Peter Rhodes on the popularity of posh comedy, a fishy puzzle and a spine-tingling image from 100 years ago

A SHORTAGE of carbon dioxide may affect supplies of beer. Depends what you call beer. As any true beer lover knows, the real thing doesn't need added CO2. It makes its own.

IS he having a laugh? Head of BBC Comedy Shane Allen says the Monty Python team would not make it on the Beeb today because they are "six Oxbridge white blokes." Allen says he's out to find "the voices we haven’t yet heard." Well, good luck with that.

BUT I can't recall a time when humour has been so dominated by upmarket white performers. Stand-up comedy, once the preserve of working-class comics, is now the happy hunting ground of privately-educated stars. A study of 42 episodes of Have I Got News For You (BBC) revealed that all but one of the guests had been to private schools. Maybe things are changing but I bet if John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and the rest of the Pythons graduated from uni tomorrow, they'd be snapped up by today's comedy producers because, whatever we may think about privilege, posh is popular.

THE First World War, entering its final act 100 years ago, produced many millions of soldiers but, compared with later conflicts, relatively few photographs. So your chances of ever spotting one of your relatives in an official image from the war zones of 1914-18 are remote. But sometimes you get lucky. My grandfather fought in the Second Battle of the Marne. In his diary he mentions a victory parade ordered by a French general. The last time I consulted Google Images there was no record of this event. But a few days ago I looked again and there, in a collection from the Scottish National Library, was a photo of the very parade. It was led by kilted Highland soldiers but I know that somewhere in that mass of Tommies was my grandfather. Having put "old Fritz" to flight, he and his pals in a Yorkshire regiment were marching proudly along a French road. It was a spine-tingling moment, as though 100 years had fallen away.

THE lesson of the above concerns the nature of the net which should never be regarded as something set in stone. It grows and changes all the time. The photo, family tree or snippet of local history you couldn't find six months ago may well be there today, or tomorrow. Keep looking.

MY Grandfather's war diary, written 99 years ago, captures long-lost forms of Yorkshire dialect. I love his words about marching through the vineyards of the Champagne region: "We passed by fields and fields of grapes and if they had been ripe we should have made ourselves badly."

IT'S always good to see old friends having a laugh, as Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse do in Gone Fishing (BBC2). And yet for outsiders the old mystery of coarse fishing is as perplexing as ever. You spend hours catching the fish and taking it out of the water. Then you put it back in again. Hmm.