Lichfield Dean

Also don't forget that on top of poor transport service and not every town having access to stations, many of us have other reasons to drive - disabilities or elderly or very young. Blaming the population of the Midlands for their "car first" attitude is a bit unfair when, as you say, there isn't really any choice in the matter for many. I use public transport or walking whenever I can, and would love not to use the car, but certain things, like travelling to the football, it can't really be avoided for me.

Yeah, if the new trains do what they say (and I'll believe it when I see it) then it'll make the Cross City line far and away the best transport facility in the Midlands. I just hope they really are that good.... I've always had problems at International. There may be a few platforms, but the intercity trains still often seem to get jumbled up with the local trains and all sorts of delays end up happening.

I don't really know what has changed but I've just stopped being interested this season and last. I always always watched the F1, during Schumacher's dominance, the McLaren dominance, the Vettel years, the Merc years, all of them. But this is different - and I don't really know why. As others have said, maybe it's a perfect storm of a dominant driver, ultra reliability, boring circuits and lack of in-race tactical thinking. It's just broken now. I don't see how it can be brought back.

Can they even see the pitch?

Been discussed before, and there are now obviously financial issues and other problems at the Alexander (although I don't know exactly what) but regardless, I'd hate to see Birmingham's premier athletics stadium and the home of Birchfield Harriers ruined by a football club. And equally, as west ham have proven, trying to make a football stadium that also needs to host athletics events doesn't really work very well. It's a huge 'no' from me.

Me too, apart from the issue of the trains. HS2 is going basically through there, but I don't imagine it will be stopping nearby, and that's obviously a long way off in the future anyway.

I've often wondered whether Victorian Talk was full of the same arguments about renovating Wellington Road vs moving a mile down the road (although I guess they didn't have the motorway/car parking issue to worry about). Bear in mind, Villa were the most successful and most famous club in the 1890s so I guess a top stadium was necessary and moving was the only real option.

Was exactly my thought lol

Not sure how comfortable I'd be with destroying an entire community like that. Guess it depends if the residents would be ok with it, but not sure they'd be best pleased!

Well, you'd hope a large majority would use the trains! I mean, in real life I don't know obviously how it'd pan out. My experience of the NEC over the years though is: 1) Exiting the car parks is usually horrendous 2) The trains are remarkably unreliable, even though you have both local services and West Coast Mainline trains passing through. HS2 may change this, but that's about as near to realisation as hover cars at this point. I'm not really knocking the location of the NEC though, it's about as good as anywhere in terms of infrastructure and available space (I think). But I can't ignore the fact that it's (for many) on the wrong side of town.

Tinker is talking about the NEC. It's totally the wrong side of Birmingham for me to be acceptable, despite some of the obvious listed advantages. Edit: also, anyone who's been stuck in the NEC car park after a concert will probably get the shivers at the thought of 50,000+ people trying to leave that area, despite what on the face of it appear to be excellent travel connections.

Two railways stations within walking distance, a major UK motorway on the doorstep... Yep, I know that place

Not sure what they are getting at here... I suppose Konsa is mostly known as a CB but even so...

And yet, I would still know that was England, weirdly enough.

When it's good, it's very very good. Measure Of A Man, Best Of Both Worlds, The Inner Light, Chain Of Command, Darmok... It's as good as any TV has been when it's on form. Then you have lots of tedious episodes and some downright offensive episodes. Overall though I love it.

The other thing about the theme tune is that they decided to remix or rerecord it for the later seasons and somehow made it worse than it originally was. At least it provided material for an endless number of jokes and some fun singalongs at conventions.

I like Enterprise. I think it's underrated. It suffered from various studio interference things, and it kind of veered around a lot in terms of what kind of a show it wanted to be from season to season, but I still enjoyed it. I recently started a rewatch of DS9 too, but after slogging through the first tedious three series I gave up and rewatched Babylon 5 instead, which is still awesome (until season 5 when it turns into the first three seasons of DS9). I'll probably head back to DS9 now because at least I know it improves dramatically from season 4 onwards.

Well, it go kaboom eventually, but it seems to have mostly worked well prior to that. And the board footage (especially during re-entry) was astonishing.

Wait a second... So you can have both a round badge AND a shield badge on the same shirt??!?! That solves all our problems!

I've often thought about this, as someone who was a little 'un at the time and wasn't really directly affected by it. From a modern perspective, the concept of men going into mines to dig up coal is so archaic and, in fact, seems pretty distasteful in many ways. So, was the real problem with the shutting down of the coal mining not the end aim of removing that industry, but the manner in which is it was done? The timescales, the pension issues, the police behaviour etc.? Because I cannot imagine any world in which manual coal mining would still be a thing now. Don't get me wrong - I'm not defending Thatcher in any way at all, I'm just curious what people think the "best" solution should have been to this assuming that we should have arrived ultimately at a point where coal mining was a thing of the past anyway.

Wooooo! Although the building being saved doesn't automatically translate to it being brought back to life. But fingers crossed!!!

How did it take so long to rule out? The wm commentators have been saying for five minutes it was handball.

Finally!!!!

Oh my god get on with it

Hang on...