No.36 (provisional)

After more than a year of diligent search, including a turn around the Sainsbury's Kiln Lane car park this very morning, No.36 has finally turned up. Turned up on a foreign plate in a rather good retread of the 'Ipcress File' which we started this evening on ITV Brand X, courtesy of our shiny, nearly-new smart TV. A west Berlin scene, towards the end of episode 1. 

With part of rather good being the slightly odd feeling of watching a costume drama that one first watched when it was just a thriller, more or less set in the present. The book was written in 1962, made into the film that I remember in 1965 - although I am not sure that I first it then - and adapted for television earlier this year, when it was set in 1963, a year after the book was originally written. This being the version of present interest.

With the present catch being that the Windows screen scrape function has let me down for once, the only consolation being that it has left me the time stamp.

For those that care about the rules, precedent was set and not challenged at reference 2. Except that on that occasion, using the same laptop, the screen scrape worked as intended. Perhaps the server end software has changed. Perhaps I will have another go tomorrow.

PS 1: tried again this Thursday morning with Microsoft's Snip & Sketch function. Where it looks as if the underlying picture is turned off before the function can kick in. However, the telephone provided a workaround of sorts, and the number is revealed as 'DF | Q 36', with my being pretty sure that the terminal '6' is not a '5'. So the provisional capture stands. But have the ITV people gone to the bother of stopping you taking a screen scrape or is the failure just some accident of image processing? And if the first, why would they bother?

PS 2: some days later. We have now finished this six-parter which, after a strong start, degenerated to a overly complicated and preposterous ending about which one no longer cared. I got the impression, without bothering to check, that the script writer, while building his script around 'The Ipcress File', had imported chunks of plot from other, later stories from the same series. Maybe I will get around to checking in Wikipedia for Len Deighton and all his works. Maybe even read reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/no35.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/no26-provisional.html.

Reference 3: https://www.itv.com/. My first impression being that it is easier to use on a smart PC than on a smart television.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IPCRESS_File.