Peter Rhodes: Digging up the ancestors

HUMOUR is a funny thing. Spring cleaning, I found my old copy of To Bed on Thursday, Anthony Brode's tale of life as a cub reporter on a weekly newspaper in the 1940s. Forty years ago, I laughed out loud at his tales of village fetes and small-town politics. Today, I smile just a little. Similarly, Tom Sharpe's savage comedy Riotous Assembly which had me rolling on the floor in the 1970s now seems ponderous. And yet at the weekend I watched three episodes of Rising Damp in succession and it wasn't enough. A comedy which was no more than moderately amusing four decades ago made me laugh like a drain. Does our sense of humour mature - or wither?

BRILLIANT locations, fabulous lighting, utterly useless plot based on improbably Freudian cobblers. Maigret (ITV), starring Rowan Atkinson, would have been greatly improved by putting Inspecteur Bean on the case.

I SUGGESTED recently that the artificial-intelligence program which defeated a human champion in the board game Go wouldn't be truly human-like until it lost, kicked over the table and lodged a protest. Bang on cue, along comes Tay, a "chatbot" created by Microsoft to natter like a teenage girl on the internet. Tay was soon nattering to the wrong people. By the time it was closed down Tay was praising Adolf Hitler and denouncing feminism as a disease. Almost human, innit?

PROFESSOR Alice Roberts is a brilliant doctor, artist, anthropologist, author and anatomist who has introduced millions of TV viewers to archaeology. She is also an atheist and patron of the British Humanist Association. This may explain her relaxed attitude to unearthing the long-dead and examining their skeletons and possessions, as in Digging for Britain (BBC4). I share her lack of religious belief. But you don't have to be a Bible-thumping evangelist to feel uneasy at this wholesale disinterment of our ancestors. Their dearest wish was to rest for all eternity beneath the land that gave them birth, not to be dug up, robbed of their swords and shields, packed in cardboard boxes and stuffed into university warehouses. Every time the TV archaeologists dig up a body, they overrule the final wishes of a fellow human being.

AND once you establish the principle that the desires of the living outweigh those of the dead, why stop at the Bronze Age? (Why, for that matter, pay any attention to someone's last will and testament?) I would not be surprised if at some time in the coming century, the scientists examine the remains of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and discover who he really was. That would make us more knowledgeable. But would it in any way make us better?

NATIONAL treasure John Humphrys says he cannot understand people indulging in the "idiocies" of Twitter and Facebook. Come off it, John. Social-media junkies simply want to be like you. They want to be famous. They want to impress their "friends" and "followers," even though they go days on end without a single viewing. Saddest of all are not the kids but those middle-aged underachievers who are desperate to show off their intellectual prowess. I know one who publishes a list online of all the books he has read. Don't scoff, John. Show some pity.

I ONCE interviewed Humphrys. He described his famously skinny frame thus: "You'll find more fat on a seagull's lip."