Culture

Both Brendan and I have written about the strange martyrdom of Louis Smith.  But here is an ugly coda. As readers may recall, the Olympic athlete got drunk at a friend’s wedding and, along with a friend, ended up doing a joke version of the Muslim call to prayer. Something to do with Aladdin apparently. Anyhow, before they knew it the phone-video had made its way onto social media and from there to The Sun. Soon sinister Muslim spokespeople were reminding everyone that their religion was to be ‘respected’ and never to be ‘mocked’. Smith has apparently been getting death threats since then. All of which tells us nothing new about the world’s most intolerant religion.

The brilliant thing about Hong Kong is that you don’t have to worry for a second about all the culture you’re missing. That’s because there’s absolutely nothing to do there except shop (I got a seriously nice bespoke dinner jacket for just £400 from Lafarfalla Tailor) drink and, most importantly, eat. Oh all right, so there are some half-strenuous walks you can do in the surprisingly uncrowded countryside just outside the city (you can cab it from the centre to the pretty Shek O beach — which on weekdays is half-deserted — in just 25 minutes) but even then the main purpose of the exercise is to end up in another restaurant.

Right at the start of filming for Dispatches on the generation wealth gap (8pm on Ch4 tonight), we were working around a striking claim: that the young were so shafted that people in their 20s are earning less now that they were 20 years ago. I asked the Office for National Statistics to check this out and when their figures came back, it was the opposite to what I expected – and to what everyone seems to believe. Not only are the 20-somethings paid more, but their disposable income is up by a third on where it was two decades ago. The idea that the young ones are paid substantially more than their parents contradicts all established wisdom. But the ONS had never released the research before, so no-one knew.

I’ve spent the last few weeks making a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on what I regard as one the biggest new arguments of our times: the generation wars. The idea that (as David Willetts famously put it) the ‘baby boomers took their children’s’ future’ – and ‘should give it back’. I’ve been talking to various experts, being heckled at protest marches, wading through research and putting the established wisdom to the test. The result is on Channel 4 documentary:  The Wealth Gap. Only Channel 4 really does documentaries about ideas: the asset bubble, the relationship between wealth and longevity.

At last, an English football manager who actually deserves to be sacked (or ‘left by mutual agreement’ if you prefer the official line). An England manager on £3 million a year shouldn’t be dreaming up ways of helping himself to an extra few hundred thousand through dodgy deals. But that makes Sam Allardyce something of a rarity. It is hard to think of another England football manager of recent times who really deserved the heave-ho. Roy Hodgson led a team to an embarrassing defeat against Iceland, but was it really him who deserved to go or the useless players who couldn’t even pick up a pass? It is no use coming up with strategy if the players start letting it through their feet.

Just when you thought the trigger-warning trend on campus couldn’t get any more bonkers it’s reported that archaeology students are being allowed to dodge discussions of ‘traumatic’ historic events. Yes, students  whose entire academic mission is to dig up bones, pore over old stuff and work out what the hell mankind was doing / thinking a thousand-odd years ago are being warned that such excavations can uncover ‘disturbing’ stuff that might ‘traumatise’ them because 'bones can be scary'. So they should feel free to nip out of class if it gets too much. Archaeology students being told archaeology is a scary pursuit — I think we’ve reached peak campus madness. The students in question are at University College London.

Nearly fifty years ago, CR Poole published a short work entitled 'The Customs, Superstitions, and Legends of the County of Somerset'. Inexplicably, he omitted the foremost of these customs: Somerset will never, ever, win the County Championship. For a while this week, I and many others dared to dream this year might be different. This could be the week, the day, the moment, history might be made. Somerset have been tilting for the championship since 1891 and only rarely been in with a chance of glory on the final day of the season. More often, as a dozen wooden spoon finishes attests, the situation has been hopeless but never serious. Today was serious. Today there was a chance. Somerset had done their part, crushing Nottinghamshire in handsome style yesterday.

When I wrote my last Daily Telegraph column critical of Btecs, an exam now taken by about a quarter of English university entrants, a friend of mine in the world of university admissions told me to wait for the reaction of Pearson Plc, which owns Btec. While A-levels and GCSEs are rigorously examined and discussed, Pearson get away with releasing very little data about Btec and plough a lot of money into marketing their exam. And they don't very much like it being criticised. Rod Bristow, the president of Pearson UK, has written to today’s Daily Telegraph suggesting that I was wrong to suggest that Btecs have gone through serious inflation – and, ergo, devaluation.

Is it a crime now to tell rubbish jokes? The bizarre and frankly cruel treatment of Paul Gascoigne suggests it might be. Yesterday, at Dudley Magistrates Court, Gazza was found guilty of using ‘threatening or abusive words’ and fined £2,000. His crime was to say the following about a black security guard who had been assigned to look after him during his show An Evening With Gazza at Wolverhampton Civic Hall last year: ‘Can you smile please, because I can’t see you?’ Some people might find that funny; I, personally, don’t. But a court case? A criminal record? A fine? For cracking a joke? The precedent set by this case is terrifying.