Peter Rhodes: People like us?

MORE weather-forecast English. This week's warning was of "murky-mizzly."

FIRST cracker of the season: "What happened to the hyena who swallowed an Oxo cube? He became a laughing stock." Ye Gods, another 10 days of this.

IF I were a cracker-joke writer in this fake-news, post-truth age when people seem prepared to believe anything, I would fill crackers with facts such as: "The River Thames is not a river at all. It is an adjective." And relax, knowing that all over Britain Xmas parties were descending into fights with gullible folk brandishing atlases, dictionaries and iPads.

SO farewell, Ian McCaskill. I never interviewed the BBC weather forecaster, who died this week, but he suddenly appeared in the office in Broadcasting House many years ago where I was interviewing the chief forecaster, Bill Giles. McCaskill burst in like a busy little shrew, sorting through some papers while robustly denouncing some ****ing **** he had just fallen out with. It was all light-hearted but to hear the housewives' favourite effing and blinding like a navvy was a bit of a shock. As I wrote at the time, it was like seeing the Pope spit.

OFF to the lake for what may be the last sail of the year. The racing catamarans were out, zipping along at impossible angles and breathtaking speeds, their skippers crawling over the skeletal craft like hyperactive black spiders, shifting their weight into the wind. Braced against the spray of a soaring bow wave, they were whippet-thin, clad in black rubber and crash helmets. We traditional sailors are very different. We pootle around in fat-bottomed luggers, wearing fat-bottomed overtrousers and woolly hats, eating cheese sandwiches and getting excited about hitting five knots. At the end of the day, asked what they have been doing, both of these different and mutually uncomprehending tribes would answer "sailing."

IN the same way, all those taking part in Muslims Like Us (BBC2) would call themselves Muslim. But if 10 average British Muslims had shared the house for the week, they would have chatted mostly about the weather, their bad backs, the state of the railways and so on, just like any other random bunch of Brits. This would not make good television. So the film-makers recruited 10 people from the fringes of the religion for maximum contrast, in much the way that the Spice Girls were assembled: Sexy Muslim, Gay Muslim, Black Muslim, Little Old Lady Muslim, and so on. And lurking among them was Scary Muslim in the form of Abdul Haqq. He is a fierce, fundamentalist supporter of jihad who, in his perfect Islamic society, would probably be chucking Gay Muslim off a tall building and organising the public stoning of Sexy Muslim. I'm not sure what the programme's message was. Most Muslims are like us? A minority of Muslims are dangerous and need watching? Didn't we know all this before?

I IMAGINE Muslim families all over Britain would watch the programme and exclaim: "She's not a Muslim" and "That's definitely not Islam." I know about such things, having been raised in a religion with a history of schisms and endless arguments about the evils of alcohol and gambling. We were Methodists.