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Antiques Roadshow gets a mention in Dick's Toolbox

Mike's Pith & Wind - Positive spin
If there’s one thing this current epic election campaign is already telling us, is that it’s that it’s much easier to attack and discredit your opponent’s message than to convincingly present a positive message of your own. The first round of party ads run on the telly a few nights ago had Malcolm Turnbull waxing positive about Liberal policies (including atypical emphatic gesturing, surely coached) while Labor saw more percentage in their ad decrying everything the Libs have put forward as favouring ‘the top end of town’.
Two strange things here – the first being that the two main parties’ advertising strategies are the opposite of what had been suggested to this point, with Labor using its time wisely since the last election without the distractions of having to actually govern the country coming up with some useful-sounding policies and the Libs lurching Labor-like from one thought bubble to the next. The second strange thing is that just a few months later the refreshingly positive bravado that Malcolm displayed as he smiled for the camera while wiping Abbott’s blood from his assassin’s blade now sounds so utterly hollow.
The politics of fear seem to have infected the Australian psyche. Since the AIDs public health campaign so effectively scared the pants back on everybody in the ‘80s it’s been de rigueur for other public health issues to be treated with the same po-faced and darn-right scary way, with graphic images of battered.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Not what it seems
Like a lot of people of my vintage I watch Antiques Roadshow, which is both endlessly entertaining and endlessly repeated. Not that I notice the repetition all that often –at least until the delightful Fiona Bruce appears with some suddenly familiar octogenarian with a moving tale about a pigeon with a medal for bravery.
In many ways it is a bit like watching a lottery draw where the ticket for entry is something that came out of your grandparents’ drawers. Whatever came out of my grandparents’ drawers should probably have stayed in them. But for every item that suddenly makes a dour Yorkshire farmer with a metal detector rich beyond the dreams of avarice there are the minor bits of family and national history. In many cases moving and unexpectedly touching especially now we are moving through the hundred years after the First World War.
But there is lots of tat and the occasional interesting fake where the expert has to gently break the news that the Chippendale.. read more