The show was also very realistic in that a lot of the squad did not survive the war. Salt died because because the contraption for disposing of the butterfly bomb got hung up, and the junior officer (a Quaker CO) was killed on the pier when he stepped on an unmarked pressure mine (“No bloody blue dot!”).
The Bomb Disposal units had some brilliant ways of dealing with unexploded munitions, but (sadly!) they didn’t always work.
I would have to see a tape of the actual circumstances, but I think “flashy” is a somewhat kinder interpretation.
Either way, I don’t think I’d want to be referred to that manner.
Yep, that’s it! Brings back a lot of memories and still gives me chills!
Thanks for posting it! 
That was a great show.
An episode that really sticks in my mind is the one where an Australian naval officer is called in to help dispose of a huge parachute mine dropped by the Luftwaffe that could take out an entire city block.
The mine’s timer is triggered, and he has less than a minute to insert the widget that will stop it. In one of the series’ most heart-stopping moments, it slips out of his fingers and falls to the floor. All he can do is turn to Anthony Andrews and say "RUN!!!"
The camera follows Andrews as he runs through the streets like a bat out of Hell, while the Australian gets down on his hands and knees and tries to find the widget amongst all the debris scattered on the floor of the flat.
Jesus, talk about butt-clenching tension! I was on the edge of my seat watching that scene and shaking like a leaf!
Everything turned out okay, though. The Australian found the widget and inserted it at the last second. The mine didn’t go off, and he and Andrews got to live another day. At the end of the show, I was almost as wrung out as they would have been.
Getting way off topic here but I watched a video on bomb disposal in London after the blitz and they interviewed one of the fellows and he said “either I get it right and live, or I’ll never know about it!”
Which I guess is correct. Being within inches of a large bomb when it went off would literally mean your brain was destroyed before your nerves had time to register anything had happened.
At the start of the series, one of the new guys asks an officer “Does it hurt, sir?” when the bomb goes off. IIRC, the officer replies “We don’t know. No one’s ever been able to tell us.”
The Verdict is a very good portrayal of civil personal injury work. Obviously, they take some liberties for the sake of making a movie.
But, it shows the huge imbalance of power when representing an injured person against a large institution. The delays, expense, of getting to trial, and tension with clients over settlement. There are problems with lay and expert witnesses, and a difficult judge. The lawyer has risked everything and is at the end of his rope. I’ve known many lawyers who were in similar situations. (perhaps a little less dramatically)
Maxim 2: A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant who doesn’t know what’s going on.
Maxim 3: An explosive ordnance officer at a dead run outranks everyone.
I was a welfare caseworker for 34 years. Folks in my profession are usually played as heartless bureaucrats or wide-eyed idealists. I’ve met my share of both, but the honest portrayal would just be someone trying to do too much with too little time, constantly having to chose between tasks when, in theory, you’re supposed to do it all. The paperwork version of Lucy in the candy factory, with people yelling at you.
I had forgotten about this. It was a fairly accurate presentation of corporate America overall, I think.
I was wondering if the social worker / caseworker in the Netflix show Maid is accurate. She went through all of the forms, couldn’t officially help the client, and then from nowhere finally found a job that she could qualify for as in “here’s the number, give the owner a call”. Was that accurate and common?
As mentioned in other threads on this subject, I was in the private security biz for over 30 years, and I have just about given up trying to find an accurate portrayal of my former profession. Fictional security officers are lazy and/or vastly overweight and/or incredibly old and/or idiots and/or cop wannabes. On the (very) rare occasions you see competently trained security officers doing a good job, it turns out they are corrupt as hell.
Didn’t see the piece in question, but working outside or around the system was as common as working within it. If I had a thing I wanted to get done that I knew my supervisor would have a problem with, I’d wait till his day off and take it to another supervisor. (Sup A if I wanted it approved, Sup B if I wanted it denied.) Did that for years.
While there was some mild joking about Carter’s replacement of eros for agape, what actually scared Hell’s damnation out of the Poles was the preference for a Russified vocabulary in the speech.
I would say it is more than merely acceptable: to Berliners then, the article was used when used figuratively. “I am Berliner” strongly implied you were born there, or had lived so long to be seen as actually one of them; “I am a Berliner” would be about the equivalent of the use of “regular” in the sentence “I’m a regular New Yorker” when used by someone from elsewhere.
So you’re saying that all of those people in the movie weren’t literally Spartacus?
D’uh! 'Cause I’m Spartacus.
Respect. My father and grandfather were both career firefighters with 65 years of service between them.