Eloise's thoughts and fancies

School League tables in the UK have, by various governments of all colours, been held up as a standard to allow parents to make an informed choice of the best schools for their children.

The arguments have largely circled around the measures included. There is a school of thought for absolute results, the number getting the best possible grades in a range of subjects, and a counter-argument that the tables should look at "value added" - suggesting that a school that selects for the most able students and produces good results is less impressive than one that takes a wide range of students and enables the good ones to get good results still while helping the less able students achieve better than expected results.

Until Tuesday, however, for over a decade, the standard of acceptable education has been achieving what is called (for reasons that would take several essays to explain) a full level 2 qualification. This concept, quite radical for Britain, swept away the concept that the only qualifications worth having were clearly academic ones. O-levels in my day, GCSEs in today's terminology. The standard for a successful education was based on the idea that you were prepared for an adult life, be that further study or the ability to leave school and enter a career. As a junior - 16 years old remember - but to find paid work with the chance of it developing into a full time, long term job.

One way, the route a younger version of me would take, to achieve this full level 2 would be 5 GCSEs (I took 10, I wouldn't be limited to only 5), but alternate routes would include training as a hairdresser plus picking up some other training (e.g. Key Skills qualification), an engineering junior apprenticeship or similar. There was obviously a lot of wrangling in deciding how much a particular qualification contributed to a full NVQ. The broad terms, however, considered the amount of time required to complete the training and the broader requirements in terms of literacy, numeracy and IT - the triumvirate of key skills (that is skills that are essential to operation as an adult in today's society).

Under these standards a junior apprenticeship, for example, which requires a reasonable standard of all three key skills and a full time education counts as a full level 2. Hairdressing, which requires a surprising amount of time but is considered a bit low in terms of key skills counts as 80% of a full level 2 and can be brought up to a full level 2 by, for example, completing a Key Skills qualification - something that (memory and personal experience points out) the hairdressing teachers and students hate but can be built into the system for them.

From 2014 the GCSEs will all count as 20% each. The full time junior apprenticeship will count as 20% despite the time requirement making it impossible to pick up the other 80%. Hairdressing will not count at all. In addition, only 40% of the full level 2 will be available from vocational qualifications.

To say I was stunned and outraged would be an understatement. I really didn't trust myself to speak on this issue until now. The problem? The statement made it very clear that the current minister in charge of this considered schools are using vocational qualifications to "artificially inflate their position on the league tables." This made me wonder.

I think there is a sad return to a very typical, and wrong-headed, standard that says you are only worthwhile if you get a degree. Do plumbers, bricklayers, even hairdressers require degrees? I think most of us would say no - although there are certainly some people in all those professions with degrees. Are they useful members of society? Unless you want to live without flushing toilets and in mud huts with horrible hair, yes. So this move is, in my opinion, retrograde and reinforcing a muddled form of the class structure where only the very intelligent count, regardless of how useful the others may be.

Further, though, it turns out that upstart schools that take students from all backgrounds are suddenly topping the achievement-only league tables, and schools in places that have traditionally scraped along in the bottom half of the league tables, in poor inner city areas for example, are suddenly showing up in the top half of the achievement table, occasionally above traditionally "good" schools, and are really dominating in the value added tables. Heaven forbid they should do this - that the oiks appear to be well educated.

I have issues with the illusion of choice in the education system that the school league tables support. But, whatever small amount of value I thought they might have has just been thrown out in favour of politicking and maintaining the status quo. Congratulations minister.

Capitalism and the free market economy are, as anyone can tell you, based on some interesting assumptions. They assume, for example, perfect information and that everyone makes dispassionate, informed, rational decisions. Both of these are demonstrably (and frequently demonstrated again and again) untrue. But that isn't the fallacy that I wish to address today.

Free market economists, along with most other people, use the idea of success in the free market as a measure of goodness. Companies that make a profit are, de facto, good ones. We can argue this - charities aim to do good work and don't make a profit, is a company that makes a profit selling riot control devices to a country that uses them to suppress its population's legitimate protests good? - but by and large it's not a terrible measure of a company.

The problem comes with the most widely accepted, historically at least, extension to this. If a good company makes profits, more profits makes for a better company. This, it seems to me, is the fallacy of the 1-percent.

Apple, by this standard, is clearly the best non-energy company in America. While I think Apple is a good company, that's not based on their profits for the quarter and the obscene amount of money they've got lurking around.

Similarly, although I'm invested enough in the idea of the government providing universal health care that I'm fundamentally opposed to private health care companies, I can accept in other countries they exist and can theoretically provide good care. I am, however, inclined to the opinion that the best private health care company could well be the one with the smallest per capita profit, not the biggest profit - a company that I pay to care for my health probably needs to make some profit from my payments but I want the payments I make to mostly be used to cover my health care thanks very much.

Although I'm not sure that global outsourcing is necessarily bad - shipping finished products is usually more sensible than shipping raw materials for example - if I live in a city where the biggest employer has just shut down the factory to send the work abroad I'm certainly less sanguine about it.

Moving call centres for customer enquiries abroad rarely seems to work well, except in terms of the bottom line. Too many queries and calls end up frustrating the customer with problems with accents, poor connections and the like. As my deafness increases, this is becoming more and more of an issue for me - even though when I was younger I rarely found the accents to be a problem. It is certainly enough of a problem that one bank and an ISP both advertise "100% UK based call-centres" as a positive.

Of course counting "goodness" by other means is hard. Counting the quarterly balance is easy - there's a single figure to look at and think about. Considering if it's more good to have short supply chains for raw materials and longer chains for finished products (good from a green as well as a financial perspective) or to have more jobs locally is much harder. Measuring happiness, wellness and the like, and considering how your actions, your company's actions if you are in a position to make those choices, affects that - definitely hard. But, almost certainly worth doing.

Don't believe me?

Well, I'd like to see some hard numbers (but you have to buy the book), and I'm not naive enough to consider these graphs prove causality - but they are rather interesting. It rather strongly suggests that while making a profit might be good, making a profit that is more widely shared is almost certainly better.

Coriolanus, if you're not sure, if one of Shakespeare's historic tragedies. There was a historical figure Coriolanus and the story of the play loosely tells his history - successful general elected consul and then overthrown and banished because of his contempt for the common people. He went to fight with the Volskians, whom he had previously defeated, and led a successful campaign against Rome until his mother persuaded him to stop. Having been banished from Rome, he had now betrayed his new comrades and was tried and assassinated before the end of it.

