THE REASON HANK MARVIN WILL OUTLIVE CLIFF RICHARD

Once upon a time there was a big sensation in the pop world: Cliff Richard and his backing band The Shadows.

 Cliff became big in the 1960s and was marketed as the clean-cut boy next door with Christian values. He parted company with the Shadows in the 1970s and went on to solo superstar status. Annoyingly he would bring out a Christmas record every year which would be number one on the chart for the duration of the festive season.

 As the seventies became the eighties and then the nineties cliff continued to put out records, mostly at Christmas. Through the eighties he was a popular guest on daytime TV and chat shows and maintained a large following of fans. I wonder now, though, how many youngsters know who he is?

Cliffs backing group, the Shadows featured one Hank Marvin as lead guitarist. He may have been in the “shadow” of Cliff but I think that his name will live on a lot longer thanks to cockney rhyming slang. Even if the man himself is not remembered his name will live on. For those of you who don’t know, “Hank Marvin’“  is now a slang term for starving. For example, someone comes home from work and says to their partner or parent:  “What do we have for a snack, I’m Hank Marvin’ “.

 Hank and the Shadows had a string of hits themselves, the biggest being “Apache” a number one all over the world. It won’t be his music or his association with the evergreen Mr. Richard which will keep Hanks memory alive, however, it will be his name passing in to common parlance. He has been awarded the greatest of accolades in the pop culture world – his name is now featuring in an advert for Mattessons “Fridge Raiders”.

This is why Hank will be immortalised and the memory of him will outlast that of Sir Cliff: youngsters watching the advert are going to think “Who is this Hank Marvin whose name means starvin’?” They will then go on the internet and look it up, and in doing so will learn of Hank and his famous Stratocaster Guitar, and will probably think “oh”. Be that as it may Hank Marvin is immortalised.

 Who Knows, as time goes by perhaps a legend will spring up around him. People will be saying that long ago there was a guy called Hank Marvin, who had a voracious appetite and would hide in the shadows beneath a cliff from which he would pounce on passers-by with snack food.

Well, stranger things have happened...

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: THE LONDON UNDERGROUND

I recently watched a documentary about expanding the London Underground. It was interesting to see how they make the tunnels these days, dealing with the challenges of digging in an old city. There was also a history of the tube given including how it was necessary to find a clean and economic means of propulsion. There is also a look at the New York subway and the Paris Metro which show the innovative techniques that have come about through improvements in tunnelling.

Due to London being such an old and historic city the Victorians decided that trains should not run across the city. This meant that all the stations in to London were in a ring on the outskirts of the city, making it difficult to get in to the heart of the city. Thus was born the idea of an underground railway.

 In the early days the work was manual and dangerous. It involved two men digging in a tunnel shield. Powerful hydraulic jacks were pushed forward every 60cm that was dug and a metal cylinder was put in the gap. Many workers died during the construction of tunnels worldwide so giant boring equipment has developed which is automated.

A look at the methods that were needed for London, New York and Paris, all with individual challenges shows just how resourceful and ingenious humans can be. Of particular interest was the way in which Big Ben had to have the ground beneath it reinforced before a new line to Canary Wharf could be undertaken. As the clock and parliament are standing on a bed of shale that is not very solid the ground beneath the buildings had to be reinforced by injecting concrete through rods that were embedded deep below the surface of the ground. The engineers that were interviewed were confident that this solution would prevent the buildings from capsizing. Whether they have factored in thousands of tube trains travelling through this ground causing vibration is another matter: I suppose they have but it still feels to me that the whole area could move if there was heavy use of the line.

Other innovations are limited by the size of the tunnels, therefore research has been carried out in to aerodynamics, lightweight and strong materials, ventilation and ways to maximise the payload. Events such as the London tube fire also hastened improvements after a wooden escalator caused a massive fire and fatalities. Lessons were learned not just about how fire spreads but the danger of smoke and toxic fumes created by burning wood as well as evacuation procedures.

This is an interesting documentary if you are interested in trains or transport history: it also shows just what we can achieve with planning and vision. People use the underground every day, taking it for granted, and are probably unaware of the work that went in to providing a high speed transport system for greater London. A good watch.

TIRED OF TV REPEATS? TRY STUMBLEUPON

Recently television schedules seem to be full of repeats: programmes are not only repeated during the same week nowadays, they get repeated every four hours on some channels. Even with hundreds of channels available it is difficult to find something new and interesting to watch. It isn’t just the general entertainment channels that do this the documentary channels are just as bad. Well here is an alternative for you which will satisfy your desire for knowledge and need for entertainment: “stumbling”.

There is an excellent add-on available for the Firefox browser, which I believe is also available for other browsers called Stumbleupon. It is my favourite internet tool and has been for a long time. When you sign up for Stumbleupon, which is easy and does not involve giving many personal details you are taken through a plethora of subjects from which you choose the ones that you are interested in. I have chosen interests that cover a range of topics, from sociology to ancient history, UFOs, my favourite types of music, horror films, and so on. Altogether I have chosen over one hundred topics of interest. Once the choices are made and the sign up is complete a “Stumble” toolbar is added to your browser. I promise you, with this add on installed your days of boredom are over.

If you get periods of time when you would like to unwind but can’t really find something to do just hit the stumble button and it will take you to a page from one of your interests. Pressing the button will choose from your interests at random and find a photo, news item, video or site. It is also possible to select to stumble just videos or photos, or to choose just one particular interest or site to stumble. You can also stumble within certain popular sites such as youtube, flikr, Wikipedia and many others. It is amazing how many times I have found items I would never have thought of looking for but have found fascinating or enlightening.

