Domestic staff as deluge doorstops

A QUICK dash to the country estate, which just happens to be in the middle of a flooded area. Luckily the waters had been kept at bay by the butler and other domestic staff lying across the doorways in an impressive act of self-sacrifice. I tip them generously. That extra Lottery ticket might just prove a winner.

So I’ve survived, but what about the rest of the region? Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. The headline in the Daily Telegraph reads “A crippled nation prays for deliverance”, but that story is about Zimbabwe, not Worcestershire, although you could easily be forgiven for making the mistake.

Despite having 48 hours notice of the imminent deluge courtesy of an unusually accurate weather forecast, the Powers That Be only decided to send portable flood barriers to the town of Upton-upon-Severn at 2pm on Friday, by which time the M5 was starting to resemble the road to Basra. And where were those barriers? In Upton itself, perhaps? Don’t be silly. For some unfathomable reason they were stored up the road in Kidderminster. So it’s floating furniture all round.

And then there’s the M5 itself. We’ve all become accustomed to the obdurate Plod shutting down hundreds of miles of motorway every time a Polish lorry driver scratches his front wing, but why did no-one have the wit to simply remove a few sections of crash barrier and allow trapped drivers to do a U-turn towards whatever sanctuary they could find? It wasn’t as if anything was coming the other way.

So 10,000 people (10,001 if you count the baby born in the fast lane) spent the night in a traffic jam just because the average traffic cop doesn’t even have the resourcefulness of the average Boy Scout. It’s not very good, is it?

And then the electricity goes off, because someone’s built a power station on a damp patch, followed shortly after by the water supply – this time forgiveable, because you can’t build a water treatment plant unless it’s near the water you want to treat. But don’t worry – those good ole boys at Severn Trent were sending out bowsers (a fine word, much underused previously) to every street corner and the Army was shipping in millions of bottles of mineral water.

Small problem. While Gloucester was literally knee-deep in plastic bottles of Eau de Del Boy, no-one had realised that they’d pulled the plug on Cheltenham as well. Cue much bleating from the elevated citizens of that Regency protectorate, who had to shower in Dom Perignon and gold dust instead of council pop.

And then there was the scrabbling for free supplies. Dear reader, I pulled into one Tesco car park and thought I’d mistakenly driven all the way to a famine relief zone in … well … Zimbabwe. Hundreds of people milled around, snatching cases of bottled water from every articulated lorry that pulled up. There was fighting and arguing. I personally saw one corner shop owner filling the back of his Land Rover with ten times the rationed allowance. I know and he knows that half an hour later, those bottles would have been on sale in his shop at a vast mark-up.

Consider this: in the space of just 18 hours, almost six million litres of water were shipped into the Gloucester/Cheltenham area, to satisfy the needs of an estimated 300,000 people (and that figure was probably overestimated because many were on holiday or had already fled to relatives elsewhere). As eny fule nos, that works out as 20 litres per person, just for that first day. And still the tattooed oafs wrestled for it in the car parks.

Have I mentioned the panic buying? Supermarket shelves were stripped bare of milk, bread, toilet rolls, beans, Marmite, Pot Noodles and, bizarrely, Fray Bentos tinned pies. Only the middle classes were grinning, suddenly finding a purpose for those used-only-once breadmaking machines that were lurking at the back of a thousand kitchen cupboards.

And then came the thieves, the vandals and the conmen, stealing flood barriers for their scrap metal value, inexplicably overturning bowsers for a laugh, and waltzing into the homes of gullible pensioners “to check the water pressure in the gas meter, love”. As they say, all human life was there.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. As I drove away on Tuesday evening, having bribed the domestic staff to keep up their doorstop duties (that Wednesday lucky number – you never know), I went past an evacuation centre from wherein the unmistakeable sound of old people singing We’ll Meet Again came wafting on the evening air. Ah, the spirit of the Blitz. That’s when we know we’ve got a real crisis on our hands.

I’M BAFFLED by all these pot-smoking Ministers who’ve come out of the woodwork. To a man (and woman) not a single one of them will admit to having enjoyed the experience, will confess that they repeated it, or will admit to getting anything out of it. They must have scored from some terrible dealers.