And that, at heart, is the story of the play and the story of this film. Being Shakespeare though, the history forms a background for big human emotions. We have quite a few here - Pride, maternal love and ambition, love of mother and anger. Lots of anger. Of possibly more topical than general interest, there's a lot of scenes of the patricians and the plebeians, riots and the like. After last summer's riots and the occupy movement it's hard not to draw parallels there that perhaps in a different decade we wouldn't notice so clearly.

This particular film is updated in costume - guns, tanks and the like, artillery bombardment at points - but keeps the original text pretty much throughout. It may just be too long since I've heard original Shakespearean text but I found that quite hard at points. There was a speech by Coriolanus trying to whip the troops into a frenzy and I honestly got to the end and just thought "Uhh... dunno" - I'd lost the thread of his words and didn't know quite what was going on. That might be the deafness kicking in, but I think it's more likely just the text is too old to really work well in a huge chunk like that. There are, though the usual excellent turns of phrase "He has no more human kindness than milk in a male tiger" being my favourite. There was also one point, the first fight between Coriolanus and Aufidius where it seemed odd - Coriolanus has Aufidius in the sights of his gun and doesn't pull the trigger. With swords and spears that makes sense, in a modern urban warfare setting, not so much.

That said, the modern setting makes the soldiers, tribunes, plebeians, patricians and so on work really well. You get all those modern visual clues for the status of the person without having to think about it. That was nice and worked really well.

Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave in particular are brilliant. Gerard Butler, Brian Cox (the actor not the physicist) and James Nesbit are very good too. Which is good, because a lot of the load falls on them and they carry it smoothly and happily. Even one or two of the other apparently central characters, such as Coriolanus' wife Virgilia (Jessica Chastain) has almost nothing to do except sit there and be insipid, weep and look... mostly pretty. A challenge not helped by being a very pale-skinned redhead dressed mostly in white or matt blacks that really don't flatter her - to the extent I wondered what she'd done to annoy the wardrobe department! Jon Snow's cameos, in iambic pentameter no less, are well worth seeing too.

If you loathe Shakespeare, this won't be the film to make you change your mind. If you're not quite sure it might be. And if you're keen on pointing out how Shakespeare's genius lies in writing plays that are relevant to every generation then you'll love it. It's a surprisingly long film - it never felt slow or dragging, and at just over 2 hours of Elizabethan English that's no mean achievement. Highly recommended.

Last week Sherlock ended. Sherlock himself seemed to dive from Bart's roof onto the pavement and kill himself to save his friends. Given season 3 has been announced it can't count as a spoiler to say he lives despite appearances any more!

So, if he'd dived like that, even with Molly's help to fake the paperwork, he would have died - it's too tall for that to be plausible. We have all the clues apparently. I'm going to guess a double whammy. Sherlock clearly has an impersonator - someone close enough to terrify the little girl earlier in the story when she sees him. This is part of Moriarty's master plan so we can assume a fairly close double - height, build, looks - perhaps with surgical or other enhancements to help. A dead body, with a head injury, that closely resembles Sherlock? Suddenly much easier. It's not him, it's his double. We're supposed to believe that Sherlock couldn't work out Moriarty's plan and many of the possible side branches and counter each of them? This is one of the fairly obvious branches I'd have thought. (By that, I thought of it while watching the show.) With that, he can't find his double, kill him and get Molly to switch bodies? All well within the bounds of possibility. Whether he didn't jump but threw the body he'd already made or he jumped and landed somewhere safe, replacing his plummeting body with his double is unclear. I favour the former, but the latter would work - it just seems to require an extra helper unless Molly is driving the rubbish truck that parks there conveniently.

So, that's in writing. Near the beginning, there is a line from Watson about "the press always turns and will drag you down." I find myself wondering if this is what is happening with Apple and quite large sections of the press.

Apple are giving away iBooks Author, with a non-proprietary output format designed for highly interactive book-apps on the iPad. The downside? If you choose to sell the product (note sell - you can give it away free) you must do so through the iBooks store. OK, I get it's tying authors in to using the iPad, iBooks and the like. But it is called iBooks Author and it's not like it's a secret that this is the point. The extensions to ePub3 to make it non-proprietary seem to be there to let you manipulate multimedia outside the normal range of ePub tools and make use of the extra oomph that an iPad offers over a traditional eReader. It strikes me that you have a simple choice - you either buy in, with full understanding, to the iBooks/iPad/iBooks Author production route, or you decide equally clearly to go some other way. It is, perhaps, the first time that we've had authoring software that focusses so tightly on producing such tightly limited eBook+ output but, assuming they're successful with this strategy, they are taking a certainly sickly if not moribund bookstore and making it easy to write for, easy to distribute through and with clear cut mechanisms. I haven't compared this to the mess that self-publishing with Amazon generates - but I have talked to someone who started to look at it and gave up in disgust because the terms are truly horrible. Whether they will sign up to this contract we have yet to see but a quick chat earlier made it clear that the terms and conditions are pretty clear and seem acceptable before the lawyers go over it in detail for her.

The protests seem almost hysterical. The one that has me really scratching my head is "it's like Microsoft want a cut from your powerpoint presentations." Um, no. Even if I charge you for a seminar and use iBooks Author to give you my book supporting the course that's all fine. If I choose to sell it separately, I have to do it through the iBooks store. No worries. It's not 30% of everything I do, it's sales of the book through their store.

Traditional publishing houses typically pay their authors 10-15% of takings. The iBooks store pays 70%. OK, that extra 55-60% pays for printing costs, editing, cover art, publicity and the like. This is not taking a swipe at those costs for others - it will be interesting to see what happens to the standard of books published this way and if the serious authors start paying editors for their services, piecework or a percentage. I'm pretty sure a good editor adds to the quality of the story. it's still an attractive offer. The software, in the limited time I've had to play with it, works very nicely - as you might and I do expect from Apple. Being tied to their platform? I can live with that. Particularly when it's not at all by stealth - they're upfront about it all.

if, like me, you read the Mac news out there through the blogs - expert and otherwise - you are probably aware that for a little while there's been some buzz about Apple and their new iBooks release. Headlines settled quite quickly into themes around "Apple to take on Amazon."

