Thanks, Oakley.Unstinting praise must also go to the other entrants in the PDSA scheme, including Pebbles the cat, who has lost nearly 10 per cent. Despite a reputation for achieving high profit margins, Johnston's chief executive Tim Bowdler insisted the company had a strong track record of investing in its titles, including the Yorkshire Post. Andrew Neil, the publisher of Scotsman Publications, which include the Edinburgh Evening News and Scotland on Sunday, said the Barclays brothers, who also own The Daily Telegraph, had decided to sell the titles they have owned for a decade after their failed attempt to buy the Glasgow Herald. The regional newspaper group Johnston Press has promised not to cut jobs and to invest in the editorial content of The Scotsman, which it bought yesterday for £160m. It was expected to land in the Isidis basin, a flat boulder-strewn plain, on the surface of Mars on Christmas Day 2003.It was envisaged as the first lander since the US Viking probes of the 1970s to look specifically for evidence of life, taking close-up images of soil and rocks, but no radio signal was received.. He said that the features he has identified within the crater could be the gas bags and a lander.Although there will be no rescue mission, a Nasa probe will arrive in Mars's orbit in March and by mid-2006 will be taking higher resolution images of the wreckage than have been seen.Yesterday was the second anniversary of the last sighting of Beagle 2, when it was ejected from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

It has fallen precisely within the landing ellipse, in a crater that has a diameter of 18.5 metres. Had it landed just one metre to the north, we would expect to be communicating with it today.Mr Rennie said that there are features within the crater, seen on the images he has studied, which are "very, very unusual and not seen elsewhere". Scientists have plotted the bounces of Beagle 2 as it ricocheted within the crater.Mr Rennie said: "Based on the image quality we can never say definitively that this is Beagle 2, but nothing else comes close. The probe's first impact was into the upper wall of the crater, which was incredibly unlucky."He has studied the images with Professor Colin Pillinger, the mission commander, Stuart Hurst, Jim Clemmet, Dave Northey and Lutz Richter, who were all involved in the Beagle project and investigation into why radio contact with the probe was never established.From the images, the team believe that Beagle 2 hit the crater, which would have increased the risk of the lander being damaged.The probe's protective covering, made up of three gas bags, was also damaged in the impact, causing at least one of the segments to deflate.

After studying images covering an area of 140 square km around the landing site scientists are confident that they have located the wreckage that was due to touch down on Christmas Day 2003. And if the probe had landed only one metre to the north, they say it would have survived and would be functioning today.Guy Rennie, a Photogrammetrist and image analyst who was called in to examine images of the landing area, said: "We are very confident that it is Beagle 2, the evidence is extremely compelling. "It's my mission to get it on mainstream TV over there," he says, eyes twinkling mischievously "But there are restrictions left, right and centre. You can show a 14-year-old kid blowing three people's heads off with a gun, but you can't show him lighting a cigarette. And they get in a complete state about anything to do with sex - remember the furore about Janet Jackson's nipple? I predict the anal sex in episode two might be a bit of a problem!"For the time being, Abbott is delighted to exploit the freedom to write what he likes over here. He certainly shows no sign of running out of ideas - he is already mapping out storylines for the fourth and fifth series "I've got 45 years' worth of stories to draw on," he laughs. "If Shameless ran for 15 series, I'd still have too much material."Shameless is a series quite unlike anything else on TV. In Threlfall's memorable view, "The Gallaghers are like the Simpsons on acid.