26th August 2011

Apparently the funniest joke told at the Edinburgh Festival was a modern joke about computer passwords.

I have to admit that I didn't laugh when I read it.

Maybe it was the way the comedian in question told it?

Maybe you needed to have heard it?

Maybe it was the timing?

I did laugh at a couple of the jokes on the list however so my vote for the funniest joke would have gone to the one which made me laugh aloud over my Bacon sandwich.

Humour is a fantastic weapon.

Colonel Gaddafi has been using it for years.

Not that many Libyans were laughing at his antics, his fancy dress, or his habit of locking people up or disappearing them.

I once attended a reading by the Libyan writer Hisham Matar of his first novel which was about the disappearance of his father in Libya.

The events are seen through the eyes of a child and are both disturbing and shocking and at the time made me wonder why Gaddafi was Mr Blair's latest 'friend'.

Now it appears in order to have the last laugh Gaddafi has disappeared himself and pops up from time to time on the TV or Radio, like the ghost in the machine.

Supporting the Libyan peoples' struggle to overthrow a dictatorship that killed its own citizens all day long and governed through fear and the long reach of its secret agents seems essentially a good thing and something that the coalition can be rightly proud of.

But it is interesting that, despite this being a good news story, not all the facts have been placed in the public domain and the role of the Special Forces is clouded in a mystery of fog and desert sand.

I must admit that I find Have I Got News for You a generally more watchable and enjoyable review of the news than Question Time the night before.

There is something faintly ridiculous about the panel of Question Time taking themselves so seriously, occasionally attacking each others views, trying to explain the unexplainable, (i.e. con-dem policies on this or that affair of state) or equally, justify the unjustifiable. As the programme descends into the usual shouting of slogans I switch off and head to bed dreaming of tomorrows bacon sandwiches.

I would much rather watch four comedians and a judge bring down 'a plague on all their houses' as Shakespeare described it in Romeo and Juliet.

I was once invited to a breakfast meeting at Downing Street to meet Mr Blair.

When I arrived I was offered various pieces of fruit impaled on cocktail sticks (this turned out to be breakfast, the Bacon sandwiches were off the menu apparently) at this point our host had not arrived and we were ushered into another room where a TV was switched on by a flunkie with a remote control and we were greeted by .... Mr Blair, apologising for not being with us in person.

There was something of the Wizard of Oz about the whole event and I am left still with the sense that Mr Blair might not actually exist in person. It could even be that Rory Bremner or Michael Sheen were the 'real' Blair and that the grainy figure on the TV was an entirely fictional person invented to meet a particular need at a particular time in politics.

When the time comes to comment on Libya Mr Cameron might think of Julius Caesar and his famous report on his short war in Turkey.

Vini, Vidi, Vici.

But reflecting on Mr Blair and his non appearance at breakfast (and the lack of Bacon sandwiches) I can only offer.

Vini, Video, Via