How Sir Jack saved Great Britain

THE Adam Smith Institute says this week that "only a small percentage" of the Green Belt needs to be sacrificed to solve Britain's housing crisis by building affordable homes. No, I don't believe it, either. No matter where houses are built they are all sold at the absolute maximum price the market will bear. Affordable homes are like nuclear fusion – a great illusion that never quite comes true.

BE sceptical, too, about the latest news on cancer. This week University College London claimed that by the year 2050 cancer will rarely kill anyone under 80. All I can add is that in 45 years in journalism I cannot remember a time when a cure for cancer was not just around the corner.

ON Tuesday, as the death of Sir Jack Hayward was announced, Julia Bradbury was exploring Brunel's magnificent Victorian steam ship SS Great Britain in The Wonder of Britain (ITV). Pity she didn't explain why the ship is displayed in glory in Bristol rather than rotting away in the Falkland Islands, as it was for many sorry years. SS Great Britain was saved solely because in 1970 Sir Jack personally paid £150,000 for the hulk to be towed 8,000 miles back to Bristol. Didn't that deserve just a little mention?

FILMING begins this month for the second series of W1A, the wonderful satire on life, work and corporate-cobblerspeak at the BBC. But how do you satirise something as inherently strange as the Beeb? This week Director-General Tony Hall declared that the corporation was "stuck in an analogue cul-de-sac". Now who wrote that? Was it his own speech writers or the script writers for W1A, going forward?

THE new series of W1A sees the return of Hugh Bonneville as the Beeb's Head of Values, Ian Fletcher. So that's all good, then.

I THOUGHT it was April the First when I found a column in the Guardian this week by one Frances Ryan. In the wake of the Golden Globes, everyone has been raving about Eddie Redmayne's performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Except Frances Ryan. In a sour little column entitled: "We wouldn't accept actors blacking up, so why applaud 'cripping up'? " she says disabled characters should be played by actors with the same disability. At present, she thunders: "They take a job from an actor who genuinely has that characteristic, and, in doing so, perpetuate that group's under-representation in the industry." It has to be said that even The Guardian's right-on readership is taken aback at the idea. A few point out that Redmayne plays Hawking in a long, tortured descent from perfect health to immobility, and what are the chances of finding an actor in the same changing condition? And yet Ryan's tirade has the feel of one of those issues which seems like nonsense today – and becomes law tomorrow.

IN the meantime, I am reminded of the yarn about the actor many years ago who was offered a million dollars to play Long John Silver in Treasure Island. "That's fantastic," he exclaimed. "I'll start tomorrow." The producer smiled: "No you won't," he said. "Tomorrow you're having your leg off."

DIDN'T Tony Blair look old, ragged and in need of a decent night's sleep during his appearance before a Common committee this week? Maybe he's worried about the soon-to-be-published Chilcot inquiry (11 years after the event) into the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Don't you hope so?