It’s remarkable. They can’t even stop lying when they’re trying to be honest. Why can’t one of them just stand up and say “Yes, I used to smoke dope and I absolutely loved it. I was whacked out of my brains for most of my university years and, if it wasn’t now illegal, I’d be sucking on a huge spliff even as we speak.” Well?

THE REASON for this sudden rush of senior politicians owning up to past demeanours is the next step on the great Puritan crackdown of Wee Gordon Broon – the reclassifying of cannabis as a Class B drug.

This comes hard on the heels of the complete about face on the introduction of supercasinos, and was followed shortly afterwards by the announcement that 24-hour drinking was up for review. And so it goes. If you own a kite, best get flying it now. Such blatant frippery won’t be tolerated for long.

Chinese burns for ungrateful immigrants

STICKS AND stones may break my bones but, to be perfectly honest, an angry Muzzie waving a bit of cardboard isn’t going to hurt me at all.

That’s why I’m uneasy about the lengthy jail sentences handed out this week to four men who were part of that notorious demo outside the Danish embassy in London. Three of them got six years apiece; the other – a father-of-five BT engineer – got four.

Their crimes were various, but seemed to me to have mainly consisted of doing a bit of loud shouting.

Of course, holding up a placard reading “Behead those who insult Islam” is a bit over the top, but we’re a tolerant nation; we can handle the flak – especially when it doesn’t even involve us, as with the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.

And I fully take the point that if I wandered round holding up a sign reading “Give Chinese burns to ungrateful immigrants” then my feet wouldn’t touch the ground before I was facing 10 years on Dartmoor and being very careful not to drop the soap in the shower.

But the right to demonstrate is the right to demonstrate and freedom of speech is freedom of speech. What worries me is now that the cops have made an example of an easy (and probably popular) target, what happens the next time the Countryside Alliance shows up with a banner reading “Actually, forgive our dreadful rudeness but we really don’t care very much for the Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP”? The police have now got carte blanche to wade in batons flailing. (Just like they did last time, come to think of it.)

And to put those six-year sentences for doing a bit of shouting in context, what about the case of Yassin Nassari, from Ealing, west London, who was last week convicted of “possessing documents likely to be useful to a terrorist”?

Mr Nassari was nicked at Luton Airport with plans for a home-made rocket in his case. He was en route for a terrorist training camp in the Middle East. His computer at home contained documents about martyrdom and weapons training, as well as instructions on how to construct the Qassam artillery rocket. Police also found several graphic videos of terrorist attacks and beheadings at his home.

Nassari, the wannabe terrorist with the knowledge, the skills and the will to do serious damage to the citizens of this country got just three and a half years. He’ll be out in 21 months – even earlier if there’s another NuLabour early release panic. How that compares with shouting “Murder Tony Blair, he’s a liar and a coward,” I don’t know. After all, it happens every night in our house.

SADLY, WE have another case of False Hero Syndrome. Particularly tragic as it concerns a 16-year-old on his second solo flight.

Sam Cross, of Hornchurch, Essex, was ordered by air traffic controllers to do another circuit as he was coming into land because there was a faster plane behind him. Sam then lost power, stalled, and crashed. Eyewitness Louise Sutherland said she thought he had deliberately crashed onto a cricket pitch to avoid hitting any buildings or people.

Now I’m sure it makes his parents feel better to think that, but he lost power and lost control of his plane. He had no choice where he crashed. And even if he did have some control, he’s got the choice of hitting a tower block of flats or some nice grass. What would you do?

I don’t know why this nonsense annoys me so much, but it just does.

WHILE WE’RE on about dodgy foreigners (see above), we should keep an eye on the situation on the River Kennet, near Reading, where 60 swans have been caught in a slick of cooking oil.

We’ve been here before with asylum seekers eating swans. It’s just that they never tried to fry a whole river’s worth before.

THE BBC ties itself in knots over the fact that its production staff have been routinely ripping off the simpletons who phone in on competition lines or because it reassembles film to suit the plot of a programme, but is it really that serious? So they fiddled a Children In Need competition or a Comic Relief scam – so what? The money still went to charity.

Do we really care that a woman was shown bidding at an auction on Flog It! when she had attended a different auction some weeks previously? Or, in Channel 4’s case, that Gordon Ramsey didn’t really catch the three fish he subsequently cooked on an ice flow?

