The Brussels Broadcasting Corporation

A REPORT reveals the vast majority of police forces are unable to investigate cyber-crime. To be fair, they're not very good at investigating ordinary crime either. It is estimated that about three out of every four reported crimes are never solved. Mind how you go.

THE quest for fruit and vegetable substitutes continues. A reader emails: "If I put an Orange SIM in my Apple phone, does this count as one or two portions?"

THERE is probably no imminent threat to British car number plates. But tucked away in new legislation are suggestions that the European Commission should consider putting ID tags on number plates and having number plates in common colours. Given the track record of the ever-expanding EU, that's enough to set alarm bells ringing, leading to last week's headlines such as: "Plot to axe OUR British number plates" (Daily Express). But if the tabloids are overstressing the threat, consider the reaction from the BBC. Its Brussels correspondent rubbishes newspaper reports with a haughty: "EU officials say that's simply not the case/" He adds: "The Leveson report on the British press talked about how 'there is certainly clear evidence of misreporting on European issues,' and that there must not be 'deliberate or careless misrepresentation of facts.'" What a strange and menacing thing to write. Last week we heard how one of Maria Miller's minions tried to warn the Daily Telegraph off the expenses story. Now, the BBC issues its own little threat to the Press on behalf of the European Union. BBC = the Brussels Broadcasting Corporation.

THE COALITION announced its immigration target as "tens of thousands, rather than hundreds of thousands" and has missed it. Labour's cunning plan, announced by Yvette Cooper (Mrs Ed Balls) is no overall migration targets. Brilliant. What a vote-winner.

DIDN'T it strike you, right at the start of Nigel Evans's trial, that there was something a bit odd about the charge of "rape" against him? The alleged victim said he got into bed with the MP after a dinner party. Because of Evans's behaviour he "got out a number of times to hide in the bathroom." But he kept returning to the bed. I was reminded of Dave Allen's tale about the brewery worker who drowned in a vat of Guinness. The drowning took hours because he kept climbing out to go to the loo.

INEVITABLY, the Crown Prosecution Service is taking flak after the not-guilty verdicts against Evans and other public figures charged with sex offences. And yet the CPS and the cops are in a hopeless situation. If you prosecute someone famous you're accused of a witch-hunt. If you don't prosecute someone famous you're accused of favouritism. No-win.

OVER recent years television companies have specialised in producing over-long programmes. You know the sort of thing. They have 20 minutes' worth of material and spin it out to an hour. You might assume there is too much broadcasting time and not enough material to fill it. And then along comes W1A (BBC2), the sharpest and smartest comedy of the year so far. And what does it get? A paltry run of four episodes, each of only half an hour. Didn't you just want it to go on and on?

THE Sunday Times TV critic A A Gill, a worshipper of London and all its works, said he couldn't imagine people living outside the capital being able to understand the media-based metropolitan humour of W1A. Actually, Mr Gill, squatting in our mud huts and wigwams on that blasted heath outside the M25, we did get most of the jokes (although naturally we needed some help with the bigger words).