No matter what your interests are you will find stumbleupon a useful tool. I have found hundreds of pages and sites that are saved in to my favourites. Any time I am bored I stumble and it doesn’t take me long to find something new and interesting. Sometimes I remove some subjects and replace them with new ones for a bit of variety. I have some amazing photographs saved that I am sure I would never have thought to go and look for.

I don’t generally recommend anything because I am one of lifes cynics but I think that Stumbleupon is worth it. Give it a try: its free so you have nothing to lose.

AWAKE

It is difficult to find an original program these days, especially in the drama category so when I saw a trailer for a new show called Awake I was intrigued.

The show is about a cop (Jason Isaacs), who is in an accident when his car was run off the road by another car. He wakes up after the accident and he is in a world where his wife survived and his son died. The he goes to sleep and wakes up in a world where his wife is dead and his son survived. This is an interesting concept as the character is unsure which reality, if either, is real and which he is imagining. He is under a psychiatrist in both “realities” and the shrink in both worlds is telling him that the world he is currently in is the proper reality.

As the story unfolds it turns out that he and his family were in a car crash. This led to the situation he is in. He works on cases in both dream worlds and the cases often overlap, leading the character, Detective Britten to conclude that the link between the two worlds is because there is something that his unconscious memory is trying to tell him. Indeed it transpires that the car accident that he was in was no accident, and that he was in fact run off the road in an attempt to kill him because he was working on a case that had uncovered a drugs gang with links to the police.

As the series progresses detective Britten not only works on routine cases but puts together the pieces following the accident and begins to remember the drugs case. He then has to convince his partner(s) in each reality that he needs their help to uncover the truth.To indicate which reality he is in, in one reality he has a red band on his wrist, in the other he wears a blue band. He checks his wrist when he wakes so that he can orient himself. Without giving too much away, Britten manages to put the pieces together and when he does he wakes up. The viewer wonders throughout the story which life is the real one, did his wife die or did his son die: in fact I pondered upon whether he was in a coma and his family lived, with the dreams being his way back to life.

The show does have the feel of “Life on Mars” but is by no means a copy. The series runs for thirteen episodes and it kept me interested throughout, although the ending wasn’t very satisfactory for me: But that could just be me as I wasn’t happy with the end of Life on Mars either, or Lost, or Paradox (which ended after six episodes and never returned), V (also disappeared without an end). All in all this is a good show worth watching. The cast is strong and portray their characters well. Laura Allen (the 4400, Dirt) plays Brittens wife and BD Wong (Law and order, SVU, Oz and various major shows as one off character) plays a psychiatrist. The other psychiatrist is played by Cherry Jones (24, Signs, the Perfect Storm, Oceans 12).   

If I was marking this show out of ten I’d give it an 8. It is definitely worth a watch.

FACT OR FAKED: PARANORMAL FILES

Syfy channels investigative series is in its third season now and continues to find interesting anomalies to look in to. There are six “experts” with unique skills who meet to discuss paranormal events, usually found on the internet, and they choose two cases to examine more closely. They then split in to two groups of three and off they go.

The personnel currently on the show are Ben Hansen, the team leader who is ex FBI, Bill Murphy is the lead Scientist, Jael de Pardo is a journalist, she previously worked on Destination Truth, Austin Porter is a stunt expert. Two newer participants are Lanisha Cole, photographer, who worked as a demonstration model on the Price is Right and replaced Chi Lan Lieu on FOF and finally Devin Marble, the tech specialist who joined in season two in place of Larry Caughlan Jr.

This is a great program if you are open minded and not too stuck in any belief system. I don’t believe in the paranormal myself but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the show. The team come across as warm, friendly and together, and kind of remind me of a grown up version of Enid Blytons famous five (yes, I know there are six of them) but maths aside they get together to go on adventures and try to uncover a mystery. Over the course of three seasons they have looked in to such things as a “ghost car” caught on video and chased by police, a lake monster in Pennysylvania, Cattle mutilations, UFOs, reproduced the “battle of LA” from 1942 when the army had a craft of some kind in spotlights and shelled it (personally I think that this was one of the Nazi UFOs, not a theory they examine in the program), and cryptozoological creatures such as big cat sightings, Sasquatch, etc. 

The team don’t seem to have an agenda other than trying to recreate what they are investigating. For example, with the ghost car which allegedly vanished while being pursued by police they showed that the car probably drove through a loose panel in a fence, which by the time the police got there had settled back in to place. When they investigated a civil war ghost haunting a cemetery they could not adequately reproduce the evidence they were studying so concluded that it may indeed have been a genuine paranormal anomaly. They did not say it was proof of the paranormal, just that they couldn’t explain it. The team go through trial and error experiments with each case using photos/videos, stunts and scientific methods before reaching their conclusion. It is interesting watching and I always find it entertaining.

My own conclusion on the paranormal is that given enough time and resources everything can be explained; although I would qualify that statement by saying that it’s a big universe that we live in so there may be many things that are not readily explained. The program is entertaining and also informative as it takes you through how to spot computer generated images and hoaxes and as I have already said does not set out to prove or disprove the existence of the paranormal. I find it laughable that people like James Randi  criticize the program (a nasty and negative person if ever there was one, I could go through how he has manipulated evidence in order to prove his position but people like that are not worth the effort). If you don’t believe then switch over and watch something else! This is meant to be entertainment, nothing more. I think it is sad that such people feel they have to ridicule others in order to make themselves look superior.

I will continue to suspend my belief and continue watching.