(And how will this new “honest” approach that we’re promised affect cookery programmes anyway? Will we have to wait for 90 minutes while a dish actually cooks, instead of having “one we made earlier” produced from the oven?)

The BBC has been lying to us for years, the prejudices of its own staff responsible for both cultural and political deception. As for the rest, well it’s television, stupid. It’s not real. Next you’ll be telling me that they fiddle the evictions on Big Brother.

SO THIS fake eviction on Big Brother. Was it any surprise that the week the hideous Charlie was up for the chop, they decided that the eviction wouldn’t really count? And what about this week? She’s firmly in the frame again when Big Brother decides that Ziggy and Chanelle have been talking about evictions and therefore have to lose a vote each – a vote that would surely have seen the dreadful harridan at the mercy of the public once again?

Next you’ll be telling me that Blue Peter doesn’t replace dead pets with lookalike substitutes.

I REALLY don’t see the point in the tit-for-tat expulsions of Russian and British diplomats. It’s a throwback to the Cold War years and, seeing as we’ve got about 70 staff in each other’s countries, chucking out four spies apiece isn’t going to make much difference.

Of course, if Mr Putin really wanted to hurt us, there are far better ways. How about recalling all the Russian workers in the catering trade or, even better, withdrawing a couple of hundred lap-dancers from our gentlemen’s establishments? Without a steady supply of nubile Russian blondes the whole industry would grind to a halt, leaving bored businessmen having to ogle the tattooed charms of Lucy from Luton rather than the more exotic allure of Ludmilla from Leningrad.

As for retaliation, we could just ban their billionaire barons from buying Bentleys … or football clubs.

Pedal faster kid, or we'll kill Petra again

I’VE NEVER really trusted Blue Peter since they sneakily replaced the original Petra when the first puppy died two weeks after being introduced on the show back in 1962. They might have thought they’d fooled us but it takes a lot to scam a street-wise eight-year-old who’s already running his own dinner ticket racket.

This was patently a different Petra, and no amount of Advent crowns made out of coat-hangers was going to make up for that. Trust me – not even Alistair Campbell could have “spun” that one.

Rumour has it that the notorious raid on the garden by Les Ferdinand and his gang in 1984 was in direct reprisal for this nationwide deceit. For all Percy Thrower’s whining about “disgraceful vandalism”, some of us thought that they deserved everything they got. As to who planted the cocaine on Richard Bacon, or got Yvette Fielding pregnant, we’ll say no more.

So it was no great surprise when Blue Peter’s production team were caught red-handed still cheating viewers fully 44 years later. Rigging a kiddies’ competition because the phone lines had gone down might seem like small beer, but what about the bond of trust between younger viewers and their TV providers?

As Homer Simpson says: “Ah, television – teacher, mother, secret lover”. Our children now spend more time with their TV programmes than they do with their parents. It’s therefore down to the programme-makers to provide the moral framework that modern parents either can’t or can’t be arsed to. And it’s a weighty responsibility.

And it doesn’t always work. Postman Pat is scrupulously honest, never once giving the impression that he rifles through Mrs Goggins’ knicker drawer at the earliest opportunity. No-one in Greendale ever gets a birthday card with the fiver already removed; credit cards and CDs turn up at their destinations with monotonous regularity. If only we could say that of our real-life postmen – when they’re not on strike, that is.

Yet one thing bothers me about the £50,000 fine levied by Ofcom on the BBC for their Blue Peter deception. Who pays? Well it’s not the programme makers, all of whom seem to have survived unscathed and unsacked. No, it’s you and me, the licence fee-payers.

So here we are, having been lied to by one of our national institutions, and now we’re being fined for it? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. That’s 370 hard-earned £135s down the pan, even less money for the BBC to spend on programming, and even more repeats of Last of the Summer Wine. And it’s not even our fault.

And what happens to the money anyway? Do the good old boys at Ofcom stick it behind the bar for their Friday evening piss-up? Perhaps they’ve blown it all on voting for the odious Charlie to get voted out of Big Brother. (Did you notice how they rigged the non-eviction again this week?) Either way, I don’t know. But I think we should be told.

AT LEAST when our kids are watching the telly, they can now keep fit as well. Yes folks, thanks to the Fisher-Price Smart Cycle, you can park your obese offspring on their very own exercise bike in front of the television and they can watch a computer-generated image of a moving road while pedalling away those Pot Noodles.

