The best of this week’s Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

NO NEWS yet on the release of the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs. So it may be worth his lawyers trying a new tack. How about: “My client robbed the mail train because he believed it was in the spirit and letter of the rules as he understood them.” It seems to work for MPs.

VICARS in the diocese of Worcester are being given special training to help them deal with swine flu. I find myself reminded of that business at Gadara when Jesus exorcised a bunch of demons and cast them into a herd of pigs. The poor creatures promptly stampeded over a cliff and drowned.  Cool trick but I dare say the vicars will be mostly learning about face masks.

CURIOUSLY enough, a Bible reader wrote to me a few days ago, suggesting that the proper collective noun for Members of Parliament is a Gadarene of MPs.

I AM assured this was actually overheard in a pub. One student to another: “I’ve got my ballet-studies result. It’s a 2:2.”

THE REFORMED-playboy act didn’t last long, did it? One day Prince Harry was doing the dutiful, dark-suited thing at the 9/11 memorial to the dead in New York. The next, bless him, he was gobbing a mouthful of champers at a fellow player in a polo match. The prince of spurts.

THE PRINCE has been big enough to admit, as I predicted in this column some weeks ago, that he’s not really up to being a helicopter pilot. “Mentally, there are the exams and everything,” he explains. “I can’t do maths.” This is fairly important. You don’t want pilots who think the best way to descend from 4,000 feet to 2,000 feet is to drop 5,000 feet. Even if the RAF wangled the innumerate Harry a pass, who’d want to fly with him?

OKAY, so some skinny 10-year-old girl burst into tears on stage and the “Hairy Angel” Susan Boyle has been admitted to the Priory with exhaustion.  Big deal.  But surely live telly can do better than that. Live should mean real life, as red in tooth and claw as Amanda Holden’s car-crash lipstick.  For next year’s finals of Britain’s Got Talent (ITV) we want real live anguish, cranked up 1,000 per cent. We want the lardy-arse singing troupes dropping dead with coronaries. We want the 90-year-old limbo dancers arrested, live before our eyes, for fiddling their benefits. We want the python act to swallow the hamster act and the dog act to poo on the doves act . We want pyramids of streetwise dancing troupes collapsing like shipyard disasters onto the tiniest dancer, with snot and gore gushing from every orifice. We want 10-year-old performers not merely frozen like terrified rabbits in the headlamps but hyperventilating, involuntarily defecating, collapsed in foaming fits and clinging to Ant and Dec for help as their hideous, pushy mums bellow: “Give her anuvver chance, Simon!” We want blood, we want terror, we want the baying crowd to decapitate Piers Morgan and stick his head on a mike stand, live and preferably in high-definition. Now, that’s entertainment.

SO MUCH for the recycling revolution. A friend who lives up a long lane has been told quietly by his binmen that he can put anything he likes in the green bin. When the money runs out, how quickly we move from Save The Planet to Sod The Planet.

A NUMBER of politicians have tried to divert public anger by referring to the lavish expenses enjoyed by journalists. So I should put on record that one of my expense claims was challenged. It was in 1970 when my then editor, a delightful old gentleman called Jim Pritchard, accused me of “playing the big boy and flashing your money about.” The bar bill in question was for five shillings (25p).

I TOOK a friend’s car for its MoT test. It failed because of a cracked suspension spring.
“It’s happening all the time,” explained the mechanic. “It’s the state of the roads.”
He seemed  cheerful. But if you were making good money out of the UK pothole scandal, wouldn’t you be?

A READER calls, somewhat perplexed. His local surgery has been reorganised into a super new surgery stuffed with GPs and practice nurses, all in the name of eficiency and “patient service.” The first thing he notices is that  the doctors, who previously required 24 hours to sign a repeat prescription, now take 48 hours.

PRINCE Charles calls for the destruction of all grey squirrels on the grounds that they are an alien species. Charles is a member of the non-native Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty. He is also grey.