OAP robs bank, "I'll be back" he tells stunned staff

Police were forced to admit last night that they were powerless to arrest Fred Goodwin, a pensioner, despite the fact that he had just robbed under-pressure Royal Bank of Scotland of £650,000. A police spokestruncheon told The JT :"Apparently, it's all perfectly legal. And according to the law, Mr Goodwin will be able to steal this money every year for the foreseeable future."

Staff at the bank, many of whom might face redundancy in the near future, are exploring the option of just stealing money from their employers. A bank clerk told The JT : "If it's OK for the Chief Executive to help himself to the bank's money, then presumably it's OK for me to help myself."

Unfortunately not, apparently, as Malcolm Matrix of The JT's legal department now explains: "Any less exalted employee of the Royal Bank trying a similar scam would immediately run into the major hurdle which is the organising principle of the legal system: One law for the rich, another law for the not-rich. Or in this case, one law for Fred Goodwin, another law for the Not Fred Goodwins."

Inside: Truly, a bank robbery that was an inside job.

Text of Communique released following meeting between SofS Clinton and Mr Alick Salmon

Secretary Clinton with some Scottish guy.

Secretary of State Ms Hilary Clinton welcomed Scottish First Minster Alick Salmon to Washington this week.

Briefly.

In a wide ranging exchange of views, Firt Minister Salmon expressed the hope that his country, Scotland, would now enter a new period of friendship with the USA. Ms Clinton responded warmly saying "Mmmm, sure, that would be nice. Whatever."

Mr Salment reminded Ms Clinton that her husband has strong links with Scotland, with his family's chain of greeting card shops present in every Scottish high street. Mr Salmund presented Secretary Clinton with a map of Scotland highlighting towns in which Clinton Card Shops had a retail presence, Munster Salman said : "The comprehensive retail distribution of Clinton shops in Scotland clearly demonstrates the Clinton family's continuing commitment to their spiritual homeland."

Accepting the gift on her husband's behalf, Ms Clinton said :"Wow, erm, this is really nice. I'm sorry, what did you say your name was again?"

Ms Clinton was interested to hear that Mr Salami "was going to have a very important meeting about economic matters with Gordon Brown. "Ms Clinton responded "You're having a meeting with Gordon Brown? Well isn't that just fantastic! You must be so excited! And this Gordon Brown guy, is he like a friend of yours?"

Bringing the meeting to a close after the scheduled five minutes, Ms Clinton thanked Mr Ess-- something-or-other for his most interesting chat but regretted that President Obama wouldn't be able to see him, no, not even just for a minute.

Ms Clinton then turned to her meeting with the Prime Minister of Armenia and the Scottish guy just let himself out.

Inside: "Alex, this has really been a good meeting, would you like some coffee?"

"Well, thank you Hilary, coffee would be really nice."

"Great. OK, so after you leave here, turn right. Walk two blocks until you come to a stop sign. Just on the left there, a 'Bucks. Enjoy. G'bye."

From The BBC

"Safety checks styled on those carried out by aircrews before take-off have been rolled out at NHS Highland operating theatres. Called the surgical pause, it is the final checklist that nurses and doctors make before performing an operation to reduce any risk of error. Questions include: is this the right patient?" BBC News Online

Other questions might include...

• Is anyone here actually medically qualified? Anyone?
• Ooh, this knife thing is very sharp isn't it? Oh, it's called a scalpel is it?
• Blimey, that anaesthetic's a bit strong isn't it? Oh, it's for the patient? Silly me.
• Don't tell me, I'm sure I know what that machine does. I saw it Holby the other night. It either monitors heart rate or makes filter coffee.
• Right, so we're cutting the patient's left leg off. Not his right, his left. Right. What I mean is I understand, not that I think we're taking off his right leg. Left, not right. Is that his left or my left?
• Ooh, that's a lot of blood isn't it? Should it be coming out like that? I think that's probably not a good thing. What does everyone else think?
  

"No, you got to be the surgeon last time. It's my turn to be surgeon and your turn to watch the bleepy things."

Antiquarian Curiosities: an occasional divertissement

"Pope Innocent X, The Celtic Minded."
Oil on canvas, by Diego Velazquez, painted around 1650.

