'The British are not good at having fun. I get overexcited if there's a pattern on my kitchen roll.' Victoria Wood (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

'The British are not good at having fun. I get overexcited if there's a pattern on my kitchen roll.' Victoria Wood

4:28pm Wednesday 2nd May 2012 in Lesley Brain By Lesley Brain

My life is full of nonsense. I suggest yours is too. Nonsense isn't what it used to be. I look at what made us smile then and it makes me smile now. Tommy Cooper, Monty Python, Edward Heath, shambling Michael Foot, Charles and Fiona from Round the Horne, young girls in mini-skirts, men in frilly shirts, P.G. Wodehouse, James Bond's girls, mock cream horns. The list is endless. Now nonsense comes without a smile, designed to take up space in the brain and steal precious time. Take this week. Why is our Prime Minister vilified for not knowing the price of a pint of milk? I don't know how much milk costs but if I needed to I should hope to find a man who does. And it seems that is where the problem lies. No-one in British politics knows what milk costs or what is a pint. Or what is the cost of accepting more than milk from a newspaper baron. Sleaze, never far from the surface of media consciousness, is topical again, as the Levinson enquiry clunks on. I watched it for a mind-numbing half hour this week and wanted to leap into the television and cry, 'no more, I have paid enough for this nonsense.' My suggestion is to revisit the concept of 'networking' and 'hospitality' and to look at how these apparently well-meaning methods of promoting business have, unquestioned, crept into our culture. We must have hospitality and generosity of spirit in business and politics but open one of those glossy regional magazines which curiously proliferate and you see pages of glazed-eyed burghers raising glasses to the photographer, smug in the knowledge that they are part of the in-crowd promoting someone’s hair salon or estate agency. Can you really say that the temptation of being in their orbit will make anyone rush off to make a booking? Turning the pages of such a magazine I see that bums are back in fashion. More nonsense. My derrière has never been out of fashion. And Alan Titchmarsh has been signed up for a further television series. What does that say about British culture? And who is A.A. Gill to say that Mary Beard is too plain for television? His rudeness is not clever. Nor is it amusing to watch a nine year old boy break down on Britain's Got Talent as he struggles with an inappropriate Beyonce song to entertain millions and live someone else's 'dream'. Nonsense too that any child who can open a computer can have immediate access to pornography, but, despite the rainfall, not a full bath of water. My horoscope is promising 'drama and excitement'. Hopefully without nonsense.