PUTTING THINGS RIGHT

DO THEY NOT REALISE...

... that if a good advert helps sell more units of a product, then a bad advert must discourage purchasers. Before Christmas we had the Phillips ad that had the temerity to suggest that their new electric shaver was a design that matched the feats of manned flight and scaling Mt Everest. If there was a hint of irony involved, it did not come across. Now we have the re-renaming of Abbey, which implies that Alice Cooper would be an obscurity if he had stuck to the name Vincent Furnier -  yet when the Alice Cooper Band broke through in the US, that was the band name, not that of any member - and even more implausibly that The Beatles would not have succeeded had Ringo Starr not adopted a stage name. Boycott these idiots!

WORLD OF ENTERTAINMENT

On one single, tragic day, the world of entertainment was rocked by the deaths  of Ingmar Bergman, Phil Drabble and Mike Reid. To commemorate 'Black Monday' it is proposed by this very site to produce a short film. The plot synopsis is that in a world over run with bird flu and insane megalomaniac civil servants, a sheepdog is playing chess with Death, and on checkmate, someone cries "runaround." At this point, the loser is asked a general knowledge multiple choice question and runs off to stand on a podium representing the chosen answer. If the answer is correct, it is a draw.  The working title is 'One Mike And His Seventh Dog Seal.' For purely publicity gathering purposes, the director is planned to Terry Gilliam, and Death will be played by Tom Cruise (on some stilts). Offers of funding to the usual email address.

TOP COMEDIAN STEALS MY IDEA

Although it has to be admitted that I had not, at the time, committed it to print. On 'The Late Edition' it was observed by Marcus Brigstocke that, after the fuss of bugging the MP in conversation with a constituent, MPs are the only people in the country that it is illegal to bug. The people who made this law were, erm, MPs, and the list of MPs who seem congenitally unable to act within the parliamentary rules, or even the law, is as long as a blue whale's penis. Which is a very appropriate analogy.

ANOTHER LESSON IN SPORT

The bickering, gamesmanship, cheating and whining are fantastic fun, but in the America's Cup, it is the actual racing that is desperately dull. Perhaps they need to have 46 boats in a race on an area the size of a cricket pitch.

NIGERIAN ELECTION

One state governor gets over 100% of the vote at the first count. The ruling party wins a senate seat in a region where they fielded no candidates. Shame on you Nigeria, it is nearly as bad as Scotland. But at least the victors in Nigeria can claim a mandate from the people, rather than the UK parties, who claim it on the basis of 2/3 of the population not voting for them.

HEART OF DARKNESS

With it having been repeated on Channel 5 of late, I has moved to consider the reality of The Clangers. They are presented as peaceable, cuddly aliens, apparently not in need of any form of atmosphere. But are they really? Many episodes revolve around petty arguments, they wear military style boots and armoured waistcoats, plus the Iron Chicken lives in what looks like a wrecked tank, and dare not set foot on the planet. War has ravaged that planet in the not too distant past.

REMAINING POLITICAL

Regarding the EU declaring the handover at a discount of the Tote to racing to be illegal state aid, why do we not do what all the other EU members seem to in these instances - pretend we never got their letter/fax/email and do it anyway, apologising profusely when it is too late to undo. 

EXTREME ABUSE

The word ‘extreme’ seems to be the most abused in our language at the moment. One of the documentary satellite channels recently broadcast a series, “Extreme History” which seemed to have the same old reconstructions, but with Roger Daltrey in them. Thus is Roger Daltrey a definition of extreme? We have “Extreme Archaeology” in which extreme means to do something vaguely awkward in the most inconvenient and inexplicably hysterical manner possible. In sport, the range of options covered by the term is too great. Parachuting from the edge of space is extreme. Canoeing down Mt Everest is extreme. Tracking the yeti in Bhutan is extreme(ly pointless). Skateboarding up and down a ramp in Battersea is not by any stretch of the imagination, extreme. Eventually racing will be tarnished with the same brush of futility. The obvious candidates for extreme racing would be staying chases and hurdles, but my guess is that it will end up being all weather racing with gibbons replacing human jockeys. You heard it here first