Yesterday was the big day. Apple announced several things. First, an update to iBooks. Most of the changes seem superficial - same bookcase layout, excellent reading experience and so on. There are some background changes though - most notably an ability to read the new iba format. This appears to be mostly ePub 3 but with support for some extra embedded objects to let you put interesting things - for example 3D models with which you can interact - into the book. The new format is called a multi-touch book, and looks like it might be excellent for textbooks, possibly interesting for novels set in RL locations too.

Then there is an interesting book deal. Probably the first of many. McGraw-Hill, a major publisher of textbooks in the US, has signed a deal to distribute textbooks cheap via the iPad. There seems to be a headline figure of $15 per iPad book, compared to a typical $75 for the hard copy. As at least one commentator pointed out, this isn't as big a change in overall income as it appears at first. Schools apparently keep textbooks for 5 years on average, issuing, recalling and reissuing the books over that period. The iPad books won't be recalled and reissued - so over five years they will get five lots of $15... coming to $75. Although there will be a cut to Apple of course, there won't be printing, storage and transport costs, so it's probably a similar amount of income. It does, however, mean that the learners get to have a full set of textbooks for all of their schooling. How many will take advantage of that? I'm not sure, but it's hard to see it as a bad thing.

And finally there is iBooks Author. It is, in essence, a word-processor. In fact if you've ever used Pages, or Keynote to a lesser extent, you'll find the interface rather familiar, the shortcuts largely identical and the whole process pretty comfortable. Where it is a bit different is in two places.

First, there are a series of templates (no 'blank document' choice) with title pages, New Chapter, New Section and New Page layouts included. A structure that is very familiar to anyone that looks into a textbook. My PhD thesis would also fit very nicely into this structure. It takes some wrangling to make the templates fit a novel but it is possible to do that too. It is worth noting, if you are going to try and write a novel this way, the new chapter page rather strongly lends itself to having pictures included - something you may or may not want. One very nice thing, once you get into main pages section, if you cut and paste text from some other tool, it flows and fills the pages automatically for you. The templates, as you might expect, fit to the iPad's screen rather than a paper page.

Second, it doesn't come with the normal range of print options - it's not that they're not there, they're just rather tucked away in menus and shortcuts rather than directly on the button bar. Instead you have a preview button (a nice icon of an iPad) and a publish button. I haven't been all the way through the publishing process - there's a lot of legal documentation including fun things like need a US Tax ID number which is a nuisance being outside the US but working with US-based companies - but it seems fairly obvious. The Preview option creates a proof copy of your book directly into iBooks on your iPad. Yes, you need an iPad! But you do get the instant gratification of seeing your book on it, seeing how the consumer will see it.

This is incredibly easy to use. I need a textbook to write! A similar tool aiming at self-publishing novels to iBooks, or adaptation to make this more novel-friendly would be nice too. Oh, and the price is most definitely right - it's free.

How this combination of multi-touch books and free authoring tools that will tie you to the iPad will work remains to be seen. Not in the immediate sense - it all seems quite straight-forward and easy - but in the Apple vs Amazon sense. Apple are suddenly making it very easy to write for their tablet and create quality content - books with embedded multimedia of all kinds. It certainly looks attractive, particularly if you can tie in schools to giving children iPads and all their textbooks via the iPad. Add the texts for English Literature classes that aren't already available and away you go. It looks like an interesting battle ahead - I'd thought the 'declaring war' headlines hyperbole but now I'm really not so sure. A nice simple tool to produce quality materials on the iPad that won't work on the Kindle and fit the Apple's content access and provision business model while striking at Amazon's content provision opportunities. War, or at least competition, seems to be declared.

Yesterday large parts of the internet went dark. Most of the rest of the internet reported on the sites going dark!

This was, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, part of the protest against two pieces of legislation going through the US system called SOPA and PIPA. What these pieces of legislation are intending to do is redefine IP rights and enable the owners of copyright and IP rights to defend their rights more readily. Broadly speaking this is a good thing: although copyright and IP legislation in most countries is horribly out of date with the technological reality of a digital world - where copying with very high fidelity is simple and cheap rather than complex and expensive - what copyright laws do, in part, is ensure that creative people - authors, musicians, artists and the like - can get paid for their time and effort in creating things. This is a good thing, because unless we move to the taxpayers supporting creative people, it enables them to get paid and successful authors, musicians and the like to carry on writing and performing for us. You can read a fuller posting about my opinions on this elsewhere on my blog.

Superficially SOPA and PIPA seem like a good idea. We all know that content piracy is easy, whether or not we are involved in it deliberately.^ We can quibble about how much it costs people, whether they be someone like my friend Janine who writes and receives a small income from her work or the whole of Disney. It’s hard to deny that it does cost people though. And while you may consider Disney can afford to miss a few million dollars in profit, there are far more struggling musicians and writers where it might make the difference between them carrying on writing or giving up that it also affects, pushing them towards the latter choice.^^

With all of this preamble, it sounds like I’m about to say I support SOPA and PIPA. That’s not the case at all. I’m saying that I understand the impetus behind trying to draft legislation to update concepts about IP rights and enforcing copyright. SOPA and PIPA though, should be kept and discussed in jurisprudence and probably citizenship classes as prime examples of how not to do it.

Good legislation should have a clear aim or more rarely aims. SOPA and PIPA do that. It should achieve that aim reliably, fairly, even-handedly and proportionately. It should be ethical too, and culturally appropriate. There should not be collateral damage. And it should be enforceable. Suddenly these two potential laws fall apart.

Any site with any copyright infringing content can instantly be blocked. There is no due process, no concept of innocent until proven guilty (a cornerstone of most US legislation), no concern over freedom of speech and the like (also a cornerstone of US legal doctrine). There are no warnings, no ‘three strikes and you’re out’ concept of escalation, just boom, gone. Culturally appropriate, ethical and proportionate? No.

If you are a genuine pirate site, providing access to pirated content deliberately and the people this is meant to affect, it’s impossible to believe that you won’t infringe multiple times. If you assume people should be able to protect their IP and copyright, then pirate sites are already breaking the law and should be able to be removed. There are problems doing this - many of them are hosted outside the US and their owners ignore US laws - but these laws are not even close to the right answer. The apparently simple solution of “blocking access” is actually easy to attempt - people do it all the time. The servers have code written to look for such behaviour and switch to alternate routing because it will look just like a DDOS attack. The server won’t tell the difference and will just ghost around briefly, find a different egress and away you go. Enforceable? No.

