Substack Exclusive Notice 27/8/26

 

I have published an article on the HPANWO Free Substack blog that will not be posted to Blogger, see: https://benemlynjones.substack.com/p/richard-d-hall-live-in-london.

Nice Town

 

My love of obscure TV miniseries that I remember as part of the haunted generation has led to me seek out Nice Town. It took me a long time to find it all. At first I discovered episode two and three on Dailymotion, but episode one was missing from that platform. This bothered me because it is the best one and it is essential for understanding the two others. Eventually, with the help of a HPANWO reader, I found the entire series on a Russian website. Nice Town was first broadcast in 1992 on the BBC. It was directed by Pedr James and written by Guy Hibbert. It is a story about family who move into a new purpose-built suburban estate of designer McMansions. The central characters are two thirty-something couples; Joe and Frankie, and Paul and Linda. Paul and Joe are brothers and Joe and Linda are ex-partners. This dynamic quickly develops into a terrible crisis. Paul is sterile and wants a baby with Linda. Joe and Linda then conspire for her to get pregnant via donated sperm from Joe; and keep this secret from Paul, making him think that he has recovered from his sterility and is the real father. Alongside all this there is a subplot involving a local teenage boy and girl with very conservative parents who want to have a sexual relationship, so Joe provides a love nest for them in his own home. What's more, ironically, Paul discovers that his and Joe's own parents have a deep dark secret related to hereditary matters. Predictably, all these secrets cannot be kept and when the truth comes out the family is torn apart.
Nice Town can be watched here. The episodes all have ironic names from the bible. "Immaculate Conception", "Unto Us a Child is Born" and "Idyll".
Episode 1: https://ok.ru/video/6858066758392.
Episode 2: https://ok.ru/video/6858066496248.
Episode 3: https://ok.ru/video/6858066889464.
 
There are other somewhat sardonic elements; for example, there are placement shots including the sky and they have a cartoon sun and moon with faces on them. The series is essentially a parody of British suburban middle-class society. We are a nation obsessed with social class and satires about it are very common, but this one is highly unusual. Joe is a very extreme caricature. I first came across Nice Town again when I was researching this year's St Theo's watch party which was for Paper Mask, starring Paul McGann, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2026/07/paper-mask-watch-party-livestream.html. McGann also plays Joe, and that character has many similarities to Matthew Harris. They share a common weakness, selfishness and deceit. I find Joe one of the most repulsive individuals I've ever encountered in fiction. He is a feeble, effeminate manipulator, a ruthless and egocentric blackguard. In terms of his marriage, he has an almost complete traditional role-reversal with Frankie. She goes out and works as a medical research scientist. Joe stays at home and looks after their daughter Katie as well as doing the housework. He wears a pink frilly apron while doing this. He has a totally blinkered and unrealistic vision of the world around him. When he presents his idea to Linda he calls it "a simple gift of life" as if he is a member of some New Age free love commune. When he is questioned by the police over his love nest for the teenagers he is totally indignant and entitled. He doesn't understand that what he did was criminal. He is physically puny and when Paul confronts him violently Paul can do so with impunity. Despite Joe's ineffectual and bland personality, his underhand actions leave a trail of chaos and destruction. I must admit, my antipathy towards Joe is really just personal because he reminds me very much of "Centaur", the man who abused me when I was a child, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2012/09/centaur.html. This is an important lesson. You may think "girlie men" are harmless, but they are not; they are highly toxic and dangerous. They actually are capable of physical violence, but only against a victim who is even smaller and weaker; that obviously means a child. Along with the cartoon heavenly bodies, Nice Town has other special effect scenes. There is a very grotesque dream sequence in which we see Joe as a satyr. The birth scene of the baby has a distinct horror element to it; and so does its aftermath in the maternity ward. Some viewers might be disturbed by that. However, the most upsetting scenes, for me, are several which are "POV" from the newborn baby, Angelica. This baby is, of course, the innocent victim caught up in the middle of a conflict she was born into and cannot comprehend. Yet in these scenes her parents both lean close to her and shout angrily in her face. That is really nasty. Towards the end of the series, Joe's malevolence gets worse and worse. Even when I saw this programme originally on TV as a much younger person, I understood what it meant and how it fitted in with my own life. Nice Town does have some good elements though. Frankie is played by Josette Simon who is very famous for Blakes 7, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2007/10/blakes-7.html. Joe and Paul's mother is played by Doreen Mantle who is a very widespread actress. You might enjoy it, so I recommend giving it a try.

