Best of Peter Rhodes - August 26

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

"BE bill-free and earn money generating your own electricity for the next 25 years" is the promise in a mail-shot from a solar-panel company. On closer inspection it appears that, in order to get free electricity, I will first have to pay this company £121.40 per month for the next 10 years. I must be missing something here.

MY EARLIER piece on the Red Arrows brought some predictable outrage. I was taken to task by one lady reader for suggesting the Red Arrows are a waste of money. I actually wrote no such thing. But if we wish to discuss the cost, the death of Ft Lt Jon Egging at the weekend was the seventh fatality in the history of the team. His Hawk was the 11th aircraft lost, at a current replacement cost of £20 million a time. The RAF is coy about the annual running costs of the Red Arrows but estimates vary from £8 million to £30 million. The cost of re-equipping the ageing fleet of Hawk T1 trainers is put at £180 million.

NOW that research proves speed cameras do not reduce accidents, the Government is asking for a breakdown of money generated and accidents reported at every camera site. We should go much further. Any "safety partnership" found with a camera which generates huge amounts of fines should be penalised for allowing it to happen. When hundreds, or even thousands, of drivers are caught at the same spot it suggests something is seriously wrong with the road design or the signing. The authorities should put it right or face a penalty for aiding and abetting.

SORRY, but I can't work up much moral outrage over the former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith getting a couple of prison inmates to decorate her house. Among all the enormous, sleazy perks that some MPs exploited, this is the smallest of small beer, on a par with the company boss who has his lawns mowed by his office caretaker. Smith provided useful employment for a couple of lags. They got a day out of clink and the interesting opportunity to see how a Home Secretary lives. Nice house. Interesting selection of videos.

SO, farewell 2012 (BBC2) which ended its run this week having wickedly parodied the arrangements for next year's London Olympics. The joy lay in the throwaway lines that were so close to reality you had to check them out. For the record, there is no such campaign group as the London Wildlife Stag Beetle Outreach Project. At least not yet.

"WE DID not like the coffee at breakfast. My husband would have liked a real draught beer." (website review for a Cotswold hotel)

READERS of a national newspaper were asked this week to comment on the policy of keeping suspected rioters in custody rather than granting bail. Fewer than half thought it was "too draconian" and 50.4 per cent agreed with the statement: "Yes, the situation demanded a response like this."

So where was this hard-line view found? In the Daily Telegraph? The Sun, perhaps? No, it was in that bible of empathising liberalism, The Guardian. There's nothing like a riot for moving you to the right.

YOU can tell it's the silly season by all the fuss the national papers are making about a former Methodist church in Bournemouth opening as a Tesco Express supermarket. This is no big deal. The former St George's church in Wolverhampton, complete with steeple, has been a Sainsbury store for the past 23 years. As far as I am aware, the sky has not fallen in.

T-SHIRTS with the logo "I rioted in London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt," are for sale on eBay. Keep calm, carry on - and spot a marketing opportunity. Makes you proud to be British.

FEW men have a face you could call beautiful but Charlie Chaplin was one. His granddaughter, Oona Chaplin, played Marnie, the long-suffering, upper-crust wife in The Hour (BBC2) which ended this week. She is a dead ringer for her grandfather and how strange, enchanting and vaguely spooky it was to see the Chaplin face on our screens.

NO SURPRISE in the news that death caused by hospital superbugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile dropped by more than a third between 2009 and 2010. It probably has something to do with hospitals cleaning the wards properly. Pity they had to be told.