And, of course, there are significant other problems. The law, as drafted, says hosting the pirated content is wrong even if you didn’t put it up, but someone else did. YouTube is suddenly responsible for any pirated videos hosted there. Currently the law says if the IP holder contacts YouTube they must remove the content or they can be forced to and potentially forced to shut down. They are keen to remove the dodgy content and not be shut down. Content on Tumblr, Flickr and Facebook are similarly controlled and can be shifted and removed. Technically retweeting breaks IP law - someone’s tweets are copyright to them unless they expressly say otherwise and if you retweet you are copying without permission. Oops. You may think closing YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook is a worthwhile price for protecting IP rights. I rather suspect you are in a very small minority if you do. All of these tools have systems to coping with protests about inappropriate material in place and enforce them. The level of collateral damage from this legislation is frankly unbelievable.

The ultimate irony? Many of the powerful media concerns pushing for this legislation - the ones that are earning billions and can probably afford to miss a million or two - don’t seem to think it’s ever going to be applied to them. The law as written means that if I comment on, say, the WSJ news site and I include copyrighted material from somewhere else - I copy a piece of Disney’s site say - then I report the content, the WSJ news site suddenly goes dark. The very people pushing for this legislation probably have the most to lose.

I am, broadly speaking, and certainly with no intent to write outline legislation, in favour of the principle that creative people own the rights to their creation and get paid for their efforts. What that will look like in this day and age I’m not sure - but SOPA and PIPA ain’t it. The legislation needs to reflect the new truths about how our world works - not attempt to reinforce their old business model. A business model that was once successful but which is increasingly clearly based on assumptions of human behaviour and technology that are just not true any longer.

The music industry has, more or less, made the change to digital completely. I remember as a child buying my first album (a big old lump of plastic with a groove on each side). The change to CDs caused the near collapse of the singles market, the change to mp3s and downloadable music has certainly hurt some companies individually but as a whole the music industry appears to be vibrant and successful still. Ironically the new reality has brought back the singles market, while also making campaigns to stop egregious marketing ploys and controlling the Christmas #1 possible.

The book publishing industry is currently squeaking and screaming and reorganising itself. It is some distance behind the music industry, and the printed book is not dying in the same way the album and CD did in competition with the mp3 download, but it is still changing. The magazine publishing industry is still further back, the newspaper industry seems to be changing in a few different ways but is still further back.

And the film/TV industries are sticking their heads in the sand and pretending it will all go away.

I don’t know what the new models for books, magazines and newspapers will look like but we’re starting to see signs:
E-Books seem to be replacing some of the market share, but improving overall sales. Some categories of book may become wholly electronic, including the self-publishing market, but books will probably survive if not necessarily in the quite the same numbers.
A number of newspapers are struggling and will probably die. One solution is to find a good niche market to serve - the FT for example is still doing well, serving the UK banking industry and similar, despite the problems in that industry. Others have successfully switched to advertising plus free to the consumer models. The evening paper in London (The Standard I think?) did this a few months ago, and although I haven’t seen figures recently, after its first and second months was doing really well as a free paper with advertising covering all its costs. This option is obviously limited to some extent, but a viable option.
I suspect both books and news media will develop more “app like” content - adding interactive elements, background research and the like over time.

For TV and film it’s a bit more up in the air because the moves are so new:
There was the comedian who filmed his show, made it available online and asked for contributions. He could, possibly, have made more using a more traditional model, but he certainly made a good return by doing it this way. Can this be extended? Probably not for a US TV season, but for some shows? Certainly.
With shorter run shows and films, crowd-sourcing for funds up-front might work. It has for films in the past. The artistic merits and commercial success are questionable, but there have certainly been films that raised their money this way.
It might change the advertising model from adverts every 2 minutes in a TV show to “CSI, sponsored by…” before each show, or during the title sequence or similar. I don’t necessarily like this model but it might work well. The UK has a limited form of this to supplement advertising - Crime on C5 sponsored by Kia topped and tailed CSI for a number of years! Product placement is harder to imagine in CSI but could be used in some shows successfully.
An extension to the BBC’s funding model, with annual subscriptions at a low rate might work - or not. Netflix, certainly in the US, seems to going down this route successfully. The BBC produces an amazing amount of content though - four TV channels and 7 national radio channels, plus many local/regional radio stations. I’m not sure how well the channels model will survive though. More and more people aren’t watching the BBC by channel so much as watching the iPlayer channel and picking and choosing programmes. That is definitely the Netflix model.
In direct contrast to the last two, a system where traditional channels are destroyed and you sign up to a show by show deal. “Watch CSI season 12 - $75. Special offer, all 3 CSIs, $150. Retro offer, all seasons of all three CSIs whenever you like - $200” (The numbers are rather plucked from thin air and might not stack up.) This is a bit like the crowd-sourcing model and a bit like the Netflix model, but for new content.

All of these will still have some sorts of issues with content piracy. They will certainly break a number of well-established companies or bend them into very different shapes. But they might be far more viable and if they can meet consumer need better, as with the iTunes store, they can make a lot of money still, for the companies, the actors and the writers AND not eliminate piracy but reduce it more than a little. More and more the music industry is coming to the former-pirate’s position that the pirated music (and it’s still there) often acts as an advertising ploy. People hear a track, acquire it illegally, then some of them buy the whole album it comes from. The piracy is still illegal but you don’t hear squealing about it killing the industry these days - and you do still hear about successful new bands.

Whatever the future is for these companies, SOPA and PIPA are trying to shore up a rapidly eroding past model. They aren’t the ways to get us to a viable future model - and although some of the old giants might go down fighting, some will change to meet the brave new world but something will happen - or don’t you believe the world has changed and will continue to change?

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^ I say deliberately because the chances are, if you’re active on the internet, you break someone’s IP rights inadvertently from time to time. Take my recent review of Shame. The review itself is fine. But I’m moderately sure that the video on YouTube of The Buzzcocks performing Orgasm Addict would be enough to have my domain blocked under SOPA. I’m not quite sure who the rights belong to (I’m guessing the band, but possibly the concert’s organisers) but probably not the person that uploaded it (and in this case almost certainly not the person that took it). It’s very unlikely that any of the parties will protest it but technically I suspect I am breaking the law. Each and every time you link to something, include something from elsewhere or similar, you are taking a leap in the dark. Even if the person says it’s OK to share (as the YouTube uploader did) and you assume they have the right to say that (which I’m moderately sure they didn’t, despite saying they did) you could be wrong and boom, you are breaking the law as it stands. No deliberate piracy, but piracy nevertheless.

