Here’s the, erm, plot so far.

Jack the lad lethario Timmy Lea, played by Robin Askwith, and his brother-in-law Sidney Noggett, played by Tony Booth, have knocked the window cleaning game on the head and opened a driving school. Relations with their rivals Mr. Truscott, Windsor Davies, who is bizarrely a Scotsman in this film, and his business partner, one Tony Bender (oh yes), get off to a poor start. From then on they can only get worse because Truscott’s daughter Mary, who Bender still thinks is his girlfriend, has the hots for Timmy Lea.

Having been coerced by Mary into playing in a rugby match against macho regular rugby player Bender, Timmy Lea takes to the field on the opposing side. At half time Sid Noggett attempts to boost his brother-in-law’s flagging energy with a “Bang On Sex Paket” love pill dissolved in his drink. Mr Truscott had obtained the pills from Denmark, naturally, and Timmy had managed to liberate them from his sideboard the previous evening. However, as chance would have it, before Sid has a chance to stop him, Bender manages to gulp down the potion instead. Hilarity ensues…

Click on the thumbnails for a larger image.

Play resumes and the potion soon begins to take effect on Tony Bender.

The object of Bender’s desire is, so he thinks, his girlfriend Mary Truscott as played by Oxo mum Lynda Bellingham. And hey, isn’t that the Prime Minister’s father in law?

As Bender’s uncontrollable urges overwhelm him he rushes over to Miss Truscott.

She promptly flees.

She runs around Timmy’s driving instructor’s car.

And tries to clamber in through the driver’s side door and out through the passenger’s side.

However because the door is jammed shut she is unable to escape, Bender jumps in to the driving seat and starts the car.

Timmy Lea and Mr Truscott watch in horror as the pill powered sex crazed maniac drives off with their friend/daughter/car.

Bender’s away. The ancient Ford’s tyres smoke as it understeers around the corner.

Lea and Truscott set off in hot pursuit in the latter’s Bentley. Because of a stuck door our hero Timmy has to drive. Presumably 1970’s car makers ought to have looked into the growing problem of sticking doors.

Soak up the awful crapitude of an average 1970’s British high street.

He’s got fire in his eyes.

Really? In the 1970s?

Bender goes left.

Lea goes right and the workmen must leap for their lives.

And the Welshman playing a Scotsman turns his usual puce.

That’s a tight squeeze.

A pipe band just happen to be marching along the road. As they often do about South London’s suburbs.

The two cars approach the pipes and drums at high speed.

And they whizz by on either side.

Leaving the marchers without kilts. But of course! Bet that doesn’t happen in The Dukes of Hazzard.

Smack! The pride of the British motor industry takes a direct hit from Bender.

Then he manages to sneak between that Austin Maxi and that brick wall.

But unfortunately someone has stacked a load of oil drums right in the way.

Remember that brick wall?

Oh dear.

Now what lies in our heroes’ path?

Only the driving examination centre.

And once they’ve crashed through the wall and into the building what do they find? Of course, the manager and his secretary busy on the job.

Magnificent stuff I’m sure you’ll agree. And if you don’t, then you’re a stuck up jaded old cynic.

Of course that isn’t quite how it happened.

However I did receive a pleasant note for sending them a correction to the archive page of one of their castaways, the venerable actress Cicely Courtneidge.

Hi Mark

Thank you for your email to Desert Island Discs. I have changed the Albert Coates to Eric Coates. I think looking at the recording Albert might have been conducting but as you rightly point out Eric was the composer.

Thank you for your interest in our programme.

Best wishes

Desert Island Discs team.

How kind of them. It’s almost as if Roy Plomley had written it himself.

I’m always having to look this up:

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find . -name '*.DS_Store' -type f -delete

In order to run Padrino Rake tasks in the production environment the ENV variable needs to be placed before the command. It took a fair bit of flailing about before discovering this.

For example:

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PADRINO_ENV=production bundle exec padrino rake -T

First grab the alert styles from the Twitter Bootstrap source and add the ‘.validation-summary-errors’ class selector where appropriate. I’ve used the “danger” (red) version of the flash.

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   .validation-summary-errors,
  .alert-message
  {
     clear:both;
    position: relative;
    padding: 7px 15px;
    margin-bottom: 18px;
    color: #404040;
  
  etc...   

Just that alone will make things look miles better already.

However the Bootstrap flash has a close button on it in order to hide the message away which is kind of neat. Let’s use JavaScript to add that.

