East Enders comes to Ambridge- Archers April Round-up.

HIGH DRAMA in this month's BBC radio soap and no one is quite sure if it is all because editor Vanessa Whitburn has gone off on her sabbatical.

But for whatever reason we have seen some fast moving crime drama in the village where usually it is only ever Eddie Grundy getting caught for some idiotic scam. Other felonies are committed, such as David Archer illegally shooting a badger and Helen Archer getting involved in a hit and run whilst drunk, but as they are Archers they rarely, if ever, get caught.

But now that acting editor, John Yorke, has moved in his experience as BBC Vision's controller of drama production, which includes EastEnders, Holby City and Casualty, may be upping the pace in sleepy old Ambridge.

So instead of a lot of left of centre women ruling the roost and bossing their sluggish husbands we have had Alice and Christopher Carter getting down and dirty wearing nothing but blacksmith's aprons; Amy Franks, the saintly daughter of saintly St Stephen's vicar Alan, having a fling with a married West Indian and to round off the month Adam Travers-Macy being knocked unconscious by a gang who we suspect has already stolen Tom Archer's quad-bike. Such excitement usually takes a decade to unravel but April in Ambridge has set off at a cracking pace worthy of any TV soap.

There have, of course, been the usual things to endure such as the Bridge Farm gang of four being as insufferably smug as only they can be, and Usha Franks, a supposedly tough Ugandan Asian solicitor going into meltdown over step daughter Amy's misdemeanours and incredibly sharing her worries with bezzie mate and know-all, prurient, mouth of the Am, Ruth Archer.

But on the plus side Tom Archer's ready meals look to have hit the editorial spike while the mega-dairy has been granted consent thus thwarting the hectoring female farmers, Ruth and Pat Archer. Anything that shuts these two up is to be welcomed with open arms.

And with TV soap themes now apparently finding favour can it be long before the surrogate father of the wonder child Henry turns up at Bridge Farm and demands visiting rights from the child's equally insufferable mother, Helen? One can but hope not.

Ambridge Round Up- the Archers in March

Walking in a Wimmin's Wonderland.....

One of the big surprises in the farming world of the Archers is how few Conservative voters there are. Brian and his air-headed wife Jennifer presumably are, but Brian is seen very much as the big, bad agri-bully down Ambridge way whilst Jennifer whiles away her time either shopping or fussing over her grown up children, all whom have been sired by different men.

We suspect Matt, a Jack-the-lad wheeler-dealer, also has strong Tory leanings yet he has been to jail, declared bankrupt, lost his business empire and was even rejected by his long lost mother in the brief time he has been part of the programme. Lynda Snell, being from Sunningdale, may also be a Tory voter but she too has suffered the ignominy of having to take a menial job having once enjoyed the trappings of success brought about by being the wife of a dot.com millionaire.  

It is impossible to avoid the fact that the Archers script writing team is not at all fond of Tory sympathisers. However, it is hugely fond of feisty women with green credentials. It seems to revere them as this month's Ambridge miracles aptly demonstrate.

First David Archer, a hot headed clod at the best of times, was all for selling his dairy herd- generations of which have been on Brookfield land since Cnut Archer first washed up the Am and decided that he had had enough of rape and pillage. Ruth, as she often does at times of crisis had hysterics before coming up with a cunning plan. 'It might just work' murmured an aghast David, who became even more aghast when another female, this one even more a specialist on dairy cow manbagement than Ruth, turned up to tell them how their entire business will be transformed by grazing the cows at different times. David, being a bloke, and possibly even a Tory is far too thick to have worked this out for himself.

Over at the Bridge Farm miracle centre an e-coli outbreak, nearly killing two children has been overcome by holding a couple of receptions and renaming the Bridge Farm products. Having the world's most understanding and atypical bank manager must also help as the Bridge Farm crew, led by feisty lefty Pat, once again start to enjoy a healthy income from organic pork and vegetable sales despite a downturn in the rest of the UK organic market during 2011.

Pat is ably assisted by her feisty, green daughter Helen as are so many others in the village sisterhood. Pip is regarded as something of a genius by doting parents, David and Ruth; Fallon holds the village pub together when mother Jolene is having a touch of the vapours, whilst Elizabeth single handedly propped up Lower Loxley well before husband, arch Tory, landowner and general all round chump Nigel Pargetter tumbled to his death.

Ambridge is no place to be either male or a Conservative if you want to succeed.

