Peter Rhodes: Insulting our intelligence

THIS is not a good time of year for our brains. The grey matter is pummelled by booze and battered into sofa-snooze by endless board games. At this season of Partytide I reckon our IQ drops by about 100 points. Yet even in this numbed and brain-dead state, Jonathan Creek (BBC1) was still an insult to our intelligence, wasn't it?

HOWEVER, just when you think Auntie Beeb has lost the plot and your TV licence is a waste of money, she suddenly produces an unheralded little gem like To Walk Invisible (BBC1). It was a brilliant one-off drama about the Bronte sisters and their alcoholic brother. It painted a grim, utterly unromantic picture of English provincial life in the 1840s. The stage-coach scenes were perfect. As a rule, horses and carriages in costume dramas are polished to perfection. The coaches, horses and passengers in To Walk Invisible all arrived plastered in mud. Which is how it must have been.

ON a freezing-cold morning, what could be more natural than filling your garden bird bath with hot water to keep it ice-free as long as possible? Prepare to be amazed. Owing to something called the Mpemba Effect, hot water may actually freeze faster than cold water. It is, as one science website admits, "extremely counterintuitive, and surprising even to most scientists, but it is in fact real."

OF course, there is one way to eliminate winter altogether. We simply make Victoria Beckham an OBE. See? Feels just like April the First, doesn't it?

IF I had to put money on what would be a big topic of debate in 2017, I might risk a few bob on sex robots. No sniggering at the back, please. We may have seriously underestimated the effect of the latest digital devices on human behaviour. Some researchers believe that England's astonishing 50 per cent drop in teenage pregnancies over recent years may be partly the result of phone texting and sexting among young people which has taken the place of actual physical contact. If a humble mobile phone can have such profound effects on human relationships, what changes might a new generation of humanoid sex robots bring about? A recent academic conference in London to discuss these contraptions heard that, in a survey, 40 per cent of men said they would buy one. And if you doubt that humans could form relationships with robots, look at how obsessively attached some people are to their mobiles. You may be shocked or revolted at the notion of robot sex but as the old saying goes, nobody ever lost money by underestimating public taste.

INCIDENTALLY, if you cherish the belief that humans are far too noble and dignified to consort with machines, consider the success of e-cigarettes with thousands of smokers producing vast quantities of vapour. If a man is prepared to imitate a steam locomotive in public, Lord knows what he will do in private.

A FRIEND tells me she wandered into a camping store over the holiday, found a basket full of totally waterproof hats, tried one on and made her way to the till. The manager asked why she was wearing a collapsible dog bowl.