Those Who Knew Them: John Inman 1935-2007

In the latest in our series of tributes to those who have passed away by those who knew them best, we at As A Dodo hand over our columns - barely pausing for the requisite juvenile snigger as we do so - to one of Mr Inman's frequent pantomime co-stars, Dick Whittington's cat.

When they told me that John Inman was dead I'm afraid my instant reaction was a full-throated "Oh no he isn't". For, however well he was known for his light-footed work as the eternally "free" and extraordinarily camp Mr Humphries in "Are You Being Served?", John's true place was undoubtedly on stage and costumed (in one of the incredible creations he himself put together) as a pantomime dame.

John having starred in more than 40 pantomimes during his life I'm sure many of your readers will have had the chance to witness his genius at work on stage. I certainly know many whose life was forever altered by a sight of his extraordinary Twankey. Indeed his very first role saw him unleashing it on the Blackpool stage when he was just 14 years old.

From then on, John and panto were inseparable. I had the privilege of appearing with him many times in Dick Whittington and - having been caught in the rain before one performance - can honestly say that his Sarah the Cook took the best possible care of her soaking pussy, outdoing even Are You Being Served's Mrs Slocombe. Whether the script required Sarah to polish up the Lord Mayor's baubles or sort out King Rat's ballcock, John always rose to the occasion with alacrity. I would that we had been able to work together more often but sadly on his last outing as Sarah I was on another stage, giving my all to the Student Prince.

Whatever anyone may think of the role of Mr Humphries, as a dame John was one of the true greats, a walking encyclopaedia of panto lore. If only, like Peter Pan's Tinkerbell, we could wish him back to life. For now though, I must leave his memory and your readers: this little pussy's got 12 miles to London and there's still no sign of Dick.

The Political Middle Ages c.1295-2007

The Political Middle Ages died yesterday when members of the Commons voted overwhelmingly for a fully elected House of Lords and the abolition of all hereditary peers under Leader of the House Jack Straw’s daring plans to drag the Upper Chamber by its be-wigged, be-gartered and be-ermined costume into the modern democracy of the, er … nineteenth century.

The Political Middle Ages began with the first Model Parliament held in 1295 when archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons (or anyone else who had a spare million groats to pop into the monarch's campaigning fund) - along with a couple of local burgesses to represent the, er, people - formed a royal council to freely discuss the important issues of the day… and then do whatever the king told them to do.

For centuries, the Political Middle Ages ruled the country with no-one raising any objection, in part because most of the people were too busy being swept up into ultimately-doomed crusades in the Middle East or suffering the black death but chiefly because, this being the Middle Ages, it somehow seemed appropriate. Time, however, moved on and people began to believe that it was somehow inappropriate for them to be ruled over by a bunch of people whose only qualifications for leadership were either (a) an ancestor having fought alongside the monarch's great-great-granddad, (b) an ancestor having slept with the monarch's great-great granddad or (c) an ancestor having bunged large amounts of cash into the monarch's great-great-granddad's campaign chest.

Gradually the power of the people began to grow, mainly because the Black Death had left so few of them standing that if all those nobles wanted their fields tilling they'd have to pay through the nose for the privilege. By the reign of Edward III, The Political Middle Ages found itself having to put up with an unwelcome division between the power of the nobility in the House of Lords and the powers of the knights and burgesses, quite rightly named "The Commons".

Matters came to a head - literally - when the country's ruler Tony Blair King Charles I started wandering around proclaiming that he was divinely appointed and could freely ignore the will of parliament, prompting Oliver Cromwell to test out the theory of whether the King's divine appointment also enabled him to ignore the lack of that bit of his body usually found above the neck.

For four years from 1649 it was believed that the Political Middle Ages had died and that Britain would be ruled by the will of its people. Sadly, by 1653 Cromwell himself had become almost as tired of democracy as those he ruled had become tired of wearing plain clothes and not being allowed to dance, and abolished parliament altogether. By 1660, the Political Middle Ages had returned to their usual position (along with several accommodating actresses) under Charles II.

By now, however, the Political Middle Ages were beginning to show their age, barely managing to stagger through Glorious Revolutions and the gradual diminution of kingly power. A series of punishing body blows were suffered during the 19th century and 20th centuries, with the passing of a series of Parliament Acts curtailing the power of the House of Lords. Soon The Political Middle Ages could only be sustained thanks to the tendency of Prime Ministers from Lloyd-George onwards to call in the ermine outfitters for anyone who could bung their party a bit of cash, no questions asked.