Ambridge Round Up- The Archers in February

Perhaps Ambridge is actually on the Isle of Wight. I pose the suggestion because in the few moments we have not been spending time with those most dysfunctional and unlikable of neurotics in Bridge Farm it has been cows week every week in this month's Archers programme.

Ruth Archer, who many listeners find wildly irritating, but doubtless is seen by The Archers producers as just the sort of feisty, tenacious young woman able to cope in today's modern and high risk farming world, has suddenly undergone an emotional melt down being twice reduced to tears over the subject of cows. Given that these willing beasts are kept in a state of almost permanent lactation until they can no longer produce a high enough yield and are summarily junked, it seems hard to believe that Ruth could become so emotional about creatures she routinely treats as mere units of production and is more usually heard shouting loudly at them or else hitting them with a stick.

However, the possible advent of Brian Aldridge's super dairy has reduced Ruth to a quivering jelly about bovine welfare. Factor in that her own Brookfield Farm is losing money hand over fist in its milk production, a rare shaft of agricultural veracity here from the script writers, and we have Ruth as simpering Victorian heroine. Can it be long before she swoons?

Over at Bridge Farm, the miracle financial renaissance of a small farm business that very nearly poisoned two young children fatally due to its lax hygiene continues unabated, only interrupted by Tony, whose voice sounds more feeble and quivering each time we hear him, finally succumbing to a heart attack- which only goes to prove that some farmers really do have hearts. Given that Tony works at least 100 hours a week and has to endure his nagging wife and children on a more or less permanent basis it may well be that he wished his attack had proved terminal. Despite having no doctors in the village, or indeed anywhere near it, Tony is already up and about again and all set to muck in with the latest Bridge Farm grand marketing campaign.

The campaign is masterminded, if that is the correct term, by the frightful know-all Tom Archer preparing to re-launch some ready meals his long suffering girlfriend has knocked up all of a sudden and which have had Borchester food critics drooling. Who packs, distributes, brands and markets this stuff on a commercial basis remains unclear.

Elsewhere another much put upon Ambridge male, Neil Carter, has been painting and decorating his dissolute father-in-law's home although brother-in-law, Gary Horrobin, one of the few of the Horrobin underclass not  yet to have found voice, does not want his room decorated for the distress losing his Star Trek wallpaper would cause him.

Presumably there has been a high degree of inbreeding in the Hororbin clan as Gary is meant to be in his mid to late thirties despite having the mental age of someone far, far younger. Perhaps rather than speak we shall just have to listen out for him strumming his banjo whilst sitting on his pa's old rocking chair. It might just drown out the sound of Ruth Archer's sobs.

Ambridge Round up- The Archers in January

It's Marketing month in Ambridge

January has seen another strange turn in the ever changing face of Ambridge. Whereas we have become used to serial personality changes this month saw an outbreak of ad-speak in the oh so weird enclave that is this tiny, inter-related farming community.

Sausage obsessed, Tom Archer, and his grill friend and girl friend, Brenda Tucker, have long since rejected traditional speech structures popular amongst civilised races for the verbal emoticons of the marketing think-tank. They routinely urge one another to 'Think outside the box' and speak of 'Once in a lifetime opportunities' and all this about sausages. Brenda has also made the rapid transformation from downtrodden, clerical underling of a convicted criminal and his alcoholic partner to the Nigella Lawson of Borsetshire's culinary world, albeit specialising only in pork products. Her recipes have been seized upon by a local supermarket chain who have no doubt, 'Run her pork lasagne up their flagpole and seen how many saluted it.' It is hard to imagine these two crashing bores ever talking about anything else other than minced pork and griddles.

The shrill, know-all teenaged prig that is Pip Archer has been doing what she does best, namely lecture anyone who will listen and bizarrely this month a village hall full of grown men and women seem prepared to. Pip is no stranger to ad-speak cliche and stridently told her gormless parents they 'had taken their eye off the ball' when it came to selling  Hassett Hills products. Whereas Tom and Brenda are cornering the ground pork market, Hasset Hills is the lamb equivalent, hawked round to anyone willing to express vague interest in the stuff. No one ever turns up at Brookfield and asks to buy any, mind you with Pip ready and all too willing to give a potted lecture to anyone in earshot, who can blame them?

Even randy old agri-baron Brian is into marketing parlance having had a meeting with a cartoon cut-out ad-man figure called Rufus and used a most un-Brian like phrase when he told the velvet voiced, if desperately wooden, lawyer, Annabelle Shrivener that something had come at them unbidden 'Out of left field.'

