Mick Hartley

If you missed it, here's a Newsnight film (15 mins) with Sue Lloyd-Roberts on a visit to North Korea. Probably nothing you didn't know already, but interesting nonetheless:

Initially I was simply irritated by our minders who seemed to have no concept of the expectations of a television film crew.

But my irritation slowly gave way to a realisation that their expectations of us were because they simply did not know any different.

North Korean TV only broadcasts hagiographies of the two leaders and pictures celebrating the country's army, model farms, model villages etc.

Our minders had probably never seen any other kinds of news item or documentary about their country or the rest of the world.

They were not allowed to, and they could not, because no-one has access to the internet in North Korea.

Instead, the North Koreans have a special internal intranet which I was shown at Pyongyang University.

A postgraduate metallurgy student who spoke good English explained that he could not compare his research with a fellow student in say, London or Los Angeles, because the system would not let him.

But, he added brightly, "the Dear leader has kindly put all we need to know on our intranet system".

At the university's foreign language department I asked the students how they had managed to learn such good English.

"Thanks to the Great Leader," one young man replied, "we are allowed to watch English and American films, like The Sound of Music."