First we need to know if flash is present. If a full page postback has triggered the showing of the validation error message then we can just look for it in the DOM on document ready.

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   var $validationSummaryErrors = $('.validation-summary-errors');
  
  if ($validationSummaryErrors.length !== 0) {
      addCloseButton($validationSummaryErrors);
  }

Simple.

But what if the validation error message was injected via client side code?

jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js, the Javascript code which performs client side model validation, runs on page load and has no input parameters so we can’t pass in a callback directly. Instead, I’m afraid, we need to add a function to the global object.

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   window.onValidatorSummaryShown = function () {
      addCloseButton(this);
  };

And we’ll call it when the ‘.validation-summary-errors’ div is injected into the DOM.

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    if (window.onValidatorSummaryShown) {
                window.onValidatorSummaryShown.call(container);
     }

And there you have it, a beautiful and arresting validation error message complete with working close button.

The code in full:

Here's a sample.

You can easily rally a fifth column to your cause through the simple use of vaguely professional, properly spelled and grammatically correct looking signage. If you don't mind your shock troops possessing tartan rugs for the dogs to sit on in the back of the Nissan Micra, any sign, no matter how daft the sentiment contained thereon, will draw a certain sort to a) obey every word, but also b) be very keen to want to tell off the non-compliant.

Try it. Erect a sign reading "exterminate the Jews, stand back and observe.

"That seems a bit harsh on old Mr Cohen."

"Yes but it is a vaguely professional looking, properly spelled and grammatically correct sign, dear."

"Very true. Alright, load him into the Nissan. Mind the road atlas and warning triangle Mr Cohen."

*Caveat: Car bodies are like kryptonite to signs and they have no effect on subjects within.

I mean, what's he been doing for most of the last 14 years?

It's good that we have the street brawling, wife a cheating, expenses trousering, Lord Lardy as our moral compass though don't you think?

Incidentally I don't follow our erstwhile deputy Prime Minister or indeed any Labour politician myself. Their chutzpa would boil my blood. Instead I saw this via Stuart Maconie; one of many folks I follow who I quite like in their field but who then disappoint with their leftist bell-endery. Maconie of course is just the man to point out the iniquities of "unearned income". Getting paid hundreds of thousands of pounds of licence payers' money to play records on a radio station whose listenership could fit in your average village hall does wonders for the economy. Yes, he does write books as well. A recent one was about how Celia Johnson's character in Brief Encounter should have let it all hang out and run off with Trevor Howard! That strikes me as spectacularly missing the point but it's argued well and entertaining. I'd like have seen him debate the idea with Peter Hitchens, mind you. They could agree about Diana death related collective nuttiness and work back from there.

This is how things work in a civilised country. Ie, not Britain.

See, it's not black and white.

Some folk read the Koran and gain spiritual guidance whilst others want to chop off infidels' heads.

Some folk read Karl Marx and remain nice chaps like Chris Dillow or Norman Geras whilst other send millions to the Gulag or the Killing Fields.

Who am I to judge which is the better option? If I say someone has done a bad thing it might hurt their feelings and then they might have low self esteem and we can't have that. Nothing is good or bad then. Apart from judging people. I think.

Anyway, it's a good thing the human race is past all that thinking in lock-step after swallowing any old guff business. As you can see from Twitter whenever, say Daniel Hannan or Peter Hitchens or Melanie Phillips manages to deposit a speck of grit into the normal output of BBC programming. Er, no. Hang on. What happens is a horde of dingbats who hadn't heard the word 'despot' before their exam in Hitler studies, a horde who all espouse the same weltanschauung of mainstream centre-left orthodoxy whilst congratulating themselves for their marvellous radicalness, a horde who've barely had an original idea of their own much less encountered someone else's, can't comprehend anything outside their bubble and take to Twitter to express themselves not with wit or intellect but by potty mouthed name calling. 

So it's a good job we're past all that conformity and we can let it all hang out in the marketplace of ideas.

And he sang along with Saga, who urges followers to rise up in the name of Aryan supremacy, as she signed off with a cover of an anthem, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, by neo-Nazi English band Skrewdriver.

It ends: "Oh Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine. Tomorrow belongs to me."

Only the Nazis would be dim enough to use as an anthem a song written by a pair of Jews from a musical based on the writings of a homosexual and starring the daughter of Dorothy* and only The Sun would presume we'd never seen Cabaret and could understand the subtexts around the song and the scene. FFS

*In the film if not on the stage.

