"You know the Bobby Moore"

"You know the Bobby Moore"

Channel-hopping last night, we caught the end of the video for Feargal Sharkey - now doing some pointless government music czar job - singing "A Good Heart". The song is now stuck in my head, the warbly-voiced, long-haired get.

"That must be great," says I.

"What?" replies Mrs Duck, knowing full well there is lunacy to come.

"Being so famous that your name is cockney rhyming slang."

"Oh, really."

Really. Unfortunately, I could only come up with obscene ones - James Hunt, Eartha Kitt, Jimmy Knapp, etc - and what with it being Nice Week, I found it difficult to come up with anything, you know, nice.

"How about Lionel Blair?" asked Mrs Duck.

Gah! Help me out here, people.

Token Nice Week content: Kittens! Kittens in Mittens!

Express Delivery

It's great to see yesterday's Daily Express (prop: Richard "Dirty" Desmond) have a go at the BBC over the number of repeats shown by the Corporation over the Bank Holiday weekend: "Fury at BBC's 16 hours of repeats". As if there wasn't enough real news about illegal immigrants, house prices and cancer scares out there.

Now excuse me! Apart from the usual arguments to refute this cheap front page - finite BBC resources, traditionally slack Bank Holiday viewing figures and, contrary to popular opinion, requests for repeats outnumbering complaints five-to-one - there's one thing about the whinging Express headline that really sticks in my craw.

And it is this: The BBC - legally bound to inform, educate and entertain - being lectured on its output by an organisation that lists amongst its assets such informative, educational and entertaining TV channels as "Red Hot 40+ Wives" and "Red Hot All Girl"*.

The BBC, as far as I know, doesn't offer a "ten minute free view", nor does it charge its viewers four quid a night for the privilege of watching some old slapper having her back door kicked in. If it did, there'd be a public outcry, no doubt led by the Daily Express (prop: Richard "Dirty" Desmond), followed by a record surge on the national grid.

It doesn't stop with the TV channels, where the same generic humping can be shown several times a night across Dirty Desmond's six channels of output. As Manic points out, Desmond's scud-mags are notorious for recycling images from shoots from as far back as the 1970s, a trick they'd never get away with in the Radio Times.

Mr Kettle, I'd like to introduce you to Mr Pot.

* I was sorely disappointed to find that "Barely Legal" was not a hard-hitting Esther Rantzen-fronted consumer programme. Desmond - I want my four quid back!