Luther

Luther

Nope, it isn't remotely believable.

Yes, Idris Elba and others are very good.

Most of all, it asks questions about how we are policed, about how the criminal justice system operates, and the ethics and morality of making your own decisions as opposed to standing by while others let us all down.

Why Waste Your Time

The callers were almost unanimous: disenchanted, they're all the same, what's the point when all they do is swindle and cheat the taxpayer, whichever party they purport to represent?

The only dissenting voices were those maintaining that you should at least go along and spoil your ballot paper to register a protest. I think this need dissembling:

Spoil your ballot paper to register your protest: that makes sense.

Go along: that's the problem, right there. Go along. Travel, wait in the queue, take your turn. In the digital age, that's positively prehistoric. You can pick up the daily paper, watch the test match, do your banking on any number of mobile devices, from wherever you are, safely and securely, but voting still requires pen and paper.

No wonder they're all still wandering about in ermine and silk, pledging allegiance to a hand-me-down crown, and generally behaving as if it were about a hundred and fifty years ago. No wonder there's that inertia that leads to calls for revolution, we're mired in so much tradition we can hardly move for the stuff. Actually, delete 'tradition' and replace with 'baggage'.

Managing expectations

Private Eye had ashen-faced supremo Ron Knee as the stereotype. There were quite a lot of grim faces in the crowd. Sport's like that. No matter how much you fork out on tickets, burgers and replica shirts for the two little lads, mate, the result's always in doubt.

England are a quarter final-ish footballing nation. One World Cup, going on for fifty years ago.

Before the hand-wringing about foreign players kicks off (sorry) that's fifty years during which there's been varying numbers of imported players, with an unvarying amount of trophies added to the cabinet. Zero, nada, ziltch, none.

An England team with plenty of changes and a lot of raw players (in international terms) lost to a team only two places below them in the standings. That isn't grounds for booing them off the park. They didn't fail to try or to give of their best, they were simply outplayed at a couple of important moments by sharp and streetwise opponents with one of the world's most in-form players popping up with two goals.