Recent content by Ashley Pomeroy

I realise this is for imaginary films and TV shows, but I'm still traumatised by Massiv' (1998), which was the BBC's attempt to cash in on the jungle / drum and bass boom of the mid 1990s. It starred Goldie, a couple of years before he was in The World is Not Enough, although in practice the...

I was going to suggest Adam Ant. But he actually did perform! I had completely forgotten. Only one song though. A handful of performers only did one song, including Elvis Costello, Howard Jones, and Paul McCartney, who from what I remember ended up doing half a song. I learn from the internet...

It's tangental - more a kind of national passive-aggressiveness rather than terrorism - but post-war Albania is fascinating. Enver Hoxha remained a committed Stalinist even after Stalin had been denounced by Khrushchev, so Albania split from the Soviet Union and aligned itself with China. But...

I have the impression that by 2004 Rowan Atkinson would have been too expensive for the role. And the thought of Ross Kemp as Doctor Who is... well, perhaps it would have worked. Who knows. But in general this list does a good job of mating up actors who would have been within the BBC's budget...

It might seem tasteless, but without the Chernobyl cataclysm we would never have had Star Trek V: The Undiscovered Country, or at least it would have been a very different film. Shatner's script was unsubtle and the ending was essentially recycled from Star Trek II - with Kirk sacrificing...

I remember the late 1990s. Back then the stock enemies were rogue Russian generals, or Balkan insurgents, or to a much lesser extent the Chinese. Notably the Operation Flashpoint games, which predated the war on terror slightly, had a mixture of rogue Russian generals, Balkan guerrilla groups...

I was going to suggest Buenos Aires - Argentina was one of the world's richest countries at the dawn of the last century, although it suffered from a "resource curse". Furthermore my hunch is that mega-cities grow from old-school blast-furnace-style industrialisation, which requires the...

I suppose it depends on the method of dispersal. My understanding is that with chemical and biological agents the key problem is delivering the agent over a wide area in a tight timescale. If for example there had been a fire in a research station leading to the dispersal of anthrax spores into...

I've read Final Cut, and there's a short vignette where the writer has a meeting with a Famous Director and asks him for advice - the plan was to sound out the idea of him taking over the film, but in a polite way. The book doesn't identify the director but I always assumed it was David Lean...

From what I remember the Encarta engine was similar to Hypercard, Director, other early hypertext/multimedia authoring systems. HTML took off because it was portable, simple, no-one owned it, and it was similar enough to SGML that academics could grasp it. Microsoft was famously slow to embrace...

I realise I'm quoting myself, but I pondered the water situation in post number two, way back on page one of this thread. I've always assumed that the Germans would manage to get at least some soldiers across, in the first wave, and perhaps some more in the second. I don't know how they would...

I learn from Wikipedia that "amongst the requirements of Specification B.1/35 was a speed of no less than 195 MPH while flying at 15,000 feet, a range of 1,500 miles while carrying a payload of 2,000lb of bombs" - it was issued in 1934. My hunch is that the end result would have been a...

I've booked a holiday to Hong Kong in October and I've been reading up on Hong Kong. I learn that I need an Octopus card otherwise I won't be able to function. According to the World Bank's incredibly useful website Hong Kong's GNI per capita in 2018 is $46310 vs $8690 for China. The relative...

I'm not sure about forever, but suppose the British cut a deal with China whereby they would agree to pressure the United States to drop its recognition of Taiwan in exchange for China overlooking the 99-year lease, or extending it, or adding a fifty-year leaseback agreement or something along...

I know it's a spoof, and it's also topic drift, but were there any plans - or any chance - of the Germans launching some kind of "spectacular" against Britain, along the lines of Otto Skorzeny's rescue of Mussolini or the SAS raid on Peddle Island in the Falklands? A strictly limited operation...