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Trundle Hill has looked rather sparsely populated this week.
I seem to remember it being quite busy the day ‘our Derek’ made his trip.
Purwell, I agree with you about the typeface, I really struggle with it. I’d also like the pages to be somewhat thicker. It is becoming a chore to read these days. Old age, see.
I have tried to cancel my subscription but it keeps on arriving.
I think the point that jockeys need to carry whips for safety reasons is not clear cut. In my experience the use of the whip quite often makes the horse veer of a straight line e’g. The Ridler at Ascot and in that case could have resulted in a nasty accident.
Once again it will the interpretation and application of the rules by the Stewards that will be crucial, and on recent evidence it’s difficult to see everyone being happy with the outcomes.
You seem to have a very healthy attitude to life, BH.
Congratulations and long may it last.
Value is much easier to see after the race.
Advice – no one forces you to have a bet. Bookies are more or less obliged to bet but if you don’t like the odds walk away and look somewhere else.
Did gamble ever consider throwing his flat-cap into the ring?
Flat-cap in de ring la di la di la…….
Epic – what a piece of work, BH.
I hate to think how long that would take me to put together.
Looking at GT’s list, I would admit to being Centre-left on most topics but veer further left when the Tories start taking the piss.
If the Big Dog does go, who would you see as the ‘best’ option.
Clive reckons there are a number of MPs who are decent people, is that qualification enough for the job?
I know we should always use our vote but I find it more and more difficult to find a party that I could trust to govern the country rather than ensure that they are the party that stays in power.
I am not convinced that PR will solve the problems but I think it might be worth giving it a chance.
Recent review in the Guardian.
Man vs Bee review – Rowan Atkinson channels Bean and Baldrick in his new slapstick sitcom
The actor is at his comic best as an accident-prone housesitter who goes on a rage spree and destroys a high-tech home in an epic battleMan vs Bee.
What did he think would happen? … Man vs Bee. Photograph: Netflix
Stuart Jeffries
Stuart Jeffries
Fri 24 Jun 2022 09.00 BST
146
Rowan Atkinson’s latest comedy bristles with life lessons. You cannot hope to trap a bee in a grand piano. Bees, as we know, are already endangered, so don’t microwave them.Should you find yourself in a mercy dash to the vet with a comatose dog, don’t get distracted and remove your shoe to swat a bee inside the car. If you have managed to destroy a Mondrian while trying to hammer a bee, repainting the red patch with tomato sauce won’t fool anyone; same goes for using old CDs and triangles you’ve cut from roller blinds to restore a Kandinsky mobile you hit with a tennis racket.
Man vs Bee (Netflix) replaces Nicolas Cage’s The Wicker Man retool as my favourite bee comedy. You remember what happened at the end of that movie? Nic, allergic to bees, has his head shoved into a portable beehive. “No, not the bees!” he screams. “Not the bees! Aaaaghhh!” I was still laughing about that days later. Atkinson, by contrast, is intentionally funny in all nine episodes of this sitcom.
Atkinson, with his writer Will Davies and director David Kerr, realise that comedy is not tragedy plus time, but stuff plus idiot. Man vs Bee could just as readily have been called Man vs Himself or Man vs House. Atkinson plays Trevor, a man fired from Asda after an altercation with a trolley and from an office after winding up on the losing side of a battle with a shredder. His wife has divorced him and his daughter yearns, perhaps futilely, for daddy-daughter bonding on a camping trip to the Isle of Wight (proving that strangeness runs in the family).
Trevor is not the go-to guy to look after a house with voice-activated security systems and a manual so thick that, rather than a tennis racket, it should have been the weapon chosen for a protracted bee smackdown.
Another cunning plan unravels … Rowan Atkinson in Man vs Bee.
Another cunning plan unravels … Rowan Atkinson in Man vs Bee. Photograph: Netflix
Julian Rhind-Tutt and Jing Lusi literally phone in their heroically grotesque performances as appalling holidaying homeowners who chillax poolside in monogrammed espadrilles, calling the man they’ve stupidly entrusted their pad to in order to find out if their assets – an E-type Jag, priceless artworks, Cupcake the dog – are still intact. Meanwhile, their pristine house ends up destroyed in a rage spree with flamethrowers. Bee, naturally, isn’t so much as singed.I’ve always felt, I now realise wrongly, that Atkinson’s best comedy was verbal and that Mr Bean and Johnny English were chiefly of interest to the lucrative dimwit demographic. What I should have appreciated is the continuity of Atkinson’s oeuvre. Blackadder’s violent nihilism (“Baldrick, believe me, eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me – and THIS pencil”) is replicated here. So is the man-out-of-time vibe of Atkinson’s Inspector Fowler from A Thin Blue Line (“Appearances, as we shall see, are like bus timetables: often highly misleading”). That said, there is one vital change: here, Atkinson has become Baldrick.
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When he gets bitten while stuck in a dog flap in the middle of a bee chase while wearing a magnetic collar for reasons that make no sense, he looks surprised – as if his cunning plan has unravelled. But, really, what did he think would happen?I’d have given this series five stars but for two things. First, the bee is woefully undercharacterised. What is its motivation? Are we to take seriously the implicit claim that male bees, ousted from their hives, are homeless and friendless and so this one is just seeking shelter and company? If so, why does it torment Trevor?
The only explanation that makes sense is that it is furious about the continuing lack of bee representation in entertainment. Think about it. Jerry Seinfeld played the titular insect in Bee Movie; the Simpsons’ Bumblebee Man was a human mutant who set bee liberation back decades. You can’t be what you can’t see, especially if you’re a bee.
Second, product placement is unremitting. For instance, all the preposterous house’s state-of-the art gizmos are supplied by that German electronics company whose name sounds like the French word for honey. I’d like to believe that’s some cute bee-related gag – but it seems unlikely.
I’m all for a bit of head-rolling, myself.
Who in their right mind and, i assume, some knowledge of horses sign off on such a ridiculous idea.
Is there no accountability left in our society?
Those bloody bugles are bad enough – FIREWORKS????? – why?
There has been a total ignorance of horses shown here. Surely someone with a little bit of nous saw the plan for fireworks and put a big red line through it. I find it unbelievable.
Let’s see if there is more accountability shown by the racing authorities than our “government” has exhibited.