Despite the fond attentions of political leaders down the years, the last gasp of the Political Middle Ages was uttered last night. The death came following a vote on Lords reform in a ballot more confusing than the Eurovision song contest and with all the logic of Deal or No Deal. As MPs poured through the Division Lobby to express a) their desire for a fully-elected Upper Chamber; b) the plan most offensive to peers that they will reject it; or c) any option – it doesn’t really matter because it’s an indicative vote which won’t become an Act of Parliament, but trust us, it will inform government policy, some time in the future… The Political Middle Ages cried “Fie!” and “Zounds!” and fell into a deep sleep from which it could not be woken – although it may just have been taking forty winks during an important debate on increasing peers’ expenses to cover the exorbitant dry-cleaning costs for getting stains out of ermine.

The Political Middle Ages will not be buried during the lifetime of this government, or even Gordon Brown’s, but some time in the future, no really it will… at the Palace of Westminster where the remaining 92 hereditary peers, appointed peers and bishops will gather to sing The House That Jack Built. It is survived by Tony Blair, the Royal Family and a vote on Lords reform by peers themselves – yes, including Lord Levy – next week…

Lewis "Scooter" Libby's Political Usefulness 1981-2007

Lewis "Scooter" Libby’s Political Usefulness as assistant to President Bush and Chief of Staff to Dick Cheney was legally terminated yesterday when it was found guilty on four counts of obstruction of justice and perjury in the cover-up of the leaking of the name of a CIA operative, and one count of being named after a character in The Muppets.

Scooter Libby’s Political Usefulness was born in 1981, the offspring of a legal career defending dodgy businessmen and military-industrial corporations and a job offer from his friendly old Yale professor, Paul Wolfowitz, who always likes to help out someone in need, provided that someone is already a hugely successful, go-getting, higher-rate-tax-payer and not some welfare-guzzling schmo who might actually be in, er, need.

The Usefulness quickly proved its worth at the State Department, specialising in East Asian and Pacific affairs, before moving to the Pentagon in 1989, as Principal Deputy Under-Secretary Of Defense For Strategy And Resources And Making Up Stuff About Foreign Countries As An Excuse To Start A War With Them.

By the end of the century, The Usefulness had become part of George W Bush’s core security team, along with Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Mr Wolfowitz – a network of neo-conservatives known as “The Vulcans”, completely devoid of human emotion, able to kill a liberal with their “death grip” but, strangely, singularly unsuccessful in achieving a mind-meld with the President.

In 2001, The Usefulness was made Vice-President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff becoming so close to the Vice President that it was known as “Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney”. At the same time, it also became an assistant to Mr Bush (“Dick Cheney’s Dick”) and national security adviser, shaping policy on Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea and other countries neocons thought the US could easily whup in a fight that posed a threat to world peace.

It was during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq that the seeds of The Usefulness's demise were sown, when former US ambassador Joseph Wilson publicly cast doubt on the President’s insistence that Saddam Hussein had the ability to develop nuclear weapons. Why Mr Wilson should have cast such doubt no one can say, perhaps it was out of envy of Mr Bush, perhaps a deep and abiding hatred of freedom or perhaps even because Saddam Hussein was not developing nuclear weapons. Nonetheless it was at this time that The Usefulness's nemesis arrived, in the guise of some shadowy figure - who may or may not have loved hunting quail and septuagenarian lawyers - authorised the leaking of the fact Mr Wilson’s wife, Victoria Plame, was a CIA operative and – far, far worse – the owner of several Joni Mitchell albums, details which were both capable of putting her life in danger and ending her career.

With the hunt for this shadowy figure on in Capitol Hill and among the press and indictments being threatened, The Usefulness entered its last moments, nobly allowing itself to be cast into the path of the ravenous pursuing lawyers, who set upon it with glee. Even as it was being devoured the Usefulness strove to protect those who had cast it aside, unwilling to call on its former masters even to speak in its favour. Found guilty of covering-up the Plame leak, The Usefulness was useful no more. It blinked its last and died yesterday in Courtroom 17.

Scooter Libby’s Political Usefulness will be buried at the Lee Majors Church of the Fall Guy. It is survived by Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz and a pardon from George Bush just before he leaves office in January, 2009.

ITV's Premium-Rate Phone-Ins 1987-2007

Students, drunks and the long-term unemployed are today huddled on their sofas , their fingers mashing the buttons of their TV remote controls as they search in vain for ITV's Premium Rate Phone-Ins, which died last night.