Why the Heatwave?

 

Western Europe has experienced its hottest driest summer ever. The heatwave has lasted for over two months. It has been continuous, with just brief drops in temperature only as low as average hot summer ones. This heatwave, oddly, has not been punctuated with the usual thunderstorms. The cause of this has been called a "heat dome", an atmospheric effect in which hot air gets trapped in a particular place, changes in global wind patterns and the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. These factors cause a heatwave that literally never ends until what's known as the "super El Niño breaking point" in which the heat gives way immediately, sometime in mid to late September, to the usual winter storms and floods. The short term forecast is for cooler temperatures and some rain, in Britain at least, for the next week or so; but the heat dome might well return to its previous dimensions and last another month. Europe is generally by far the worst area affected by climate change and so these conditions are predicted to return next year, the year after and the year after that... forever. There's no escape! And, the overall boogieman, the supercharging force behind it all, is, of course, human-caused global warming. Source: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/blog/2026/deep-dive-european-heat-builds-while-the-uk-sits-on-the-boundary. The political classes have been making more hay over this situation than the poor British farmers. The usual prophecies of doom and appeals for fundamental changes to industry, the economy and society to save us from this catastrophe have been massively boosted. Andy Burnham's new administration have renewed their drive for Net Zero and more "environmentally friendly" energy generation, together with the inevitable increase in internationalism and authoritarianism.
 
I have to wonder if the current extreme weather is being intensified and perpetuated, if not even generated, by geoengineering technology. There are full details in the background links below, but it is not a secret that weather can be controlled to a certain degree; when it comes to creating rain clouds. However, the original publicly revealed research into weather control was far more ambitious. This Disney documentary from 1959 predicts such methods, along with meteorological satellites, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3HaWViVjF8. As you can see, this is science fiction, but it is speculative rather than fantasy. We see the ability to change the pattern of high and low pressure areas; in this case, to protect the US eastern seaboard from a hurricane. What happened to this research after the 1950's? Was it simply abandoned? I don't think so. What's more, surely it must have occurred to somebody at some point that the same technology could also be used to direct a hurricane towards a seaboard, that of an enemy country. What we have here is the most terrible weapon of war, and the capability to deploy it with plausible deniability. It can be dismissed as a freak of nature. What goes for hurricanes can also apply to heatwaves; after all, both are simply caused by atmospheric pressure zones. There are many facilities of earth that are designed to fill the skies with electromagnetic radiation, such as HAARP. I recommend the research of Elana Freeland on this. One of the last things the late Gareth Davies did was give me a copy of her book Under an Ionized Sky in which she argues that the earth's atmosphere has been filled with conductive metallic nanoparticles through chemtrail operations and that it operates in conjunction with ground-based phased-array transmitters like HAARP, see here for an interview with Elana: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1DaAAMSMMU. There is a growing scepticism in the European population towards the notion of manmade climate change and the way globalist statesmen seem to be using it as a pretext for almost everything bad that they want to do. More and more citizens are electing populist politicians who openly question the scientific consensus on climate change. Seeing as climate change has been turned into something so essential to the authorities as a justification; to take it away so suddenly would cause a calamitous loss of credibility for them. For this reason I would definitely not put it past them to engineer an ecological disaster that seems to be caused by manmade climate change to try and make us think again. What's more they don't care if people overheat or animals and trees die or farms can't grow any crops. (In fact they've got other nasty schemes in store for farmers anyway!) Don't fall for it, people.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/11/climate-change-portal.html.
And: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2022/02/chemtrails-portal.html.

