Peter Rhodes: We cannot ban it but we can despise it

SCREECHING like a banshee, Sarah Palin pledges her support to Donald Trump. What a delightful couple they make: the Trump and the Chump. I can't think of a time when Hillary Clinton has looked quite so appealing.

FIRST, the taint of corruption hung over football, then athletics and now tennis. But these are all big-scale sports, with players charging around over acres of turf or clay. Deliberately losing such a match would produce big-scale incidents, with records being broken by huge margins, goals missed by yards, tennis shots going metres over the chalk lines. Big-scale cheating must be relatively easy to spot. But if someone was taking a bribe to lose a match where the outcome is decided in fractions of inches or the merest nano-kiss of cue on ball, who would ever spot it? I hope the relevant authorities are looking very closely at snooker, pool, shove ha'penny and tiddlywinks.

THE full veil, the medieval symbol of male ownership of women, is alien to British culture and an affront to equality. Like all religious trappings it sends out the divisive message: "I am different from you. I am better than you," which is not a big step from saying: "You are lower than me. You are worth less than me." A smart lawyer might even argue that the wearing of the full veil is a hate crime. At a time when we are at war with people who make their women wear the veil, to see it paraded in British streets is as offensive and threatening as seeing someone strolling through London in 1940 in the black uniform of Hitler's SS. We cannot ban the full veil by law. The essential freedom to wear what we choose is too precious to be extinguished. Yet David Cameron's declaration this week that he will support hospitals, schools, colleges and other places which insist on the "proper and sensible" measure of faces being visible is a welcome step. As the Tory MP Philip Hollobone puts it: "I don't want to live in a country where a police officer is veiled, where a news reader is veiled, where a nurse or doctor is veiled." For the sake of freedom we cannot ban the full veil. But in the name of freedom we can despise it.

ARE we supposed to be impressed that the cast and crew of The Revenant lived like pigs in the pursuit of authenticity? The film tells of one man's epic flight across a frozen wilderness, pursued by killer tribesmen and a bear. Leonardo DiCaprio apparently slept in animal carcasses and ate raw meat, and the whole crew endured hypothermia to get into the spirit. In the making of the tank-warfare movie Fury, Brad Pitt and his co-stars allegedly spent weeks beating each other up to "break them down psychologically" in preparation for the combat scenes. It makes great material for Hollywood's ever-ravenous PR industry but does it matter? Does it show in the quality of the acting ? Where's the proof that wallowing in entrails or giving your co-star a black eye adds anything to a movie? A great actor produces a great performance by acting, not by stinking of bear guts.

PS: I smeared my entire body in the blood of a dozen ferrets before writing this column. As always.

THINGS on your bathroom shelf. Ever noticed how similar a tube of Oral-B toothpaste is to a tube of Neutrogena hand cream? Deeply unpleasant start to the day.