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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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The nation loves Julian Fellowes' ambitious drama series, Downton Abbey. Yet all is not well down in the Yorkshire countryside. Jan Moir expressed it so well in her Daily Mail article this week that we couldn't resist borrowing it ...
 

 
Clunking cliches, panto villains, bonkers storylines ... lawks! My beloved Downton is losing the plot ...
 
By Jan Moir

 
There is a scene in the latest series of Downton Abbey where Violet, the Dowager Countess Grantham, tartly observes that, one way or another, everyone goes down the aisle with half the story missing. As usual, the old dear is right. We all know what exactly she means; nudge, nudge, wink, wink, taps side of nose, mentioning no names but all beady eyes on the upstart, Miss Lavinia Swire. Not to mention the trembling Lady Mary, who still has that difficult, despoiling Turkish incident lurking in her own recent past. Not a delight. Not at all. Ahem.
 
Yet I can’t help thinking that over recent weeks, the same trenchant thought also applies to the entire second Downton Abbey series itself. For increasingly, the millions of viewers who love the series, turn on the television each Sunday night and also feel that half the story is missing.
 
For what in the name of starched camiknicks is actually going on in Downton Abbey? It is becoming impossible to keep pace with events. Who is he? Why is she in the kitchen? Where is the pet labrador? We may be barely out of the steam-age in Downton, but time flies at a supersonic pace around the stately home, events are telescoped and conflated, leaving only rattling teacups and confusion in their wake.
 
Not only is it already 1918, it is also episode five of series two. Yes, a great deal has happened since the Titanic went down in the very first episode, as indeed did pregnant Cora a few episodes later, slipping on the bar of soap placed in her way by the devious maid O’Brien.
 
Yes, it was pure soapotage. And from these two incidents — one of great historical significance and the other about some boat that crashed in the sea — an entire drama series has boomed and flourished.
 
Until now. Downton is still unmissable and pretty darned wonderful but ... the gaffes and inconsistencies are becoming impossible to ignore. Very little makes sense. For example, one minute, nascent land girl Lady Edith is seen smooching with the farmer, thighs braced against the tractor fender, head thrown back with sexual awakening, all reason flown out of the barn window. The next she is back at the breakfast table, meekly eating her boiled eggs, still a virgin, with no mention of Farmer Horny Hands ever again.
 
All manner of stuff such as this is going on. There is a new maid called Ethel, who was made pregnant by Major Bryant. Eh? Who are these people? In lickety-split time, Ethel had her baby, which is now growing like a genetically modified pumpkin. Next week it will be the size of a shed — and she still hasn’t spoken to the major about his little kiddy. Saintly Mrs Hughes has made overtures on Ethel’s behalf, but nothing has come of it. ‘The last thing I wish to be is rude,’ he told her. ‘But in this case, I really must be left to my own devices.’
 
There is also quite a lot of clunking dialogue, a new development from the smooth progression of the first Downton series. Quite often, the lines are actually more like semaphore signals than actual dialogue. For example, Sir Richard Carlisle, the newspaper magnate, is always striding around shouting: ‘I am a bold and modern man. Do you not like me, because I am a bold and modern man?’ And so on. Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator, should just give him a sandwich board and be done with the shouting.
 
Meanwhile, Branson the chippy chauffeur — is there ever any other kind? — is really more of town crier than a character. His job is to nurse his grievances and his love for Lady Sybil, while shouting out world events to give background context to the Downton Abbey drama. ‘HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE EASTER RISING?’ he will say, to uninterested Sybil. A little later something else stirs his communist soul. ‘HAVE YOU HEARD THE TSAR OF RUSSIA IS DEAD?’ he booms, or words to that effect.
 
And then, of course, there is the unlikely Earl of Grantham himself. As played by Hugh Bonneville, he’s more like a soft-hearted social worker who deals dope on the side, rather than a member of the aristocracy. The kindness and largesse he extends to his staff is surely an anachronism. So philanthropic!
 
Was it my imagination or was a lingering look across the coal scuttles exchanged between him and a new maid — another one! — this week. If so, that might take his lower order philanthropy to its logical conclusion. The beast.
 
Worst of all, perhaps, is that some of the villains have just become too ridiculously villainous. They are like stock characters in a pantomime. Oh no they’re not. Oh yes, I am afraid they are. O’Brien, in particular, is a terrible turn. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a metal hook rather than a left hand, or that her downstairs collaborator Thomas had cloven feet.
 
And despite her entrenched wickedness, some of the things she does just do not make sense, even for such a bitter witch. Would she really have written a letter to Mr Bates’s wife, a letter that threatened to cause the destruction of the Crawley family, ruin their fortune and thus threaten her very own livelihood? For what purpose? It just doesn’t make sense.
 
It seemed as if even she was beginning to have second thoughts about it last week. ‘Oh, I wish I’d not written that letter to Bates’s wife,’ she cried, in another clunking Plot Alert semaphore aside.
 
Speaking of which, step forward the evil Mrs Vera Bates herself, fox furs swagged around her shoulders, now enmeshed in Blackmail Plot Part Two. The reasons why she hates her noble husband so much have never been fully explained, but so what. Mrs Bates popped up again this week, by walking straight into the Downton Abbey kitchen. How on earth did she get there? It’s not a branch of Boots, for God’s sake. It’s not the walk-in counter at Nandos. For a start, there is about a five-mile drive from the gates to the big house, yet Mrs Bates just appeared by the soup tureen, as if she had borrowed the teleportational machine from Star Trek to get there. Beam me up, Batesy. No sorry, wrong show.
 
Elsewhere, personalities slalom from nice to nasty and back again for no good reasons whatsoever. Characters old and new suddenly appear in scenes like jacks in the box. Important events clatter by like the destinations on a railway board. What? Who? Is Matthew still lost? No, here he is back from the trenches, stippled with mud and blood and conscious enough to spit out a good line about being an impotent cripple stinking of sick. Where’s the little stuffed wabbit Lady Mary gave him? Oh good, there it is.
 
In short order, Matthew then sends Lavinia packing because he could never be a proper husband to her, wink wink. Not until he makes a 100 per cent recovery in the middle of next week, of course.
 
In the meantime, I still love Downton Abbey. Of course I do! I adore the fact that a mysterious, scarred stranger appears next week and asks: ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ If you have to ask that question, the answer is no.
 
In the meantime, I do worry that Julian Fellowes is not as fearful of clichés as he should be — and is producing just a bit too much soapotage of his own.
 

 
The GOS says: I save most of my puzzlement for the character of Lady Cora.
 
She drifts around in a benign, new-age hippy haze most of the time, but seems able to snap out of it well enough when there are sick soldiers to be cared for and organised (only officers, of course). She cherishes her maid O'Brien, apparently unable to divine that the woman is patently an evil bitch who spends most of her time plotting, muttering malicious comments only just under her breath, and leaving bars of soap on the floor in the hope that her mistress will take a fall and kill herself.
 
I mean to say, surely even the most detached aristocrat could tell that someone whose eyes are that close together can't possibly be a good thing? For goodness' sake, the woman lurks, and all Lady Cora can do is smile her little secret, enigmatic smirk.

 

 
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