The TV programme 'Who Do You Think You Are' was back with a huge hit last Thursday night. EastEnders actor Danny Dyer was the subject of the popular ancestry show and what a show to start the new series with. The programme unfolded in usual fashion, giving us the subject's background and where he comes from; chats with family elders threw in the family myths for later scrutiny and then ... bam!! we were off on a roller coaster ride through English history.
Zac is busy at work on his latest commission, he's just had a conversation with the family concerned and he's already hard at it mining an archive. Sounds like any family historian, but the year is 2216 and Zac is not just a genealogist, he's a specialist Web-archaeologist. The holo-link blinks back into life and a slightly flickering image of an individual who passed away 100 years earlier is talking about their life and times as if they were in the room. It hadn't taken him long to find the lost file, after all he's an expert.
On this day in 1938 Britain's then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from a Munich crisis conference with Adolf Hitler. Waving a fluttering piece of paper in his hand, he would claim, as he stood at the microphone outside his recently landed aircraft, bore Herr Hitler's name and his own. This he said he believed would give us "peace for our time". History of course went on to show that he and the rest of the appeasers got it very wrong regarding Hitler and that far from delivering any sort of peace, the conference was just a prelude to a war on a scale of which the world had never seen before.
I recently watched with interest as a giant 1666 model of London was set ablaze. From the comfort of my sofa and the incredible clarity of HD television, I marvelled as a 400 ft long wooden model was engulfed in flames.