All this ad-speak has led to an outbreak of two things: websites and leaflets. The Archers is just as wild about websites as the BBC is and one can only wonder if that is entirely co-incidental. But just as the Beeb urges us to download endless podcasts and sign up to its vast array of Twitter and blog pages so Archers characters routinely turn their businesses round in a nano-second  simply by posting a web page.

Bridge Farm, the near bankrupt centre of an e-coli break out has been transformed simply because Tom Archer put up a film of pigs playing football on his website. Pip extolled the poor unfortunates in the village hall how a website will get sales of Hasset Hills scrag end soaring, whilst Rufus has delivered a wonderful website for Brian's new mega-dairy with a hunky milkman on the front, so planning permission is doubtless a formality provided the majority of the planning committee hanker after a hunky milkman.

Then there are the leaflets. I must make an admission here and say that I religiously, and without hesitation, throw away each and every leaflet I receive. In Ambridge they are treated like tablets brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses. Even Jo Grunday, 91 this September, has prepared leaflets advertising his latest money making scheme. Mind you even he cannot beat uber ad-man, Rufus, who had leaflets prepared and ready for Brian and Annabelle to approve before he had even received Brian's brief. A talent indeed. Especially as, in Ambridge, no one ever bins a leaflet.

The Archers Golden Marrers Awards 2011

Tiring of the BBC's hyper sensitivity over its message boards where even the word 'moron' is considered far too coarse for its contributors' delicate senses, I have waved goodbye to The Archers boards after many years of good fun amongst delightfully witty posters who see the idiocy of the programme in all its fatuous glory. Sadly, they too are now in the minority as the boards seem to be increasingly populated by those who would far sooner attack individual contributors rather than hear any ill of the Archers and others who may have nothing to say but are nonetheless determined to say it and at length.

But for those who remember the halcyon days of the message boards when tiresome soap characters were invariably bumped off in the most savage and bloodthirsty fashion and well before the present trend of 'Well you would not think it funny if one of your relatives was tarred and feathered' response, here are the Golden Marrers, 2011 awarded for what undoubtedly has been a year to remember in Ambridge for nearly all the wrong reasons:

The 2011 Golden Marrer Awards:

The Brideshead Flyte person of overwhelmingly know-all tedium memorial chalice.

Every year serial Archers listeners ask themselves 'Can anyone be duller than Ashok?', a man who raised the bar of tedium to such heights it was insurmountable by anyone other than a truly Olympian bore. Each year we meet new characters whose dullness startles us and 2011 has been no exception with the arrival of stereotypical Welshman Rhys Williams and the spectacularly uninteresting Spencer, Pip Archer's hapless love interest who, strangely for a teenage boy, is far happier talking at length about arable farming than attempting to get his girlfriend's kit off at every conceivable opportunity.

The weird and seemingly multi-talented Harry is still around to numb the senses and to appease older listeners who may feel left out of things there is Professor Jim who sets pub quiz question about Greek classics with barely a murmur of discontent from any save the hard pressed listener.

But this year's effort to out-Ashok the master is a joint award to without doubt the most tedious, unamusing and downright bloody annoying couple to have graced the Ambridge scene for many a long year. Step forward those two serial bores, the far fetched, contrived and utterly ridiculous James Bellamy and Leonie Snell.

The first Mrs Rochester- woman who should be locked in an attic salver.

It is rare that an award usually so keenly fought over should turn out this year to be so totally one sided. In any regular year poor neurotic Kathy would have embarked on at least four relationships of a wholly unsuitable nature, had moved house twice and had her son arrested but this year she has had to make do without the frightful Kenton Archer which seems to have had a calming effect on her. Perhaps she is enjoying working at a golf club that only appears to have two members.

Loopy Debbie Aldridge has also enjoyed a stable year, or more accurately a milking parlour year, and has been consulted on a regular basis. Debbie loses it big time when she is not consulted. This year she has rejected dreary males with odd names and embraced milk cows in a rapacious fashion. The Magyar Milker Mark III, a bovine lactating Hungarian behemoth, has occupied her every waking hour and kept her out of the psychiatrist's chair for a whole 12 month.

Ambridge's resident nutter, and the woman once described by mumsnet.com contributors as the world’s most unpopular pregnant person, Helen Archer, finally gave birth to super babe, Henry, who responds in a Disneyesque fashion with gurgles and goos to every daft question posed him. This also helps to fill in a good deal of time so is a lot more popular with script writers than listeners. Helen has concentrated this year on getting other people to do everything for her which has prevented her more usual psychotic side coming to the fore and rarely have we seen the manic, control freaky, obsessive neurotic we have come to know so well.