This also has the added benefit of keeping them safe from the dodgy blokes with the squints and puppies who allegedly cruise every street. In fact, once your kids have been excluded from school for smoking crack, they need never leave the house again. They can even sign on by phone these days.

I can’t help feeling that the manufacturers have missed a trick here. While your pre-teen porker is pedalling away, why not link them to an electricity generator? In fact, regulate the telly so that it only comes on when they’re producing a surplus of power. Faster, faster, it’s Hollyoaks. It’s a brilliant application of the carrot-and-stick theory and a damn sight more effective than David Cameron’s wind turbine.

MIND YOU, I can’t see them pedalling too hard if all they can see is Alistair Campbell’s smug mug, because that’s all that’s been on the box for the past week. How has this man managed to blag so much free publicity for his book from the very corporation that he tried to bring down? It beggars belief. (I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d been in Les Ferdinand’s garden-wrecking gang.)

He cost a decent BBC reporter his job, forced out Greg Dyke, the director general, and bullied the chairman, Gavyn Davies, into resigning, yet you can’t switch on a single radio or TV channel without coming across Mr Blah’s Lie-Master General. And … and, we even paid him, through that bit of the licence fee that Ofcom hasn’t confiscated, to read the damn book out in three one-hour specials. Why? It isn’t even very good. (He’s said to have pocketed £50,000 for his part in the programmes, on top of a £1million advance from his publishers. You may be familiar with that figure. It’s another 370 hard-earned £135s.)

One newspaper columnist put his finger on it rather well. The BBC, he argued, is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages grow to admire those who’ve bullied and mistreated them. That can be the only sensible explanation for this ludicrous, incestuous circus.


THE GOVERNMENT’S Department of Guesswork, Mr Keith Waterhouse’s estimable invention, has been busy this week aiding and abetting some nutty researchers at Oxford and Nottingham Universities who argue that imposing VAT on “fatty” foods could “prevent more than 3,000 deaths a year in the UK”.

Now how do they work that out then? They don’t even know which foods are to be declared “fatty”; they don’t know how people will react to a 17.5 per cent price increase; and they don’t know if the supermarkets and the fast food providers will subvert their Nanny State nonsense by cutting prices. So how can they possibly calculate how many people will avoid heart disease? It’s utter rubbish.

And why would it work anyway? I eat a McDonald’s quarter-pounder with cheese and a medium fries once a month. It’s a treat, something I look forward to – a bit like a rock of crack. I haven’t the faintest idea how much it costs and, frankly, I don’t really care.

What I do know though is that you can buy a burger for 99p, and if that price staggers up to £1.17, it isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference to those who choose to buy it. Stick the same increase on a jar of caviar of half a pound of foie gras and you’re talking serious money. Put the price of a tin of London Grill up by tuppence and no-one blinks. (Do they still do London Grill? Beans, sausage, bacon and kidney? Made by HP? Lovely stuff.)

Almost by its very nature, “bad” food is cheap food, produced for the purpose of feeding the poor masses. Should we just put prices up until they starve? Or should we just let them eat cake?

Oh, hang on, that won’t work, will it …

Of barmy Bishops and predatory poofs

HAILSTONES the size of golf balls are bouncing off the car, the dog was herded outside for a wee and promptly blew over and the bloke next door is in tears at the thought of having to leave for his Lake District camping holiday tomorrow.

Yes, folks, it’s global warming.

Except it isn’t, really. According to the Bishop of Carlisle – who should know after his own flock floated away a couple of years ago – we’re suffering all this biblically bad weather as God’s judgment on society’s moral degradation.

“This is a strong and definite judgment,” said the Right Rev Graham Dow. And it’s the poofters and their silly gay weddings that are to blame. “The sexual orientation regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment which is intended to call us to repentance.”

(I don’t know what possessed him to say it. Perhaps he’d been out on the lash with the Bishop of Southwark.)

But there you have it. According to the clergy, if George Michael could please just stop hanging around public toilets until the floodwaters have gone down a bit, there are some people up north who’d be very grateful.

