Britain’s gawking plods strike again?

weeklend blog

On Wednesday this week, I wrote a blog about an incident I observed on Tuesday while I was doing a 7-mile walk along the local beach. A woman had apparently been pulled from the sea after what was described as ‘a medical incident’. I noticed that there were no fewer than two ambulances and one helicopter air ambulance present along with one police car containing two police officers. As time went on another police car containing two police officers arrived. Then about 15 minutes later a police van with three police arrived.

Given that the police are reportedly far too busy to turn up when homes are burgled or cars or phones are stolen – even when those cars or phones have tracking devices – I wondered how the police could possibly have the resources to send no fewer than seven plods to one beach medical emergency.

You’re not going to believe this, but I was doing the same 7-mile walk yesterday (Friday) and saw the same helicopter air ambulance landing in almost exactly the same spot. This time the situation was possibly more distressing. There are several places along the beach where there are small cable cars:

Apparently a distressed man had climbed onto the roof of the clifftop end of such a cable car track. There’s a cafe on the clifftop just nearby and someone had called the police. I’m told by a witness who had been drinking coffee with her husband that a police car had arrived and the two police officers had tried to convince the man to come down. But the man jumped and died from the fall.

https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/26232158.serious-incident-man-falls-fishermans-walk-cliff-lft

I can understand that it would be necessary for a few police to attend such an incident. Maybe you’d need 2 to 3 to cordon off the area where the man jumped and to take witness statements and perhaps another 3 to 4 police to cordon off the area where the suicidalist landed. But I counted 12 police cars and vans. I know one car had 3 police while the others would have had at least 2 police each. That suggests there were over 20 police in attendance. While it is obviously necessary for police to attend such an incident, I did wonder whether more than 20 police officers were really necessary or whether some of them could have been doing something unusual for our police like catching criminals or trying to prevent crime.

Will we soon not need humans in TV programmes?

To cheer us all up, I attach below a recent YouTube video I found quite amusing. The people who made this video have made several others featuring the same character. I don’t know how long it took to make this video or how much it cost. But I imagine this could be done much faster and at a much lower cost than producing 2-3 minutes of TV using real people. Given the power of AI which allows people choose any person they want and to make that person say anything they want in that person’s real voice or to create any character they want in any scenes they want, I wonder how long it will be before we have whole TV programmes which don’t feature any real people. That will put an awful lot of actors, celebs, camera operators, sound recordists and others of their ilk out of a job: