Notices by John Bull (garius@mastodon.me.uk)

No stream today as I'm a bit under the weather.

Also there's a cat on me.

The only good thing about a Fawlty Towers reboot will be that it finally demonstrates to a lot of people how critical Connie Booth was (on camera and off it) to the first one.

Connie Booth was the credited co-creator/co-writer of Fawlty Towers. She was an enormous influence on both the tone and pacing, as well as doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the actual scripts.

It was not a solo-Cleese effort, and (to his credit) he's never traditionally claimed it to be.

But people have always treated it as a Cleese thing. Maybe he sees it that way himself now. Age does weird things to memory.

But without Booth, there's no Fawlty Towers. And more people need to know that.

Crazy that a law designed to let the Met Police do what they want without consequence is being used by the Met Police to do what they want without consequence.

I don't see how anyone could have predicted that.

Paul refused to drop his alter ego for the entire duration events.

When she was booked in, and ordered to give her name the answer was "Lily Savage".

When a REAL name was demanded, the reply was:

"Lily Veronica Mae Savage"

On release, Lily was back on stage the next night. /3

The raid was one of a number carried out by the police, using obscure laws as justification for their intimidation.

In this instance, the excuse was "reports of drunkenness on premises"

With Lily continuing to mock the police, she was handcuffed and arrested with others. /2

It's 1987. The Metropolitan Police are waging an intimidation campaign against London's LBTQ+ community.

Wearing rubber gloves to "protect from AIDS" they raid the Royal Vauxhall Tavern

"Well well," says Lily Savage (Paul O'Grady) from the stage as the police pile into the venue. "It looks like we’ve got help with the washing up" /1

On 16th March, 1968 Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jnr was flying helicopter reconnaissance for an attack on an alleged North Vietnamese-controlled village at My Lai.

As the ground attack developed below, Thompson realised he was in fact witnessing something something else:

A massacre.

He decided to act. /1 🧵 #history #histodons

I have to say, CatGPT is scarily accurate. Machine learning has come a long way.

https://catgpt.wvd.io/