Not only was Pope Innocent The Tenth "Celtic-Minded" he was also singularly prescient, loyally following the fortunes of a football club some two centuries before it was formed.

In common with much portraiture of the period, the painting is replete with symbolism. In his left hand, the Pope holds a copy of The Celtic View, representing the profane. In his right hand, representing the sacred, he holds a fragment of parchment, an encyclical, urging on his team to greater achievements.

Later in his life, the Pope would issue an encyclical condemning "the practice of members of the black-clad masonic secret societies, umpiring matches between Celtic and lesser teams, conspiring, one with the other, to deny The Hoops stone-wall penalty decisions. So they uhr."

Scots on the Box

Limmy's Show, BBC2 Scotland, 10pm, 17th February

I think you'd better sit down. Have the smelling salts to hand because I've got something to tell you. Ready? OK, brace yourself, here it comes : someone said "fuck" on BBC Scotland last night and the sky didn't fall in!

In fact, I think on Limmy's Show people swear quite a bit. They also say "dae" rather than "do" and they make few dialect concessions. If Rab C was a bit of a hill to climb for our Southern neighbours then LS is Kilaman-fuckin'- jaro big-man- so- it- is. But that's OK, because LS reaches our tellies as a slice of life from the universe created by "internet phenomeon" Brian Limond and this is a demanding, difficult world to get a handle on.

First off, I'm not sure if I'd call this comedy. Bits of LS are very funny but equally bits are unsettling, disturbing and just freaky. Are paranoia and delusion funny, are they fit subjects for comedy?


A non-using junkie, physically clean but psychologically rattlin' like a collecting tin on a flag day. A compulsive shoplifter, trapped by the fixation, miserably rehearsing over and over his excuses yet to be made to polismen born of his guilty imagination.
I found these characters interesting, I really appreciated the work that went into their creation, but there was nothing remotely funny about their suffering.


The rants to camera about rhyming road-signs and the cultural practice of calling everyone, regardless of gender, "guys" didn't work, the performances seemed forced, the outrage too obviously confected. A discourse on why big people aren't allowed on swings elided into a meditation on the promise of youth and the disappointments of adulthood. Not funny, but beautiful and strange.

Other stuff might have benefitted from being left out.

A cartoon ( God, I hate cartoons) pissed about with the elderly " what if someone's at the controls inside oor heid?" idea. As an exempler of stoner coversational profoundity it was right up there with "what if we're aw just part of a butterfly's dream?" and "If a tree falls in the forest and nae cunt's aboot does it still make a noise?"

Don't know, don't care.

Being an astute sort of reader, you'll have noticed by this stage in the review that I'm a bit conflicted by LS. I'm not really sure of what to make of it. I'm also not at all sure that this was a pilot that it would stretch to a series. TV absolutely devours comedy. 30 minutes is an eternity to fill, I don't know if Limmy's world is big enough.

LS apart, Limond is clearly a gifted performer and I'm sure we'll be seeing him again in something, sometime. And if it does all go tits up, he can make a good living as a lookalikey of Tom Yorke out of Radiohead.

I'm telling ye, maun, he's his fuckin' spit, so he is.

Nuclear power perfectly safe says undead Jim

Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy this week attacked the SNP over its opposition to nuclear power and insisted: "Iam living proof that you can be exposed to radiation over long periods and still look quite human. Sort of."


As the attending media edged towards the door of the press conference, Mr Murphy went on :" My dad built nuclear power stations in South Africa and, as a boy I used to play in the isotope dump we kept out the back. I've taken a daily drink of strontium 90 for as long as I can remember and its never done me any harm. Although to be honest, my short term memory's gone."

Mr Murphy further revealed to a now empty room that politics had not been his first choice of profession : " as a young man I wanted to be an actor. I remember going up for the part of Lurch in a stage production of The Addams Family and the producer saying that I'd got the part and I could take the make -up off. Imagine his surprise when I told him I wasn't wearing any! And you will just have to imagine his surprise because at that point he ran out of the room screaming."

Elsewhere on planet it- gloweth- in- the- dark, a British nuclear sub managed to crash into a French nuclear sub in the North Atlantic earlier this month.