The same cannot be said of her mother. From the very start of the year the once resilient feminist that was Pat has morphed into a veritable blancmange of quivering idiocy. Now she seems to speak almost entirely in given names: 'Oh Tony, Tony, look at Rich. Can't you see John? It's John, Tony, John!'

Always obsessive about her late son who met his end whilst fatally trying to guess the weight of a Massey Ferguson, Pat's mental downward spiral has been rapid. She insists her two extant but equally awful offspring dress a Christmas tree in their dead brother's memory each year forgetting that both is well past the toddler stage. She rejoiced in her daughter being artificially inseminated and was quite brutal to poor simple, fat Clarrie who always walks around carrying more germs than the average dung heap, so shouting health & safety dicats long after e-coli had been found in the strawberry ices was as daft as it was belated.

The discovery of her dead son's love-child has finally pushed Pat clean over the edge. Mysteriously known as Rich although his name is John the only good news for the Fitz-Archer lad is that he does not know who his paternal grandmother is. Well at least not yet.

She richly deserves her award and will surely be taking up full time residency in the secure wing at the Convent of the Sacred Part, Prestatyn, where she has already woven many a basket.

The Charlotte Corday please murder me in my bath rather than subject me to any more of this storyline rose bowl:

Idiotic storylines and the Archers are no strangers. The centre of tedium as well as barking madness has very much been Bridge Farm. Plunged into something approaching bankruptcy until sister Lillian produced her cheque book and bankrolled the organic losers (see John Harvey Jones award for economic miracles below) to the tune of £10,000, Tom Archer who is completely obsessed with sausage meat in the same way his sister is nuts about cheese decided to go it alone and save 'the Tom Archer'.

'The Tom Archer', as well as being a cocky little squit with a Nottinghamshire accent, is also a sausage and possibly a burger, presumably a pork one, as Tom never talks about anything other than pork products. Quite what he does with the more succulent cuts of his pigs is a mystery and it would not surprise listeners if he only kept the heads and burnt the rest of the carcass.

Assisted by his powerfully built girl friend who has been on an advertising and marketing course, Archer junior came up with the inspired idea of advertising his sausages on YouTube showing a clip of pigs playing football. Such was the delight amongst the Borchester sausage eating community of seeing the animals that went into their sausages that the Tom Archer sales boom whilst the rest of us wonder, despairingly, about just how many more sausage links we must endure.

In second place, and how can we endure many more moments of wild excitement such as these, is the annual invasion of highly literate and wildly glamorous fruit pickers who enjoy nothing so much as a night watching a Shakespeare play rather than getting off their faces in their caravans on home made vodka. The love duel between brain damaged milkman, Jazzer, and chipper, ever helpful and utter pain in the arse milkman, Harry, over fruit picker Sofia, a woman named after a Bulgarian city and who spoke like a Meerkat from the TV advertisement added a milk float sized slice of tedium to our early evening listening.

But there has to be a winner and for this year, the beatified corpse of Ivy Horrobin being transformed in death to a figure comparable only with Mother Theresa of Calcutta with perhaps a dash of Joan of Arc thrown in is our worthy recipient.

In life, Ivy was one of those women who have been so much in the news for refusing to move from their Basildon caravan park. As a family the Horrobins have always been an under, under class who even the workshy Grundys could sneer at and look down on. They are the sort who still use newspapers as lavatory paper in the outside bogger.

Susan, having endured only a short term encarceration and who not only knows the name of the father of her two children but is actually married to him is very much the Kate Middleton of the Horrobin brood. But following Ivy's death it has been 'Mum this' and 'Mum that' and how she always did wondrous works for her utterly wastrel, villainous spouse and offspring. Suspicions linger that yet another ghastly Radio Four Extra Archers style offshoot may be planned called 'The Horrobins, an every day story of non-travelling travelling folk.' It is just the sort of thing Vanessa Whitburn and her ever so liberal urban based employers would love.

The Lucretia Borgia award for the dinner guest one would most like to poison:

Incredibly Ruth Archer does not even figure in this contest which shows you just how tough the competition has been this year. Mind you Ruth still deserves some kind of long service award for being such a perennial smart arse combined with prurience and hooting insensitivity. For her a very special, The Sir Bruce Forsyth chalice for minimum ability combined with maximum ability to irritate.