Or perhaps it’s God’s judgment on South Yorkshire. Imagine a giant Monty Python-style megaphone parting the clouds and a voice booming: “Spend less money on pies and bingo and more on household insurance, you tight buggers! And that flock wallpaper at 33, Whippet Crescent, Doncaster, really didn’t go with the DFS leatherette suite anyway.”

Stand by for the plague of frogs.

IT HAS never been hard to tell the difference between Mr Gordon Broon and a ray of sunshine. He can pretend to smile all he wants, but that dark, brooding, dour presence – prudence and Presbyterianism – sucks all the fun out of a room like one of Harry Potter’s Dementors.

So we turn to his list of Big Ideas revealed this week. OK, he might have decided that he doesn’t want the Prime Minister to have the sole right to declare war, or choose bishops (although we could obviously do with some new ones), and he wants us all to stick a bloody great flagpole in the middle of our gardens and display the Union flag (you don’t fool us, mate; you’ll always be a Porridge Wog to us).

But what about the secret agenda, the things he doesn’t want you to know about? I can exclusively reveal that these include the Maypole (Demolition) Act 2007, the Birthday Cake Candle Banning Act 2008, the Abolition of Kite-Flying Act 2009 and the Sherry Trifle (Licensing and Portion Control) Act 2010. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

OF COURSE, if our Bishops are allowed to cite the vengeance of God when it comes to pillorying poofs, it’s only fair to allow Muslims to call down the wrath of their God when it suits them as well. And if that means driving a burning Jeep into the terminal at Glasgow Airport, then we can’t really argue about it - although it brings a whole new meaning to the phrase: “Let me through, I’m a doctor.”

(I thought that joke might be a bit over the top until Radio Five Live actually used it as the introduction to their news programme one evening. No, really. There’s also a line here about there being no chance of finding the martyr’s traditional 72 virgins in Glasgow, but we’ll leave that one to John Humphrys and the Today programme. The Daily Telegraph has already done the one about there being a six-month wait to see a terrorist.)

While most people seem a bit baffled as to why half a dozen doctors should suddenly decide to try to kill thousands of innocent citizens of all faiths and races, I’m more concerned about the behaviour of some of them before they went postal. One was described as a “mystery man who seemed to lack interest in being a doctor … he would disappear for long periods during the day to pray or log on to Arabic websites.”

Well excuse me. Who was managing this man? Most of us wouldn’t get away with swinging the lead in such fashion. If we spent all day at work on Facebook (or the female Arabic version, NoFacebook) we’d soon get the sack. Yet this bloke just seemed to doss around and no-one said boo to him.

Secondly, you worry about the intelligence of these so-called well-trained medical professionals. We’re in the middle of the wettest summer since records began, yet they go and buy 137 barbeque gas cylinders from B&Q and expect not to be noticed. No wonder hospital patients (usually smokers) often come home with the wrong leg cut off.

Finally, we must also consider the impact that the removal of this number of staff from the NHS will have on waiting lists. With every foreign doctor at risk of being locked up at any second, and with the McCanns still on bloody holiday, you’ll be fortunate indeed to have that in-growing toenail sorted out before Christmas.

BREAKING NEWS: Liverpool’s John Lennon airport was closed for six hours today after police found a suspicious car parked outside. It was taxed, insured and still had its radio.

JUST ABOUT every snap of Alan Johnston being released from captivity had him pictured with a mobile phone clamped to his ear. But what was the call, apart from “You have 2,976 new messages”?

I suspect it went like this: “Listen, Big Brother. I’ll come in for £100,000 a week, but I want a guaranteed go on the dim twins. Oh, and for another £25k you can chain me to a radiator.” Such is modern celebrity.

The Puritan mob is at the door

AND NOW, the end is near … after an illustrious career of over 40 years, I am about to give up my job as a professional smoker. It won’t be easy; it won’t be pleasant; but the ban on smoking in enclosed public places (yes, and even on railway station platforms) has finally achieved what millions of pounds and decades of advertising has failed to do – convinced me to stop.

It’s not that I’m worried about my health – if I had been I’d have packed it in years ago. It’s just that there’s no fun in it anymore. I’m not allowed to smoke at home and have to stand on the back doorstep. They’re going to ban me from smoking in my car. I can’t smoke in a pub or in a restaurant and I can’t smoke in the office. What’s left? Lurking in the drizzle on a street corner with one eye out for the council warden who’ll hit me with an £80 spot fine if I drop a dog end? No thanks.

