Peter Rhodes: Life imitates art

BRITAIN'S Tastiest Village was the entirely mythical BBC programme invented on W1A, the spoof series based on the management of the BBC and starring Hugh Bonneville. Our Dancing Town, on the other hand, is a real-life reality programme launched this week by BBC1. Tasty villages, dancing towns. Art imitates life and can anyone tell the difference?

I REFERRED recently to the Northern plover which has a distinctive crest on its head and is commonly known as the peewit. Until, that is you go Oop North where it is called the tewit, pronounced chewit. This explains the old Yorkshire Dales riddle: "What's oop when it's down an' down when it's oop?" The answer is "T' crest on t'head of a chewit." They used to make their own entertainment in those days.

DO you find yourself wondering what Theresa May would be like without Brexit? She put on a good performance this week and is emerging as the champion of the cause. But my hunch is that, without the enormous distraction of Brexit, May would be embarking on the greatest reform of health and social care since the NHS was founded in the 1940s. Leaving the EU is what the people want but it is all-consuming. As one political pundit put it this week: "Brexit sucks the life out of politics."

THE Supreme Court ruled this week that bus drivers should do more to help disabled passengers. It followed an incident when disabled Doug Paulley was left at a bus stop in Yorkshire when a mother refused to move her pushchair from a place on the bus reserved for wheelchair users. The judges suggest that drivers should take a sterner line, including refusing to drive off "with a view to pressurising or shaming the recalcitrant non-wheelchair user to move." This may sound like sweet reason in the judges' parlour but their worships are pushing drivers into the front line of the war on declining standards and sudden violence. It is a heavy and unfair burden. When someone is shamed or offended, things can escalate quickly. Some years ago a row between a man and woman in a south London supermarket ended with the woman phoning her ex-partner. He stormed into the shop and felled an innocent bystander who later died of his injuries.

THE supermarket tragedy may be an extreme example but we live in unpredictable times and no bus driver can ever know how a stroppy passenger may react, or whom they may summon to the scene. One of the downsides of this high-speed digital age is that you are never more than a phone call away from a psychopath.

MY tale of woe about my car battery failing in the winter chill took me to the vehicle-diagnostic man, the 21st century equivalent of the shaman who lives in a dark little workshop and weaves his magic to find out what is amiss in the car's electrics. The garage owner gave me the instructions to find him including: "You go down that road where the old pub used to be." Can there be a single road in England that does not fit that description? We are a land of lost pubs.