In third place is another speaker of fluent Meerkat, Elona, a former Albanian sex worker who fled her home country when prostitution was nationalised and who offers occasional relief to the aged inmates of The Laurels, Borsetshire's most luxurious care home for those of a forgetful disposition.

Peggy Woolley, Ambridge's first and foremost venture capitalist, and no stranger to the oldest profession herself has taken Elona as a personal maid providing her with a house, no questions asked, on the basis she is the only carer allowed to tend her addled husband Jack, who currently thinks he is the Crown Prince of Bohemia. This has resulted in an outpouring of interminable conversations along the lines of, 'Kom now Jeck, you hef not eaten zendvich. Vair good zendvich vair nice' or 'Pikkay, you zo kind. Zuch kind vooman, I rilly do not deserve zuch, ow you zay, kindnezz.'

Second, is the truly frightful Professor Jim Lloyd. Parachuted into Ambridge to fill the role of upmarket single old bloke with a pension previously occupied by Freddie Danby and more recently by Guy Pemberton and Oliver Sterling before Caroline Bone, the black widow hotelier, got to go grips with them. To start with Jim was tolerated because he was so rude to his sex crazed daughter in law, Shula.

Now he is simply irritating, quoting classical Greek texts, and having admitted being totally useless at everything save the classics he now takes to DIY with a will in order to get his hands on the hand knitted underwear of septuagenarian, twinset wearing megabore Christine Barford. Sadly Caroline does not appear interested otherwise Jim's days would be seriously numbered. Perhaps his pension is just not big enough.

But the blue riband award goes to another of Ambridge's bi-polar females who becomes the first ever double winner. She always sounds as though she is reading from a particularly tedious travel brochure and this year she really did read from a particularly tedious travel brochure extolling the virtues of the Croatian coastline. A know-all prig of the first order she has now found a wimp of a boyfriend for no one with any back bone could stand more than a minute of her high pitched, condescending whine. She is without doubt appalling. She is also Pip Archer, the apple of her smug, insufferable parents' eyes.

The John Harvey Jones trophy for economic miracles:

Only white anglo-saxon protestants are villains in Ambridge. Even a renegade Taliban member bristling with home made explosives would be welcomed into the village by Jill Archer with a casserole and would doubtless become a regular at St Stephen's before the month was out. And only WASPs are ever bumped off. The chance of gorgeous, intelligent, wise and caring Lucas Madikane falling off a roof in Johannesburg are nil, but this year editor Whitburn turned to class warfare when she wiped out Ambridge's last real toff, the likeable if startlingly dim Nigel Pargeter.

However despite only having two people, and one of those Roy Tucker, to run it along with aged Mrs Titcombe and her retired spouse, Lower Loxley, the conference centre without any accommodation for delegates goes from strength to strength. Ditto the Bull which apparently is getting even busier because of the bright ideas that erupt from the Neanderthal cranium of serial wastrel, Kenton Archer, a man constantly on the look out for a woman of mature years with more property than sense.

Presumably Kenton has tapped into a thick, with thick being the key word, seam of punters for whom the sophistication of the whoopee cushion or a button hole that squirts water is the pinnacle of communal entertainment.

But once again we must return to the Bridge Farm asylum for dysfunctional miseries that once again has held onto the Harvey Jones award. With the deepest recession since the Great Depression and organic food sales bombing, the Bridge Farm team, already mortgaged to the armpits, managed to poison its customers with e-coli. Only in Ambridge would an e-coli outbreak have kept off prime time television but the locals were probably far too busy watching Tom Archer's condemned pigs play football.

However, with a swift wave of sister Lillian's cheque book all fiscal problems seem to have been solved thus allowing Pat to pursue her manic interest in her dead son's child, who could have no crueller trick played on him than to be told who his paternal grand parents are, let alone his barmy uncle and aunt. If Bridge Farm remains bailiff free during 2012 then the moon really is made of Helen Archer's disgusting cream cheese, known to Archers' congnoscenti as mankwold.

Congratulations to all our winners!

