Peter O'Toole was by no means the last of the hell-raisers

TOM Kerridge Cooks Christmas (BBC2) was excellent, apart from the idea of putting pork scratchings in the crunchy turkey topping. Where would you find a dentist on Christmas Day?

ONE of the obituary writers referred to the late Peter O'Toole as 'The Last of the Hard-Drinking Hell-Raisers'. Ordinary people who drink too much become embarrassing drunks. 'Hard-drinking hell-raiser' status is reserved entirely for celebrities (Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, George Best, etc). It is a term which implies that their alleged wit, talent and girl-appeal somehow make them superior to any other embarrassing drunks. The truth is that they are no different. They are a trial for their friends and their families, and the idea that O'Toole was the last of the breed is ludicrous. Our celebrity culture has an endless capacity to turn out embarrassing drunks. The next one will be staggering along shortly.

BARELY has it been opened than the new BBC London HQ is getting a facelift estimated at between £100,000 and £500,000. A Tory MP, Philip Davies, says: "It proves the BBC has still got far too much money to spend." If further proof were needed, look no further than Auntie's latest brainchild, the NHS Winter project. Type your postcode into the BBC website and up come the statistics for your local hospital. God knows how much cash has been ploughed into this venture but who decided it was a proper use of the viewing public's money? If these figures are useful then surely they should be funded by the NHS, not by the licence payers.

I DID enjoy seeing Kelsey Grammer, still best known as Frasier, playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol: The Musical (C5). Take Frasier, give him a wispy wig, an English accent and a scowl and what have you got? Something spookily similar to Harry Enfield's Old Git.

THE 'right to die' issue is back before the courts accompanied, as always, with the solemn pledge that if mercy-killing became legal it would be used only in the rarest and most extreme cases when an adult was in unbearable and incurable pain. I bet that's what the Belgians and Dutch believed when they adopted euthanasia a few years ago. Shortly before Britain's Supreme Court considered the issue this week, there were two significant developments. The Belgian senate voted to extend its euthanasia law to cover terminally-ill children. At the same time, a poll revealed that more than one-fifth of Dutch people support euthanasia for elderly folk who may not have a serious condition but 'no longer wish to live'. And that's how, little by little, mercy killing becomes something altogether darker.

AMID the biggest pre-Xmas shopping splurge for everything from computer games to coffee machines, from Chanel to Choo, a global survey by Mori reports that people in the UK are among the least concerned with material things. So are we unmaterialistic? Or have we simply got everything?

JACK Dromey MP has been digging himself out of a hole entirely of his own making. He tweeted a picture of himself standing next to a postal worker with the caption 'the Pikey from the Erdington Royal Sorting Office'. As the race-awareness lobby went mad, Dromey explained that Pikey had nothing to do with an offensive term for travellers but was a nickname based on the character in Dad's Army, Private 'Stupid Boy' Pike. I bet the BBC is already frantically going through all its Dad's Army archives and removing the term.

WHAT'S really surprising, in this sensitive, politically-correct age, is that any MP would dream of using the word 'Pikey', no matter what the context, and then be surprised when all hell broke loose. I foresee a new word evolving in the social media to describe one who foolishly tweets before engaging his brain. What a Dromey.