Peter Rhodes: We were Python fans before Python began

I TOUCHED last week on that highly specialised area of literature, writing witty slogans for septic-tank emptying lorries: "Thanks for flushing our business down the drain" and so on. My favourite was spotted in America on a particularly grim and grubby honeywagon: "We haul milk at weekends." Lovely.

ALL will become clear but is anyone else puzzled that women "slaves," who walked out of a house in south London after contacting a charity, were not able during the previous 30 years to walk out and go to the nearest police station?

YES, of course it is wrong for coppers to fiddle crime figures and for their bosses to collude, in order to hit their Home Office targets, as revealed a few days ago. And yet there are times when you wonder why police officers bother going to work at all. I wrote last week about the disgraceful process of turning shoplifting from a court offence into a fixed-penalty misdemeanor on a par with parking on a yellow line. By coincidence, on the day that item appeared in the column, a repeat of Motorway Cops (Dave) reminded us of the hair-tearing, wall-punching frustration facing officers today. By a fine piece of detective work, involving some personal risk, a West Midlands motorway cop stopped and detained two Polish career shoplifters. He found their car and suitcase stuffed with what we used to call swag. It was a great nick. This pair had previous convictions, including a firearms offence, and they were relieved of their ill-gotten plunder and put in the cells. And then, this being 21st century Britain, world capital of human rights and blithering idiocy, they were granted bail. They promptly vanished. I wonder how many cops go home at the end of their shift, pour a very large glass of wine and ask themselves: "Why do I bloody bother?"

A READER says I was insensitive for suggesting in a recent item on David Dimbleby that, at the age of 75, the best tattoo you can have is your name and address. As he points out, it is no joke to visit your loved ones in a care home when their dementia means they no longer recognise you. Agreed. But dementia is so commonplace and so terrifying that the rational response is not always the best one. If we don't sometimes laugh at this wickedest of diseases, there is nothing left but tears.

AS THE Monty Python team regroups for a stage show, it's odd how the memory plays tricks. Back in t'Sixties, when we all lived in shoeboxes, ate gravel, got up before we'd even gone to bed and had to lick the road clean with our tongues, I recall how we'd gather in the school corridors at break time, exchanging gags by John Cleese and Graham Chapman from the latest edition of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The reality is that Python was not broadcast until September 1969, three months after my class left school. The surreal jokes that made us laugh back then actually came from the radio series I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again (1964-73) and At Last the 1948 Show (1967-68). There is a folk-belief that Python sprang, brilliant and fully-formed from nowhere. In fact it was a slow evolution as Cleese and Co honed their skills. By the time the Flying Circus burst on to our black-and-white TV screens, a generation of teen and twentysomething fans was tuned in, clued up and ready to hoot with laughter at material that our parents simply didn't get. We were Python fans before Python arrived. And you try and tell the young people of today that, they won't believe you . . .

CAN Cleese and the others recapture the old magic? Frankly I'm not expecting too much of the Spanish Inquisition.