Best of Peter Rhodes - June 18

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

VUVUZELAS are nothing new. The bane of the South African terraces has been available for years in Britain. It is sold to leisure sailors as a plastic mouth foghorn. The 12ins pipe costs about £7 and produces a 100-plus decibel blast which can be heard miles away. It is also excellent for waking up the crew.

IT IS predicted by some football pundits that after the World Cup is over, vuvuzelas will appear at British football grounds. They will not be universally welcomed. In fact, I dare say the surgeons are already figuring out how to extract them.

YOU know how it is. Some amazing new comedy series comes along, pushing the boundaries, breaking the mould and cocking a snook at the Establishment. And we all laugh along, we who delight in seeing the old order crushed beneath an avalanche of clever new gags and brilliant satire. Vive la revolution, eh?

And then our iconoclastic hero Eric Idle pops up advertising digestive biscuits with his "Wink, wink ,nudge, nudge" routine from Monty Python.

And fellow Python John Cleese is suddenly promoting Yellow Pages.

And hard-drinking stand-up hero Johnny Vegas is signed up by PG Tips.

And now Paul Whitehouse, star of The Fast Show, turns up playing an old bloke in the Aviva ads for pensions.

And the hugely inventive creators of Little Britain, David Walliams and Matt Lucas, appear in a series of commercials for Nationwide.

Hang on, lads. What happened to the revolution? And how long before Frankie Boyle is flogging Ovaltine?

HARRISON Ford and Calista Flockhart have married. They fell in love with the English canal network and sealed their love on a narrowboat trip. Here is a marriage which will surely last. Take it from me, if a relationship can survive a canal holiday, it can survive anything.

EVER since they made way for tights in the 1960s, the return of suspenders has been a shimmering mirage on the far horizon of Fleet Street's fevered male imagination. The story got yet another make-over with the news that Debenhams sold 238 per cent more black suspender belts last month than in April. This time, however, the sales are blamed on the modern celebrity fashion for wearing underwear as outerwear. This gave us the disturbing spectacle of Helena Bonham-Carter at the Baftas wearing a perfectly sensible frock with a corset on top, complete with dangly suspenders. It looked like a dementia-related dressing error and was about as sexy as sago.

THE astonishing power of football. In 90 minutes the world's most evil and despised regime suddenly became plucky little North Korea. Maybe it was the underdog effect as Kim Jong-Il's lads took on Brazil's finest. If so, the fans back in North Korea probably wouldn't understand. Over there, the underdog comes with fried rice.

FOR years, those who care for Multiple Sclerosis sufferers have been able to grab occasional holidays thanks to respite care provided at three MS homes in England. Now, after a brief consultation, the MS Society has announced an end to respite care at the homes. Instead, it is promising "personalised respite services". If experience elsewhere in the care sector is any guide, "personalised" means a) expensive and b) not as good. We are watching.

MPs are complaining that they have been "thrown to the dogs" by a tough new expenses regime. And the source of their abject misery and blazing fury? Apparently they have to fill in expenses forms showing what they have spent before they receive the money. Poor lambs. They still don't get it, do they?

THE BBC football reporter Mike Ingham got an MBE in the weekend honours list and was reminded on Radio 4 of his first day on the Today programme some years ago. After he delivered the sports report and his forecast for the racing winners, the late, great John Timpson turned and said: "Mike Ingham for a horse."

DAVID Cameron made a profoundly impressive apology for the events of Bloody Sunday. Not bad, considering he was five when it happene. Now, any chance of a £200 million inquiry into Bloody Friday? That was the one when the IRA planted 22 bombs in Belfast. They killed nine people and injured 130. David Cameron would have been too young to see the TV coverage of the security forces shovelling up the body parts. The rest of us will never forget it. When I mentioned Bloody Friday to Gerry Adams in an interview some years ago he said the deaths were "a matter of deep regret." So that's all right.

LOWERING the drink-drive limit from 80 to 50 mgs might save some lives. But I wonder how many more lives would be saved if landlords and fellow boozers routinely dialled 999 to tell the police that the bloke fumbling with his ignition keys in the pub car park is as drunk as a skunk.

WE hacks sometimes complain about sub-editors cutting our priceless prose or "improving" things for the worse. But I have to put on record that this column has never suffered from any sub-editing quite as ruthless as that endured by a reporter chatting to Radio 5 Live a few days ago. He told how one old sub went through his review of an Alice Cooper concert, studiously changing every reference to Cooper from "him" to "her". The same sub made a wedding report fit the space simply by removing the last word. Thus "The bridegroom is a potato farmer" appeared as: "The bridegroom is a potato."

MIND you, sometimes the checkers save our lives. An old proof reader told colleagues his finest hour was preventing a vicar's advertisement appearing in its original form. The vicar was trying to recruit a new choirmaster and wrote: "Must be fond of small boys". After some haggling, His Reverence agreed to drop it.

A THINK-tank claims that learning Latin would help primary-school children with their written and spoken English. Alternatively, we could try teaching them English.

CHURCHILL'S famous cigar has been removed from an image of him on show at a museum in south-east London. Smoking is officially regarded as the work of the devil and, clearly, the kids must not be exposed to images of famous men doing unspeakable things (even if the kids don't actually know who Churchill was). Coming soon: the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler with all the anti-semitic bits removed.

I AM probably the only journalist in captivity who does not own a mobile phone. It is entirely due to cowardice. Several years as a TA Royal Signals officer left me with a huge regard for the awesome power of radio frequency. I have no desire for an electro-magnetic device which is powerful enough to reach an antenna several miles away and has to be held within an inch or two of the human brain. This week comes yet another report suggesting a link between mobiles and brain cancer. I sincerely hope it is wrong. There is absolutely no satisfaction in being proved right when everyone else's brain has turned to mush and they don't understand a simple phrase like: "I told you so."

AT LEAST we know why Barack Obama is so irritable about the Gulf of Mexico spill and is looking, in his own words, for ass to kick. He has just given up smoking.