The Anglo-Saxon Social Model - The Expanded Universe
- Thread starter Rattigan
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The way I imagined it would work is that you could filter your search results by proximity, language, condition, price etc. much like OTL Amazon and similar. I think print on demand will play a part but I imagine that bookshop.org would have a negative impact on self-publishing.
Quite the opposite, I think. My guess would be that an online bookseller TTL doesn't really have an incentive to expanding into selling other things for the same reason that a physical bookseller wouldn't (because it's not what they're into). It does serve as a model for online retailers in other industries though.
Food delivery is interesting - my last update this week is about a major ridehailing app (again, what would civil servants in the 1970s think is useful?) and I think the structure I describe there is something that food deliverers might also adopt through their union.
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Hopefully they built a new Wembley or kept loads of the old one rather than flatten it as per OTL.
I think there was a plan to keep the two towers and rebuild the rest, wasn't there? But I think it was abandoned on cost.
The idea behind that one is that the club's "close" relationship with the devolved assembly in Cardiff results in them getting a new ground built for them in the early 00s at public expense. It's a bite of a white elephant, though, and usually only gets about two-thirds full. Also, there are still safe standing areas in most premier league grounds so that will pad out the capacity figures somewhat.
That's basically what I'd imagine happened TTL.
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Good to see the number of Sinclair employees has gone up 150,000 times! I like the idea of them making phones too; I can imagine a Spectrum Phone being a big seller for Generation X-ers brought up on ZX Spectrums...
I'm curious... What happened to "Eastenders", "Black Adder", "Doctor Who" and Monthy Pyton in TTL?
A film and TV update is coming in a couple of weeks but, with the exception of Doctor Who, none of these are addressed directly. There aren't that many changes beyond budget but in brief:
Mostly like OTL, which mainly reflects that I don't really follow the show at all. There would be a couple of changes to reflect the slightly different demographics of TTL's London (for example, there would probably be at least one Pacific Islands family over the course of the show).
The basic premise remains the same, although there would be bigger budgets to reflect the increased financial power of the CBC. The final series is set in Colditz POW camp rather than the trenches and is very funny, if not quite as poignant as OTL's finale.
Again, the same as OTL, although probably with a higher budget.
I've got an update on this coming in a couple of weeks. Basically it'll be a list of actors to play the role. The tone will remain pretty much the same and the character of the Doctor is unchanged but the budgets, again, are higher than OTL.
Mostly like OTL, which mainly reflects that I don't really follow the show at all. There would be a couple of changes to reflect the slightly different demographics of TTL's London (for example, there would probably be at least one Pacific Islands family over the course of the show).
The basic premise remains the same, although there would be bigger budgets to reflect the increased financial power of the CBC. The final series is set in Colditz POW camp rather than the trenches and is very funny, if not quite as poignant as OTL's finale.
Again, the same as OTL, although probably with a higher budget.
I've got an update on this coming in a couple of weeks. Basically it'll be a list of actors to play the role. The tone will remain pretty much the same and the character of the Doctor is unchanged but the budgets, again, are higher than OTL.
It just occurs to me, given that Germany is somewhat different in this timeline during the war, how are Germans presented in media? both in the sense of War films and comdies? You can't have an SS/Regular army constrast for example?
An interesting question. As you say, the way the World War shakes out, you can't plausibly claim that Nazism was something done to the otherwise civilised German nation (leaving aside whether that's a true interpretation OTL for a second - it is at least something people sometimes say) but it really does look like the logical extension of German culture. This, in turn, stimulates a fairly vicious anti-German racism - as these kind of deranged psychopaths you can't turn your back on - in the decades afterwards that goes beyond the kind of xenophobia seen OTL (which I regard as basically just boorish, although mileage may vary). However, the fact that Germany was partitioned after the World War mean that things do differ by country. I think the general attitudes could be summed up in this way:
- Brandenburg, Saxony, Prussia - absorbed into the Commonwealth of Independent States in 1969 so tend to get lumped in with them and get referred to simply as 'Slavs' (the commonly accepted demonym for people from the CIS, by those outside it at least - inside they prefer 'Europeans' or even 'Independents') even by a lot of politicians and academics outside it.
- Austria, Bavaria - their relationship with each other and Italy is kind of the closest TTL has to the OTL post-1945 Franco-German axis, being the hinge on which a lot of European politics and economics turns. To that end, both countries tend to emphasise their Mediterranean (it's a state of mind, alright, give the Bavarians a break) cultural inheritances, with the Catholic Church even enjoying a bit of a revival in the past couple of decades as a form of cultural unity with Italy (and, to a lesser extent, Spain, Catalonia and Portugal). Their depiction in Commonwealth media tends to be as beer/wine-swilling (delete as appropriate) eccentrics. They've largely wriggled out of the popular perception of Germans by being almost aggressively pacifistic (if that makes sense) in their politics, helped by the fact that they were independent kingdoms absorbed into the greater Reich in the 1930s so they can do a bit of the "first victim" narrative that Austria does OTL (regardless of how spurious that is, in practice). In practice, there were fewer Bavarians and Austrians in the UK, but where they appear, the attitude isn't dissimilar to that seen towards the Hanoverians (see below).
- Rhineland, Hesse, Baden - these are the ones whose economies and industrial bases were basically strip-mined by the western Allies and carted back to France/America/the Commonwealth. As a result the people there are very poor and governments run by a succession of more or less authoritarian figures. The main industries are agriculture, with a certain degree of natural resource extraction and industry, although these are generally outsourced Italian, Bavarian or French industries (and outsourcing isn't as common TTL, for a bunch of reasons). Basically they have standards of living hovering around the level of OTL Paraguay or Bolivia. The general stereotype of them in the Commonwealth are as untrustworthy and lazy (basically your standard strongly anti-immigrant attitude, not that it always goes unchallenged) and immigration from those countries is restricted to basically nil.
- Hanover - a bit more complicated as it was basically the whimsical creation of the Commonwealth occupying forces after 1945. It's not like Bavaria and Austria, who have managed to shed a lot of the more nasty connotations of Germanness, in particular because it maintains a reasonably substantial army. Like Austria and Bavaria, it was allowed to keep a lot of its pre-war industry and it remains pretty important as a financial centre, along with some industry. They get a bit of rather patronising credit as being 'our Germans' and for being as close to the British as they can but Hanoverians in Britain can experience a fair bit of xenophobia, even if most of it is 'playful' (in a certain way it's perhaps not all that different from the attitude of certain Scots towards the English TTL). That being said, there's a lot of interchange between the two countries, with plenty of Hanoverians in the UK, and vice versa, and there being extensive cooperation between Five Eyes and the Hanoverian security agencies.
Sinclair's R&D department spin-off and subsequent departure allowed him to keep on with his individual research projects so it's perfectly possible that the C5 or something similar would have come out of that. In this case, I think the design probably would've been sold to one of the Big Four car companies (bear in mind they're all producing electrical or otherwise renewable vehicles).
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