Born in 1987, Premium-Rate Phone-Ins was the younger sibling of the notorious Premium-Rate Chatlines. Having seen its elder family member gain its dubious reputation after thrusting itself (along with a number of semi-clad, gyrating women with unlikely breasts and improbable tans, plus several gym-addicted young men in overtight T-shirts, all keen to "make new friends on the telephone") into tabloid newspapers, softcore magazines and the advertising breaks on TV's "James Whale Radio Show" in the mid-1980s, Premium-Rate Phone-Ins quickly realised what it would take to let it push through the crowd in the heavily shoulder-padded world of Thatcher's Britain.

Soon Phone-Ins found itself hanging around in Soho alleyways near the Groucho Club, offering the prospect of good - and extremely lucrative - times to red-eyed media types who seemed more interested in the pressing business of finding a lavatory cistern with a nice flat top, a good lock on the door and no draughts. It was not long before, like a modern day Lulu, it was mixing with the nation's leading figures: hanging on Terry Wogan's arm as he hungrily urged the nation to get its collective wallet out and spend its wad on charitable causes, sidling up to Richard Madeley on the sofa as he took time off from the endless task of revealing the vastness of his wisdom to the country to urge his viewers to start fingering their buttons and dial in to the latest premium quiz, standing by to answer (extremely expensive) calls from a voyeuristic audience as an endless parade of the desperate and untalented prostituted themselves before the nation on Big Brother, X Factor and their ilk.

All this was as nothing, however, compared to Premium-Rate Phone-Ins' greatest coup, persuading the doddering old gentleman that was ITV to give it a whole TV channel to itself. ITV Play was the zenith of Phone-Ins' achievement, filled as it was with hour after hour of former Big Brother finalists, ex quiz-show warm-up men and shiny-toothed blonde women in their early twenties all doing nothing but singing Phone-Ins' praises. And all the while viewers across the land were falling over themselves (admittedly this was, in many cases, due to having imbibed enough Bacardi breezers to stun a herd of wildebeest) to pay 75p a minute to attempt to answer impossible quizzes in which the answers to the question "What would you find in a woman's handbag?" included "rawlplugs", "dog biscuits" and "balaclavas" and all despite their belief that the call centre they were ringing probably only possessed one, broken telephone manned by a profoundly deaf monkey.

Such an exercise in hubris could not go unpunished. Soon the very gods themselves, not to mention journalists eager for a rip-off Britain story to fill up their pages on a slow news day, were crying out for Premium Rate Phone-Ins' demise. With even the slumbering, not to say comatose, media-regulation giant Ofcom giving signs of being roused, senior officials at ITV led by Michael Grade last night visited Premium-Rate Phone-Ins' ITV Play home bearing a thank you note for all the millions it had brought ITV in one hand and a sock filled with wet sand in the other.

ITV's Premium Rate Phone-Ins will be remembered in a special service at the Lord Reith Church of Revolving-in-his-Grave. It will be (a) buried, (b) cremated or (c) shot from a purpose-built rail-gun into orbit around Saturn^(*). Those wishing to leave their condolences are asked to repeatedly dial an 090 number despite having absolutely no prospect of getting through.

^(*) Ofcom regulations require that As A Dodo advise readers that (c), being the least likely answer, is, of course, correct.

The Attorney General of England and Wales 1315-2007

Legal and constitutional experts are lowering their wigs and closing up their dusty tomes this morning following the announcement by As A Dodo that the office of Attorney General of England and Wales has passed away, after an attempt to advise itself on the decision to advise itself about advising the government of which it was a member on the legality of a member of the government of which it was a member advising the government of which it was a member about its decision to take out of injunctions which might be seen to be to the advantage of the government of which it was a member resulted in a rip in the fabric of reality, not to mention assorted conflicts of interest.

The office of Attorney General was born in 1315, when Edward II took time out from being defeated at Bannockburn and avoiding pointed fire irons (especially the heated ones) to appoint an individual (ideally someone who worked out a lot and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the latest madrigals) to prosecute his business in the Court of Common Pleas.

Over the following centuries the office of Attorney General went happily about its business of advising the Crown (and whoever happened to be wearing it) without anyone ever questioning its role. Soon it was deciding who could and could not bring cases in the courts, handing out injunctions, being responsible for the criminal law and representing the public interest.

Early signs of future disaster began to appear in the late 17th century and early 18th century when the gradual spread of a phenomenon experts have identified as "democracy" first began to appear in the British constitution. By the 20th century definite questions had begun to arise over whether, as a government minister, the Attorney General could really safeguard the public interest when the government kept doing things that the public weren't interested in at all like having wars and buggering up the National Health Service.

