Peter Rhodes: Drunks at 30,000 feet

YEAH, we gotta stop polluting the air and we gotta take the planet seriously. Bite-sized gobbets of eco-wisdom dropped from the lips of the great and good at the Oscars. Here's a good question to ask any celeb championing the environment: How many times did you fly last year?

YET another bunch of airborne drunks have ruined a flight for their terrified co-passengers. They now face fines of up to £19,000 after a Ryanair plane had to divert to Berlin. Good. I once shared an airliner to Estonia with a dozen idiots on a stag trip. They almost started a fight with one traveller and reduced at least one woman to tears. It was only as we disembarked at Tallinn that the suspicion grew, from their appearance and their occasional dropped words, that this posse of drunks were off-duty police officers.

LAST week the BBC paid part of the £100,000-plus costs to the producer who was thumped and racially abused by Jeremy Clarkson. This week, its lawyers may be getting a writ for libel from Tony Blackburn. If the sacked DJ wins his case, the BBC could be forced to pay another six-figure sum. So that's where your licence fee went.

THE Blackburn case is bizarre. He has emerged from the Jimmy Savile inquiry with not a hint of scandal against him. He was sacked last week apparently because his verbal evidence was contradicted by evidence in documents seen by the inquiry. The documents alleged he had been interviewed twice during an investigation into a 15-year-old girl's claims of under-age sex. Blackburn insists no such interviews ever took place. The retired former Lord Justice Sir Brian Neil, talking to the Daily Mail, is equally insistent that he interviewed "someone called Tony Blackburn" and that this happened "in the presence of someone called Cotton" (presumably the BBC executive Bill Cotton). It is all very odd.

EVEN odder, and deeply unwise, is the assumption behind all these historical inquiries that the human memory is a reliable organ. It is not. A few weeks ago, searching online for a travel feature I wrote about Vietnam, I came across something quite bewildering. It was a letter in the Birmingham Post in September 1998 in which I referred to the underground war fought by the Vietcong. I had no memory of writing it. If you had asked me under oath beforehand whether I had penned such a letter, I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I had not. And yet there it is, in black and white. And now I see it, I fancy I can sort of remember writing it, although I'm not even sure that is an authentic recollection, or my brain altering things to suit the evidence. Memory is a strange and uncontrollable thing and I'm sure it is perfectly possible, especially if you lead a busy life, to forget things absolutely.

INCIDENTALLY, if you think the human memory is reliable, sit through a few contested cases in your local court. Time after time you will see impartial, honest witnesses describing the same incident in totally different ways – none of which bears any relation to the CCTV footage. Surveillance makes liars of us all.

BY all means raise a whiskey to Frank Kelly who played Father Jack in Father Ted (C4) - but not the Toilet Duck, eh?