^^ Please note I am not suggesting it is fair that piracy removes money from anyone’s purse, however fat it may appear. Losses due to human error, stock being pilfered, damaged in fires etc. Happens though. Expecting human nature to be what it is, I consider some level of loss due to digital piracy is inevitable. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made illegal and attempts made to stop it, but it will still happen. My sympathy is much more for the person where loss of income means a change in jobs than a corporation where small percentage losses to pilfering and piracy are still eye-bogglingly large numbers. If a company turning over a billion dollars loses 1% to piracy that’s 10 million still. It’s a stupendous amount and they’ll want to reduce it. I agree they should try to. But if you’re struggling to make a living writing full time and producing 1-2 books a year (fairly typical from what I know), and you lose the income from one of those - you’re suddenly starving or finding other work to feed the family. That gets my sympathy vote a lot more. Even if you’re comfortably off and losing all the income from one book won’t do that my sympathy is with the individual more than the corporation.

Netflix has recently come to the UK. I’m not 100% what it’s like in the US, but in the UK it’s really competing in a fairly mature market with services like Love Film, and the 500lb gorilla in the shape of Sky. It also, to some extent, competes with some of the other channels like Watch and Dave that show old series of TV shows.

There are really three elements to consider with Netflix:
• The technical side - how well do they present their content;
• The range of content they have available;
• The pricing.

Technically, on both my computer and using their free app on the iPad, I have to say I don’t have a problem. I watched parts of West Side Story and have started catching up with Twin Peaks on both and there was almost no buffering, no blips, the audio and the video both was fine. There was a subtitles option and although I didn’t need it, I tried that too (it’s extra to stream after all so if there were problems with me being near the limits it should show them up) and that worked just fine too. That was over wi-fi to the iPad and a wired connection to the iMac so a result there. I do, sometimes, get buffering if I’m watching just after 6pm. It’s not completely clear where that is occurring - but it’s worth noting that I try to avoid internet heavy things at that time if possible because my bandwidth seems narrower. I’m guessing a lot of people locally are using their internet heavily after work, after tea, whatever so it’s probably a problem at my end rather than theirs.

On the iMac it runs in a browser window. However, courtesy of Lion, we now have fullscreen mode in Safari and for the first time ever I used it - it does make a difference and is well worthwhile if that’s an option for you. The iPad app gives you a good solid fullscreen display, and touching the screen gives you easy access to a timeline slider/scrubber, volume, a “zoom” function (show widescreen or full height) etc. It’s one of those times when it’s hard to say much. They’ve more or less copied the UI from the Apple YouTube app with, I think, an extra for subtitles on the floater. It’s not radical and new - but it is copying a well thought out structure and system so no complaints. In fact the familiarity might even be a plus.

There is one feature on both interfaces (although it works slightly different between them) that is very nice when you first open the app or their webpage. Both display some version of “recently watched, carry on…” choices. On the iPad this will let you pick up in the middle of an episode or film even. On both, if you are watching a series, it automatically offers you a link to the next episode. That’s nicely done and makes it easier to use on both systems. As you might expect jumping to the middle of a movie isn’t instantaneous but it is fast. I typically takes longer to scrub to the middle of a 4 minute video on YouTube and it to start playing than it did to jump nearly 2 hours into West Side Story and start playing smoothly.

Both systems offer a selection of movies and a search choice. They’re both easy to use on both systems. If you do it in a browser Netflix builds up a profile of your likes and dislikes so it can try to make recommendations for other things you like. I haven’t seen this in action for long but it seems to work pretty well in a short period.

I don’t normally give marks for these things, but there really is nothing wrong with any of the technical side of things from what I’ve seen and if I was handing out marks, I would have to award 10/10.

The range of content might be more of an issue. I enjoy CSI for example. I can watch, on some channel, CSI from all 11 seasons that have been broadcast over here. (We’re waiting for Season 12 to start soon.) There are four seasons of the new Dr. Who (Eccleston and the three Tennant ones up to but not including the specials). West Side Story is obviously there. There’s a fairly random seeming collection of films. No Country For Old Men isn’t there. The Expendables (which is 2-3 years later I think) is. Sadly I don’t want to watch The Expendables and while I’m not burning to rewatch No Country For Old Men I would rather watch it than some of the other options. However, I was going to write this comparing Netflix to Love Film which offers a similarly priced streaming only service. Quickly hitting up some favourites shows there’s a wide range - Netflix gives 2 returns for Les Miserables, Love Film gives 6 for example. But only one of those 6 from Love Film is available on “Watch Now” which is their streaming service. I can have them post me the DVD, but this costs more. There’s similarly no CSI, only old Who on DVD and No Country For Old Men is there… on DVD only. ARGH! The content appears better on Love Film at first but loads of it isn’t available there and then and having DVDs posted out costs more too. No thanks! Adieu, Love Film. You could, at least, offer a filter on the iPad for “only show the streamable content” with an expansion button for rentable content or a preference pane or similar, but no. That was enough to make me cancel my membership right away because it really, really annoyed me. You may feel it’s a better deal though.

Given the similarities between the two in what I did check, I’m assuming that it’s a rights issue. Hopefully Netflix will start to be successful and spend over here to get more rights to show content. We shall have to wait and see. In the mean time I don’t feel like I’m at a loss for content - although if I have an urge to watch a particular show that they don’t have rights to I obviously won’t be able to.

The pricing as a monthly subscription is interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it or not - but then a month’s free trial is about making those choices. However, paying for a month regardless and then watching whatever I like is a good deal in my opinion. They’re gambling, of course, on me only watching one or two movies. I’m gambling on watching a bit more on average. We shall see. But a system where I had to pay to watch experience (such as pay-per-view movies on Sky) suggests I simply won’t use it. There’s something about paying anyway then getting whatever it is free at the point of demand that makes me more likely to keep the service and more likely to use it. Your opinion may be different. Netflix also offers no purchase option. Their CEO, when I heard him interviewed during the process of thinking about this, claimed that buying a film was unnecessary as being away from broadband is increasingly rare and if the film is always there on demand, plays instantly, then what’s the difference? There will, of course, be people who can’t get broadband. People who travel and might want movies away from a good 3G/4G service. Netflix may not be for them. But for me it seems to make sense - I’m rarely away from the internet. Not filling memory on the iPad and watching online works just fine.