Star Wars in Welsh

 

The first Star Wars film, A New Hope, is set to be given a Welsh language version. This is not to be confused with the very amusing "Taff Wars" videos; these are amateur YouTube Anglo-Welsh spoofs, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPM1v2nUkWA.  Star Wars- Gobaith Newydd, will not be on the big screen, but it will be broadcast on S4C. The cast will include some famous names as voice actors including Rhys Ifans, best known for Notting Hill, and Mark Lewis Jones who played a supporting role in JJ Abrams' sequel trilogy. I'm hoping this will be a better quality production than previous ones that switch language. This is not the first time Star Wars has been dubbed into other languages. I recall watching a German version as a child on Dutch TV. Dubbing used to mean that the viewer was put off by the fact that the shape of the actors' mouths did not match the speech they were hearing. This must be a particular problem for the hearing-impaired who have to lip-read. These days modern video editing should be able to manipulate the visuals to change the actors' mouths so that they sync with their dialogue. This has been a major news story, but should it really? All the Star Wars movies have been dubbed before; into German, like I said, but also French, Spanish and Japanese. I suppose the novelty comes from the fact that Welsh is not a world language and is in fact only spoken in Wales, with a few clusters in the diaspora, especially in Argentina and the USA. About a million people speak it as a first language, but probably at least that many speak it as a second language, including myself although I'm very rusty after all these years in Oxford. Welsh language education is pushed very vigorously in Wales, helped by some negative pressure that I don't approve of, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/10/cvd-is-ruining-wales.html.

The franchise has been dubbed into other smaller local languages like Swedish and Czech. (Amusing fact: If it ever gets a Norwegian one then Yoda's strange dialect will make sense because Norway's language has an object-subject-verb construction too.) This Welsh language version must come with challenges, the same ones faced by the writers of the "Anglish" script, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/03/star-wars-in-anglish.html. There are some terms in Star Wars that are unique to the franchise such as "droid", meaning an intelligent robot. They can't just use the same word droed, because that means "foot". They might just have to fall back on robot, which is an English loanword. We'll see. The notion of Star Wars in Welsh is completely canon. The story is set a long time ago in a galaxy far far way. Even though most of the characters are physically identical to humans, probably though some kind of parallel evolution, they are technically aliens and would not really be speaking the language the viewer hears. They primarily speak "Galactic Basic", a lingua franca that emerged out of the native tongues of Coruscant and the other "core worlds". Any human language can be substituted for that in the script for the convenience of the filmmakers and the comprehension of the audience. I look forward to watching this, only on Iplayer seeing as I don't live in Wales. I intend to keep the subtitles off and see how much I can still understand.

It IS Possible

 

MH370 is not the world's only missing aircraft; in fact I've also covered the story of Amelia Earhart closely, see background link below. Another one lost was Pan Am Flight 526A. This was a Douglas DC 4, like the one in the illustration, with sixty-four passengers and five crew that took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico en route to New York City on the afternoon of April the 11th 1952. Shortly after takeoff one of its four engines failed. The pilot turned around to do an emergency landing at the airport and straight away another engine shut down. With only two working engines and the danger of this remainder failing too, the pilot, Capt. John Burn, carried out a controlled ditching. (Ironically, Burn had been co-pilot of another plane that had crashed a few years earlier and he had survived.) Unfortunately the sea was rough and the plane quickly broke up and sank. Only seventeen people made it into the life rafts. Although the fate of the aircraft is not a mystery, the location of its remains was, for over seventy-four years. Now it has been found. A team of scientists from the Air-Sea Heritage Foundation in partnership with the Discovery Channel used underwater remotely operated vehicles to explore the seabed in the area until they came across the largest part of the aircraft; its fuselage and attached left wing. The wreckage is corroded and partly buried in sediment, but it is identifiable. Some of its Pan Am livery remains intact. It was at a depth of two thousand feet. Their adventure is covered in an episode of the TV documentary series Expedition Unknown. Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrvyllxj71o. There are no plans to raise any debris. Even if this were possible, the wreck has become regarded as a grave, like the Titanic. What this shows it that it is possible to find a lost vehicle in the depths of the ocean. Therefore there is no theoretical reason why MH370 cannot also be located. The difference with Pan Am 526A is that it is in comparatively shallow water close to shore and we already had a rough idea of where it might be. At least the margin of error is far smaller than the 7th arc. However, with MH370 there's an even bigger problem; is it even in the Indian Ocean at all? I doubt it. A number of MH37-tologists have postulated that the remains of the plane are in other very different places, such as Kazakhstan, according to Jeff Wise; the Gulf of Thailand, according to Florence De Changy; or the Maldives, according to Ashton Forbes. At the moment I'm leaning more towards Ashton's explanation, but time will tell. Certainly I have not given up at all on the prospect that the lost Malaysian airliner might one day be recovered.
See here for background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2024/05/mh370-portal.html.

