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From Kevin Marsh
It's a good job that nothing on earth ever makes me tetchy.
The Guardian said on Wednesday that I should ban 91 year olds from Today. Can you believe it?
Had it been any other paper I would have dismissed it as plain daft but this is the Guardian and as we know its editor Mr Alan Rusbridger is the Cardinal Manning of our time and his organ our century's Pius IX and therefore quite obviously as infallible on this as on everything else. And anyway the argument is so straightforward that there can be no counter to the proposition that every time a 91 year old appears on Today it is a sign that we are frit, running scared and have abandoned the "old-style" Today of Jack De Manio and Monty Modlin, fine fellows both.
The big reason we should not have any more 91 year olds on the programme, according to the Guardian, is that they do not snarl and are not routinely uncivil enough to suit the tastes of modern columnists and newspaper diarists though this is presumably because they spent too much of the 20th century fighting the Nazis, inventing antibiotics, building the welfare state and winning the Ashes and didn't have enough spare time to develop a genuinely sneering mindset or terminal smugness.
It should be obvious by now - and I know I run the risks of Albi with this - that if I really had things my own way around here the only people I'd ever have on the programme would be 91 or older and that I would prefer nonagenarians to put the show together as well. You only have to listen back to some of our recent 91 year olds (or thereabouts) to realise why.
Try Meg Parkes, the daughter of war hero Atholl Duncan.
Listen Again.
Or mountaineer Stephen Lang's grandmother Grace.
Listen Again.
Even better in terms of pure longevity, try Fred Lloyd, 104, who because he was preoccupied serving in the trenches of the Great War didn't have time to develop a taste for scribbling on the back of adverts for a living and is therefore of no account whatsoever.
Read the report and listen again.
The other thing the Guardian has decreed is that we should ban the "0855 funny" and this is also a shame because as you know our only aim in life is to send the nation off to catch the 0923 from Warmington on Sea with a chuckle in its heart and a spring in its zimmer.
Thursday's "0855 funny" for instance (The history of local taxation; have we ever got it right?) could have come straight from the pages of Viz. Listen Again.
Wednesday's (Is the new space race in fact a new Cold War?) reminded me of Jim Davidson's dog-day filled summer at the end of Cromer pier.
Listen Again.
And Tuesday's (Is SARS a deception; does it only kill those who would die of other mild diseases? … followed by the breaking news of Harold Shipman's
suicide) had us all reaching back to Tommy Cooper in his heyday for comparison.
Listen Again: SARS.
Listen Again: Harold Shipman
Alarming moment of the week was Sarah's appearance in the studio last Saturday when I thought she was supposed to be having a Holby City moment with the gas and air. But no. We're all still waiting and all is still going well and I promise to keep you posted of any developments in particular the eventual appearance of Montague minor.
But we do think of everything on Today so as soon as Sarah appeared at the studio door I was despatched to get the hot water and towels ready but I must have got it a bit wrong because I couldn't control the boiling water that came out of the tap which made the windows steam up and the swan pass out.
The point is, Sarah is the only one who knows how to handle the geyser - which sounds worse than it reads - so I was chancing my arm quite literally with the whole thing and will in future stay well out of this sort of business.
Anyway it was all ok in the end and so as soon as Sarah came off air I was able to steer her towards the sink where the washing up water was still pretty hot, hand her the towels and a pair of saved-up marigolds and leave her to get on with it.
Who's Eamonn Holmes?
Kevin
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