Overall I have to say I was impressed with Netflix. There are licensing issues to be worked out, and one or two things I’d miss on live TV but within a short period of time between iPlayer, ITV Player and 4OD, plus some PAYG access to some other things, I could probably cover all of my TV I actually make the effort to actively watch. At that point and adding Netflix (ideally with slightly more content closer to current) to round out the choices I could probably do without a television. It might make me odd (OK, it would make me weird according to one media expert) but it will be a viable option for me. It might not happen for a while but I wouldn’t be that surprised if I never buy another TV set - unless they start broadcasting holographic TV or similar.

Thinking through the pricing system, I find myself wondering just how easily we will move to a pay-per-show model. Would I pay some fixed fee per programme or prefer a fee per month? I’d rather the latter as I’ve already said. Maybe something where I pay like that and I get up to 5 shows a week, or a lower fee and 5 shows + adverts. Perhaps a fee that gets me rights to the season forever… much like having it on DVD but including the right to watch “live” at broadcast time. I might have 500 channels available, but I don’t watch most of them. In fact I mostly watch about 5 of them, plus have some of the free (license fee covered) ones I watch too. That’s all I need to replace.

Shame is definitely an adult (18-rated in the UK) movie, with a lot of nudity and a lot of scenes of a sexual nature.

And in some ways that could be the review. In fact, during the early part of the film I was thinking that they should have chosen Orgasm Addict by The Buzzcocks for incidental music. In some ways I still think they should. Although the pick-up scene uses Rapture by Blondie instead, which works pretty well as a theme song too and is more suited to the New York setting I guess.

That said, this film is really a character study of Brandon, who is the orgasm addict. In fact, in many ways, I feel like I've been on 2 or 3 dates with Brandon, getting to know him - something he absolutely wouldn't allow without sex on the first (or maybe second if I was a work colleague) date. It becomes very clear that he's a highly successful player on the scene. He has learnt how to pick women up, to pay attention, to flatter, to interest them. Possibly this is a left-over super-power from X-Men First Class, because he is shown as being able to stare at women on the subway and instead of provoking responses of "Fuck off you creep" (which both of us felt we would have said) he has eye-sex with a married woman who happily comes back for more. He does other things that seem odd like that too. Fassbender is, I'm assured, not hard on the eyes, but he seems to be able to fascinate women without trying.

But that 3 dates thing... we see more about him over the film, but in a way where it's presented like we're learning about a friend, or a date. We meet his boss, who fancies himself as a player too but is terrible at it. We meet his sister and see how she disrupts his carefully regimented life and gradually we find out in little drips and drops why they are both the way they are. Not in all the detail but enough that it's made clear, even if you don't suspect from seeing the two of them together.

This is not, at all, a light, fun movie. In fact I'd say it's decidedly downbeat if not out and out depressing. But it's one of those good depressing films. We came out subdued, thoughtful and pleased we'd seen it. There have been films that are much more frothy and apparently exciting that we've seen in the last year that I really regret seeing. Shame will not be on the list of regrets.

And in case you don't know Orgasm Addict...

An article asking this question flitted by on my Zite aggregation and made me think before flitting off again.

I find myself unconvinced and rather saddened by the piece - although asking the question may be fair game. There were four central arguments:

1. Irene Adler is outwitted by Sherlock. I disagree on two points here. She sparred with Sherlock and more than kept her own - the only person other than Moriarty every to manage this. She eventually lost - as did Moriarty in many respects. She is one of the few characters who even comes close to holding her own and eventually loses to the central character of the show. There's a shock. That's not sexism in action, that's the hero winning at the end of the show. Also, she could be a male character, Sherlock a female character - the result would be the same, Sherlock would eventually triumph. Sexist? Well we could go back and question why they cast men for the roles of Holmes and Watson rather than women, but given it's the start of season two, not sexist in and of itself thanks.
   
2. Adler says she's lesbian (she does) but is overwhelmed by Sherlock, fascinated and smitten by him, and that's her fatal flaw. Stronger grounds here I feel, except we know Adler tells lies to manipulate people and at the point she declares she's gay (in response to Watson's protestation that he isn't), she's clearly manipulating Watson to get him to tell her how to get her phone back from Holmes. Some of what she said was doubtless true but we really have no idea about that one statement that is critical to this argument. Even if she is gay, we also have only Holmes' read that she loves him. She's portrayed as fascinated by his mind - that could be what Holmes misreads as love easily enough.
   
3. She took advice from Moriarty. Except he's a consulting criminal, it's exactly the kind of thing he should do. He doesn't advice her how to protect herself, rather he advises her how to maximise the "protection" she's already got. Does that diminish her role and impact? Possibly, a little. However, it's also a plot hook for an on-going story arc and one that I rather find myself thinking if I were a criminal with a suddenly "hot" piece of blackmail, I would approach a consulting criminal for advice about how best to use. It's not about her gender again. Sorry - it might be an extra straw if the other points convinced me, but they don't, and this doesn't convince me along.
   
4. Finally, (spoilers!), Holmes rescues Adler from execution. This I understand. The sexually predatory woman is brought literally to her knees and is about to be executed (it's not really clear what for) but it's a re-assertion of patriarchal control. She's helpless and rescued by the hero - and she does appear resigned to dying until Holmes rescues her. The old helpless woman needs a man to save her trope. OK, both of these have some weight. But... the kneeling execution pose is what we see in news videos and a million TV shows when it's being done to men. They could have tried to find a different group of people to kill her in a different way but this one ties back to other comments in the episode so it fits. Taken in isolation, I'd seriously consider if this scene was promoting old stereotypes and sexism, but taken in the context of the whole show and the characters, I think it's possibly portraying the "hero rescues the helpless woman" but it is also rather clearly playing up the level of fascination that Irene Adler holds for Holmes. Is he the hero rescuing the helpless maiden or the helpless pawn aiding his muse? And if Holmes had been cast as a woman... the ending would work just as nicely, with her rescuing Adler. Tricky one. Since Moffat's a Scot the jury (well me) finds the case 'Not Proven' rather than the defendant innocent.

