Monday, March 30, 2009

Ceausescu's excrement

I'm in the UK this week, and probably not likely to be here much, but I just wanted to mention that on Saturday night just after I arrived there was a documentary on BBC2 about Ceausescu, which was a bit less fascinating than I hoped, but still had some interesting nuggets of information. Chief among which was that Nicolae employed someone to destroy his excrement so that foreign agents couldn't get hold of it and analyse it to check on the state of his health. How do you destroy shit? Blow it up? Fire it off into space? Throw it against a fan? Flush it down the toilet?

He also insisted that Romanian TV never filmed him doing anything normal - like eating, drinking, wiping sweat off his brow, coughing, that kind of thing.

I'd tell you to watch it on BBC iPlayer (the title of the programme was "The Lost World of Communism"), but because nothing in the world makes sense you can only watch BBC iPlayer in the UK (which also happens to be the only place in the world that you can actually watch the programmes on TV in the first place - go figure). I believe you can trick the BBC iPlayer into believing you live in the UK, but it's beyond my technical abilities, so I've never done it, and can't pass on the way of doing it to you. But if you manage it, let me know.

8 comments:

Gadjo Dilo said...

Sadly that iPod expertise is beyond me too. If I had to get rid of my own shit with no danger of it being analysed, I'd keep a pet pig in the toilet :-)

Catherine said...

You can't even watch it on iPlayer anyway - presumably, there are rights issues with some of the archive footage.

dumneazu said...

You need to access it through a UK based proxy server, which can easily be found on google, but are often a bit dodgy if you are an IT dabbler - it is a bit above my level of expertise.

Anonymous said...

Ceausescu certainly was an odd duck.

Random Andy fan said...

Andy, let me tell you about the REAL Ceausescu's excrement. I’m talking about Vadim Tudor. Well, now he and Gigi Becali have decided to candidate together for the European Parliament, in the Greater Romania Party’s name! Please Andy, reactivate the excrement destroying machinery to take care of the remaining excrements of Ceausescu! ;)

LucyM said...

iplayer is illogically annoying and unfriendly to those of us living abroad - and now Justin tv has stopped letting me watch the UK footie from a Belgian laptop...grrr
Managed to see the Ceausescu prog on BBC2 though, the footage of Elena shouting after they announced the show-trial verdict and wanted to tie them up was pretty shocking

Andy said...

Thanks all. Sadly Random Andy fan, I fear my power does not extend to getting Vadim disposed of. Perhaps Gigi and his henchmen can "illegally detain" him for the next 30 years?

Ian Plenderleith said...

I'm similarly infuriated trying to listen to football commentary from Five Live. Only if you live in the UK, where you can listen to it on the f***ing radio anyway.