To get annoyed by a badly written novel with serious factual mistakes

[PhaedraIsMyName]

Author thinks the witness to a crime can decide who the Crown calls as expert witness.

Expert witness is a therapist who was treating the witness to the crime. Expert witness is married to a lawyer. Expert witness has been discussing the background with lawyer husband. The person accused of the crime is the crime scene witness'father. Author thinks the lawyer husband can represent the accused and this is not a conflict.

Lawyer husband is actually employed in a government legal department and author thinks lawyer husband can, whilst still employed, act as a defence lawyer.

It's tosh. Did nobody bother to edit or proof read it?

Is it just me who bothers about stuff like this?

But in the 70s, M&S stores didn't have changing rooms. (Can't remember when they introduced them - anyone?)

I remember there being one in either Leeds or Manchester, but it was very very unusual. We lived an hour between both and it was quite an adventure to go to the M & S with a changing room.

That would have been late 1970s early 1980s.

None of this - none - is as bad as the fêted anthropological (and therefore supposedly NON-fictional) tome I began recently that a) got the basic scientific facts of optics and acoustics wrong and then b) treated them as metaphor (and therefore as if the facts were less important than whether they worked as an analogy), when they are, in fact, laws of physics.

Michael Taussig, I am calling you out.

The thing everyone knew about M&S in the 70s and early 80s and before hole in the wall machines became ubiquitous was you could buy something with a cheque on a Saturday, take it back and get cash. Politeness dictated one left the shop briefly and returned but I did know one person who didn't bother and just went straight to return.

The tv series of This is England dropped a massive clanger too. It was set in the early to mid eighties but started with a couple getting married in a venue that was neither a church or a registrars office.
Then later in the series they refered to the Commodore 64 as a games console!

PS for Scone up thread; sorry to point this out but coffee is not from the New World - it originates in Arabia (hence arabica beans).

But potatoes, yes. And tomatoes, capsicum and chillis, chocolate, and tobacco.

Pipbin I didn't notice the first one and the second one goes over my head. I'd forgive both as the film and TV series were just so good.

SconeRhymesWithGone
I love historical fiction, and though I have a degree in British history, I am not a complete pedant and can handle some historical inaccuracies (I watched the whole of the Tudors), but it's the details that really bother me. OK, so Henry VIII had a sister named Margaret who married the King of Portugal and then married Charles Brandon, but at least make sure that what they wear and eat is authentic.

I couldn't watch The Tudors Scone because they merged Henry XIII's two sisters into one character so the viewers didn't find it too confusing thereby altering the whole story as both sisters are historically important to what happened after Henry XIII died.

There seem to be quite a few sites devoted to correcting all the errors in this series!

I think that's what scone meant ... she means she can cope with Margaret being presented as both the sister who married the King, and the sister who married Brandon, but she doesn't like the minor inconsistencies.

I'm reading something at the moment set in an alternate universe where Elizabeth I married Dudley, and I'm fine with it but the attitude to homosexuality is irritating me, because I think it's implausibly modern.

(Plus there's a character who runs around in a tight-laced corset that makes her look like a boy. Er, no. Sorry.)

I have nothing to add but I'm finding this thread oddly compelling :o

You are right Pirate. Mea culpa. Coffee came later to Latin America.

I was a few chapters into a book when a character was in Ilfracombe and could see the lights of Lyme Regis,
Now that is good eyesight! And I read no further.

Well, and they missed one of the most compelling true stories of Henry's reign: Mary Tudor, his beloved younger sister, "the most beautiful princess in Christendom" who loved Katherine of Aragon, married the King of France and then the love of her life, Charles Brandon, and died at the age of 37.

Actually that needs to be a series of its own.

And yes, the real Margaret, who provided the Stuart link to the crown of England.

I was a few chapters into a book when a character was in Ilfracombe and could see the lights of Lyme Regis,
Now that is good eyesight! And I read no further.

That reminds me, I watched about the first ten minutes of Broadchurch and then had to turn it off as the accents were so bad. Olivia Coleman is a good actress and surely would have done more research.

I'm a historical pedant though, I can't stand minor or major inconsistencies!

DrJuno - that Jodi Picoult book gave me the rage too,

I will add the murder mystery set in Cornwall in the early 1970s in which a policewoman goes into her police station and is pleased to notice that there is a fresh pot of coffee on the go. She would have been lucky to get Nescafe.

I was once reading a book in the same sort of category as Holy Blood Holy Grail (in my defence I was a lot younger). I can't remember the title but it was by Colin Wilson.

He got St Augustine of Hippo and St Augustine of Canterbury mixed up. I couldn't get past it. It was in the days before the internet but it wasn't bloody rocket science, it's part of your basic encyclopedia you can get in libraries.

Grumble, grumble, grumble...

I read a book a few years ago, and the protagonist kept having flashbacks to being a child in 1970. Where she watched Rainbow, and her elder brother listened to punk. Except that's 2 and at least 4 years too early, respectively.

I'm also the sort of pedant who gets really annoyed by everyone having perfect white teeth in historical dramas, and all the women have no body hair (and a Brazillian, if there's a sex scene).

I am sad. It is a basic fact and I need to learn. I was playing a computer hidden object game set in Ancient Rome and I was having hissy fits because there was tobacco and pipes in it.

Grumble, grumble, grumble...

I remember reading a novel in which the heroine was staying in a house in Harley St in London, strayed a few streets away and got lost, and began to feel alarmed because she realised there were 'rough men in shirtsleeves lounging in doorways'.

I guess those would have been the notorious surroundings of Marylebone High Street, where the dirt-poor residents have to make do with only a Waitrose, the White Company and the Conran Shop

I was just about coping with the awfulness of the BBC version of Robin Hood until they started talking about the old trip to Jerusalem and arranging to meet up behind it.

This won't mean much to anyone who isn't an Edinburgher but this film featured Helena Bonham-Carter as a hard-up, struggling single parent working as a waiter and living in Ramsay Gardens.

Flats in Ramsay Gardens rarely appear for sale on the open market. One sold for £1.1 million in 2013. I saw it in a small cinema in Edinburgh and the audience were hooting with laughter.

Women Talking Dirty
imdb.com/rg/an_share/title/title/tt0180316/

Ha i haven't seen it phaedra but definitely understandable. I have to say I always found it interesting that Rebus could walk from the Oxford bar to Sighthill in 15 minutes....he should be in the Scotland athletics team and not an aging policeman.. .

I'm a teacher and I can't bear books set in schools as the children speak so differently to how they really speak! Also, withering putdowns in books always shut loudmouth kids up, whereas in real life...they don't.

The amount of basic facts about schools that I've seen that are wrong in books (children in the wrong year for their age, year 7s in primary school etc) is staggering, given that you don't even need to be or know a teacher to check - just ask a child, who will happily correct you!

Hackmum - we inherited DH's grandfather's answering machine from the 1950s! Mind you it's the size of a suitcase and office kit so broadly I'd be a bit surprised at the domestic answering machine too. Although Jim Rockford had one :)