Peter Rhodes: Ken Barlow's going nowhere

AFTER last week's item about the gardener whose dust-mask elastic whipped off his hearing aids and catapulted them into the long grass, another reader reports a freak gardening mishap. A dangerous place is the herbaceous border.

THIS gardener was using an electric hedge-trimmer when he suddenly heard a loud bang and was whacked on the head. Startled, he look around for the cause and found nothing. He assumed at first that a tile had fallen off the roof and struck him, or that he had been hit by a meteorite. And then, some minutes later, he found one half of his ear defenders. The thick plastic head band holding the earpieces in place had suddenly snapped, producing a mighty bang, whacking him on the head and hurling the evidence into the shrubbery. Another one for you, Holmes.

THERESA May's proposed renaissance of grammar schools has been greeted with the usual dire warnings about children being separated from their classmates at 11. There is another social argument against grammars which is that they strip working-class areas of the clever kids who would grow up to be community leaders. I once heard this called the Ken Barlow effect. It is an odd choice of name because Ken must be one of the few grammar-school and university-educated people who refuses to move out. He still lives in the same Coronation Street he lived in back in 1960. I dare say all the other residents hoped clever Ken would push off but he just hangs on in there.

I WROTE last week about the growing practice of Morris dancers blacking their faces. Clearly, in an age when face-blacking is regarded as deeply dodgy, the only people smearing on the boot polish must be the ones most passionately committed to observing an alleged 500-year-old tradition in every authentic detail. And then a reader sent me an image of a woman Morris dancer with blackened face and that essential item of authentic 16th century dress, fishnet tights.

IF you have been watching the BBC iPlayer on your smartphone or other device, you will have noticed that it now comes with a warning. You must tick one of two boxes. The first declares that you have a TV licence, the second that you are a complete idiot who wants to be nicked. Call me cynical, but I bet most users will tick the first box. And as for those threats of being hunted down by detector vans, do we believe it?

I DO not subscribe to many conspiracy theories but I can't recall a single court case of a TV licence dodger being tracked by one of these vans. If you have a suspicious mind you might think the vans are just a device to scare us into paying up and supporting a licence system which was invented in the 1920s and should have been scrapped long ago.

THE Daily Telegraph chose as its picture of the day an image of the Apple boss Tim Cook showing off the new iPhone 7 to a dancer during the launch. What we see is a clever man explaining something very complicated to a wide-eyed blonde. Get the message, kids? Men are very clever. Ladies are very pretty but a bit dim. Or maybe the iPhone 7 can time-travel you back to the 1950s.