Whatever one’s opinion of the Showtime/Fox TV series Homeland – I personally have been hooked since Season One, but am not an uncritical fan – you have to wonder what went wrong with the spellcheck for episode one of season five, which I watched last night. How, I asked, or rather spluttered, as such things reduce me to a splenetic geeky wreck (I blame my father – whose fetish for ‘correct grammar’ and so forth left an indelible impact – or emotional scar – on all three of his children) can no one have noticed that the title contained a spelling error? SEPERATION ANXIETY is the title of episode one, according to Amazon Prime, and as any fule kno, seperate (for separate) is the second most commonly made spelling mistake on the internet (after ‘loose’ for ‘lose’). In fact my autospell thingy has just corrected my spelling of ‘seperate’ (twice now) as if to prove the point, if it needed proving.

Mrs Blanco is used to these outbursts, and once I’d calmed down we watched the damn thing – although the 50 minute episode took the best part of two and a half hours, over two sessions, as the broadband width is so measly here in the village that watching anything online involves a Zen-like acceptance of things as they are, even if this includes staring at a still of a gurning Claire Danes for ten minutes while the Circle of Death does its turning and the buffering buffers. A charming Peruvian technician has come out from Spanish Movistar (can anyone ‘come out’ from Movistar, I wonder?) on at least three occasions, but he claims, apologetically, that nothing that can be done, that the state of our wi-fi is irremediable, since we are, and I quote,  at ’the end of the line’, i.e. a dead-end, the last village before France. I’m not convinced. Even with my (very) limited knowledge of technology, does broadband width depend of whether you are at the beginning, the middle or the end of the line? Does it just Peter Out, like the failing legs of a long distance runner?

Weirdly, in reviews and online summaries of the episode the spelling has been corrected, but not on the title credits or on amazon video.