Express & Star

What about us uglies? Peter Rhodes on TV discrimination, an unlikely cop drama and a victory against passwords

A READER, fascinated at the gender-bias row within the BBC, says all TV channels are guilty of another insidious bias - our screens are dominated by attractive people. Where are the top jobs for those of us who have been well beaten with the ugly stick?

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Deyn and Sturgess - best of friends

CALL me old-fashioned but if a female colleague whacked me with a steel truncheon, kicked me repeatedly in the stomach and left me bleeding and semi-conscious, I might be tempted to remove her from my list of special friends. But in Hard Sun (BBC1), Renko (Agyness Deyn) knocks seven bells out of Hicks (Jim Sturgess) at the end of episode one but by episode two the two detectives are chums again. And all those wounds and bruises have miraculously healed.

I AM delighted to report a small victory against that modern nightmare, the Tyranny of the Password. A reader who has always renewed her car insurance by post was surprised to get this year's renewal notice by email. The policy would renew automatically but she was told to study the details by logging in to something called "insurance servicing." She was then instructed to create a new account and password. But she already has more than 20 assorted passwords for everything from banks to BT, so she phoned her insurance company and explained the last thing she wanted was yet another account or another password.

IT turns out that the insurer is quite happy to do everything by post, including providing her policy documents in printed form, not online. Which I bet is what most customers would prefer. But if you don't ask, you don't get.

"HARDLY a major crime, is it?" sneered one Facebook user after Cambridgeshire police appealed for information about a motorist who drove through a huge puddle, drenching a mother and her two children. It is when it happens to you.