"You shouldn't be watching that sexist rubbish," she practically screamed. Once, while having tea in front of Crackerjack at a friend's house, I grumbled that we were allowed to watch only Benny Hill at home My friend's mother gaped at me in horror. My sister and I were too young to understand either, but since there was nothing else on offer, we tried our best. We observed with quiet bafflement how, with the first blast of the "Yackety Sax" theme tune, my mother's eyes would fill with tears of merriment and my father would grasp his corduroy knees in anticipation of the hilarity to come.Admittedly, not everyone shared this enthusiasm.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, my father insisted there was nothing on television worth watching except Benny Hill and the Six O'Clock News. Yet the British remain deeply embarrassed by their most popular comedy export.It was not always thus. Plenty for Conservative traditionalists (and environmentalists) to chew on there, you might think - yet no one has paid it the slightest notice.What is it about Alfred Hawthorn Hill that makes him persona non grata among his own people? The rest of the world adores him; his shows have been sold to 140 countries and still attract audiences in the billions. The press could hardly have been more scandalised if he had chosen "The Internationale". Cameron's playlist also includes "This Charming Man" by The Smiths: a song, so far as anyone can tell, about a sexually confused young bicyclist who gets seduced by a man in a big car. Radio 4 has been trailing the programme with a clip in which Cameron claims that he knows all 600 words and often sings them as a party piece. If his aim was to generate maximum publicity, he has hit the jackpot. Far from being a spineless people-pleaser, Cameron seems to be deliberately courting controversy.
How else to explain the Benny Hill thing? On tomorrow's Desert Island Discs, the Tory leader will publicly confess his love for Benny Hill's 1971 hit song "Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)". I have my reservations about David Cameron - that tiny, cherubic mouth; the way he begins each policy discussion with the words "I want", to which I find myself shouting "Never gets!"- but credit where it's due. Next year Chelsea should be a monument to that great British institution of sustainable gardening, not that other tradition of exploiting the people and environments of other nations. The question now is: Does the Royal Horticultural Society really have green fingers?Pat Venditti is head of the Greenpeace UK forest campaign. In the past Greenpeace has even caught the Government using illegal timber on its own building sites.There's simply no need to make furniture from conflict timber.
may have been mined, produced or manufactured by forced or indentured child labour."Tony Blair could deal a blow to the junta and deliver a boon to forest protection efforts by banning imports of illegal timber tomorrow.As it is, New Labour's record on forest protection has been lamentable. Meanwhile Burmese teak remains on a US Department of Labour list of items for "which there is a reasonable basis to believe ... Now we know some of that cash comes from Chelsea.But the exhibitors of SW1 cannot be held solely responsible. While even George Bush has imposed sanctions, including a ban on Burmese imports, the EU and UK have gone no further than advising companies against investing in the country. Fifteen per cent of the junta's export earnings come from timber. Timber revenue and control of the trade on the border has enabled the armed ethnic opposition to finance their side of the conflict as countries such as China and Thailand support the insurgents in exchange for access to natural resources including timber.Global Witness estimates that illegal timber exports from Burma amounted to at least 1.3 million cubic metres in 2003-04.