Best of Peter Rhodes - March 18

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

BERNARDO Hees, the US chief executive of Burger King, recalls his time in England thus: "The food is terrible and the women are not very attractive." Mr Hees may not be aware that there was a time in England when the food was great and the women were beautiful. And then the burgers arrived.

BY the time the Romans invaded in 43AD, the ancient Britons had constructed enormous stone landmarks such as Stonehenge and Avebury and more hill forts than you can shake a spear at. So it always seemed a little odd that we had to wait for a bunch of Italians to arrive before the roads got built. That Rome-centred view of history has just taken a severe knock with the discovery of a fine metalled and cambered road at Bayston Hill quarry in Shropshire , constructed 100 years before Caesar's legions paddled ashore. A new theory emerges. The Britons built the roads. The Romans resurfaced them and claimed the credit.

AN ITV spokesman declares, in suitably shocked and horrified tones, that the comments by Brian True-May on the importance of keeping Midsomer Murders "the last bastion of Englishness" are "absolutely not shared by anyone at ITV." The profits, however, are. Isn't it strange that ITV, an organisation which now claims to have such high principles, was quite happy to make money from a series with not a single black or Asian face, until True-May pointed out the bleedin' obvious?

AND imagine if Midsomer Murders were not an ITV series but a new book by Salman Rushdie, set in an all-white English village. How many of the great and good who are now branding Brian True-May a racist would be heroically defending Rushdie's freedom of expression to publish whatever he wanted?

THERE are some headlines you just can't ignore. This, from the Daily Mail this week: "Can a vibrating pill shake off constipation?"

A READER says he is irritated to be offered the chance to buy tickets for the Olympics. He suggests: "What about complimentary tickets for the British public to say thank-you for the support that was taken from us, but never agreed to?"

That's got to be worth a gold medal in the freestyle optimism event.

A READER rang, claiming that British survivors of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps saw the tsunami as "payback time" for the wartime brutality of the Imperial Japanese army. I do not believe a word of it. I have met many veterans who went through the ghastly experience of being PoWs. I remember one who, in August 1945, wanted to see atom bombs dropped on every Japanese town and village to wipe out the entire nation. But I would be astonished, 65 years on, if any of the old soldiers I knew would feel anything other than the deepest sympathy for the shattered and bereaved people of Japan. They were bigger men than that.

A NEW app for your iPhone is known as Skiver and offers a range of plausible illnesses, and their symptoms, for anyone phoning the boss to take a day of "ill". Why are we not surprised to learn that this invaluable aid to throwing a sickie has been developed by a software firm at Gateshead in Geordieland, the spiritual home of Andy Capp?

BIOLOGY is fascinating. Six weeks ago the chap next door chopped down a horse chestnut tree and left a pile of brushwood. This weekend, the sticky buds began to swell and glisten on the severed twigs. Spooky.

PHYSICS, on the other hand, is deadly dull. If physics were exciting, it would be the subject we all wanted to do at school. As it is, we drop it at the earliest opportunity, entering adult life with disconnected snatches of utterly useless information concerning the displacement of bodies, the speed of light and some old Greek bloke in a bath.

So here's a brilliant idea. Let's make a TV series about physics and give it a really whammo name like Wonders of the Universe (BBC2). Let's get that hip, happening, mop-haired Professor Brian Cox to say incredibly gobsmacking things like: "Every atom in your body was forged in the furnace of the universe" and see what happens.

What happens is that we lose one hour of our lives to physics every Sunday night and are reminded why we packed it in after the fifth form. And even when he's given a line to deliver about atoms and universes, Cox manages to make it about as exciting as Nora Batty ordering suet. Am I missing something?

IF YOU think the Germans have no sense of humour, then you have obviously never met an American in authority. "Unsmiling" barely begins to describe the average US cop or immigration officer and it seems this joyless mind-set extends to military guards. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US soldier in custody for allegedly slipping state secrets to Wikileaks, had his shoelaces, trousers, shirt and belt removed to prevent him taking his own life. He joked with his guards that he could probably hang himself with his underpants. So they took those away, too.