Peter Rhodes: Funny then, dire now

PHILIP Larkin is at last commemorated in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey with a plaque bearing his name and the lines: "Our almost instinct, almost true / What will survive of us is love." Larkin's best-known line is, of course, quite unsuitable for a sacred building. As any Mum and Dad will agree.

PURELY by chance, my recent item on Adrian Edmondson as Eddie Hitler in Bottom appeared on the day that the death was announced of Andrew Sachs, best known as Manuel the waiter in Fawlty Towers. There is a connection. Eddie and Manuel are forever linked by the same domestic implement used in a comedy sketch. The frying pan.

MEANWHILE, the BBC's decision to screen a 1979 episode of Fawlty Towers in honour of Sachs, followed by the scheduled show, Walliams and Friend, was a reminder of how brilliant some TV comedy was 37 years ago and how desperately unfunny some of it is today.

WHITEHALL'S plan to impose life sentences on drivers who cause death by dangerous driving while using a mobile phone is typical of the daftness that runs through the English legal system. Let us call it Tripwire Justice. It involves utterly ignoring thousands of crimes and then suddenly singling out one incident and giving the culprit a hammering. You see it used against youths who know they can rack up dozens of offences and receive a kid-glove succession of warnings, cautions, community services and suspended sentences. And just when they have got it into their heads that the law cannot harm them, they commit one more offence which triggers the tripwire and, to the horror of themselves, their mates and their wailing mothers, they are suddenly sent to jail for years. And you can't help wondering how a short, sharp spell behind bars earlier might have shown them the law has teeth, and saved them and their victims much suffering.

IN the same way, driving while using a mobile is a serious offence but police virtually ignore it. It is a fair bet that the first mobile-using driver to be jailed for life for causing death by dangerous driving will have used his or her mobile on the road many times before, and got away with it. The menace of phoning while driving will end only when police take it seriously and every driver knows of another driver who has been nicked and banned. Why wait until someone is killed?

ETHAN and Reuben Harvey, teenage brothers in Norwich, have dug trenches in their garden to recreate the Battle of the Somme in honour of two relatives who died in the First World War. Anyone else reminded of Blackadder Goes Forth? In the final episode, Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and Lieutenant George (Hugh Laurie) promise to meet up after the war and "relive the old times." Captain Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is not impressed: "What, dig a hole in the garden, fill it with water, and get your gamekeeper to shoot at us all day?"

I SEEM to recall Blackadder's sardonic view is based on a genuine letter home from the Western Front. One for you Great War buffs.