Hancock's Half Hour

Most of you won’t get the reference here but Hancock’s Half Hour was a popular radio comedy show (and subsequently a TV show) that was broadcast in the UK between 1954 and 1961. It was a bit before my time, although the classic episode, The Blood Donor, would occasionally get a replay when I was but a wee lad.

Netflix’s new show Ancient Apocalypse could quite reasonably be re-titled as Hancock’s Half Hour. It features Graham Hancock, an erstwhile journalist, who has for the last few decades been pursuing evidence for his theory that civilization is much older than it seems to be and that early, advanced, civilizations were wiped out in some global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. Each episode of the Netflix show is about half an hour long. And, the consensus opinion being that Graham Hancock is a peddler of pseudo-scientific nonsense, we might even describe it as a comedy show.

I watched the show and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was beautifully produced and depicted places and monuments I’d never even heard about. Monuments like the awesome huge snake in Ohio (called Serpent Mound) that is a stunning example of landscape ‘art’ by an earlier civilization.

Hancock takes us on an enjoyable romp through a set of lesser known (to me) historical sites and attempts to draw a narrative around them. I wasn’t wholly convinced, but some things were intriguing. The alignment of some of these sites with solstices, if true, is fascinating - although Hancock’s continual reference to this being evidence of an ‘advanced’ civilization able to understand ‘sophisticated’ astronomy is something of a stretch.

The age of some of these sites seems to pre-date the previously ‘accepted’ estimate for the age of the first civilizations to be developed - one site going back to nearly 9,000BC (if Hancock is to be believed).

All of Hancock’s theorizing aside (and, who knows, he could be right in some particulars?) I loved it because I now have a list of archaeological sites I’d never heard about to look up and learn about. It’s not the only reason I enjoyed it, but that’s a big part of it.

Fascinating stuff and definitely thought-provoking. It’s probably not quite in the same category as “it woz ancient aliens wot built evryfin” - which is another class of ‘documentary’ I find hugely entertaining.

A harmless way to while away the odd (or even decidedly odd) half hour whilst trying to decide whether pineapple on pizza really does represent a culinary disaster or improvement for the thousandth time.

Or so one might have thought.

You’d be wrong. The show is . . .

DANGEROUS

Yup. I exposed myself to a breath-taking level of risk - and not from the pizza - by watching it. How could I possibly survive without those beacons of compassion and humanity at The Guardian looking out for me?

I’m so grateful to them and will submit myself for mandatory re-education and re-programming immediately.

But, here’s the kicker. The Guardian goes on to ask

Why has this been ALLOWED?

WTF with extra, huge, pineapple-flavoured dollops of What, The and Fuck.

The thing about free speech that most don’t emphasize is that it’s not just about the rights of the speaker, but also the rights of the listener.

Just who the hell do the folk at The Guardian think they are, that they can attempt to curate what I can and can’t watch? A question we could more pertinently ask of governments too. Fuck you and your ‘misinformation’, I will decide for myself without any of your paternalistic, patronizing, authoritarian and sanctimonious bullshit.

We’ve seen first-hand just how much governments got ‘right’ with their utterly criminal and disastrous response to covid.

I don’t care if Graham Hancock is, in fact, a conspiracy-addled pseudo-scientific nutjob who likes pineapple on pizza¹. I want to hear what he has to say. I don't want some faceless and joyless clod in some government office deciding it's too "dangerous" for me.

And what the heck is wrong with a good conspiracy theory anyway? After all, some of them (a small fraction of the sum total of all the world’s best conspiracy theories, admittedly) came true. Having said that, the hit-rate for “conspiracy theory being true” during covid was alarmingly high.

We kind of expect governments to be crappy, and we expect our politicians to be slightly lower on the trustworthiness scale than an axe-wielding psychopathic second-hand car salesman. But the trick these absolute TUNCS² have managed to pull off is to convince a sizeable fraction of our populations that it’s OK to call for stuff to be censored, that only certain things are “allowed”.

We cannot afford to let them get away with it.

It isn’t Graham Hancock who’s dangerous, it’s you bunch of miserable lowlifes at The Guardian and people like you who are truly dangerous.

1. Although to be fair, this fact alone should probably require his banishment from society

2. This is an anagram for the more sensitive reader