I see and hear a film has been made about a certain former Prime Minister of the UK.

I must say at the outset that I shall not be going to see it – not least because the good lady (my good lady) is still too scarred by that woman’s actions that she cannot bear or contemplate anything to do with her.

I gather the film portrays its heroine as frail and dotty. (I suspect this may be a dramatic necessity for the purposes of making the film.) I have heard a speaker on Radio Scotland – a Tory MP – English of course – complain that it went beyond good taste as the person concerned was still alive and it therefore compromised her dignity. Well, that was rich.

Firstly and brutally, if she is frail and dotty she won’t know, will she?

Secondly, did she in her prime give a shit about the human dignity of all those she condemned to hardship and penury, everything she destroyed, as a result of her policies? You could call it karma.

In any case there were signs in her late Premiership that she was unhinged, if not deranged, so its not surprising she’s not all there in her dotage.

Yet none of this is to do with the thrust of this post.

Coincidentally I read an article from Tuesday’s Guardian that, as part of the setting up of Sky, Thatcher made the BBC pay £10 million a year to have their channels broadcast on Sky’s platform. Yet one more example of the baleful influence the woman had on British public life. And these payments persist: they are happening now.

Is this circumstance more widely known? Because I was outraged.

Does any other broadcaster – anywhere – have to pay another to have its own programmes shown on that other’s channels? Surely not.

Doesn’t the BBC sell programmes/formats around the world rather than pay others to broadcast them? Don’t the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 pay to the originator for US (or Australian or whatever) generated programmes? And doesn’t Virgin have to pay Sky to have Sky channels on its (Virgin’s) service? Doesn’t Sky itself pay HBO hefty amounts for their programmes?

We all know the reason why there would not have been much protest from the BBC at such an arrangement. The perceived power of the Murdoch Press. The pusillanimity of politicians of all parties with respect to that power.

That power may now be a busted flush and despite the Tories’ antipathy to anything that smacks of public endeavour surely the BBC ought to be demanding an end to this public subsidy of a private company. For that is what the arrangement amounts to.

As it stands it is – and always has been – a total waste of licence fee payers’ money to throw it away on Sky for no content in return.

The boot should be firmly on the other foot. Sky ought to be paying the BBC – and handsomely – for any access at all to BBC programming. Not to mention providing adequate compensation for all the years in which money has been shamefully drained away from the BBC in this way.

Edited to add:- my good lady says the speaker on the radio was none other than Jeremy (H)unt – her parentheses.

Yesterday afternoon I glimpsed a programme called Grand Tours of Scotland. I wouldn’t normally have watched this (mainly because the good lady thinks the presenter, Paul Murton, has an unappealing voice) but we were in someone else’s house at the time.

It was episode 6 of the series, the only one I’ve seen and Murton was “following the sun” up through the East of Scotland’s sea-side resorts. On the way he visited Stonehaven Swimming pool which has featured in my Scotland’s Art Deco Heritage posts (see link above.)

He ended up at the Beach Ballroom, Aberdeen, which is in my Aberdeen Art Deco Heritage posts. Murton undertook some dancing inside the Ballroom. The interior still retains Art Deco features.

Anyway the programme is available on the BBC iPlayer, but only until Wednesday 21/12/11, so if you tune in you can catch some glimpses yourself.

Also on the iPlayer (till tomorrow 20/12/11) is a piece, about 25 minutes in, from The One Show on the Midland Hotel, my post on which you can see via the link.

So. It’s Russia.

Well done, comrades. (Or don’t you say that anymore?)

Fat lot of good having David Beckham, the Prince William and Mr Irresponsible presenting the England bid as part of the team did them.

But what an outpouring of bile we got from the commentariat on BBC news in the aftermath, saying that the process was flawed, not transparent enough and must be changed.

What? You lose the vote and that’s because of the system?

This display of sour grapes is profoundly unappealing. You were acting as if it were your divine right to have the tournament. I know God is supposed to be an Englishman but get a grip. No wonder you lost.

Where does this ridiculous sense of entitlement originate? You lucked out once and have been more or less mince ever since. You continually puff up your league as the best in the world. If it is – and that’s by no means a given – it would only be because it is stuffed full of foreign players who are more gifted technically, and more intelligent in the football sense, than your indigenous ones.

And before anyone points the finger, my poor little football country has no such delusions of grandeur. We cured ourselves of any vestige of that a long time ago.

It’s indicative of the desperation fans of England feel that they appear to think that only by hosting the World Cup will they ever win it again. (I would suggest that the way the England team is going now even being hosts wouldn’t guarantee that.)

Face it guys. Nobody likes you. You’re too arrogant.

In an interview on Football Focus today – I had a quick look on the BBC website and the iPlayer but the clip doesn’t seem to be there – Steven Gerrard, talking about the World Cup, said that England had gone to South Africa as “genuine contenders.”

Oh really, Steve?

You just don’t get it, do you?

I settled down last night at 9 pm to watch the second swatch of the latest BBC adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day Of The Triffids only to find it wasn’t on. This was because Holby City had been bumped to an hour later by River City and so we in Scotland didn’t get to see The Day Of The Triffids until 10.20. I went and had a bath instead.

But… The main BBC news was on in Scotland at 10. The Day Of The Triffids lasted 1½ hours and so the news in the rest of the UK wasn’t till 10.30.

Was there a special news, for Scotland only, at 10? What did the (London) BBC news unit think of that? (The Scottish news opt out which normally follows the news – the “where you are” bit – came on as usual afterwards: it wasn’t a BBC Scotland main news.) Or did they just use the BBC 24 hour news feed for the fifteen minutes?

Anyway, The Day Of The Triffids adaptation itself was well done and, apart from some updating and an unnecessary emphasis on the hero, Bill Masen’s, family, (I blame Russell T Davies) reasonably true to the book as I remember it, with a fine performance by Eddie Izzard as the baddie, Torrence.

It was, however, – even the daylight scenes – filmed almost entirely in what I call Super Murk-O-Vision. This was probably to avoid too many shots with triffids in them as, no matter what you do, plants are not really that scary in appearance. Here, the book definitely scores over any possible visual version. The depiction of the triffid sting, showing it as a potent disabling weapon, was also much too late.

[Edited to add: the voice over was a mistake too.]

I doubt this version would have converted anyone that didn’t already have a penchant for it to SF, though.

For anyone who wants to see them, the iplayer reruns are here and here.

One strange thing we learned about Chester is that it’s in Wales – in the televisual sense at least. Button 4 on the remote in the B&B had S4C and Channel 4 was on button 8. I think the border is actually right on Chester’s outskirts but it still seemed strange.

We left Chester and headed east to view some modern architecture. I took the A56 because I was fed up with motorways and knew the road passed close to our destination.

As a result of this we travelled through Altrincham, Sale and Stretford, encountering quite a few Art Deco cinemas, shops and houses on the way but I have no pictures as I was driving.

At Salford we were directed down Matt Busby Way past the Theatre of Debts Dreams and on to Daniel Libeskind’s building for the Imperial War Museum North. This photo was taken from across the Manchester Ship Canal.

The first thing I noticed on getting out of the car in the car park I instantly recognised as a Soviet designed tank. (The good lady wondered how I knew but they’re just so distinctive.) It’s in desert camouflage since it’s a T-55 as used by the Iraqi army and was captured by British forces during the second Gulf War.

There’s a T-34 inside the museum. (When I see Second World War footage of those I always think they look like Daleks. It’s probably the way the gun sticks out.) Also among the exhibits are a Harrier Jump Jet – which had to be craned in before the roof was put on – a gun turret from a Wellington bomber – tiny inside – and a German floating mine laid at Scarborough in World War 1.

The building’s shape and form were explained by the tour guide (from whom we got a hug: but don’t get your hopes up – she went to school with our younger son’s girlfriend, and we’d met before.)

The unusual shape is based on a fragmented world with three shards representing Earth, Air and Water – the three arenas for war. Apparently there was to be a fourth symbolising Fire – highly appropriate to war, as well as matching the four ancient Greek Elements – however, the project’s funding didn’t permit that. The audio visual displays projected onto the inside walls are very effective.

We spent four hours inside and wondered where the time had gone. It’s well worth a visit.

A spot of lunch (late) and then over the Ship Canal to the Lowry, designed by Michael Wilford and started in 1997. We were told the building is supposed to resemble a steamship. My photo is a stitch of two taken from the War Museum side.

More details are on the Lowry website.

There were lots of Lowry paintings, of course – some not of matchstalk men: mostly the early ones before his style settled. In “Going To The Match” he captures perfectly that stooped-over walk men used to have when walking to a football match. Others of the pictures show this stooping too, though, so maybe it’s a Northern England thing.

There are some of Lowry’s landscapes here too but none was as good as his riverscape that we saw in the Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.

We then spent some time in the Lowry Retail Outlet just across the plaza.

The area has been cleaned up since it was industrial. There were scullers taking advantage of the calm water. The new BBC premises in Manchester are under construction a stone’s throw away off a branch of the Canal. (See the cranes in the photo above.) I hope from the outside that will be more interesting than the vast shoe box they recently built in Glasgow – which is stunning inside instead; but that’s a bit pointless really.

The footbridge across the Ship Canal between the two museums is interesting as it’s on a lift; or rather two lifts – a kind of modern equivalent of the Transporter Bridge at Middlesbrough. There’s a photo on the Lowry site of it raised to allow a ship through.