Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on the true cost of slavery, improbable incisors and how the Beeb forecast an ice age

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

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Sir Andy - something to smile about

WE are endlessly warned that TV programmes or news reports may contain flashing lights or distressing images. Yet there wasn't much warning about the enormous, horrific tumour about to be removed, in all its glistening, suppurating glory, from the belly of an old sheepdog in The Yorkshire Vet (C5). Horror-film makers dream of creating things as ghastly as that. Anybody else traumatised?

SIR Andy Murray has had his snaggly teeth fixed. However, he has deliberately not gone for the dazzling white finish chosen by so many stars and celebrities, opting for a "natural" colour and shape. Well done, him. The Hollywood smile looks daft enough in Hollywood without being exported to this side of the water.

THE most laughably inappropriate glacier-white teeth were surely those of Donald Sutherland when he played Mr Bennet in the 2005 movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. The action is set early in the 1800s and yet Sutherland sports a set of gnashers that would have dazzled the competition on a 21st century Oscars night. In the movie, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen , he seems positively embarrassed by his teeth and spends most of the final scene covering his arc-light smile with his hand.

CAMBRIDGE University has ordered a two-year investigation into its historic links to the slave trade. And if it finds a few modest bequests came from middle-ranking slave traders centuries ago, it can duly apologise to its minority students, make a suitable donation to anti-racism charities and move on. But what if the researchers discover that the place was built, run and sustained by vast amounts of money from slave-shipping, sugar plantations and other offshoots of this vilest of trades? What if the only acceptable recompense for the wickedness of many bad men is compensation which would bankrupt the university? There is an old saying, never meet your heroes. Meeting your villains can be just as unpleasant, and far more expensive.

A READER reminds me that back in the 1970s the BBC went big on a book called "The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice." Written by Nigel Calder, a distinguished researcher and former editor of New Scientist, it considered long-term changes in the climate. The BBC produced a documentary series to spread Calder's message which included the prediction that by 2030 global warming would have failed to occur and there would be "renewed concern about cooling and an impending ice age." Much of Calder's work has now been challenged but it is good to be reminded how passionate and strident scientists can become about their beliefs, even when they are wrong. Calder contributed to the controversial 2007 documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. During production, the film's working title was Apocalypse, My Arse.

THREE years ago I suggested the media was taking Twitter far too seriously. The current Private Eye magazine reports the latest research supporting this view. It says some journalists may believe that Twitter "offers insight into the public mindset," but the reality is that 10 per cent of Twitter users generate 80 per cent of the platform's tweets, and they tend to be richer, better educated and more left-wing than most folk. "So the next time someone cites 'outrage ' in Twitter," warns the Eye, "remember it might just be journalists and other media types staring at each other." Or as I put it three years ago, just regard them as naughty 14-year-olds until proven otherwise.

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