The UK Babe Channels Forum

Star Trek Voyager Ep 12 “Heroes and Demons” Season 1

The Doctor goes on his first away mission, the Doctor eps were always very good.

Sea Power - Submarines
Forces TV

Another cheap and cheerful series of half hour military documentaries on Forces tv. I thinks this was probably made for Australian tv based on the narrator's accent and the antipodean emphasis of some of the subject matter.

The first half was a superficial look at the German submarine war against Britain in WWII. The U-Boats fought as wolfpacks and the British fought back with convoys, radar and sonar and as the Kriegsmarine started the war with only 28 boats they were not able to starve Britain into submission. We've seen it all before in more detail.

The second half looked at the Oberon class of diesel-elecric submarines which were built in Britain and served from the sixties to the nineties during the cold war in the navies of Britain, Australia, Canada, Brazil and Chile. One of these (HMS Onyx) was the only conventional powered boat to see action in the Falklands War. Being smaller than the nuclear submarines it could maneuver into smaller inlets to disembark special forces behind enemy lines. Eight of this class are now preserved as museum boats but only one is in Britain at Chatham dockyard, HMS Ocelot seen below.

Last Week Tonight Ep UK Air Date 11/05/20 - Some skewering of the Trump admin over the dropping of charges against Michael Flynn a look at The US postal service & why it is about to go bankrupt

Supergirl Ep 17 “Deus Lex Machina” Season 5

Timeshift: The Rules of Drinking
We don't actually drink much more now (or in 2011, when this was made) than we did a century ago. A rather tipsy meander through a century of changing mores did at least cough up a clip of Tom Baker in his drinking days, during a bit about alkie journos like Jeffrey Bernard.

Desmond’s Ep 6 “Reunion” Season 2.

Dennis Miller Plus One - Bo Derek
Still working, still caring for animals, still pretty. Bo, that is.

The Dambusters Raid
Laserlight Productions 2001 - BBC

A 49-minute documentary which gives a straightforward account of the raid using interviews with some of the men from 617 squadron and some of the german witnesses. Historians provide a balanced analysis of the impact of the mission.

The Sorpe dam was one of the three primary targets and the only one that wasn't breached. The British didn't realise that the Sorpe had a concrete core and so it was higly unlikely that it could have been breached without hitting it with many more mines.

The first Lancaster to reach the Sorpe was AJ-T. The bomb aimer was George "Johnny" Johnson and he insisted on nine dummy runs before he was satisfied that he had the optimum position to release the mine. He is now 98 years old and the last survivor of Operation Chastise.

Johnny Johnson on the far left.

Springwatch
2019 - Episode 6

More about the salmon conservation project in Scotland with info about a captive breeding programme to replenish the declining numbers while they work out the reasons for the decline.

We hear how in many nests the young birds have to compete to be fed and the bigger and redder the gape the more likely they are to have something shoved in it - known in academic circles as the Adriana Chechik effect. It's also recently been discovered that in puffins parts of the bill are phosphorescent and this is thought to assist the pufflings in detecting where the next mouthful of sand eels is coming from.

Also commented on was the Ring necked parakeet which has been introduced to the UK and is slowly spreading from South London, where populations became established in the mid 20th century, to other parts of the country with breeding populations as far north as Tyneside. One of the bizarre theories to explain the origin of this population is that a drugged up Jimi Hendrix released a pair of birds on Carnaby Street, or it might have been Beaky out of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch on the Goldhawk Road, we'll probably never know.

Lorraine
She talked to John Stapleton (& his son) about Lynn Faulds Wood, her funeral service, memories of happier times working with her (Lorraine and Dr Hillary had both done stuff with her on TVam/GMTV/etc) and coping (John professed to being inept and glad his son & his son's wife had moved in to help him in the past few weeks).