsorship deal again I see

@Microinteracti1 @maxbergmann Well first thing that would happen is getting a taste of all that Polish heavy armour. More than enough to make anyone’s eyes water.

You think a country that couldn’t take more than a few hundred square kilometres in four years is suddenly going to be in Lisbon and London? Europe would crush them. More artillery than the US, more soldiers, more of everything that actually matters on a battlefield. And behind all of it, Ukraine — the most battle-hardened nation on earth, armed with weapons that have been proven to work. Trump not helping isn’t a death sentence. It’s a mildly inconvenient Tuesday.

What's the plan, Europe? NATO has nothing. All the eggs are in the Trump basket. So what do you do when its 2028, 200k Russian troops are moved to the border of Baltic states, and Trump/US isn't going to lift a finger. What do you do?

@daveainsworth63 @channel5_tv Acknowledgement to rorkesdriftvc.com/vc/dalton.htm

@daveainsworth63 @channel5_tv Without Commissary Dalton (a retired Staff Sergeant), outcome would have been very different. Persuaded Chard and Bromhead not to strike camp - all be killed in the open - supervised defence and showed indomitable courage. These pieces from Chard and Hooks accounts

Film of the day - Zulu (1963) Excellent classic drama directed by Cy Endfield, starring Stanley Baker, Michael Caine and Jack Hawkins @channel5_tv 3.10pm this afternoon #Zulu #StanleyBaker #MichaelCaine

@RodneyMarshall1 A month or so after my arrival. Not quite such an iconic set of events!

The Talented Husband aired in the UK on ATV in London on Sunday 30th September 1962. The following Friday brought the release of The Beatles’ debut single, Love Me Do, and the first Eon Productions 007 film, Dr No. A landmark week for 1960s British pop culture.

May 1962. Lew Grade announces to the press that Roger Moore had agreed to make 26 hour-long episodes of The Saint. RM: My contract had been drawn up on the premise that it would be half-hours. Which made a lot of difference. RB: We got you cheap, Roger. RM: You certainly did. 1/

@I_amMukhtar Is that Samantha Cameron’s sister Emily Sheffield, black boots?

Same energy.

I’m dying. 😂

@RodneyMarshall1 Always brought a very distinctive intensity to his roles. No doubt he’s got one of those ‘do you think we’d be able to get Pat Malahide?’ type reputations.

Across a decade and twenty-four episodes of Minder, Cheerful Charlie tried his best to put Daley behind bars. However, it's one thing arresting Arthur, another getting those charges to stick. PM played a huge role in making Minder's comedy drama work, though.

Changing places. From playing DS Albert "Cheerful Charlie" Chisholm desperately trying to catch Arthur Daley selling dodgy motors, to playing a second-hand car dealer himself, under suspicion from Morse in Driven to Distraction. A happy 81st birthday 🎂to Patrick Malahide. 1/

@ATRightMovies Star Wars! Opening day, Nottingham Sunday 29th Jan 1978. Queued from 7am until door opened at 1pm. Second in queue with mate.

What was the first film you saw Harrison Ford in?

“Netanyahu is exploiting Donald Trump to secure his own political survival, Palestinian emasculation and the elimination of Iran as a threat to Israel.” Max Hastings getting straight to the point 🎯