After a bit more thought, I found myself wondering if the writer of the original piece has it in for Stephen Moffat for some reason. I think he sketches in all his characters from fairly standard tropes, elevating them by adding some great dialogue and spectacular plots where he shows plausible reactions from those tropes even if they're outside the norm. He's not doing this to the women specifically - he does it to everyone. If you want to see a writer that can't handle writing for women at all look at Being Human (the UK one). And while it's incredibly disappointing that a TV writer can't write well for women's roles, even then I'm not sure that makes the writer sexist - just limited.

Having talked about it in the review for the movie, it was inevitable I'd talk about the TV show.

They both reinvent the books in different ways. The film series adds a mix of steam-punk and gay flirting. The TV series moves the setting to modern London. Oddly, though, it seems that the TV series remains truer to the originals. The stories are clearly identifiable, even if you're not a scholar of the books. Yes, there are changes, I'm fairly sure Conan Doyle didn't bother with the American Secret Service (whatever it was called back then, before it eventually became the CIA) because America then just didn't matter. Today it does, so CIA agents appear. Conan Doyle has anarchists, Moffat and Gatiss have terrorists. But it's pretty clearly an update to the stories.

And the other thing - people sometimes complain that Moffat has a tendency to make the plot rush along so you don't think of the plot holes. Although it would be fair to say this never drags, it's also not a mile-a-minute rush through the story. Because that would tend to kill the other thing that's going on: there is a lot of beautifully crafted dialog. Holmes and Watson come over very strongly as a couple, albeit one with no sex involved and no sexual tension. An all-consuming partnership perhaps. But the dialog from both of them around and about it is great.

And the other thing, as well as great dialog that enhances all of the characters and their interactions, is the little nods. Holmes, of course, is renowned for his Deerstalker. With the exception of Kim Newman, an eccentric in any generation, no one wears a deerstalker. But Holmes and Watson are leaving a theatre, warned of the press Holmes steal a piece of costume as a disguise... and the deerstalker is born.

It seems odd to say that two visual dramas based on Sherlock Holmes are so dissimilar as to be almost impossible to compare. But they are. The romp was fun. The TV show, the series I'm sure, is a good solid piece of drama that it will be a joy to watch again. Chalk and cheese.

If you saw the first film on this series (reviewed here) then stylistically you know what to expect:

• the "Holmes fight" where he plans the whole thing, immaculately, in advance;
  
• the gay not-very-sub subtext;
  
• the mad experiments, mostly on Gladstone;
  
• The steam-punky atmosphere

All those things remain. The gay subtext is not quite cannon now - they don't kiss, have sex or anything, but there are a number of scenes that are played right up to the brim of tipping into that, sometimes for laughs (such as Holmes gradually being stripped by Watson and ending up nearly naked, under him and next to him on the bed), a number that are much more subversive - such as Holmes and Watson dancing together at a ball for Ambassadors, and Watson revealing it is Holmes that taught him how to dance.

The story moves at more of a even romp pace than the first one though, aided by a story which makes more sense and a villain who is well up for the challenge and Holmes' intellectual equal, if not better. A situation that is wonderfully handled when they meet above the falls.

The story is one that Conan-Doyle would almost certainly never have written, but uses his characters and puts them in a situation where the story feels almost as if it should be an adaptation of an original book.

What will be interesting will be tonight's episode of Sherlock on the BBC - the same characters should abound and the same end point... but I can't help feel a rather different journey. And the niggles of the film, particularly Holmes attending a fine dinner unshaven, will not slip though I'm sure.

Women's Hour, a radio programme in the UK that no longer lasts an hour but is (almost always) female presenters and largely female guests (one notable exception was for Red Nose Day when a man was allowed to present as a 'big dare' kind of thing) - has joined twitter and uses it for feedback and commentary, as well as (at least occasionally) a source of extra questions. Women's Hour isn't quite a current affairs show - it would be fair to say it's women's affairs which can include current affairs but can also include pieces that would fit in at more or less any time - a piece about why some women find horses and ponies so interesting and attractive for example.

Today they broadcast a retrospective piece, looking at the top tweeted stories of the year. I have absolutely no problem with this, and actually it was funny and interesting. The horses and ponies piece was one of their top stories in fact.

But it did make me wonder. On Christmas Day I went to have a meal with some friends and until a migraine curtailed my time out, I ate far too much wonderful food (thank you to the hosts!), drank a little, played silly games and chatted to friends one of whom I see regularly (although possibly not often enough) and many of whom I see far too infrequently. The only TV that was allowed to intervene was Dr. Who and we split roughly evenly between those that wanted it to be appointment TV and those that would watch it later if the game finished later than it started.

Dr. Who is, for me, I think the only appointment TV on the schedules. That is, I will plan to be there, stop, watch it at the time of broadcast quite deliberately. I have a few other things, news and rugby matches, that I will tend to have on live, but I can always catch the news online or similar and while I prefer to watch the rugby properly I will often actually record it and watch it later, or work and have it on and turn round to watch the replays of the highlights. Even topical shows - Have I Got News For You, The News Quiz and so on - I will rarely watch/listen to at the time of broadcast even when (as #HIGNFY/@bbcHIGNFY show so nicely) they try to encourage you to tweet real time about the show.

So, it occurs to me that there's a tension here. Somehow I've become one of the middle aged, as have my friends (everyone at Christmas Dinner was over 40, they way squeal about the description but it's hard to deny it) and we're supposedly representative of the bulk of our society (we have some very specific differences, like none of us have children, but we're meant to be representative). There's a mix of tech-savvy and not (although everyone uses computers a lot in their work) and for all of us, stopping to watch Dr. Who at its broadcast time was a significant and unusual event. Appointment TV is a thing of the past even for middle-aged folks like us. At the same time, the technology that makes it no longer common to watch TV as its broadcast is encouraging the broadcasters to try and engage with us and get us to interact live.

Fun times.

A long time ago, or so it seems, I wrote about EVE and my first impressions. I'm sure I've blogged about it since then but can't find the links.

A while ago I was tempted back by a good offer - cashing in all my SP in learning skills to get a load of other skills made a big difference to my character. I also added a second character who is mostly Science & Industry based, but has a strong set of leadership and gradually increasing logistical skills. Both characters now mine, fairly efficiently, but only for an hour or so a week - little enough I can tolerate it.

My main character flies, with very good skills, a variety of Angel Pirate faction ships now, for mission running. Also about an hour (or less) but most days. Occasionally a bit more than an hour on days when I'm not working. I have, to go with this, a good set of skills for shield and speed tanking and shooting things with guns - big guns even. With all big ships you get drone bays of various sizes, so I've picked up decent (but not really extreme) drone skills.

