Their rigour and intelligence was a world away from the casual, easy-does-it style that was beginning to sweep through television food programmes on the coat tails of the Keith Floyd revolution.
John Brennan's comments on Monday represent the most significant pushback yet against recent reforms of a surveillance programme that swept up millions of Americans' telephone records and was exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Snowden went on to assert that New Zealand's Government Communication Security Bureau (GCSB) uses surveillance tool X-KEYSCORE, a massive data mining programme that sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history.
The presence of repetitive compound muscle action potentials (CMAPs) was assessed in the four motor nerves tested using an F-wave programme, with a slower sweep speed than conventional CMAP recordings.
Under the changes, housing benefit, income support, incapacity benefit and dozens of other payments will be swept away in a major reform programme intended to break the culture of welfare dependency by making work pay.
The week of programmes has a broad, ambitious sweep in its survey of the history of the written word.
Two of the programmes, Prism and Tempora, can sweep up vast amounts of private data, which is shared between the two countries.
His own experience as an NSA analyst, he said, left him with no doubt that New Zealanders' communications were swept up by the XKeyScore mass surveillance programme.
Unlike traditional welfare schemes, which dole out money without demanding anything in return, CCTs will only pay out if the recipients ensure their children regularly attend school and health facilities or schools alone.These programmes have swept across the developing world.
A witness protection programme yokes them back together and sweeps them from the madness of Manhattan to the timeless wilds of Wyoming.
In an excellent recent BBC4 programme, the argument was that punk inevitably swept away pub-rockers such as Brinsley Schwarz and Ian Dury's earlier band Kilburn and the High Roads.
