Best of Peter Rhodes - December 3

The best of this week's Peter Rhodes column from the Express & Star.

HAVING just swept three inches of global warming off the drive, allow me to remind you what the climate-change prophets promised: hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. Which means over the past two years they have been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

ONCE again, the liars win. I noted last week that a deliberate untruth in selling crisps went unremarked by Alan Sugar in The Apprentice (BBC1). This week, a succession of blatant lies by the boys' team was also not mentioned. If telling whoppers to customers has become common practice, it may explain Britain's spectacular decline as a trading nation.

A TOUCHING pre-Xmas tale reaches me of a reader who asked her granddaughter what she would like for Christmas.

"A gold ring," replied the child.

"And why a gold ring?" asked Gran.

"So I can send it off to Cash4Gold and get the money."

WHILE Sarah Palin, moose-killer and scarily possible presidential candidate, calls for Wikileaks to be hunted down like the Taliban, I dare say the rest of us have enjoyed seeing how the world actually works, as opposed to the version peddled by our leaders. How bracing it is to know that before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War had even begun, Whitehall had promised the White House that measures were in place "to protect your interests."

THE really worrying thing about the material released by Wikileaks is that it was not restricted to a tiny clique of politicians and spooks. Some of these documents were circulated to three million people. Conspiracy theorists like to believe that the world is run by a few hundred people called the Illuminati. The reality is that a vast superclass of movers and shakers controls the destiny of the rest of us and seems to take it for granted, for example, that Arab kings can tell the United States to start wars.

ACCORDING to Wikileaks, the Duke of York declared that Americans do not understand geography but "in the UK we have the best geography teachers in the world." Now, there speaks a lad who has never been in a state school.

AND if we're so hot on geography, why does the Duke of York live in a palace called Buckingham which is nowhere near Buckingham?

MEANWHILE, every male in the land will be examining his hands, following the discovery that if your index finger is longer than your ring finger, you're less likely to get prostate cancer than those with longer ring fingers. Does it help if we wear our rings on our pinkie fingers? Thought not.

EDWARDIAN Farm (BBC2) works its magic, giving us a weekly peek at those good old days we claim to cherish but would never willingly revisit. It's like Victorian Farm, but with more steam.

AN enterprising Spanish woman, Angeles Duran, has applied through her lawyer for ownership of the sun. She says no-one else has registered a claim and she intends to charge the solar-power industry for using it. Dangerous game. How long before someone in Scotland sues the sun's owner for failing to make the damn thing shine?

THEY say you never swear properly until you learn to drive. But when you drive sub-zero, menaced by Igloo Man who peers dead ahead through a thawed ice-hole in his windscreen, by golly, that's when you really learn to swear.

YOU know how it is. You open the back door on a freezing night and call the cat in. And although a cat dashes in and gratefully demolishes a plate of Whiskas, it turns out to be not your own cat but a skinny, pregnant little creature which has "dumped by feckless owner" written all over her. It's an old story. Yuletide soon-to-be single mother seeks new home. We have called her Mary.

NAZ Humphreys, a British woman of Pakistani heritage, is just five feet tall and, on a long holiday to New Zealand, applied to be an extra in the forthcoming movie, The Hobbit. But she says she was turned down as too dark-skinned. A casting manager allegedly told the hopefuls that Hobbits "all look kind of homogenised beige and are all derived from the Caucasian gene pool." The debate about race and Tolkien has been rattling on for decades (Google has 194,000 references to it). It is undeniable that Tolkien's heroes tend to have pale skins and golden locks while the baddies are generally dark. The curious part is that a 21st century movie feels obliged to mimic the books. Theatre companies long ago adopted "colour-blind casting." If theatre audiences can accept African King Lears and Asian Lady Macbeths, surely cinema audiences can cope with Naz Humphreys wandering into camera shot in Hobbiton.

FOR a few seconds in its report on Transport Secretary Philip Hammond discussing the proposed High Speed Train (HST2) , Central News inadvertently put up the caption "promotional video." And yet that's exactly what it was. Although a "consultation" process is under way, Hammond eagerly promotes a plan which will cost billions, carve a swathe through the heart of England and produce unremarkable savings in journey times. He is supposed to judge what is best for the nation but seems 100 per cent in the HST2 camp. He even plays the underdog, warning darkly that opponents of the scheme are "well organised and amply funded." For the record, Philip Hammond's Department of Transport has an annual budget of £13,000 million.

THE movie Four Lions is advertised as "hilarious". The word "funny" appears 10 times on the DVD case. So we watched this tale of "hilarious" Islamic extremists. If you chuckle at young men killing themselves and others for the sake of superstition, then, okay, it's hilarious. If not, you may find it the saddest, bleakest movie you have seen for a long time.

THE obituaries have strangely overlooked the fact that Leslie Nielsen was not only a great deadpan artist but was also notorious for carrying a concealed device. He used it to devastating effect, memorably on the Wogan Show. We'll miss you, Les. You and your fart machine.

MY local branch of WH Smiths got its first consignment of Easter Eggs on December 1.