Beefy's Corner - The Off-Topic Chat Thread

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Watched The Great Train Robbery - The Robber's Tale tonight on the iPlayer. What a thumping good dramatisation that was. I knew a sketchy bit about the history, like Biggs was a very peripheral figure, and the train driver he got didn't do the business, etc.., but this drama brought the whole thing to life.., and it really did have a feeling of early 1960's. There was a distinct sense of The Italian Job without the Mediterranean sunshine and the humour, but the story fairly crackled along just the same, and every actor was convincing.

I tend not to like crime stories, especially the inevitable view from the law abiding side, because every time they need a new drama series it tends to be around crime solving, but the truth based element of this means I'm looking forward to The Copper's Tale** It may well be worth waiting for.

**yes I know it's already been on, but at the time of writing it has yet to become available on the iPlayer, so I'll watch it in a day or two.

I watched it n player last night also. Just need to catchup on part two now.

Did you watch Lucan?
 
I watched both programmes and I loved the characterisation of the various players on both sides, and the gritty, early-60's atmosphere. It was a partially fictional adaptation, in the sense that to this day, some of the lesser villains, such as, (I think) the guy they got in to rig the signals, have never been identified. The BBC plays were based on the book Signal Red by Robert Ryan, which looks like being a good read, so I have downloaded it to my Kindle.

There was one point made at the end of the second part ((hopefully the story is well-known enough that this isn't a spoiler). After his arrest Bruce Reynolds says that the long sentences handed down for a crime committed without guns, meant that from then on similar robberies would always have firearms involved, as there would be no point in not using them. Did he have a point? I wonder.
 
I'm due to go there next year, kinda crazy that it happened. Heard any news on the injuries?

Good news that no one was killed by the Apollo collapse...though there are serious injuries. It sounds like the cause may have been water leaking into the plaster...early days for supposition yet. However, referring to your ticket to go to the Apollo...it will be a long time before the theatre is up and going again. It is grade II listed so any repairs will have to be to a high standard and exact copy of the previous ceiling. Suspect it will be out of action for 6 months at least.
 
You two don't have show off your youth with those statements. Unless you're saying it on purpose. :)

Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.
 
Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

Completely agree .
 
Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

Well said Dan, well said! I'm not quite 11 but in my youth I don't really understand it either :)
 
Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

Yep I agree with this.
 
The most interesting bit is how the media continually reports it all. It's like an early version of tabloidy clickbait.
 
I watched it n player last night also. Just need to catchup on part two now.

Did you watch Lucan?

Yeah I have to do the same. The robbers tale was good tho, hoping for the same with the 2nd part.
 
Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

He's basically a dick.
 
Well I'm educated to a reasonable standard, and to be honest I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. Ronnie Biggs was a serial criminal who was a relatively minor part of an unsuccessful crime that involved all the finesse of battering a guy with a metal bar, yet now he's treated as some kind of maverick and lovable rogue. Might be my youth, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

This is why I suggested you were showing your youth. You'll have noticed that I didn't refer to Biggs at all. I have known for donkey's years that he was a peripheral figure [probably because I'm old enough to know the story reasonably well], whose main claim to fame was evading the police after his prison escape. The newspaper headlines of the day called it the great train robbery. If it wasn't great [they meant it in another definition of the word in any case], then it was memorable. It was a well planned and fairly well executed criminal act, and almost nothing anywhere near its scale had been tried before. Just in case you haven't worked it out, the gang stole £2.6M, equivalent to over £41M today. That's a few pints in the pub.

Btw, there is no lovable rogue in my attention to the story. Merely an academic interest that a seemingly averagely educated bunch of individuals could plan and coordinate themselves to pull off such a scheme against an unwitting establishment. It's the attention to detail which interests, not the characters.
 
Well I thought I'd seen most things on a computer but clearly there are instances to learn. Last night I went to turn on one of my computers and it simply refused to boot up. I tried several times and I was unclear as to whether it was managing the process or not. In the end I simply held the power button in for 5 seconds and the computer shut down. I then went and turned another one on. This morning, I absent mindedly came back to the errant computer and turned it on. It booted up fine, but something was slightly odd. Then I checked the date. It had jumped precisely 3 days into the future. There are many and varied reasons why a computer's time and date might jump into the past, but jumping three days into the future is a new one for me.
 
Well I thought I'd seen most things on a computer but clearly there are instances to learn. Last night I went to turn on one of my computers and it simply refused to boot up. I tried several times and I was unclear as to whether it was managing the process or not. In the end I simply held the power button in for 5 seconds and the computer shut down. I then went and turned another one on. This morning, I absent mindedly came back to the errant computer and turned it on. It booted up fine, but something was slightly odd. Then I checked the date. It had jumped precisely 3 days into the future. There are many and varied reasons why a computer's time and date might jump into the past, but jumping three days into the future is a new one for me.

Nip onto Google and let us know tonight's Euromillions numbers would you?
 
Well I thought I'd seen most things on a computer but clearly there are instances to learn. Last night I went to turn on one of my computers and it simply refused to boot up. I tried several times and I was unclear as to whether it was managing the process or not. In the end I simply held the power button in for 5 seconds and the computer shut down. I then went and turned another one on. This morning, I absent mindedly came back to the errant computer and turned it on. It booted up fine, but something was slightly odd. Then I checked the date. It had jumped precisely 3 days into the future. There are many and varied reasons why a computer's time and date might jump into the past, but jumping three days into the future is a new one for me.

Look up the Saints score please. <laugh> Please tell us Saints won. :emoticon-0107-sweat
 
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