Thanks for everything, Seve

Making your site public


Seve! You only had to say that name and people everywhere knew precisely who you were talking about. The great golfing conquistador who single handedly transformed European golf is gone and with him a bright light extinguished in our world.
I last saw Seve in September of 2007, the year before he collapsed and his cancer was diagnosed. I was at St Andrews waiting to interview him whilst a film shot of him reliving the famous moment on the 18th hole when he clinched the 1984 Open was being staged for a DVD of his life story. He was dressed in black rather than his trademark last day navy blue and the production editor was getting stressed. 'God knows how long this is going to take. We've hired a "chopper' to do some aerial shots which is already costing a small fortune and he has got to hole that putt yet.'
Seve had to 'can' the famous 14 feet putt that toppled in the side of the hole before he went into his signature, clenched fist celebrations. The other journalist, a broadsheet feature writer, and I said we were simply happy to watch Seve however long it took, but we did not have to wait long.
The great Spaniard strode onto the 18th green to a huge round of applause as passing folk realised who it was back at the Old Course. He looked at the putt hard, stood over it and, first time, rapped it into the back of the hole to wild cheers and laughter, a sound that had followed him around courses throughout his professional life.
Job done we strode off down the 18th hole towards the Old Course Hotel where we were to hold the interview over breakfast. Before we got to the Swilken Bridge a blonde American lady had hauled herself over the wall of the Old Course and rushed towards us. 'Seve, you are my hero,' she cried and pleaded to have her photograph taken with him. The great man obliged and she rushed away again almost deliriously happy. Seve had that effect on women.
Then two more American autograph hunters appeared, male this time, and again Seve does his stuff. Notoriously careful with his money, Seve says to us two journalists , 'If I charge pound for every autograph I be very rich man.'
For a moment as he looks around the Swilken Burn bathed in autumn sunlight, perhaps remembering his halcyon days, there is something almost approaching sadness in his dark brown eyes. Then he snaps back into the present as he looks approvingly at the Road Hole. 'Thees great golf hole. Everyone talk about par five or par three make great golf hole. I want make holes like thees. You take birdie, par, maybe seven, eight, nine.' he smiles and we walk back down the fairway to the entrance to his hotel.
Despite the no smoking signs everywhere. Seve lights up in the lift. He looks sternly at us, 'You no write about,' he says wagging his non smoking index finger before he takes another drag before nipping it out and striding in for breakfast.
We chat for an hour as he picks at breakfast and looks at every good looking woman who comes into the restaurant. 'I theenk maybe from my agency,' he says, but no one round the table believes him. He tells us of his post golf ambition to enter the Dakar rally. A truly awful driver who would hit the kerb even on his way back from his nearby local golf club to home we gasp in amazement. 'As driver?' I ask. He smiles. 'Oh no. I navigator.'
Sadly he never made it to Dakar. Nor to St Andrews again. The last sight I had of him on this earth was being photographed with two security guards at Edinburgh airport and giving them his autograph. He made their day, just as he so often did ours. They loved him. And so did we.

Millionaire footballer takes penalty shock

It is April 30th and Chelsea, the premiership side who have made Manchester United become more popular, is playing Liverpool in the semi final of the European champions league.

Liverpool concedes a penalty and up steps Frank Lampard, whose mother has died tragically young aged 58. Lampard is paid around £100,000 a week and regularly takes penalties for his club. He duly scores and raises his hands to the heavens, presumably to give thanks to God and his dead mother. A camera man captures the scene which was described in the Times thus:

'It captures a moment of transfiguration. A sport's photographer's snapshot becomes a symbol of something far greater for thousands of fans. For many this image of thanksgiving will feel like the Stamford Bridge equivalent of that most moving Christian tableau, the deposition from the cross.' Rachel Campbell-Johnson, the Times's Sally Jockstrap, wrote that and she should be ashamed of herself.

Every day young and old lose mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and somehow their life must go on. Let Sally, sorry, Rachel tell the parents of Jimmy Mizen- fatally stabbed whilst shopping in his local bakers- how brave multi-millionaire Frank has been, or to any serviceman in Afghanistan fighting an unwinnable war without decent gear, or talk to those few old men that still survive from the horrors of 1914 to 1918 in Northern France and the low countries. See what they think of Frank's heroism.

And silly Campbell-Johnson was not the only one. Seasoned commentators one expects a lot more from joined in the lazy slush-fest that was the column inches and radio sound-bites devoted to a man going about his extremely well paid business.

So please. No more outpourings of national grieving each time a footballer or one of his relatives dies- journeyman Celtic player Tommy Burns is the latest to receive wildly over the top eulogies. Would the same be said if Burns and Lampard have been doctors? or firemen? or property developers? Of course not.

So just because it is self obsessed, venal, deeply up its own arse football, we have to endure hysteria when a dignified silence would be so much more effective.