It was in the early 21st century that the Attorney General embarked on the course which was to lead to his office's doom. The first sign of the disaster awaiting humanity came in 2003 when Lord Goldsmith was asked to advise his cabinet colleagues on the legality of war with Iraq and, when he indicated that he wasn't one hundred per cent sure it was legal was told to go away and think again until he came up with the answer Tony wanted. With the fabric of reality already beginning to twist as the Attorney General engaged in a novel form of quantum superposition, being at one and the same time a loyal member of the government and also an impartial law officer, many experts were already issuing dire warnings that "the constitution cannae take it captain".

Undeterred, the Attorney General ploughed on with his experimentation, insisting that the British constitution itself required him to test the public's tolerance by being the final arbiter of whether his cabinet friends and colleagues, including the Prime Minister that appointed him could ever be prosecuted should the police decide that they had been offering passing billionaires a "touch of the old ermine" for a loan of a spare million or two. Matters came to a head when, acting on a request from the police, the Attorney General attempted to obtain injunctions to prevent the public from finding out anything about the police's investigation and to prevent them from knowing he'd asked for an injunction in the first place. The attempt to act "completely independently of government" whilst at the same time being a member of that government caused the public's belief in reality to explode, irrevocably destroying the Attorney General's office.

The office of Attorney General will be buried under a vast selection of constitutional hats at the Heisenberg Church of Quantum Uncertainty. It is survived by the equally confused offices of Solicitor General and Lord Chancellor as well as being both survived and not survived at the same time by Schrödinger’s cat.

But Not Forgotten: Week Ending 3 March 2007

• Lord Forte 1908-2007 - hotelier
• Heinz Berggruen 1914-2007 - art collector
• Leroy Jenkins 1932-2007 free jazz violinist
• John Menzies 1927-2007 - member of the Scots newsagent dynasty
• Alex Henshaw 1912-2007 - Spitfire test pilot

The Internal Combustion Engine c.1879-2007

The Internal Combustion Engine has coughed and spluttered its last, suffering from terminal indigestion triggered by that dodgy litre of petrol it bought at a supermarket in the South of England this week.

The Internal Combustion Engine was born of doubtful parentage in the late nineteenth century, although Karl Benz laid claim to it with his patent for a four-stroke engine. It was a large and greedy baby requiring constant feeding with petrol-based snacks and spent its youth roaming the countryside frightening women, horses and the people of Norfolk. Indeed, it was considered so dangerous that, by law, a man was required to walk in front of it waving a red flag – sending terrified Edwardians into the nearest chemist for a reassuring tincture of laudanum.

In 1913, with Henry Ford mass-producing his infamous “automobiles” built around the Engine, it was only a matter of months before millions were spending their last dimes on feeding the noisy, belching brat in pursuit of the American Dream of life, liberty, happiness and bigger engines, bigger tyres and bigger overdrafts.

Around the world, sensible, horse-drawn members of society abandoned their quiet lives in to become “travelling salesmen” – willing to work harder and further away from home to feed their mechanical off-spring and their need to cruise at 55 mph in the middle of the motorway regardless of the emptiness of the inside lane.

The Engine’s constant demands for attention played a part in the decline of organised religion as supplicants worshipped at a new altar, preferring to spend their Sundays tinkering with their beloved Engines before going for a nice drive in the country – spending four hours stuck in a traffic jam on the A12, arguing with their partner about whether they really should have taken that last left and stopping for a relaxing cup of tea from a thermos on the hard shoulder of the M25.

With the price of petrol being driven up by decreased stability in oil-producing regions that, completely coincidentally, had recently been invaded by forces looking to develop peace, stability and new oil exploitation opportunites, many owners were driven (literally) to find cheaper fuel for their voracious Engines and started frequenting supermarket petrol station forecourts, looking for a good two-for-one offer to keep the over-sized wheels of their 4x4s turning and possibly a microwaveable burger for themselves. The ill-effects of a lifetime of reckless combustion combined with a last meal of contaminated petrol brought about the Internal Combustion Engine's inevitable end as, bloated, unwieldy and starved of oxygen, it had one final seizure and rolled to a silent halt by the side of the road, out of sight even of a Little Chef.

The Internal Combustion Engine will be placed in an unleaded casket inside a Rover Maestro before being scrapped at St Clarkson’s Turbo-Charged Church of the Petrol-Head. It is survived by the bicycle, Shank’s Pony, Virgin Trains and irreversible climate change.