Best of Peter Rhodes - December 28

WORST Christmas shock. Waking up and discovering you agree with Piers Morgan.

I ONCE visited a school with its own armed guard, as suggested by America's National Rifle Association (and rightly condemned as idiotic by Morgan). The guard was a jovial, slightly overweight soldier sitting in the sunshine outside the head's study in the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, with his Armalite assault rifle on his knees. The NRA says all schools should have a guard like this to prevent more school massacres. The snag, of course, is that the psychopath preparing to slaughter children knows exactly what is about to happen but the guard does not. In order to kill the children, the gunman would first shoot the guard. No problem.

A PUZZLE from the sales. Why is it the average till operator can hold on to the winter snuffles for ages and then cough or sneeze straight into a handful of your change?

SIMPLE, isn't it? All you have to do to establish what happened by the main gate to Downing Street is to play the silent CCTV footage of "Plebgate" and try to speak the dialogue between officers and Andrew Mitchell, as reported in the official police log. Paul Merton and Daniel Radcliffe performed it as a playlet on Have I Got News For You (BBC1) and there seemed to be far too many words to fit the time available. David Cameron has had access to the police log and the tape for three months. Did he try making the words fit? If not, why not?

BEST party-cracker joke: "I wanted to train as a masseur but they said I'd have to start at the bottom."

A READER reports that, quite out of the blue, his wife has been bombarded with begging letters from half a dozen charities. He handles the household bills and correspondence and she never uses the internet. So how have these charities, who have never bothered his wife before, suddenly become aware of her existence? All he can suggest is that his wife has recently started drawing her state pension. Surely someone at the Department of Work and Pensions cannot be supplying details to charities? I wouldn't be in the least surprised. Would you?

THE BBC may have millions of pounds to shower on its bosses and senior managers but, at the bottom of the pile, BBC local radio is strapped for cash. From January 7, instead of getting a local programme, all 39 BBC local-radio stations in England and the Channel Islands will get the same three-hour programme. Auntie promotes it as "the BBC's brand new all-local radio evening programme," which is one of those sentences that, the more you read it, the less it means.

The job of spinning bad news into good news falls to David Holdsworth, the BBC's Controller, English Regions who says : "Expect a mix of great story telling, focussing on people and places, and debates on the issues that really matter to local communities, wherever they are."

Or to put it another way, expect lots of listeners to switch off.

THE GRADUAL demise of regional broadcasting, both radio and television, is pitiful to behold. Ever-expanding regions have created a style of journalism which, in order to hold the viewer's attention, deliberately conceals the location of the story until the last possible moment. The opening sentence refers to "a city" but it's not until the end of the report that viewers in Telford, Hereford or Birmingham discover that the city in question is Lincoln or Peterborough or some other far-away place of which they know little, and care less.

FESTIVE puzzler. When did champagne flutes replace the old wide-bowl champagne "coupe" glasses (which, according to legend, were modelled on the breasts of Marie Antoinette)? The argument in favour of flutes is that they preserve the bubbles longer, but who wants to make a glass of champagne last any length of time? If you really must cradle one drink for the whole evening, I recommend a pint of mild.

YOU don't have to be flooded to have a thoroughly damp and wretched yuletide. Water comes down as well as up and there is no more dispiriting noise on a rainy night than the steady plip-plip of a leak from your roof on to your bedroom floor - especially when every roofer in town is on holiday for a fortnight. Spare a thought, at this drenching time of year, for the thousands of Brits with dodgy roofs.

AM I the only one who cannot watch the 1963 Burton/Taylor epic Antony and Cleopatra (repeat, BBC4) without expecting Sid James to pop up?

THINGS that passed me by entirely in 2012. Gangnam. Fifty Shades of Grey. Tablets (electronic, not NHS).

I REFERRED recently to the Queen saving string and wrapping paper at Christmas for the next year's presents. A thought occurred to me as Her Majesty posed for the picture a few days ago with David Cameron's Cabinet. Wouldn't our economy be in better shape if it were in the hands of the 86-year-old lady who saves string, rather than anyone else in the photograph?