I decided to see how different EVE could be. Thanks to flying a Mach, I have good Gallente Battleship skill, but not the Hybrid weapon skills. Like most Minmatari I can armour tank, but where many of my shield tanking skills are at 5 and the rest are at 4, my armour tanking skills are lacking... a few critical ones at 4, but mostly a bit lower. But the Dominix is a drone boat that armour tanks... adding guns helps, but I can add Projectile guns successfully and with a bit of training I managed to fit a t2 large armour repairer, some decent resistance modules, a nice cluster of drone enhancers and the like.

The experience is very odd. My reflexes yell at me to move, shoot, move, webbers are top priority targets and so on. Drones are a nice little extra to add or to clear out the small stuff.

Now: I sit still; I calmly (allegedly) watch the shield evaporate and when the alarm goes turn on the armour repper; I swap sentry drone types as the range changes; I shoot things ineffectively with my artillery for relatively insignificant amounts of damage at ranges that don't challenge the range of my auto cannon on the Mach.

It's odd. I don't trust it enough to run really hard missions yet, but I did one with plenty of room for it to go wrong. It took a while - 2-3 times longer than last time I did it in my Mach - but it was never below 100% shield after the repairer finished its cycle. Remembering to align to a station, ready to escape felt odd and it was slow... but not really frustratingly so. I still completed a mission that allow 3 hours in around an hour, and rather than spending a small fortune in ammunition, I fired <200 rounds. In a mission like this one, I'd probably fire 200+ rounds per gun on the Mach - there are 7 of them - so that's a big difference. I'm still tweaking the fit for optimum mission running - I've currently gone for the normally cardinal sin of mixing gun types so I have actually have 4 working ranges. Long range sentry sniping, large artillery + long range sentries, auto cannon + short range sentries, too close, use the medium drones!

I need to think, too, about diverting from the core drone skill improvements to add some of the other skills (better armour tanking) too, and consider in the longer term my second character's development and how to support an Armour Tanking ship with leadership skills and modules.

But... Surely this is the fun of EVE? There's stress relief to running a mission, blowing things up, selling and making stuff. But writing insanely long training queues, working out the best way forward to fly the ship well. Surely that's part of it too? And with the Domi throwing a new thing into the mix, what fun!

Recently a friend, I should probably say erstwhile friend in the circumstances, suggested to me that in terms of explaining how we come to be here, any story was as good as any other. I objected to this. In the UK we have creation stories from many places - science, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, various pagan traditions and more. We can, he did, suggest alternatives such as we aren't real rather we are just internal agents in someone's mind with no true history.

I objected then, and still do now, to this proposition. A story, in general, has no need to be truthful and there are often benefits to telling untrue stories as well as true ones, even in educational/learning settings. But not when it comes to explaining things. It's clear there can be many explanations for things, and it will often not be possible to be completely true, but an explanation that can't be tested, is incoherent or that flies in the face of available evidence ought really to be discarded. God creating the world 6,000 years ago - sorry, lots of evidence to counter that so not a good explanation. It could still be a good metaphor mind, but not an explanation. (I’m not intending to divert into a big discussion of the nature of truth here, nor of mistakes and correcting them - more to accept that we can try to make a decent explanation that is true as we understand it and many of us often do this pretty well.)

Yes, that might make me sound like a scientist - there's a shock - but if you talk to a historian, not a history student, a historian, they will tell you that they do the same thing. It's not a totally alien idea even in the humanities you see.

Why does this matter? What prompted me to blog about it?

Recently several parts of the foaming, right-wing press have been attacking the BBC for failing in its duty of impartiality. Not, well mostly not, in the easy to refute type of balance between political parties, but on a topic where in fact the politicians, at least those allowed to speak publicly, are in broad agreement in fact. (There are differences in the detail of what to do about it, but not that it's a problem.) It may surprise any readers in the US, if I have any left, that this issue is global warming - our leading politicians and our scientists agree that it is a genuine problem and something needs to be done now. Various frothing and foaming members of the press don't, or pretend not to for their writing, but the BBC does agree with the consensus. Because there is such a strong consensus they have no need or duty to report "other views" to maintain impartiality, just as there is no need to ask representatives of the Flat Earth society to present their ideas every time they talk about the Earth being a spherical planet. They don't invite people to discuss the geocentric model of the solar system when talking about orbiting planets either.

The trouble is that people who willfully ignore evidence of, to coin a phrase, an inconvenient truth, believe, just like my friend, that any explanation is fine. They don't want to believe it, so they don't, maintaining despite the evidence, that they are in the right and should be heard. It is possible some of them might support flat Earth and geocentric models too... But they don't admit that in public! Not giving a voice to the lunatics is not failing to be impartial.

And, just for fun, here's a skit on some of the other headlines we're possibly supposed to believe from one of these sources (thanks to Thau for the original link).

It's that time of year again. I've seen two such lists already (both today mind) so here's mine!

1. Troll Hunter


2. Sucker Punch



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3. Black Swan


4. The Adjustment Bureau


5. Tron Legacy


6. Ironclad


7. True Grit


8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes


9. Hanna


10. Season of the Witch


11. The Debt


12. Source Code



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13. Harry Potter 7.2


14. Pirates of the Carribean 4


15. Thor



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16. Gulliver's Travels


17. Sanctum


18. Conan the Barbarian


19. X-Men: First Class



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20. Immortals

• Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Not so many films this year for various reasons, including 2 or 3 I missed thanks to migraines.

Again a top two that it was hard to choose between. Sucker Punch made me think, hard, about many things. But Troll Hunter just beat it to the punch for being so delightfully unexpected and wonderful all round. Black Swan nearly made it into this category too, but for EDL syndrome it probably would have done.

The next chunk were all good solid films. The order of this cluster could change on a different day, they were all rather close.

The next three were fun but flawed in general. Certainly I don't regret the time for any of them, but I wouldn't make any effort to watch them again.

The next four were poor. I'd have rather done something else to be honest, but they weren't terrible.

And then Immortals. Maybe it's because it's new, maybe something else, but my biggest waste of time of the year.

Please note I've not listed Cave of Forgotten Dreams in any particular order, just noted I watched it (that's why there's no number). It was so different to everything else (it still makes me think of a Time Team episode rather than a film, documentary or otherwise) that it's hard to work out where to put it in relation to them.