Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Trapped inside Phil Drabble

It is high time we spent another week with Rutland's most popular fictional peer. Liberator 336 has long been with subscribers.

As it is Wednesday we shall start with...

Monday

Autumn has come to Rutland and the season of agricultural shows has drawn to a close for another year. While I always enjoy the opportunity to display my Longhorns, for me the highlight of these events is the sheepdog trials. It is, I hasten to add, many years since any dog was executed: these days they take place merely for entertainment.

I fear, however, that the wider public has a wholly unrealistic picture of what a dog can accomplish because of the activities of Phil Drabble. ‘One Man and his Dog’, his moving television programme, enjoyed great popularity in the 1980s until it became embroiled in a notorious scandal. You see, the sheep on his show were not sheep at all, but out-of-work actors in woollen costumes. While this provided welcome employment to former cast members of ‘Triangle’ and ‘Howards’ Way’, the public felt cheated when the practice was revealed and the programme was taken off the air under something of a cloud.

Drabble, incidentally, later decided he was ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ (which must, in all fairness, be Terribly Uncomfortable), had the operation and now enjoys some success as a novelist under the name Margaret.

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