Still, Orwell Prize worthy stuff no doubt. Can't say I'm overly bothered about the Johann Hari/Orwell business. I can't personally see how it's possible to bring a far too pleased with itself, left-wing, backslapathon into disrepute. Hey, it's not like the signs that Hari was writing utter bollocks weren't there before; it's just they chose not to see them so more fool them.

Living on a traffic island, crapping in the flowerbeds and generally being an eyesore and loon for ten years isn’t great for one’s health.

Also proven, so long as it’s all the West’s fault, having any set of beefs no matter how contradictory, mobile or crazy will get you a grip and grin cum exploitation by the Wedgie Benn faction no matter how daft. And your “supporters” will be tucked up in their warm beds each night, glowing with satisfaction about your struggle, man, while you’re breathing in bus fumes and freezing.

It’s like the Arabs use of the Palestinians in microcosm.

I thought so, at least until I saw how many moron had re-tweeeted the revolting idiocy. All members of the "it's everybody's fault but us" brigade as well.

The Twitterers I follow who were talking about it are all involved in the future chip wrapping business in some fashion or other.

I can’t imagine many people with real jobs are terribly exercised by the scandal. Mostly that’s because we don’t really know who Hari is in the first place.

This made I laugh though, first comment:

A couple expressed worries that if he’d lie about that, he’d lie about other things too.

You think? Ross has some heartbreaking news for you.

Russell Davies I quite like. A British Mark Steyn. The "T" (for tosser?) is obviously talented but I can't say I'm familiar with his oeuvre. I don't recall watching any of it. 

Apparently though, we should all be falling over ourselves to fund his magnificent outpourings regardless of whether we watch them or not, though and any suggestion to the contrary means "you're evil, nah, nah"; and then he throws his sonic screwdriver out of his pram.

Mr Davies said of Mr Cameron: ‘When is he a consumer of that stuff, when do you imagine that David Cameron actually sat down and enjoyed a night’s television? How much do you think he knows about it?’

Well for a kick off "T", I suspect the Prime Minister is quite busy and doesn't have much down time. When he does however he perhaps likes to spend it doing fun things with his children. For me, except for sport, television is a last resort for when other avenues have been exhausted. Mad Men excluded.

Let's be honest. "T" is a 48 year old man without children and most non-parents are, I'm sorry to, not truly grown up.

What a strange week President Obama had. There was the ongoing budget business, all that birth certificate bullshit, its release with the comment about “mov[ing] on to real issues that matter to our future”, a turn as a stand up comic at the press corps dinner on Saturday night, and then on Sunday afternoon the elimination of public enemy number one.

Quite how Obama kept it all together I don’t know. Knowing the moonless night THAT mission would take place on was rapidly approaching whilst having to deal with such nonsense (apart from the budget) must have really ticked him off.

Broad-brush ahoy. Basically, the pro AV camp are pretty much the “progressives” which have caused nearly everything we lament in Britain today and I want to give them a hiding.

If voting for an incumbent MP in a safe seat to go back to Westminster to not exactly prise out the Labour shower felt nice then voting, even obliquely, against those responsible for foisting upon us the likes of the EU, massacre of the survivable unborn, the end of the death penalty, closure of the Grammar Schools, decimalised currency, and the cancellation of the Blue Streak; should feel really, really good.

“Ah”, you say, “your logic is silly.” Well, it’s certainly no more silly than the partisan gamesmanship which supports AV because it get more of “our bums” onto parliament’s seats or, worse, yes we know that AV is a turd sandwich compared to other systems but, hey, at least it’s a sandwich.

Douglas Carswell has what might be called a sensible reason to vote no. To be honest though, I think I prefer my rationale. Such as it is.

I wish the same old gang ubiquitous luvvies who troop out to support left wing political campaigns would do the same. Put up or shut up Fry.

Also, if a campaign expects a positive from an endorsement surely they can’t not expect a negative as well. Ie. if cuddly Baldrick/loony left Labour committee member Robinson is for it then I’m against it.

He paid a million dollars for that dump? His estate agent must have been chuckling all the way to the bank.

It’ll be up for sale again soon no doubt. If anybody fancies a high altitude retreat in a building which resembles a multi-story car park with some bullet holes in the wall then now is your chance.

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadhan Foundation, which promotes the image of Muslims in Britain, said: ‘I know many Muslims who have married their cousins and none of them have had a problem with their children.

Obviously, we don’t want any children to be born disabled who don’t need to be born disabled…

So all those handsome fellows with six toes per foot and their heads on upside down needed to be born that way I suppose?