So they’ve finally broken my will, which has come as something of a shock to the system. You see, selfish spoilt brats like me are used to doing whatever they want whenever they want. Another 15 pints? Bring it on. Glass of wine? Make it a bottle. Red meat, double cream, sugar, salt and lard? Sounds like the perfect diet. And the fags, oh the fags.

Gauloise, Gitanes and Park Drive Plain. Dunhill, Players and Capstan Full Strength. The more tar the better. Cigarettes so strong that you’d have to smoke the first of the day lying down just in case you fainted. That raucous rush of nicotine through the bloodstream, the warm poisonous smoke filling your lungs. Oh joy.

But no more. The Puritan mob is at the door. Another element of enjoyment has been stubbed out in the great ashtray of life. I shall just have to drink more before that’s banned as well.

I BET the poor people caught up in the horrendous floods of the past week could have done with a packet of waterproof Woodbines. Six dead, well over 5,000 homes flooded, the M1 motorway – the nation’s primary artery – closed for days and a £1 billion insurance bill … but don’t worry: Environment Secretary David Miliband says flood defence systems have “worked well”. Oh really?

I turned on the local BBC radio station – Valium 95.9FM – to work out a route into the office only to hear some incoherent youth confidently report that the four feet of sewage-infested water wreaking havoc down the High Street had been caused by “climate change”.

Oh really? How does he work that out then? The world’s greatest scientists can’t agree on the subject yet a snotty-nosed kid with a limited vocabulary and a dodgy degree in Media Studies thinks he’s got it sussed. Lazy journalism or inherent BBC bias? You decide.

I SUPPOSE we have to cast a backward glance at the departing Mr Blah, constant companion and often inspiration of this column for the past 10 years. I met him very early on in his Presidency. He was young, bright, full of energy and ideas and had the knack of convincing you that Things really were Going To Get Better.

Perhaps if he’d concentrated on the job in hand instead of becoming obsessed with personal popularity they would have done. As it is, his much-vaunted “legacy” consists of a National Health Service swamped with money, yet beggared by bureaucracy; an education system that promises universities for all yet can’t even teach kids to read and write; a street crime epidemic where 10-year-olds settle scores not with Chinese burns but with switchblades; and a disastrous immigration policy that threatens to create irreparable divisions in society. And we won’t even mention the war. Sorry, wars.

So farewell then, Tone. Enjoy the gravy train ride to the Middle East. As a “pretty straight kind of guy” I’m sure you’ll do a great job – even if that appointment does seem a bit like asking an arsonist to put out his own fire.

WITH THE return of Old Labour in the guise of the Fat Scotchman, the unions are doing their bit to give us a Life on Mars moment with the first national strike of Post Office workers for over a decade.

The dispute, supposedly in pursuit of a 27 per cent pay rise over five years, has a hidden agenda: the outright resistance to any kind of modernisation. Now it’s not for me to outline the stupidity of this action at a time when major companies – including internet giant Amazon – are already moving their deliveries to private firms, but if Postman Pat and his placard-waving pals aren’t careful, there’ll be precious few birthday cards for them to steal fivers from in a couple of year’s time.

WITH OUR jails overflowing, illegal smokers and thieving posties are having to be banged up in police cells until a rapist or murderer gets early release and frees up a space for them. This gives rise to one of my favourite newspaper stories, namely how much it costs to lock someone up overnight.

The latest version, courtesy of Suffolk police, manages to get the cost to a marvellous £385 a night. Now go on, explain that to me. The police station is already there. The cells are already there. The cops are already there. The only new item is the criminal, and what are his or her costs? Half a bog roll and a microwaved pizza? So how does that equate to a night in a suite in a Park Lane hotel? It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

YES, I’M still watching Big Brother, but only to see the hateful Charlie eventually evicted. What is wrong with her? Can it really be that she’s so thick that she can’t adapt to or understand what’s happening around her and therefore is doomed to forever shout and bitch at 90mph?

In the meantime, I think it’s safe to say that the “psychopathic” twins really, really deserve to win. At the very least the £100,000 prize will mean a boost for the takings of pink mini-skirt shops nationwide. VOTE SAMANDA!