In a show of chutzpah that takes this week's prize, a naval spokeshornpipe actually went on record to say that the collision showed that the stealth mode on the boats really worked well, since they each didn't know where the other was.


Truly, satire is rendundant.

Inside: This is also true. A "British defence journalist", whatever the fuck that is, told the BBC, that while the UK and US share location codes (where the subs are relative to each other) the French aren't told. Quite right, can't trust the bally French, look what they did at Agincourt etc.


Lurch off The Addams Family




The other bloke

Scots on the Box

“New Town” BBC 4, 9pm, February 14th

There is a story, more than likely apocryphal I’ll admit, about the radical UCLA graduate who washes up on the Glasgow shores sometime in the late 1960s to teach. Being entertained by a local in one of those fuckin’ awful buckets of blood that the city used to specialise in, our naïve American friend says “Hey, I never realised that Glasgow was such a radical town.” Meaning what, his Scottish contact enquires: “Well, I see Fight The Power graffittied all over the city. You know, FTP?”

Cue long embarrassed silence…

I was reminded of just how wide the Atlantic can be and how long people can take to dry off, as it were, after watching Annie Griffin’s latest offering on BBC4. Annie, an American, has been resident here in God’s Country for some time. As a writer she gave us TV’s “The Book Group” which was brilliant, she gave us cinema’s “Festival” which wasn’t. The Book Group worked because, despite being set in Glasgow it concentrated on the minutiae of interpersonal relationships and didn’t rely on the Glasgow setting for comic effect.

Festival, set in Edinburgh in any August, was all about luvvies and consequently sucked big time.

With New Town, a murder mystery set amongst property wheeling and dealing types, Annie returns to TV and Edinburgh but the script lacks the intimacy of Book Group without fully convincing the viewer that Annie has a confident grasp of the warp and weft of the broader Scottish culture. Leave aside the uncertainty of tone, (Realist? Fantastical? Black comedy? Modern Gothic?) and there are still questions to be asked about how sure Annie’s grasp is.

Irritating little errors abound in the show which I’ll leave to others but there are two absolute humdingers that I can’t leave alone.

First, casting. For some reason, Annie has put a blonde wig on the Anglo-Iranian comic Omid Djalili and asked him to play a Scottish-accented property developer. Er, why?

No offence to Omid Djalili‘s abilities but I’m sure there are a lot of Scottish actors who could’ve handled what’s not an especially demanding role and by default, made a better job of the accent. When Djalili concentrates he carries it off but too many times his accent slopes off to somewhere east of Armenia. The actor is just miscast, pure and simple.

And then, second. there’s the character “Rhian from Vatersay”.
Remember the movie Brigadoon? Well, imagine that the producers cryogenically froze one of the supporting players, accent, other-wordly feyness, weird dress and all. And then imagine that Annie thawed the actress out, gave her a cup of tea and invited her to just carry on pretending she was in Brigadoon. The character, Rhian, come to Edinburgh to study art, floats around in a state of faux naiveté that suggests the population of contemporary Vatersay are all subject to learning difficulties.

I can see what Annie’s possibly going for here, some idiot-savant shtick, whose innocence contrasts with the avarice and stupidity of contemporary Edinburgh society, blah blah blah. But Idiot-savant? Well, at least she’s got the first part nailed. It's just possible that Rhian is really a criminal mastermind, but I wouldn't bet my hoose on it.

This is maybe risking digging up the bones of Monarch Of The Glen again but who is this character meant to be kidding? I don’t know of anyone in modern Scotland who thinks that people from the islands all sound and think as if they’ve just stepped out of the 18^th century. Maybe viewers who live in The Home Counties but think Scotland is just lovely. But otherwise? Fuck off.

I’ve no idea the status of New Town, whether it’s a one-off or a pilot, but if it's designed to get a series, there’s a lot to sort out. A show that has the ex-Episcopalian bishop Richard Holloway guesting as a blind minister is a bit up itself if you ask me.

Needs work, a lot of work.

PS: I’m sure BBC 4 will repeat this show, so let me know what you think. I’d especially like to hear from the solicitors who read The JT what they make of the show’s (ahem) casual ”explanations” of how Scots Law works.