The Why Files does Elisa Lam

 

I've been impressed with The Why Files' coverage of a number of enduring mysteries that I have addressed myself, for example see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-why-files-does-pentyrch.html. Now they have covered the mysterious disappearance and death of Elisa Lam. This is a tragedy that took place at the Cecil hotel in Los Angeles, USA in 2013. A young Canadian tourist vanished after being spotted on CCTV in a lift behaving strangely. Her body was later recovered from a freshwater cistern on the roof of the building. How she disappeared and died is still a mystery, see background links below. This is one of The Why Files' "stripped" videos, ie without Hecklefish. Perhaps considering the tragic subject matter it is more sensitive for AJ to address it alone. The Why Files coverage of the Elisa Lam case is fairly good. I cannot really comment much on most of it because it tallies with what I myself have already said; but they do make one or two errors. These mistakes may seem small, but they are crucial considering the verdict on Elisa's demise. There seems to be some contention over whether the water tank lid was left open or shut after Elisa vanished. AJ states that the technician who found the body said the lid was open. If it were open then that would support the official story of accidental death. If the lid had been shut after Elisa had been thrown inside then somebody else must have done it. She could not possibly have shut the lid from inside. If the lid were open the whole time then why did the search parties on the roof not notice? They checked the entire location. Why did the sniffer dogs lose her scent on the top floor? Why did the police helicopters not notice the open tank lid? Source: https://youtu.be/RFijoi8S49M?si=4b3RqwU51XUd4d6I&t=1453. Also AJ states that Elisa's corpse was in the tank for nineteen days. Is this certain? Is it based on a pathology report? Alternatively it could be an assumption; Elisa disappeared on January the 31st and so anybody who believes the official story will assume therefore that Elisa climbed into the tank that same night, thereby causing her disappearance until the day of the 19th of February when her body was found. The Why Files have done a fairly good job on this mystery; and I'm glad they have addressed it, but the segment could have been better.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/03/elisa-lam-netflix-docu.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/04/elisa-lam-update.html.

JET and the Big O

 

In my nostalgic quest for old TV adverts I've found some that are scary: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2025/03/scary-tv-ad.html, some that are funny and charming: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2025/04/powergen-bob.html, and some that are moving: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2025/05/tennents-hero.html. I have now recalled one that combines elements of the second and third kind. There is only one problem; I can't find a recording of it anywhere. The ad is part of a series that was produced for JET filling stations in the 1990's that emphasized community or family values and friendly small-scale service. Its slogan was: "It's a people thing." The central character is a man who runs a JET station on a busy road and has a cheerful extravert personality. He is popular with the drivers who call at his station to fill up. The main reason he stands out is that he adores the singer-songwriter Roy Orbison. He is such a big fan that he dresses like Orbison, including the smooth black hair and thick sunglasses. He even impersonates him, singing Pretty Woman and Only the Lonely while he goes about his duties. The narrator then says that if there is one thing that character thinks more of than Roy Orbison, it is his JET service station. "You may wonder what management think of (the central character's) strange obsession. Well, they prefer Kenny Rogers... JET, it's a people thing!" What I like about this advert is that it gives out the message that a person's eccentricity is something completely acceptable, even admirable. This message is endorsed by an international corporate brand. JET are proud to have somebody working for them who projects that kind of individuality. How often do you get that these days? Almost never, except perhaps with JD Wetherspoon, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/03/wetherspoon-bounces-back.html. Other than that, the trend in service industries is strictly about uniformity and conformity. Public facing personnel are ordered to utter template phrases like "enjoy your meal, please call again". They sometimes are even given courses in the right facial expressions and tones of voice. No wonder hardly anybody notices when we are replaced with machines, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2025/07/tesco-butlerian-jihad-4-always-ask.html. As far as I'm concerned this is monstrous; and that JET ad from the '90's therefore constitutes a rebel yell. Does anybody else remember this particular TV advert? If you do and you know where a recording of it exists, please let me know.